in my opinion, the amount of latent heat in some room temperature plutonium is the key reason why you can't make it cause a fission chain reaction of any usable size.

i'm not sure what its latent heat capacity is, i know that water has the greatest latent heat capacity of all materials known, and additionally, metals are very heat conductive, which is another way of saying that when you put heat in, it comes out quite easily and quickly.

however, if you break the structure, as must happen when you break a nucleus, all the electrons are liberated and all the latent heat (which is basically captured infrared photons) are also liberated, and are absorbed and conducted well by the remainder of the solid, and rapidly turning into liquid, plutonium metal.

when a metal becomes liquid, right off the bat it expans by about 3x or more in volume, which is another way of saying that your fission nucleus strike precision now has to rise by this factor of expansion

add a few more successful hits and there is a certain point at which the amount of heat, which presumably is all trapped inside the implosion device of an alleged plutonium based explosive charge, by both the mechanical feature of it being a metallic sealed vessel and by the implosion force of your shape charges, the entire mass of plutonium is going to reach above the triple point and be ready to turn into gas the moment that the compression and containment cease to hold.

i would estimate that this point is probably a pretty small percentage of fissioned material because the strongest implosion vessel i can conceive of would have to be made out of solid, inch or more thick tungsten, at which point you know that if the thermal yield of the fission so far has achieved the point where this metal starts to melt, just so happens to also be in the range of the boiling point of plutonium

so, if you can explain where the kinetic energy (not heat) is coming from to rupture this violently instead of melting it like a baloon lit by a lighter (or like a hindenberg, hissing a violent burst of combusting hydrogen out the first crack that opens) and providing your kinetic force (not just heat) then i'm sorry but your plutonium is going to be no more than 10-20% fissioned, and the rest is going to be boiled, and even the strongest conceivable containment vessel around it, surrounded by the delicate temperature regulation gear that is required because of the micron tolerance of the whole apparatus to failing to achieve even this pissy amount of fission, is just going to be a nasty dirty bomb that fortunately is only a few kilos of metal boiled rapidly into vapor, and there certainly isn't going to be a great flash and much wailing and gnashing of teeth. maybe some cancer. a little.

anyway, do the math yourself. there is a good text you can read that goes through every sordid detail of the alleged nuclear fission chain reaction-and-hypothetical-explosion story, it's got more holes in it than grandma's magnum opus doily.

Ok, I may have also studied, chemistry, physics, and quantum mechanics as part of my Engineering Science degree as well. But it's been a while so claiming expertise based on it is a stretch.

i don't think nuclear fission is that orderly. sometimes a proton strikes and knocks out another, and doesn't also join. sometimes it breaks off several protons and releases the neutrons, and disrupts the electron configuration due to the change in the nucleus(i) now existing after the break.

in the slow, typical case, yes, it tends to be one proton bumps out one or two protons from the other, and you don't get an inordinate amount of heat.

with stuff like uranium and plutonium and americium etc they have such giant amounts of protons and neutrons in the middle of them that it feasibly could happen that a whole hydrogen atom worth of nucleus gets thrown out, or even bigger sometimes.

assuming that the whole objective of the refinement of decayed uranium to extract the plutonium is because it has a greater tendency to break apart more vigorously, i can say that probably there is a lot of other things that break, but obviously i think the point is that it's more likely to completely shatter (as in, release a lot of hydrogen nuclei, effectively). but that doesn't comport well with the "one proton in two protons out" story that we know is pretty accurate for uranium fission and is quite safe if you don't push it hard and cool it even harder.

idk what to say. the only way i can conceive of an actual explosive effect comnig from shattering nuclei is pretty simple: they turn into hydrogen, and then once the pressure and heat overcomes the containment, it rapidly detonates as a plain old hydrogen explosion.

in my opinion that is the best case scenario. the reality is not quite so clean as that.

the real world decay process of uranium produces huge amounts of iodine 131 and cesium 137. this is a sign that there is a progressive decay process, and when the newly formed structures scoop up their electrons, their boiling point is exceeded and off they go into the atmosphere. iodine is an easy one to see that happening, it just sublimes easily at about ... i forget, 90'C or so

cesium is a much smaller fragment, so already i know that uranium which is like 235 or something, and cesium 137 and iodine 131, we have here what clearly sounds like ... let's see, this can't come out of one uranium, as it would be 268

so this already suggests that even the relatively "calm" fission of uranium breaks off random amount of protons/neutrons from a uranium nucleus in the standard meltdown conditions. i also know a lot of hydrogen forms in the process, this makes sense, this is what you would expect from one proton being bumped out.

anyway, what's my point, oh yes, i was going through the question about how plutonium might hypothetically work if you can contain its heat long enough to keep it solid or at least supercritical while all those protons bash each other up, the ideal result would be hydrogen, which with the heat and then sudden exposure to oxygen would essentially make a fancy hydrogen fire bomb. you can make one of these anyway. just a cylinder of hydrogen, armor the hell out of it and put a magnesium charge in the middle of it. it won't be that much more fancy than a normal carbon based exploder but it will be a lot more impulse and shorter burst, a "pop" instead of a "boom". however both release about equal amounts of heat per mass of reagent in total so likely they also make nasty firestorms.

but either way. i just don't think that plutonium actually makes that much hydrogen that quickly, and even if it did, reliably, a lot of the plutonium is going to be boiled in the process, which is not going to explode because it's too dispersed for those protons to hit them.

the more you think about it, the more obvious it becomes that the last thing that is going to happen with a plutonium meltdown is an orderly production of primarily hydrogen, along with a huge amount of various kinds of radiation particles, heat, and whatnot.

more likely it's going to just boil. as i see it, that's the central reason why it's a hoax, the thermodynamics of the release of all that latent heat can't possibly allow the metal to stay solid, even under the most ideal conditions of implosion (ie, explosions all around it).