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Comment by SlickNixon | Hacker News Reader

I believe the original question was whether storage of multiple weapons in the same vicinity could result in accidental assembly of a critical mass, which appears to be something the author of the original blog came up with on their own.

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I thought there was a story of Richard Feynman going round Oak Ridge and realizing that they were getting close to a critical mass of stuff stored in adjacent rooms.

>Feynman had discovered that the Y-12 Plant was storing uranium nitrate solution enriched in U-235 in drums holding 300 to 3,000 gallons. After performing some calculations, the young physicist determined that the drums were placed in potentially unsafe arrangements in a number of buildings.[0]

Looks like fluids again, not warheads.

https://exploreoakridge.com/how-a-26-year-old-physicist-may-...

I think modern US designs are fusion boosted, making them immune to predetonation. Older experiments are increasingly dangerous, especially high-yield uranium guns.

Fission, boosted, or fusion all start with a fission bomb with a possibility to fizzle.

Can an implosion bomb designed in the 100t yield range go ambient supercritical even in the presence of a neutron reflector?

You forgot to add "asking for a friend" ;)

A single bomb core is a sub-critical mass; needing either neutron reflectors or another source of neutrons to start a chain reaction.

But if you pile a bunch of such cores up together like they were cannon balls, that inherent safety goes right out the window.

In the context of this blog post, which explosive parts should we mothball and which ones are too dangerous to store intact, it’s unwise to store pre-boosted plutonium cores at all.

But, as a thought experiment, what is the difference between a pile of boosted-era plutonium cores; and a weird but moderated reactor? Specifically, does an arbitrarily-sized pile of weapons-grade plutonium marbles have the same inevitability of criticality you expect than if those are designed for use in boosted triggers?

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