More commonly, fission is used to generate energy within a nuclear power plant. (Image credit: Igor Kostin/Laski Diffusion/Getty Images) The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant melted down in April, 1986, creating the biggest nuclear disaster in history. Related: The 9 most powerful nuclear explosions Nuclear power It used fission as the first step in a chain reaction that ended in fusion. For instance, the Tsar Bomba that was detonated in 1961 created the largest nuclear blast in history. Ultimately, militaries found that fusion could power more powerful bombs, but fission was often the first step in the chain. No one has used fission bombs in warfare since, but several countries have them in their arsenal. The second was "Fat Man," which weighed 10,300 pounds (4,670 kg) and used plutonium-239 to set off a chain reaction. The first, "Little Boy," used 140 pounds (64 kilograms) of highly enriched uranium-235 in a fission bomb, and was dropped on Aug. Robert Oppenheimer, ultimately resulted in the creation of the first atomic bombs. Known as the " Manhattan Project," the top-secret endeavor, led by physicist J. In 1943, the Army Corps of Engineers took over the research for making a nuclear weapon. Roosevelt funded American research on the atom bomb, and in 1941, the Office of Scientific Research and Development was formed with the aim of applying the research toward national defense. President Franklin Roosevelt at the start of World War II, drafted by Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein, noted that such research could be used to create a bomb of epic proportions, and raised the specter that Germans could deploy such a weapon against America. In an intellectual chain reaction, scientists began to realize the possibilities of fission. This self-sustaining reaction is known as "criticality."Ī mushroom cloud rising from the first atomic explosion, which was detonated Jnear Alamagordo, New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project. 2, 1942, in a basement in Chicago, according to Argonne National Laboratory. Fermi would ultimately create the first self-sustaining nuclear fission reactor on Dec. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi had also produced fission earlier in 1934, but had not realized it, according to the Atomic Archive. A single impact could jumpstart a chain reaction, driving the release of still more energy. Ultimately, other physicists realized that each newly freed neutron could go on to cause two separate reactions, each of which could cause at least two more. Working on the problem, she established that fission yielded a minimum of two neutrons for each neutron that sparked a collision. Previous efforts by physicists had resulted in only very small slivers being cut off of an atom, so the pair was puzzled by the unexpected results.Īustrian-born physicist Lise Meitner, who had fled to Sweden following Hitler's invasion of her country, realized that the split had also released energy. In a surprising twist, they wound up splitting the atom into the elements of barium and krypton, both significantly smaller than the uranium that the pair started out with. In 1938, German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman bombarded a uranium atom with neutrons in an attempt to make heavy elements, according to the Atomic Archive.
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