The Advancement of Nuclear Science Over the Last 100 Years

Name: Course Code: Date: The Advancement of Nuclear Science Over the Last 100 Years Introduction In 1789, Martin Klaprot discovered Uranium and named it after Uranus, the planet. A century passed without much development or discovery of radioactive elements. By 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen discovered ionizing radiation by passing an electric current through the evacuated glass tube to produce X-rays. 1896, Henri Becquerel found that radium and uranium ore caused the photographic plate to darken and attributed this phenomenon to radiation of beta and alpha particles emission. By the turn of the century, early applications of the discovery of the potential of radioactive materials were used in preserving food as Samuel Prescott demonstrated in 1898. However, despite a slow start at the turn of the 20th century, research intensified during the world war II which birthed atomic bombs and fast-tracked the knowledge of nuclear power and its subsequent application in other non-military fields. Today, the technology has had an immeasurable impact in mining, cosmology, hydrology, archeology, medicine among other fields. Early 20th century The race was on to expand the utility of these new elements that had ‘radioactive’ properties. As scientists continued to experiment with the radioactive elements, earnest Rutherford discovered that radioactivity entailed spontaneous events that emitted alpha and beta particles from the nucleus creating the different element. In 1911, Frederick Soddy discovered that radioactive elements had different isotopes. In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman demonstrated nuclear fission of uranium which created new lighter elements. In 1939, Lise Meitner, Neils Bohr and Otto Frisch explained the phenomenon by suggesting that the nucleus captured the neutron causing severe vibration leading to fission. They noted that the vibration did not necessarily create two equal parts but they calculated that the energy released by the fission process was about 200million electron volts CITATION Sch18 \l 1033 (SchiHi.org). This was a turning point in the understanding of the properties of radioactive elements and paved a new way for the likely application of such energies if they were harnessed in a controlled manner. According to CITATION Wor19 \l 1033 (World Nuclear Association),’ Hahn and Strassmann showed that fission not only released a lot of energy but that it also released additional neutrons which could cause fission in other uranium nuclei and possibly a self-sustaining chain reaction leading to an enormous release of energy.’ Bohr discovered that the U-235 isotope was more likely to undergo nuclear fission that the U-238 isotope. He also discovered that the fast-moving neutrons were less likely to initiate nuclear fission that slow-moving neutrons. This knowledge prompted Szilard and Fermi to further the research which led them to find out that a moderator can be introduced to slow down emission of neutrons. Due to the volatility of the U-235 isotope of uranium, most ‘uranium’ showed that they comprised of about 0.7% of the U-235 isotope natural uranium and 99.3% U-238 isotope. Scientists attempted to ‘purify’ the uranium to have only the U-235 isotope. The process was later known as enrichment which entail...