Congratulations to Gamma, our trusty atomic dog! Gamma has a new job as a Citizen Inspector of United States nuclear weapons facilities. To get ready for the job, he is doing a few calculations on some proposed inertial confinement experiments at the National Ignition Facility under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He is wondering if these experiments will be in compliance with the CTBT, going on some information he found in his dog-eared copy of IEER's report, Dangerous Thermonuclear Quest.

Specifically, Gamma is wondering about an experiment that would have a laser output of 1.8 megajoules of energy which would be deposited into a fuel pellet. On the high yield experiments, the diagnostic equipment at NIF would detect approximately 10¹⁹ neutrons being released from the resulting fusion reactions. Each released neutron represents one fusion reaction (as he learned from the diagram in the article on fusion weapons in this newsletter), so that would indicate 10¹⁹ fusion reactions. Gamma knows that each fusion reaction releases about 17 MeV (mega-electron-volts) of energy. He needs to do a few more calculations to find out if this experiment is in compliance with the CTBT, but needs your help (those darned paws are just too big for the calculator keys).

1. How much energy is released from each fusion reaction (in joules)? (Hint: 1 MeV=10⁶ eV and 1 eV = 1.6x10^-19 joules (J))

   
   

2. How much energy is released from all 10¹⁹ fusion reactions?

   
   

3. Is this more or less than the amount of energy put into the fuel pellet?

   
   

4. Based on your answer to question #3, is this a "nuclear explosion?"

   
   

5. How many pounds of TNT equivalent is this? (Hint: There are approximately 2.1x10⁶ J per pound of TNT.)

   
   

6. Is this more or less than the four-pound hydronuclear experiments the United States agreed were banned under the CTBT?