Loomis backed much of Lawrence's work, not least his uranium fission research, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.
It was at that Washington conference in 1939 that Bohr and Fermi first publicly addressed the idea that neutrons were emitted when uranium fission takes place.
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Few believe in fusion now, though uranium-powered fission reactors may be coming back into fashion.
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For really heavy elements, such as uranium, such fission happens spontaneously.
There are various advantages cited for this type of reactor, including the claim that it can be stopped easily if things get out of hand, and that it produces less long-lived nuclear waste than the uranium-fuelled fission reactors that are currently in common use.
Normal fission involves breaking uranium or plutonium atoms up by hitting them with neutrons.
According to papers filed with the Blue Ribbon Commission, the current research involves faster and simpler processes for separating uranium and plutonium from other fission products in spent fuel and from minor elements like americium and curium.
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Nuclear fission, generally fuelled by uranium or plutonium, heats up water which evaporates.
During fission, large elements like uranium are split into smaller elements.
The device's primary source of neutron radiation was the radioactive element californium, but the stream of neutrons produced by the californium was multiplied by passing it through a lattice of highly enriched uranium U-235, whose nuclear fission released additional neutrons.
Each fission reaction splits the nucleus of an atom of uranium-235 or plutonium-239 into two smaller atoms and releases a great deal of energy.
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Reactors that exploit nuclear fission (in which energy is generated by splitting uranium atoms) have produced thousands of tonnes of spent fuel and other radioactive by-products.
About 2 billion years ago, uranium rocks at a site in Oklo, Gabon, experienced such compression that they underwent fission reactions much like those that occur in nuclear reactors.
Modular nuclear reactors take uranium, or in some cases thorium, and produce steam for turbines via heat generated in fission reactions.
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