Nuclear fission

In physics, fission is a nuclear process in which a heavier unstable nucleus divides or splits into two or more lighter nuclei, with the release of substantial amounts of energy. When a free neutron of the proper energy is captured by the nucleus of a fissionable atom, the resulting unstable nucleus will split producing two or more fission products (atomic nuclei of different elements formed from the protons and neutrons originally comprising the nucleus before its fission), two or three free neutrons and a tremendous amount of energy.

Atomic nuclei are made up of neutrons and protons. The number of protons is equal to the atomic number, Z. The number of neutrons, N, is equal to the difference between the atomic mass number, A, and the atomic number. There are two sets of forces acting on these particles, ordinary electric Coulomb forces of repulsion between the positive charges and the very short range strong nuclear forces which bind the particles of a nucleus together.

Neutron to Proton ratios for stable atomic nuclei.

The combined effects of these attractive and repulsive forces are such that only certain combinations of neutrons and protons are stable. If the neutrons and protons are few in number, stability occurs when their numbers are about equal. For larger nuclei, the proportion of neutrons required for stability is greater. Finally, at the end of the periodic table, where the number of protons is over 90 and the number of neutrons nearly 150, there are no completely stable nuclei. (Some of the heavy nuclei are almost stable as evidenced by very long half-lives.) If an unstable nucleus is formed artificially by adding an extra neutron or proton, eventually a change to a stable form occurs. This is not accomplished by ejecting a proton or a neutron but by ejecting a positron or an electron; within the nucleus a proton converts itself into a neutron and positron (or a neutron converts itself into a proton and electron), and the light charged particle is ejected. In other words, the mass number remains the same but the atomic number changes. The stability conditions are not very critical so that for a given mass number, i.e., given total number of protons and neutrons, there may be several stable arrangements of protons and neutrons (at most three or five) giving several isobars. For a given atomic number, i.e., given number of protons, conditions can vary still more widely so that some of the heavy elements have as many as ten or twelve stable isotopes.

It is a general principle of physics that work must be done on a stable system to break it up. Thus, if an assemblage of neutrons and protons is stable, energy must be supplied to separate its constituent particles. If energy and mass are equivalent then the total mass of a stable nucleus should be less than the total mass of the separate protons and neutrons that go to make it up. This mass difference, then, should be equivalent to the energy required to disrupt the nucleus completely, which is called the binding energy.

Most atomic nuclei can be penetrated by at least one type of atomic projectile (or by gamma radiation). Any such penetration may result in a nuclear rearrangement in the course of which a fundamental particle is ejected or radiation is emitted or both. The resulting nucleus may be one of the naturally available stable species, or - more likely - it may be an atom of a different type which is radioactive, eventually changing to still a different nucleus. This may in turn be radioactive and, if so, will again decay. The process continues until all nuclei have changed to a stable type. There are two respects in which these artificially radioactive substances differ from the natural ones: many of them change by emitting positrons (unknown in natural radio-activity) and very few of them emit alpha particles. In every one of the cases where accurate measurements have been made, the equivalence of mass and energy has been demonstrated and the mass-energy total has remained constant. (Sometimes it is necessary to invoke neutrinos to preserve mass-energy conservation.)

The principle of operation of both nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors is that a nuclear chain reaction must occur. If one neutron causes a fission that produces more than one new neutron, the number of fissions may increase tremendously with the release of enormous amounts of energy. It is a question of probabilities. There are four possible outcomes of a neutron produced in the fission process:

1. escape entirely from the fissionable material
2. non-fission capture by fissionable material
3. non-fission capture by nonfissionable impurities
4. fission capture

If the loss of neutrons by the first three processes is less than the surplus produced by the fourth, the chain reaction occurs; otherwise it does not. This is often expressed numerically as the neutron multiplication factor, k, where:

k = f - l

With f being the average number of neutrons undergoing fission capture, and l represents the average sum of neutron loss mechanisms 1, 2, and 3 above. Any one of the first three loss processes may have such a high probability in a given arrangement that the extra neutrons created by fission will be insufficient to keep the reaction going. For example, should it turn out that the non-fission capture by uranium has a much higher probability than fission capture, there would presumably be no possibility of achieving a chain reaction. If the number of neutrons causing fissions is decreasing with time, the reactor is called subcritical. If the number is constant with time, the reactor is called critical, and if the number is increasing with time, it is called supercritical. The criticality state of the reactor is represented by K_eff (K-effective), where K_eff is the number of neutrons in one generation divided by the number of neutrons in the previous generation.

