When a beam of neutrons is aimed at a sample ... "I've been studying actinides and uranium since I joined ORNL as a postdoc," ...

In January of 1939, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment: after bombarding uranium with neutrons—neutrally charged particles—they ...

Heavy water can help keep such a chain reaction going. As each uranium atom breaks apart, it shoots out neutrons that can go on to split other atoms. But the neutrons are much more likely to ...

Any fission reactor basically works the same. An unstable atom like uranium or plutonium breaks apart, creating fast neutrons. There’s a chance some of those neutrons will strike nearby unstable ...

This is a property of the neutrons used in the reactor ... This includes the U-238 that makes up a large percentage of uranium fuel. In addition to these reactor designs, Natrium also adds ...

The fast-moving neutrons carry most of the energy from the reaction with them (99%) but before the neutrons can collide with fresh uranium nuclei, they need to be slowed down.

A nuclear reactor is designed to split atoms. Some elements, like uranium, naturally throw off particles called neutrons as time goes by. The way a nuclear reactor works is by arranging uranium in ...

Because fluorine is essential for converting uranium into a form suitable for ... the same number of protons but a different ...

Scientists have discovered that a piece of uranium extracted from an African mine is a two billion-year-old natural nuclear reactor they're calling Oklo.

Uranium; radiation detectors; neutrons beams — not the kind of paraphernalia that sits around in many laboratories, because the explosive energy they can theoretically unleash is enormous.

In 1939 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann announced that uranium nuclei "burst" when they are bombarded with neutrons. How they came to this conclusion is a classic example of the nature of science ...