Any fission reactor basically works the same. An unstable atom like uranium or plutonium breaks apart, creating fast neutrons. There’s a chance some of those neutrons will strike nearby unstable ...

No immediate changes to the Savannah River Site's role are expected now that Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been confirmed ...

Once detonated, the explosives condense the plutonium surrounding the case so intensely that it triggers a fission reaction. The transition from “atomic” to “thermonuclear” designation ...

Plutonium pits are hollow spheres that cause the nuclear explosion of these deadly weapons. Usually, a chemical explosion ...

Then some of the plutonium would fission, yielding energy and creating ... the uranium can be run through the reactor again & again until essentially all of it has been turned into energy.

By the end of the year the physicist Werner Heisenberg had calculated that nuclear fission chain reactions might be ... into "element 94," now called plutonium. Like uranium 235, element 94 ...

Each fission reaction releases a huge amount of energy ... which converts long-lived nuclear waste (the minor actinides plus, if desired, plutonium) into short-term non-fissile waste that can ...

But the neutrons are much more likely to trigger new fission events if ... in breeding weapons-grade plutonium from common uranium. In a heavy-water nuclear reactor, when neutrons bombard U ...

Heat builds rapidly, produced by the fission of uranium-235 and plutonium-239. If the chain reaction of fission and decays is allowed to go on, the heat will build up enough that the fuel rods ...