X-Nico

unusual facts about fission


Fission

Nuclear fission, where a large atomic nucleus (such as that of uranium) is split into two (or sometimes more) smaller nuclei.


A2W reactor

Extracting the rods to a calculated height allows the reactor to reach criticality — the point at which the nuclear fission reactions reach a self-sustaining level.

ADSR

Accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor, a nuclear reactor using a particle accelerator to generate a fission reaction in a sub-critical assembly of fissionable material

Cdc14

Mutants in the ortholog of the fission Schizosaccharomyces pombe exit mitosis normally (unlike S. cerevisiae) but are altered in septation and cytokinesis.

Direct conversion

In the late nineties research was undertaken by Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, The University of Florida, Texas A&M University and General Atomics to use direct conversion to extract energy from fission reactions.

Einstein–Szilárd letter

The Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd, who was residing in the United States at the time, realized that the neutron-driven fission of heavy atoms could be used to create a nuclear chain reaction that could yield vast amounts of energy for electric power generation or atomic bombs.

Entamoeba

Studying Entamoeba invadens, David Biron of the Weizmann Institute of Science and coworkers found that about one third of the cells are unable to separate unaided and recruit a neighboring amoeba (dubbed the "midwife") to complete the fission.

ET.317

Since the Reggie secondary manufactured in the UK from British-owned materials was a copy of the US W-59, by implication, the W-59 thermonuclear weapon deployed in some Minuteman I ICBMs also used the fission-fusion-fission process.

Hans-Joachim Born

At the KWIH, Born examined the distribution of Radionuclides in the organs of rodents, and he also worked with fission products from research programs conducted under Nikolaus Riehl, scientific director of the Auergesellschaft, who was a participant in the German nuclear energy project Uranverein.

Heterochromatin

In the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe two RNAi complexes, the RNAi-induced transcriptional gene silencing (RITS) complex and the RNA-directed RNA polymerase complex (RDRC), are part of an RNAi machinery involved in the initiation, propagation and maintenance of heterochromatin assembly.

Fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) uses another mechanism for heterochromatin formation at its centromeres.

Jens Johansson

Johansson has released several instrumental solo records such as Fjäderlösa Tvåfotingar, Ten Seasons (a piano solo album improvised in the Mark Kostabi gallery, New York), Heavy Machinery (with Anders and Allan Holdsworth) and Fission (with Anders, Shawn Lane and Mike Stern) and many collaborations with other artists, metal compilations and Berends Brothers' band Mastermind.

Mary P. Sinclair

When Consumers Power announced their intentions to build the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station on the shoreline of Lake Michigan in 1967, Mary Sinclair's background in nuclear fission technology prompted her to write a letter to the editor questioning the safety of several elements of their plan.

Noor Muhammad Butt

In May 1998, when India tested its fission devices in Pokhran, the Pakistani government gave the scientists a green signal to test the nuclear weapon.

Nuclear power proposed as renewable energy

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development(WCED), an organization independent from, but created by, the United Nations, published Our Common Future, in which a particular subset of presently operating nuclear fission technologies, and nuclear fusion were both classified as renewable.

Peter Armbruster

His major research fields are fission, interaction of heavy ions in matter and atomic physics with fission product beams at the Research Centre of Jülich (1965 to 1970).

Pom1

Pom1 is a polarity protein kinase in fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe (S. pombe), that localizes to cell ends and regulates cell division.

Pombe

Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the fission yeast, a yeast species used as a model organism in molecular and cell biology

Prompt

Prompt critical, in nuclear engineering, the state of an assembly when for each nuclear fission event, one or more of the immediate or prompt neutrons released causes an additional fission event

Prompt neutron, in nuclear engineering, a neutron immediately emitted by a nuclear fission event, as opposed to a delayed neutron

Stanton T. Friedman

Friedman was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as General Electric (1956–1959), Aerojet General Nucleonics (1959–1963), General Motors (1963–1966), Westinghouse (1966–1968), TRW Systems (1969–1970), and McDonnell Douglas, where he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications.

Students for a Libertarian Society

As part of this effort, it worked closely with scientist John Gofman, a veteran of the Manhattan Project and a key developer of an early process for separating plutonium from fission products, in a campaign to repeal such subsides for nuclear power as the Price Anderson Act.

The Pile

the Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial nuclear fission reactor.

Unbiquadium

In 2008, a team at GANIL, France, published results indicating that nuclei of unbiquadium had been produced at very high excitation energy, which underwent fission with measurable lifetimes.

Variable speed of light

For over three decades since the discovery of the Oklo natural nuclear fission reactor in 1972, even more stringent constraints, placed by the study of certain isotopic abundances determined to be the products of a (estimated) 2 billion year-old fission reaction, seemed to indicate no variation was present.

Violet Club

In 1953, shortly after the Americans tested a thermonuclear weapon in 1952, followed by the Soviets with Joe 4, and before the UK government took a decision in July 1954 to develop a thermonuclear weapon, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston was asked about the possibilities for a very large pure fission bomb with a yield of one megaton.


see also