Nuclear energy release from fragmentation

Abstract

Abstract. Nuclear energy released by splitting Uranium and Thorium isotopes into two, three, four, up to eight fragments with nearly equal size are studied. We found that the energy released from equally splitting the 235,238 U and 230,232 Th nuclei into to three fragments is largest. The statistical multifragmentation model is employed to calculate the probability of different breakup channels for the excited nuclei. Weighing the the probability distributions of fragments multiplicity at different excitation energies for the 238 U nucleus, we found that an excitation energy between 1.2 and 2 MeV/u is optimal for the 235 U, 238 U, 230 Th and 232 Th nuclei to release nuclear energy of about 0.7-0.75 MeV/u. ‡ Email: imqmd@qq.com § Corresponding author: fszhang@bnu.edu.cn Nuclear energy release from fragmentation 2 Nuclear energy is one of the most efficient sources of energy based on the Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula (∆E = ∆mc 2 ). It originates in the strong force holding the protons and neutrons together. The release of nuclear energy happens when nucleons rearrange themselves to form more stable nuclei. In such nuclear reaction processes, a large amount of energy is released in the form of emitted kinetic energy of particles or fragments and electromagnetic radiation.There are three ways to release nuclear energy, known as radioactive decay [1][2][3][4], fusion [5][6][7][8][9][10] and fission [11][12][13][14][15]. The radioactive decay is the spontaneous process which occurs in radioactive materials by which the nuclei of unstable parent nuclei, gradually break up and are transformed into more stable isotopes or into nuclei of a different type. The daughter nuclei, consequently lose energy by emitting radiation in the form of particles (include α, β, photons, neutrons particle etc.) and/or electromagnetic waves. The continuous fusion reaction happens in the core of stars including our sun. However in order to harness it to produce power, the fusion process must be controlled. Nuclear energy from fusion is still far from commercially viable even though controllable fusion reaction has been studied for many years through the means of magnetic confinement [16][17][18] and inertial confinement [19][20][21][22]. The fission technology has been widely used to generate power by neutron-induced chain reactions. This fission process occurs when a heavy nucleus such as 235 U and 239 Pu absorbs a thermal neutron and the excited compound nucleus is excited to be near its fission barrier. At low excitation energy, quantum effects in the fission process are very significant to the dynamical evolution of the system. Nuclear structure effects, such as the shell corrections, directly influence the fission barrier height and the fission path. Most fission modes induced by thermal neutron are binary fissions in which one daughter nucleus has a mass of about 90 to 100 u and the remaining nucleus 130 to 140 u. Occasionally ternary fission and quaternary fission occur with relatively probability of 1/300 and 1/3000 per ...

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“…7 for surface energy. These parameterizations are widely used in the astrophysical [45] and statistical calculations [46] and are used here for comparison . We compare the results in reference to the properties of nuclei at finite temperature and consequently study the role of critical temperature of and dashed lines are from Eq.…”

Research Trend on Nuclear Energy From 2008 to 2018: A Bibliometric Analysis

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