This means that the total mass of each of the fission fragments is less than the mass of the starting nucleus. This huge force over a small distance leads to a fair amount of released energy which is large enough to cause a measurable reduction in mass. This is an incredibly huge force for such small particles. Each proton is pushing every other proton with about 20 N of force, about the force of a hand resting on a person's lap. The enormous energy that's released from this splitting comes from how hard the protons are repelling each other with the Coulomb force, barely held together by the strong force. To read this charming story about the history of nuclear science please see this article. These results were correctly interpreted by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch over Christmas vacation. Although he expected the new nuclei to have larger atomic numbers than the original uranium, he found that the formed nuclei were radioisotopes of lighter elements. He believed that certain elements could be produced by bombarding uranium with neutrons. In addition to smaller nuclei being created when fission occurs, fission also releases neutrons.Įnrico Fermi originally split the uranium nuclei in 1934. This fission process generally occurs when a large nucleus that is relatively unstable (meaning that there is some level of imbalance in the nucleus between the Coulomb force and the strong nuclear force) is struck by a low energy thermal neutron. The amount of mass lost in the fission process is equal to about 3.20×10 −11 J of energy. This means that some of the mass is converted to energy. So much energy is released that there is a measurable decrease in mass, from the mass-energy equivalence. When large nuclei, such as uranium-235, fissions, energy is released. Nuclear fission is the process of splitting apart nuclei (usually large nuclei). Note that this is just one of the many possible fission reactions. A model of a fission reaction of uranium-235.
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