#nucleur

Always eyed this place as the reason the west coast community are going extinct and can’t have calves.

The short version would be that the radioactive material in it is forced to all decay at the same time, releasing all the energy at once rather than over an extended period of time.

Usually, simultaneous decay would be forced by putting all the radioactive material in one very small spot, where the products from the decaying materials destabilizes surrounding nuclei, causing a chain reaction. There are two general methods for this for conventional atomic weapons (ignoring fusion bombs). Uranium slug methods used two pieces of Uranium and shot them together with conventional explosives (as in the Little Boy bomb). Implosion methods have a shell of radioactive material that is then fired together very precisely with regular explosives (as in the Fat Man bomb).