HerrGeneral913

I've heard a couple interviews where you say that you consider yourself a feminist. What made you open your eyes to the way the world treats women? If you could give one message to the world, what would it be?

(Big fan, by the way. Stay real, Santa-Man.)

This is a comment that should be read by everyone- the amount of misconceptions that are out there about nuclear energy is appalling.

Although I'm not the OP, I find nuclear weaponry immensely fascinating and so I'll try to answer the question.

The most important part of any nuclear weapon would be the fissile material- in almost all "normal" cases, plutonium. Not only does it have to be immensely pure, you also have to have enough in order to cause an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction. This reaction is set off by basically compressing the plutonium together very quickly.

Around this core of plutonium is the explosive. This is just a normal high explosive, albeit highly refined and perfectly shaped in order to direct the explosive force inward, almost like a lens.

The bomb is set off by detonating the shell of high explosive all at once (timing is important in order to make sure the plutonium implodes perfectly). The shockwave from the detonating explosives compresses the plutonium enough that it reaches critical mass. At that point, the nuclear chain reaction starts, and that little sphere of plutonium turns into a little piece of the sun on earth- releasing ungodly amounts of energy.

Obviously, this is very oversimplified and I'm sure I got some things wrong- but that's the gist of it. Most of this information is freely available on the internet, such as Wikipedia.

Honestly, I wouldn't blame you at all if you said you hated nuclear power, considering what it put you through. A lot of people forget about it, because "oh, it was 35 years ago, who cares".

That being said, the problem with Chernobyl was exactly what you said- it wasn't controlled, and the fixation with "we can't tell the citizens because it's bad PR!" hurt many more people than it had a right to. On average, if it's safely done, nuclear power is extremely safe and amazingly efficient. Unfortunately, the Soviet power plant design had major flaws, and the disaster was caused by an unsupervised test run- both things that could have been avoided.

My psychology professor put it this way: Men are erotic, women are romantic. She's more interested in having a romantic date than just going at it- she wants to know that you care about more than just her body. Good thing to remember.