page_title: Mushroom cloud
section_title: Cloud composition
hierarchical_section_title: Mushroom cloud / Nuclear mushroom clouds / Cloud composition
caption_attribution_description: English: Buster-Jangle's Charlie shot
context_page_description: A mushroom cloud is a distinctive pyrocumulus mushroom-shaped cloud of debris, smoke and usually condensed water vapor resulting from a large explosion. The effect is most commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, but any sufficiently energetic detonation or deflagration will produce the same effect. They can be caused by powerful conventional weapons, like thermobaric weapons, including the ATBIP and GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast. Some volcanic eruptions and impact events can produce natural mushroom clouds.
  Mushroom clouds result from the sudden formation of a large volume of lower-density gases at any altitude, causing a Rayleigh–Taylor instability. The buoyant mass of gas rises rapidly, resulting in turbulent vortices curling downward around its edges, forming a temporary vortex ring that draws up a central column, possibly with smoke, debris, and/or condensed water vapor to form the "mushroom stem". The mass of gas plus entrained moist air eventually reaches an altitude where it is no longer of lower density than the surrounding air; at this point, it disperses, drifting back down.
context_section_description: The cloud contains three main classes of material: the remains of the weapon and its fission products, the material acquired from the ground (only significant for burst altitudes below the fallout-reducing altitude, which depends on the weapon yield), and water vapour.  The bulk of the radiation contained in the cloud consists of the nuclear fission products; neutron activation products from the weapon materials, air, and the ground debris form only a minor fraction.  Neutron activation starts during the neutron burst at the instant of the blast itself, and the range of this neutron burst is limited by the absorption of the neutrons as they pass through the Earth's atmosphere.
  Most of the radiation is created by the fission products. Thermonuclear weapons produce a significant part of their yield from nuclear fusion. Fusion products are typically non-radioactive. The degree of radiation fallout production is therefore measured in kilotons of fission. The Tsar Bomba, which produced 97% of its 50-megaton yield from fusion, was a very clean weapon compared to what would typically be expected of a weapon of its yield (although it still produced 1.5 megatons of its yield from fission), as its fusion tamper was made of lead instead of uranium-238; otherwise, its yield would have been 100 megatons with 51 of those from fission. Were it to be detonated at or near the surface, its fallout would comprise fully one-quarter of all the fallout from every nuclear weapon test, combined.
  Initially, the fireball contains a highly ionized plasma consisting only of atoms of the weapon, its fission products, and atmospheric gases of adjacent air. As the plasma cools, the atoms react, forming fine droplets and then solid particles of oxides. The particles coalesce to larger ones, and deposit on surface of other particles. Larger particles usually originate from material aspired into the cloud. Particles aspired while the cloud is still hot enough to melt them mix with the fission products throughout their volume. Larger particles get molten radioactive materials deposited on their surface. Particles aspired into the cloud later, when its temperature is low enough, do not become significantly contaminated. Particles formed only from the weapon itself are fine enough to stay airborne for a long time and become widely dispersed and diluted to non-hazardous levels. Higher-altitude blasts which do not aspire ground debris, or which aspire dust only after cooling enough and where the radioactive fraction of the particles is therefore small, cause much smaller degree of localized fallout than lower-altitude blasts with larger radioactive particles formed.
  The concentration of condensation products is the same for the small particles and for the deposited surface layers of larger particles. About 100 kg of small particles are formed per kiloton of yield. The volume, and therefore activity, of the small particles is almost three orders of magnitude lower than the volume of the deposited surface layers on larger particles.
  For higher-altitude blasts, the primary particle forming processes are condensation and subsequent coagulation. For lower-altitude and ground blasts, with involvement of soil particles, the primary process is deposition on the foreign particles.
  A low-altitude detonation produces a cloud with a dust loading of 100 tons per megaton of yield. A ground detonation produces clouds with about three times as much dust. For a ground detonation, approximately 200 tons of soil per kiloton of yield is melted and comes in contact with radiation.
  The fireball volume is the same for a surface or an atmospheric detonation. In the first case, the fireball is a hemisphere instead of a sphere, with a correspondingly larger radius.
  The particle sizes range from submicrometer- and micrometer-sized (created by condensation of plasma in the fireball), through 10–500 micrometers (surface material agitated by the blast wave and raised by the afterwinds), to millimeter and above (crater ejecta). The size of particles together with the altitude they are carr
caption: The mushroom cloud from Buster-Jangle Charlie, yield 14 kilotons (at 143 m • kt −​1⁄3), during the initial phase of stem formation.  The toroidal fireball is visible at the top, a condensation cloud is forming in the middle due to intense updrafts of moist air, and the forming partial stem can be seen below.  The cloud exhibits the reddish-brown hue of nitrogen oxides.
exif: {}