4/2/20

Coronavirus: nuclear explosion vs nuclear reactor approach


The epidemic is a chain reaction process. One person (nucleus) produces virus-full-droplets (neutrons), which infects (induce fission process) at least one further person (nucleus) and so on. There are two quite different trajectories in a chain reaction - uncontrolled and controlled. The former one is a nuclear explosion or epidemic with mild (or inappropriate) protection of citizens (e.g., season flu). Some countries have chosen almost uncontrolled chain reaction and the daily number of newly infected/deaths increases exponentially (like 20% per day). The chain reaction will naturally stop when all (related) people/nuclei went through reaction.   The latter case is a nuclear power plant generating a stable amount of energy under the strict control of absorbing rods or the current strict measures of self-isolation and quarantine in some countries.
What is the main difference between these two trajectories? Most important, the controlled chain reaction allows 1) to decrease the number of people/nuclei passing through illness/fission; 2) to lower and smooth the released energy/stress for the medical system is and does not crush surrounding media/social connections..
About self-isolation and quarantine. In order to start explosive chain reaction one needs to dramatically increase the density of fission material (e.g., uranium, plutonium). It highly increases the probability for a spontaneously (i.e. in natural radioactive decay) generated neutron to be absorbed by another nucleus. For this purpose, chemical explosives are used. Another possibility is to create a very large plutonium sphere and it will explode by itself at some point. (Do not store your plutonium in large buckets!) Therefore, in order to avoid nuclear explosion one just needs to keep fission material in non-compressed form. For the epidemic, the fission material density is the same as the physical distance between people. What we observe now, people gathering in  larger groups create conditions for explosion trajectory. Unfortunately, this process is spontaneous and probabilistic. For corona-virus, people are already contagious when they have no visible illness-specific features. Hence, any crowd may play the role of the nuclear explosion igniter. Stay safe!

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