Critical Mass

The relative number of neutrons which escape from a quantity of uranium can be minimized by changing the size and shape. In a sphere any surface effect is proportional to the square of the radius, and any volume effect is proportional to the cube of the radius. Now the escape of neutrons from a quantity of uranium is a surface effect depending on the area of the surface, but fission capture occurs throughout the material and is therefore a volume effect. Consequently the greater the amount of uranium, the less probable it is that neutron escape will predominate over fission capture and prevent a chain reaction. Loss of neutrons by non-fission capture is a volume effect like neutron production by fission capture, so that increase in size makes no change in its relative importance.

The critical size of a device containing uranium is defined as the size for which the production of free neutrons by fission is just equal to their loss by escape and by non-fission capture. In other words, if the size is smaller than critical, then by definition no chain reaction will sustain itself.

Moderators

Thermal neutrons have the highest probability of producing fission of U-235 but the neutrons emitted in the process of fission have high speeds (they are not thermal). It is an oversimplification to say that the chain reaction might maintain itself if more neutrons were created by fission than were absorbed, because the probability both of fission capture and of non-fission capture depends on the speed of the neutrons. Unfortunately, the speed at which non-fission capture is most probable is intermediate between the average speed of neutrons emitted in the fission process and the speed at which fission capture is most probable.

For some years before the discovery of fission, the customary way of slowing down neutrons was to cause them to pass through material of low atomic weight, such as hydrogenous material. The process of slowing down or moderation is simply one of elastic collisions between high speed particles and particles practically at rest. The more nearly identical the masses of neutron and struck particle, the greater the loss of kinetic energy by the neutron. Therefore light elements are most effective as nuetron moderators.

It occurred to a number of physicists that it might be possible to mix uranium with a moderator in such a way that the high speed fission neutrons, after being ejected from uranium and before re-encountering uranium nuclei, would have their speeds reduced below the speeds for which non-fission capture is highly probable. The characteristics of a good moderator are that it should be of low atomic weight and that it should have little or no tendency to absorb neutrons. Lithium and boron are excluded on the latter count. Helium is difficult to use because it is a gas and forms no compounds. The choice of moderator therefore lay among hydrogen, deuterium, beryllium, and carbon. Even now no one of these substances can be excluded from the list of practical possibilities. It was Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard who first proposed the use of graphite (a form of carbon) as a moderator for a chain reaction.

REDUCTION OF NON-FISSION CAPTURE BY ISOTOPE SEPARATION

An additional complication is that natural uranium contains three isotopes: U-234, U-235, and U-238, present to the extent of approximately 0.006, 0.7, and 99.3 per cent, respectively. We have already seen that the probabilities of processes (2)and (4) are different for different isotopes. We have also seen that the probabilities are different for neutrons of different energies.

For neutrons of certain intermediate speeds (corresponding to energies of a few electron volts) U-238 has a large capture cross section for the production of U-239 but not for fission. There is also a considerable probability of inelastic (i.e., non-capture-producing) collisions between high speed neutrons and U-238 nuclei. Thus the presence of the U-238 tends both to reduce the speed of the fast neutrons and to effect the capture of those of moderate speed. Although there may be some non-fission capture by U-235, it is evident that if we can separate the U-235 from the U-238 and discard the U-238, we can reduce non-fission capture and can thus promote the chain reaction. In fact, the probability of fission of U-235 by high speed neutrons may be great enough to make the use of a moderator unnecessary once the U-238 has been removed. Unfortunately, U-235 is present in natural uranium only to the extent of about one part in 140. Also, the relatively small difference in mass between the two isotopes makes separation difficult. Nevertheless, the possibility of separating U-235 was recognized early on in the Manhattan Project as being of the greatest importance.

PRODUCTION AND PURIFICATION OF MATERIALS

It has been stated above that the cross section for capture of neutrons varies greatly among different materials. In some it is very high compared to the maximum fission cross section of uranium. If, then, we are to hope to achieve a chain reaction, we must reduce effect (3) - non-fission capture by impurities -to the point where it is not serious. This means very careful purification of the uranium metal and very careful purification of the moderator. Calculations show that the maximum per-missible concentrations of many impurity elements are a few parts per million- in either the uranium or the moderator. When it is recalled that up to 1940 the total amount of uranium metal produced in this country was not more than a few grams and even this was of doubtful purity, that the total amount of metallic beryllium produced in this country was not more than a few pounds, that the total amount of concentrated deuterium pro-duced was not more than a few pounds, and that carbon had never been produced in quantity with anything like the purity required of a moderator, it is clear that the problem of producing and purifying materials was a major one.

Control - Weapons or Power?

