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Nuclear fission was discovered in December 1938 by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. Fission is a nuclear reaction or radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller, lighter nuclei and
In nuclear fission events the nuclei may break into any combination of lighter nuclei, but the most common event is not fission to equal mass nuclei of about mass 120; the most common event (depending on isotope and process) is a slightly unequal fission in which one daughter nucleus has a mass of about 90 to 100 daltons and the other the ...
As of 1993, worldwide, 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions (including eight underwater) have been conducted with a total yield of 545 megatons (Mt): 217 Mt from pure fission and 328 Mt from bombs using fusion, while the estimated number of underground nuclear tests conducted in the period from 1957 to 1992 is 1,352 explosions with a total yield ...
The first light bulbs ever lit by electricity generated by nuclear power at EBR-1 at Argonne National Laboratory-West, December 20, 1951. [7]The process of nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 after over four decades of work on the science of radioactivity and the elaboration of new nuclear physics that described the components of atoms.
In a fission nuclear reactor, uranium-238 can be used to generate plutonium-239, which itself can be used in a nuclear weapon or as a nuclear-reactor fuel supply. In a typical nuclear reactor, up to one-third of the generated power comes from the fission of 239 Pu, which is not supplied as a fuel to the reactor, but rather, produced from 238 U. [5] A certain amount of production of 239
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.
During and after the end of World War II, scientists working on the Manhattan Project and other nuclear weapons research projects conducted studies of the effects of plutonium on laboratory animals and human subjects. [114] Animal studies found that a few milligrams of plutonium per kg of tissue is a lethal dose. [115]
In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, a nuclear reaction is a process in which two nuclei, or a nucleus and an external subatomic particle, collide to produce one or more new nuclides. Thus, a nuclear reaction must cause a transformation of at least one nuclide to another.