NATS 1945 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Fissile Material, Electronvolt, Atomic Nucleus

• School: York University
• Department: Natural Science
• Course: NATS 1945
• Professor: Robin Metcalfe

Document Summary

Fissio(cid:374): the splitti(cid:374)g of a(cid:374) ato(cid:373)"s (cid:374)u(cid:272)leus i(cid:374)to t(cid:449)o lo(cid:449)er-(cid:373)ass (cid:374)u(cid:272)lei (cid:894)(cid:862)fissio(cid:374) frag(cid:373)e(cid:374)ts(cid:863)(cid:895) Induced by firing a neutron at a fissionable nucleus. (i. e. a weakly-bound nucleus due to a large number of nucleons. Releases high-speed particles and high-energy electromagnetic waves (i. e. ionizing radiation) Releases over a million times more energy than the same mass of gasoline. In a fissile atom, released neutrons can trigger chain reaction. That pro(cid:272)ess is k(cid:374)o(cid:449)(cid:374) as nuclear fission, and the resulting chunks are called the fission fragments. Now the ff are not the only result of f, another product of f is the amount of energy that f releases. When we talk about the energy released by atomic nuclei we typically use the energy unit, mega electron volt (mev). Mev is a million electron volts, and it is a very small amount of energy, in fact, it takes about 6 trillion mev to make 1j of energy.