Robin van Spaandonk wrote:
In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Mon, 9 Oct 2006 20:43:36
-0400 (GMT-04:00):
Hi,
[snip]
Seismologists estimate the size of the North Korean explosion at between 1 and
15 kilotons. My bet: 1 kt. I mean literally, 1000 tons of explosive.
The number I heard was that the explosion was the equivelant of 550 tons.
Then they obviously registered something, and clearly not natural.
Explosions have a different seismic signature to natural Earth
tremors.
That's what I heard.
I just spoke with Mizuno about unrelated stuff, and he mentioned that his department at
U. Hokkaido, Nuclear Engineering, has superb monitoring equipment, but they have not seen
a thing. He said that even with an underground test "something comes out of the
ground; we would seen some signature after 24 hours." I suppose the material
migrates up the instrument lead-wires.
I would expect that it would shatter the rock for quite an area. In
order to place the bomb, you'd have to drill a large tube into the rock.
I would assume that this tube would be filled with concrete, but given
the shock, and the difference in strength between the rock and the
concrete, I would expect the concrete to totally fracture. This would
release gas, which could be sampled by a high flying aircraft, which is,
I assume what they are doing now. I would expect there to be Pu in
addition to the fission products, and an analysis of them would yeild an
understanding of what happened, and how efficiently the process went.
They would need to have something in orbit wouldn't they? I
thought that they would detect gammas from a real explosion
(though this was deep underground), and I thought the USA had
satellites in orbit specifically for this purpose (that picked up
the gammas from thunderstorms?). I doubt that they would be able
to pick up gammas in Hokkaido, because the curvature of the Earth
would put hundreds of km's of rock between them and the explosion.
So what exactly were they looking for, neutrinos?
[snip]
Regards,
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