13 posts on nuclear. All posts · RSS feed
Lecture 12 of the MIT course 22.01: Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation covers the manufacture of by neutron irradiation of in a research reactor. The thermal neutron absorption cross section of is , so for a neutron flux , the rate of change …
An atomic nucleus consists of protons and neutrons (collectively referred to as nucleons) bound together through the strong nuclear force. Models for the nuclear binding energy were introduced in a couple of previous posts on this blog. The semi-emprical mass formula (SEMF), also known as …
As a short addendum to this blog post, the code below plots a chart of the nuclides showing four types of isoline: isotopes: these are nuclides with the same proton number, (and hence nuclear charge) – vertical lines in the chart. isotones: nuclides with the …
A quick update on this blog article with some extra cross sections and an additional plot of Maxwell-averaged reactivities. The processes covered are: The cross section gives a probability for the reaction to occur as a function of the collision energy. In practice, the colliding …
As of April 2020, there were 440 operational nuclear power reactors in the world. They are listed on this Wikipedia page, which can be scraped using the code at the bottom of this post for their important details, including their locations as latitude and longitude …
Natural uranium consists largely of two isotopes, and . The less-abundant (0.72%) isotope, , is important for nuclear reactors and weapons because it is the only isotope existing in nature to any appreciable extent that can sustain a fission chain reaction (that is, it is …
More than 3000 nuclides (atomic species characterised by the number of neutrons and protons in their nuclei) are known, most of them radioactive with a half-life of less than an hour. About 250 or so of them are stable (not observed to decay using presently-available …
The most feasible nuclear reaction for a "first-generation" fusion reaction is the one involving deuterium (D) and tritium (T): Tritium is not a primary fuel and does not exist in significant quantities naturally since it decays with a half life of 12.3 years. It therefore …
In a nuclear fusion reaction two atomic nuclei combine to form a single nucleus of lower total mass, the difference in mass, being released as energy in accordance with . It is this process which powers stars (in our own sun, hydrogen nuclei are fused …
The Python program given below generates this stacked area plot of the number of nuclear reactors in different countries over the last six decades or so. It requires the Pandas library and the data file reactors.csv.
