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The fission process can occur spontaneously, or it can be induced by an incident particle." The energy from a fission reaction is produced by its fission products, though a large majority of it, about 85 percent, is found in fragment kinetic energy, while about 6 percent each comes from initial neutrons and gamma rays and those emitted after ...
A criticality accident occurs if the same reaction is achieved unintentionally, for example in an unsafe environment or during reactor maintenance. Though dangerous and frequently lethal to humans within the immediate area, the critical mass formed would not be capable of producing a massive nuclear explosion of the type that fission bombs are ...
Photofission is a process in which a nucleus, after absorbing a gamma ray, undergoes nuclear fission and splits into two or more fragments.. The reaction was discovered in 1940 by a small team of engineers and scientists operating the Westinghouse Atom Smasher at the company's Research Laboratories in Forest Hills, Pennsylvania. [1]
The medical effects of the atomic bomb upon humans can be put into the four categories below, with the effects of larger thermonuclear weapons producing blast and thermal effects so large that there would be a negligible number of survivors close enough to the center of the blast who would experience prompt/acute radiation effects, which were observed after the 16 kiloton yield Hiroshima bomb ...
Transfer reactions can occur: from the projectile to the target - stripping reactions; from the target to the projectile - pick-up reactions; Examples: (α,n) and (α,p) reactions. Some of the earliest nuclear reactions studied involved an alpha particle produced by alpha decay, knocking a nucleon from a target nucleus. (d,n) and (d,p) reactions.
The sum of the atomic mass of the two atoms produced by the fission of one fissile atom is always less than the atomic mass of the original atom. This is because some of the mass is lost as free neutrons, and once kinetic energy of the fission products has been removed (i.e., the products have been cooled to extract the heat provided by the reaction), then the mass associated with this energy ...
A common practice is to apply a double contingency analysis to the operation in which two or more independent, concurrent and unlikely changes in process conditions must occur before a nuclear criticality accident can occur. For example, the first change in conditions may be complete or partial flooding and the second change a re-arrangement of ...
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.