* Likely a dirty explosion, spreading radioactive contaminants.
* The area where the beam is targeted (couple meter radius) gets a 1 Sv/sec dose, for about 100 seconds. "compared with the U.S. Federal off-site limit of 1 mSV/year"
I'm also curious if anything inside the earth gets dosed by the beam? I don't know enough about neutrinos to speculate.
Also, wouldn't one assume that these bombs have neutron shields on them, to prevent accidental triggering by the stray neutron source? Hence, they'd really need the beam to target _inside_ the bomb, not just near it.
Finally, skimming the paper, I didn't see mention of the energy levels of the neutrons they expect to hit the radioactive materials. Most radioactive isotopes don't have a large cross section for fast neutrons. Is it expected for this hadron shower to generate thermal neutrons? Otherwise, the beam would need to be several orders of magnitude stronger...
(Not that the idea isn't cool as fuck)
EDIT: Thinking about it a bit. If I understand the paper correctly, the beam has to be at 1000TeV to penetrate the Earth and hit the target, so you can't decrease the beam's strength and mitigate the above issues. But if the beam could be PWM'd, then you can effectively do that. And if you can lower the effective energy of the beam, then it might be possible to spray a slow and steady stream of neutrons inside the bomb, slowly decaying all the radioactive isotopes. It would take a lot longer, on the order of months, and would probably be detectable, but at least there wouldn't be that pesky issue of turning it into a small dirty bomb...
* 3% explosive yield
* Likely a dirty explosion, spreading radioactive contaminants.
* The area where the beam is targeted (couple meter radius) gets a 1 Sv/sec dose, for about 100 seconds. "compared with the U.S. Federal off-site limit of 1 mSV/year"
I'm also curious if anything inside the earth gets dosed by the beam? I don't know enough about neutrinos to speculate.
Also, wouldn't one assume that these bombs have neutron shields on them, to prevent accidental triggering by the stray neutron source? Hence, they'd really need the beam to target _inside_ the bomb, not just near it.
Finally, skimming the paper, I didn't see mention of the energy levels of the neutrons they expect to hit the radioactive materials. Most radioactive isotopes don't have a large cross section for fast neutrons. Is it expected for this hadron shower to generate thermal neutrons? Otherwise, the beam would need to be several orders of magnitude stronger...
(Not that the idea isn't cool as fuck)
EDIT: Thinking about it a bit. If I understand the paper correctly, the beam has to be at 1000TeV to penetrate the Earth and hit the target, so you can't decrease the beam's strength and mitigate the above issues. But if the beam could be PWM'd, then you can effectively do that. And if you can lower the effective energy of the beam, then it might be possible to spray a slow and steady stream of neutrons inside the bomb, slowly decaying all the radioactive isotopes. It would take a lot longer, on the order of months, and would probably be detectable, but at least there wouldn't be that pesky issue of turning it into a small dirty bomb...