Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Aqueous homogeneous reactors were sometimes called "water boilers" (not to be confused with boiling water reactors), as the water inside appears to boil, though the bubbling is actually due to the production of hydrogen and oxygen as radiation and fission particles dissociate the water into its constituent gases, a process called radiolysis.
Fission product yields by mass for thermal neutron fission of U-235 and Pu-239 (the two typical of current nuclear power reactors) and U-233 (used in the thorium cycle). This page discusses each of the main elements in the mixture of fission products produced by nuclear fission of the common nuclear fuels uranium and plutonium.
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 ...
When a uranium nucleus fissions into two daughter nuclei fragments, about 0.1 percent of the mass of the uranium nucleus [15] appears as the fission energy of ~200 MeV. For uranium-235 (total mean fission energy 202.79 MeV [16]), typically ~169 MeV appears as the kinetic energy of the daughter nuclei, which fly apart at about 3% of the speed of ...
Uranium-235 fissions with low-energy thermal neutrons because the binding energy resulting from the absorption of a neutron is greater than the critical energy required for fission; therefore uranium-235 is fissile. By contrast, the binding energy released by uranium-238 absorbing a thermal neutron is less than the critical energy, so the ...
BWRs are characterized by boiling water around the fuel rods in the lower portion of a primary reactor pressure vessel. A boiling water reactor uses 235 U, enriched as uranium dioxide, as its fuel. The fuel is assembled into rods housed in a steel vessel that is submerged in water. The nuclear fission causes the water to boil, generating steam.
The mere fact that an assembly is supercritical does not guarantee that it contains any free neutrons at all. At least one neutron is required to "strike" a chain reaction, and if the spontaneous fission rate is sufficiently low it may take a long time (in 235 U reactors, as long as many minutes) before a chance neutron encounter starts a chain reaction even if the reactor is supercritical.
There are also five other trace isotopes: uranium-240, a decay product of plutonium-244; [111] uranium-239, which is formed when 238 U undergoes spontaneous fission, releasing neutrons that are captured by another 238 U atom; uranium-237, which is formed when 238 U captures a neutron but emits two more, which then decays to neptunium-237 ...