The Atomic Bomb Essays (2385 words) - Actinides, Radioactivity

The Atomic Bomb By Douglas Thornton BOOM! The first detonation of an atomic bomb was on July 16,1945 on Hiroshima, Japan . That was one of the reasons why I picked this topic. Another reason was that there is lots of information on the atomic bomb out there and the last reason is I wanted to know why the atomic bomb has great explosive power. The main part of an atomic bomb is of course an atom. So that is what I'm going to say first. The Atom Atoms are everything. It is your paper, your house, your clothes, and everything else. Atoms is the smallest thing on earth. You can fit a million atoms in about the width of a piece of paper. You can't see them with the naked eye or with the best microscope in the world. The sciencists use theories and tests to know that they are there. Atoms are made up of three things; electrons, proton(s),and neutrons. If you combined proton(s) and neutrons you get the nucleus of the atom. Then the nucleus is surrounded by a shell. That shell is made by an electron(s) spinning around the nucleus so fast it makes that shell. Each shell can only hold a certain amount of electrons, this graph will show you that. * The proton is positivtly charged while neutrons have no charge. The proton attracts the electron. This pull causes the whirling of electrons which creates the shell.Most of an atom is empty space( the empty space is between the nucleus and the electrons). Neutrons are just slightly larger than protons. An electron is small. It's about 1/1836 of a proton or a neutron.In every atom there is always the same number of protons and electrons. The Atomic Bomb Now, what is an atom bomb? The Atomic Bomb is a weapon of mass destruction. It does that by a quick release of splitting or fission of a nucleus of a heavy element like uranium and plutonium. They send a neutron to strike a nucleus of the isotopes( means the name given to an atom that has acquired or lost one or more neutrons from it's nucleus.The atoms structure is relatively the same, but the added or subtracted weight may cause the atom to have new properties such as being fissionable) uranium-235 or plutonuim-239. Then the nucleus splits into two halves. Each half of the nucleus has about the same amount of neutrons and protons. When the nucleus splits a great deal of thermal energy and gamma rays and two or more neutron are given off. Under some conditions those neutrons that were released come back and strike again. Then you two split halves of a nucleus. Then they give off the same thing and the neutrons come back and strike again, and again. This chain reaction results in which almost all the fissionable material is blown up. This cause the great explosion. All isotopes of uranium are fissionable, but uranium-235 is better than uranium-238 because it goes under fission quicker and gives off more neutrons per fission than Uranuim-238 or any other isotopes of uranium. plutonium-239 has the same characteristics of uranium-239. Both uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are used in the atomic bomb. If you use a small amount say .45 kg(1 lb) of uranium-235 or plutonium-239 it can't under go the chain reaction that is needed and is called subcritical. It can't undergo the chain reaction because the average of the neutrons released by the fission are likely not to hit another nucleus. Then if more of uranium-239 or plutonium-239 is added there is a higher percentage of neutrons hitting the nucleus. At the point when critical mass has been acomblished, and a chain reaction the explosion will be created. All subcritical fissionable material must be brought up to critical state extremely quick. One way to do that is to take two subcitical masses together at one point. When you combined those two subcritical masses you will achieve critical mass. How you do it is you use two high explosives to shoot the subcrital masses of fissionable material together in a hollow tube. The second way is to use an implosion, which instead of blow up outward it blows up inward, by which the core of fissionable