Nuclear fission is the splitting of an atom into two or more parts. When such an occurrence takes place, a very large amount of energy is released. This can occur very quickly as in an atomic bomb, or in a more controlled manner allowing the energy to be captured for useful purposes. Only a few naturally occurring substances are easily fissionable. These include uranium-235 and plutonium-239, two isotopes of uranium and plutonium. Isotopes are forms of the same chemical element that have the same number of protons in their nuclei, but a different number of neutrons.

Starting a fission reaction is accomplished by bombarding fissionable nuclei with neutrons. This causes the nuclei to fly apart, splitting into two fission products and emitting two or three neutron

Many scientists are responsible for the studing and creating the nuclear bombs. One was Otto Hahn, a German chemist and physicist. Noted for important work on radioactivity, he received the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry for splitting the uranium atom and discovering the possibility of chain reactions. The development of the atomic bomb was based on this work. Another famous person was Lise Meitner an Austrian-Swedish physicist and mathematician.(Bergerund). She discovered the Protactinium-231 isotope and investigated the disintegration products of radium, thorium, and actinium and the behavior of beta rays radioactivity. Her conclusion, from experimental research in bombarding the uranium nucleus with slow-speed neutrons, that fission of the nucleus had occurred, contributed to the development of the Atom Bomb. The last is J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American physicist. He taught at the Univ. of California and the California Institute of Technology and was from 1947 director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Director (1942-45) of the laboratory at Los Alamos, N.Mex., that designed and built the first Atom Bomb (Parshall). Oppenheimer later became a main proponent of the civilian and international control of atomic energy. He was chairman (1946-52) of the general advisory committee of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, but in 1953 the AEC suspended him as an alleged security risk (Bergerund). Oppenheimer strongly opposed (1949), on both technical and moral grounds, the development of the Hydrogen Bomb.

Nuclear Fusion Basics. January 2000.

Parshall, Gerald. Shock wave. U.S.A: U.S. News and World, 1995.

In simpler terms it is LiH surrounded by an Atom Bomb which is surrounded by TNT.

Another form of nuclear energy is called fusion. Fusion means joining smaller nuclei to make a larger nucleus. The sun uses nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. This gives off heat and light and other radiation. Two types of hydrogen atoms, deuterium a

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