Nuclear Fission Or Nuclear Confession

Artificial nuclear reactions can be either classified as nuclear fusion or nuclear fission. Nuclear fission involves lighter colliding particles making the heavy parent more unstable and it fragments or fissions into smaller nuclei and other particles. This was first discovered when the German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman made an amazing discovery in 1983. They found that when U-235 was bombarded with neutrons, sometimes smaller nuclei were produced. These smaller nuclei were approximately half the size of the original nuclei. This baffled the german scientists but two Jewish physicists Lisa Meitner and Otto Frisch found that the U-235 nucleus had absorbed the neutron to form a U-236 nucleus. After this occurred the U-236 like a drop of water splits into two roughly equal pieces. They called this nuclear fission as it resembled biological fission(

A chain reaction refers to a process in which neutrons released in fission produce an additional fission in at least one further nucleus. This nucleus in turn produces more neutrons, and the process repeats. The process may be controlled for nuclear power or uncontrolled for nuclear weapons. Although two to three neutrons are produced for every fission, not all of these neutrons are available for continuing the fission reaction. If the neutrons are lost at a faster rate than they are formed by fission, the chain reaction will not be self-sustaining.At the point where the chain reaction can become self-sustaining, this is referred to as critical mass. Critical mass is defined as the amount of material at which a neutron produced by a fission process will, on average, create another fission event. The chain reaction in nuclear reactors is controlled to stop it going too fast. A nuclear reactor is a structure in which fissile material can be made to undergo a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction with the consequent release of