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The Prussian blue reduces the biological half-life (different from the nuclear half-life) of the caesium. The physical or nuclear half-life of 137 Cs is about 30 years. This is a constant which can not be changed but the biological half-life is not a constant. It will change according to the nature and habits of the organism for which it is ...
An assembly is critical if each fission event causes, on average, exactly one additional such event in a continual chain. Such a chain is a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. When a uranium-235 (U-235) atom undergoes nuclear fission, it typically releases between one and seven neutrons (with an average of 2.4).
During part of this process, the assembly is supercritical, but not yet in an optimal state for a chain reaction. Free neutrons, in particular from spontaneous fissions, can cause the device to undergo a preliminary chain reaction that destroys the fissile material before it is ready to produce a large explosion, which is known as predetonation ...
A chain reaction is an example of a complex mechanism, in which the propagation steps form a closed cycle. In a chain reaction, the intermediate produced in one step generates an intermediate in another step. Intermediates are called chain carriers. Sometimes, the chain carriers are radicals, they can be ions as well.
Chain reaction in chemistry and physics is a process that produces products capable of initiating subsequent processes of a similar nature. It is a self-sustaining sequence in which the resulting products continue to propagate further reactions. [ 1 ]
The CNO cycle (for carbon–nitrogen–oxygen; sometimes called Bethe–Weizsäcker cycle after Hans Albrecht Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker) is one of the two known sets of fusion reactions by which stars convert hydrogen to helium, the other being the proton–proton chain reaction (p–p cycle), which is more efficient at the Sun's ...
A subcritical mass is a mass that does not have the ability to sustain a fission chain reaction. A population of neutrons introduced to a subcritical assembly will exponentially decrease. In this case, known as subcriticality, k < 1. A critical mass is a mass of fissile
This is then a self-propagating and thus self-sustaining chain reaction. This is the principle for nuclear reactors and atomic bombs. Demonstration of a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was accomplished by Enrico Fermi and others, in the successful operation of Chicago Pile-1, the first artificial nuclear reactor, in late 1942.