The problems that have been discussed so far have to do merely with the realization of the chain reaction. If such a reaction is going to be of use, we must be able to control it. The problem of control is different depending on whether we are interested in steady production of power or in an explosion. In general, the steady production of atomic power requires a slow -neutron-induced fission chain reaction occurring in a mixture or lattice of uranium and moderator, while an atomic bomb requires a fast-neutron-induced fission chain reaction in U-235 or Pu-239, although both slow- and fast-neutron fission may contribute in each case. It seemed likely, even in 1940, that by using neutron absorbers a power chain reaction could be controlled. It was also considered likely, though not certain, that such a chain reaction would be self-limiting by virtue of the lower probability of fission-producing capture when a higher temperature was reached. Nevertheless, there was a possibility that a chain-reacting system might get out of control, and it therefore seemed necessary to perform the chain-reaction experiment in an uninhabited location

Up to this point we have been discussing how to produce and control a nuclear chain reaction but not how to make use of it. The technological gap between producing a controlled chain reaction and using it as a large-scale power source or a explosive is comparable to the gap between the discovery of fire and the manufacture of a steam locomotive.

Although production of power has never been the principal object of this project, enough attention has been given to the matter to reveal the major difficulty: the attainment of high-temperature operation. An effective heat engine must not only develop heat but must develop heat at a high temperature. To run a chain-reacting system at a high temperature and to convert the heat generated to useful work is very much more difficult than to run a chain-reacting system at a low temperature.

Of course, the proof that a chain reaction is possible does not itself ensure that nuclear energy can be effective in a bomb. To have an effective explosion it is necessary that the chain reaction build up extremely rapidly; otherwise only a small amount of the nuclear energy will be utilized before the bomb flies apart and the reaction stops. It is also necessary that no premature explosion occur. This entire "detonation" problem was and still remains one of the most difficult problems in de-signing a high-efficiency atomic bomb.

Three ways of increasing the likelihood of a chain reaction have been mentioned: use of a moderator; attainment of high purity of materials; use of special material, either U-235 or Pu. The three procedures are not mutually exclusive, and many schemes have been proposed for using small amounts of separated U-235 or PU-239 in a lattice composed primarily of ordinary uranium or uranium oxide and of a moderator or two different moderators. Such proposed arrangements are usually called "enriched piles."

History

The process was discovered in 1939 by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and coworkers

The results of the bombardment of uranium by neutrons had proved interesting and puzzling. First studied by Fermi and his colleagues in 1934, they were not properly interpreted until several years later

On January 16, 1939, Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, Denmark, arrived in this country to spend several months in Princeton, N. J., and was particularly anxious to discuss some abstract problems with Albert Einstein. (Four years later Bohr was to escape from Nazi-occupied Denmark in a small boat.) Just before Bohr left Denmark two of his colleagues, O. R. Frisch and L. Meitner (both refugees from Germany), had told him their guess that the absorption of a neutron by a uranium nucleus sometimes caused that nucleus to split into approximately equal parts with the release of enormous quantities of energy, a process that soon began to be called nuclear "fission."

The occasion for this hypothesis was the important discovery of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann[?] in Germany (published in Naturwissenschaften in early January 1939) which proved that an isotope of barium was produced by neutron bombardment of uranium. Immediately on arrival in the United States, Bohr communicated this idea to his former student J. A. Wheeler and others at Princeton University, and from them the news spread by word of mouth to neighboring physicists including Enrico Fermi at Columbia University. As a result of conversations among Fermi, J. R. Dunning[?], and G. B. Pegram[?], a search was undertaken at Columbia for the heavy pulses of ionization that would be expected from the flying fragments of the uranium nucleus. On January 26, 1939, there was a conference on theoretical physics at Washington, D. C., sponsored jointly by the George Washington University[?] and the Carnegie Institution[?] of Washington.

Fermi left New York to attend this meeting before the Columbia fission experiments had been tried. At the meeting Bohr and Fermi discussed the problem of fission, and in particular Fermi mentioned the possibility that neutrons might be emitted during the process. Although this was only a guess, its implication of the possibility of a chain reaction was obvious. A number of sensational articles were published in the press on this subject. Before the meeting in Washington was over, several other experiments to confirm fission had been initiated, and positive experimental confirmation was reported from four laboratories (Columbia University, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, University of California) in the February 15, 1939, issue of the Physical Review. By this time Bohr had heard that similar experiments had been made in his laboratory in Copenhagen about January 15. (Letter by Frisch to Nature dated January 16, 1939, and appearing in the February 18 issue.) Frédéric Joliot in Paris had also published his first results in the Comptes Rendus of January 30, 1939. From this time on there was a steady flow of papers on the subject of fission, so that by the time (December 6, 1939) L. A. Turner of Princeton wrote a review article on the subject in the Reviews of Modern Physics nearly one hundred papers had appeared. Complete analysis and discussion of these papers have appeared in Turner's article and elsewhere.

See also Nuclear fusion, nuclear weapon, nuclear reactor, nuclear engineering