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Explanation and Context:

Fission

Timeline of Fission
1789 - Martin Klaproth discovers uranium
1898 - Marie Curie discovers polonium and radium. She also coins the term Radioactivity.
1911 - Marie Curie wins the Nobel Prize for the discovery of polonium and radium
1934 - Marie Curie dies of aplastic anemia, caused by exposure to radiation.
1938 - Nuclear fission is discovered by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists
Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. Fermi wins Nobel Prize for "demonstrations of the
existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation and for his related
discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons"
1942 - The first successful nuclear fission occurs at the University of Chicago. Beginning of the
Manhattan Project.
1944 - Hahn is awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering nuclear fission.
1946 - The Atomic Energy Commission is created in the US.
1947 - End of the Manhattan Project, The first Nuclear reactor in the UK is built.
1951- EBR-I became the first power plant to produce usable electricity through atomic fission.
1956 - The first commercial nuclear power plant in the UK is built, it is named Calder Hall.
1979 - March 28, Three-mile island disaster in the USA is called the worst nuclear disaster on
American soil.
1986 - 26 April, Chornobyl Disaster in Ukraine, about 30 die directly in the reactor meltdown.
2011 - March nuclear disaster in Fukushima, a 15-foot wave damages the power supply and
cooling for 3 Fukushima Daiichi reactors the 3 reactors melt down.
2011 and after - Starting with Germany many nations suspend nuclear power plant creation and
start to dismantle reactors all over the globe.

Explanation:
Basics:

Three key components to a fission reactor are fuel rods, control rods, and moderator, control
rods are normally made of boron or cadmium
Neutrons are key

How does a fission reactor work? Well, first ceramic uranium pellets are made then stacked
upon each other then in cased zirconium metal tubes these tubes are called fuel rods. Your
average fission reactor has about 200 fuel rods. The fuel rods are also encased in graphite and
surrounded by water this water runs through a pipe and a pressurizer in a circuit. This water
gets really hot because of the energy released from the nuclear reaction. But because of its
contact with the uranium, it becomes highly radioactive so it must remain contained. This hot
water heats up non-radioactive water which turns into steam and turns a turbine then
condenses again into water to repeat the process.

Control rods are long skinny rods commonly made out of Boron or carbon; the control rods are
used to keep the reactor from melting down. By catching the spare neutrons from the reaction.

Efficiency - 34 to 36% of the energy in a fission reaction is harvested into electrical energy for
our use.

Explanation and Context:

Fusion
Timeline of Fusion
1920s - The British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington suggested that stars draw their energy from
the fusion of hydrogen into helium.
1930s - Scientists, particularly Hans Bethe, discovered that nuclear fusion was possible and that
it was the energy source for the sun.
1934 - With his famous experiment Rutherford shows the fusion of deuterium into helium and
observed that “an enormous effect was produced” during the process.
1950 - Soviet scientists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm proposed a design for a fusion reactor,
they call it the Tokamak
1973, 1977 - The Europe Commission gives the green light to build the JET fusion test reactor.
1997 - JET the first reactor to run on a fuel of a 50-50 mix of tritium and deuterium breaks the
fusion energy record by creating 16 MWs from an input of 24MWs.
2005 - ITER Members unanimously agreed that ITER would be built in Cadarache in France.
ITER is a new testing fusion reactor.
2021 - JET sets another record of 59 MJ of energy in a 5-second burst while only burning 170
micrograms of deuterium and tritium.
2022 - ITER is 77.7% complete towards the first plasma/test.
Monday, December 5, 2022 - Breakthrough in fusion, about two megajoules (a unit of energy)
went into the reaction and about three megajoules came out at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.

Explanation:
Explanation and Context:
Fusion:

Basics:
● Simply, you can heat a fluid like water. It will vaporize the water, which will then spin a
turbine and create electricity.
● Fusion is the process that takes place in the heart of stars and provides the power that
drives the universe. When light nuclei fuse to form a heavier nucleus, they release bursts
of energy
 ● Produce energy from fusion here on Earth, a combination of hydrogen gases –
deuterium and tritium – are heated to very high temperatures (over 100 million degrees
Celsius). The gas becomes a plasma and the nuclei combine to form a helium nucleus
and a neutron, with a tiny fraction of the mass converted into ‘fusion’ energy. A plasma
with millions of these reactions every second can provide a huge amount of energy from
very small amounts of fuel.

Efficiency:
One kilogram of fusion fuel could provide the same amount of energy as 10 million kilograms of
fossil fuel. A 1 Gigawatt fusion power station will need less than one tonne of fuel during a
year's operation.

Example of energy lost:

The fusion of lighter elements in stars releases energy and the mass that always accompanies
it. For example, in the fusion of two hydrogen nuclei to form helium, 0.645% of the mass is
carried away in the form of kinetic energy of an alpha particle or other forms of energy, such as
electromagnetic radiation.

Optimization:
Currently, fusion reactions take a lot of energy and do not produce much energy. To optimize
and make fusion feasible we need to make the reaction take less energy to create or harvest
more energy from the fusion reaction.

Electromagnetism: the electrical and magnetic forces or effects produced by an electric

current.
We create a force by spinning a turbine, that goes into a generator. This removes a charge in a
magnetic field, which creates a current.

Fusion energy is released in the form of fast-moving neutrons, which will be slowed down in
special blankets within the vessel walls. The resultant heat would generate electricity in just the
same way as existing power stations, where the heat is used to raise steam, driving turbines to
produce electricity. The possibility of using the energy more directly has been considered but
does not seem practical at this time.
Products:

Fission:
Model of a fission reactor

Fusion:
Stop-motion animation of what fusion is