![]() Like Leo Szilard and other colleagues, he disliked using nuclear fission for weapons. Besides being a maverick in theoretical and experimental nuclear physics, Fermi had a social conscience. Using rods of natural uranium dispersed through a pile of graphite bricks, a self-sustaining chain reaction was achieved on December 2, 1942, with a 'critical mass' of uranium almost exactly as predicted by Fermi. The first reactor was designed and built in 1941 according to Fermi's calculations. He determined the minimum amount of uranium and moderator needed to make neutron-induced fissioning of uranium self-sustaining. After he learned in 1939 that his German colleagues Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassman had shown that uranium could fission, he quickly started analyzing and measuring neutron multiplication by fissioning uranium and estimated what it would take to construct a 'critical pile' (now called a nuclear reactor). Fermi who had left his native Italy for the US in 1939 when Mussolini's fascists took over, was one of a few pioneers in the 1930's who tried to understand the workings of atomic nuclei by bombarding them with newly discovered neutrons (see Section 3.4). ![]() The first nuclear reactor was assembled in 1942 by Enrico Fermi and collaborators at the University of Chicago. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |