"Nuclear fission was discovered on 19 December 1938 in Berlin by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann."
The process in which a nucleus is split into two or more smaller nuclei, releasing a large amount of energy in the process.
Atomic structure and chemistry: Understanding the properties of atoms, ions, and molecules; how they interact and account for chemical reactions.
Radioactivity and radiation: Types of radioactivity, the physics of radiation, and exposure of human to radiation.
Nuclear reactions and nuclear energy: The nuclear reaction process, energy release, and the fuel cycle.
Nuclear power plants types: The common types of nuclear power plants, including pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors, and supercritical water reactors.
Nuclear fuel cycle: The stages of nuclear fuel production, storage, and disposal, including enrichment of uranium or plutonium, fuel fabrication, spent fuel storage, and nuclear waste management.
Safety and security regulation: The regulations and guidelines that govern the conducting of nuclear reactions.
Reactor technology: The design of nuclear reactors to optimize energy production and minimize reactor accidents, including control rods, cooling systems, containment, and reactor shielding.
Nuclear fusion: The process of triggering nuclear fusion reactions for energy production, including tokamaks, inertial confinement laser fusion, and magnetic confinement fusion.
Nuclear weapons: The history of nuclear weapons, how they are made, and their modern political significance.
Applications of nuclear energy: The use of nuclear energy in various areas including power generation, medicine, research, space exploration, and military applications.
Thermal Fission: This is the most common type of nuclear fission where a nucleus is split into two smaller nuclei by colliding with a neutron whose kinetic energy is similar to the average thermal energy of the reactor.
Fast Fission: This type of fission occurs when high-energy neutrons collide with the fissile nucleus, causing it to split into two smaller nuclei.
Spontaneous Fission: Some radioactive elements such as Uranium, Plutonium, and Curium undergo spontaneous fission, where they break apart into smaller nuclei without an external neutron.
Neutron-Induced Fission: This type of fission occurs when neutrons collide with heavy atomic nuclei, causing them to split and releasing energy.
Photofission: This type of fission is induced by the absorption of high energy gamma rays or X-rays.
Electrofission: This type of fission is induced by the absorption of high-energy electrons.
Muon-Induced Fission: This type of fission is induced by muons, which are subatomic particles usually produced when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere.
"Physicists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch explained it theoretically in January 1939."
"Frisch named the process 'fission' by analogy with biological fission of living cells."
"The fission process often produces gamma photons."
"The fission process...releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay."
"For fission to produce energy, the total binding energy of the resulting elements must be greater than that of the starting element."
"Fission is a form of nuclear transmutation because the resulting fragments (or daughter atoms) are not the same element as the original parent atom."
"The two (or more) nuclei produced are most often of comparable but slightly different sizes, typically with a mass ratio of products of about 3 to 2."
"Occasionally (2 to 4 times per 1000 events), three positively charged fragments are produced, in a ternary fission."
"The unpredictable composition of the products (which vary in a broad probabilistic and somewhat chaotic manner) distinguishes fission from purely quantum tunneling processes."
"Nuclear fission produces energy for nuclear power and drives the explosion of nuclear weapons."
"The amount of free energy contained in nuclear fuel is millions of times the amount of free energy contained in a similar mass of chemical fuel such as gasoline."
"The products of nuclear fission...are on average far more radioactive than the heavy elements which are normally fissioned as fuel, and remain so for significant amounts of time, giving rise to a nuclear waste problem."
"Nuclear reprocessing aims to recover usable material from spent nuclear fuel to both enable uranium (and thorium) supplies to last longer and to reduce the amount of 'waste'."
"Fast breeder reactors can fission them all albeit only in certain configurations."
"The industry term for a process that fissions all or nearly all actinides is a 'closed fuel cycle'."