Abstract
The first two sections of the chapter present a survey of various types of nuclear collisions and illustrate the cross section concept, which is largely used to describe nuclear reactions. The remaining part of the chapter deals with nuclear fission, the process that is of fundamental importance for the production of nuclear power. Sections 3.3–3.7 examine in detail the distribution of fission fragments, the energy released in the fission reaction, the fission induced by neutron capture, the general conditions for setting up a fission chain reaction, and the way used for slowing down neutrons in thermal neutron reactors. Sections 3.8–3.12 review the basic physical features in fission technology for energy production, and carefully describe the physics and the components of thermal and fast reactors, with a particular attention to reactor control and fuel burnup.
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Notes
- 1.
The origin of the barn unit is said to lie in the American colloquialism “big as a barn”, which was first applied (in 1942) to the cross sections for the interaction of slow neutrons with certain atomic nuclei, which was much higher than expected.
- 2.
Often no distinction is made between fission of U-235 and U-236. Also in this book we will speak of fission of U-235 but show reactions involving U-236. Strictly speaking, it is the nucleus U-236 which splits into nuclear fragments, after being formed by capture of a neutron by U-235. However, we also say that the process occurring is the fission of U-235.
- 3.
When the reactor has been operated for a while, an additional heat source is provided by the alpha-decays of transuranic elements produced by neutron capture on 238U.
- 4.
The fragment components producing the majority of the delayed neutrons have half-life 1.52 and 4.51 s; there are also components with half-life 0.43 s, 15.6 s and 22.5 s.
- 5.
To this respect, it is important to notice that nuclear reactors cannot explode like an atomic bomb. The latter has all of its fissile material set up for the chain reaction to propagate as quickly as possible. Instead, nuclear power plants use extremely small amounts of nuclear fuel at a time, and the fuel is insufficiently concentrated, so that it cannot explode. This will be discussed more extensively in Chap. 5.
- 6.
A Megawatt-day is a quantity of energy corresponding to a power of 1 MW (=106 J/s) extended over one day (=86,400 s). Therefore 1 MWd = 8.64 × 1010 J. Another similar unit is the Gigawatt-day (GWd), corresponding to a power of 1 GW over one day, equal to 8.64 × 1013 J.
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De Sanctis, E., Monti, S., Ripani, M. (2016). Nuclear Reactions and Fission. In: Energy from Nuclear Fission. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30651-3_3
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