Portal:Nuclear technology

• Nuclear technology is technology that involves the nuclear reactions of atomic nuclei. Among the notable nuclear technologies are nuclear reactors, nuclear medicine and nuclear weapons. It is also used, among other things, in smoke detectors and gun sights. (Full article...)
  
• Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators in some space probes such as Voyager 2. Reactors producing controlled fusion power have been operated since 1958 but have yet to generate net power and are not expected to be commercially available in the near future. (Full article...)
  
• A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear weapon), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. (Full article...)

From 1942 to 1946, the project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys, and subsumed the program from the American civilian Office of Scientific Research and Development.

The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023). The project pursued both highly enriched uranium and plutonium as fuel for nuclear weapons. Over 80 percent of project cost was for building and operating the fissile material production plants. Enriched uranium was produced at Clinton Engineer Works in Tennessee. Plutonium was produced in the world's first industrial-scale nuclear reactors at the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington. Each of these sites was supported by dozens of other facilities across the US, the UK, and Canada. Initially, it was assumed that both fuels could be used in a relatively simple atomic bomb design known as the gun-type design. When it was discovered that this design was incompatible for use with plutonium, an intense development program led to the invention of the implosion design. The work on weapons design was performed at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, and resulted in two weapons designs that were used during the war: Little Boy (enriched uranium gun-type) and Fat Man (plutonium implosion).

The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test, conducted at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. The project also was responsible for developing the specific means of delivering the weapons onto military targets, and were responsible for the use of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The project was also charged with gathering intelligence on the German nuclear weapon project. Through Operation Alsos, Manhattan Project personnel served in Europe, sometimes behind enemy lines, where they gathered nuclear materials and documents and rounded up German scientists. Despite the Manhattan Project's own emphasis on security, Soviet atomic spies penetrated the program.

In the immediate postwar years, the Manhattan Project conducted weapons testing at Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads, developed new weapons, promoted the development of the network of national laboratories, supported medical research into radiology, and laid the foundations for the nuclear navy. It maintained control over American atomic weapons research and production until the formation of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in January 1947. (Full article...)

• ... that the British Tychon missile was developed from a Barnes Wallis concept to keep strike aircraft safe while dropping nuclear bombs?
• ... that T. K. Jones thought that a nuclear war was survivable if "there are enough shovels to go around"?
• ... that after a 2008 tornado, Michael Chertoff likened Picher, Oklahoma, to a nuclear bomb site?
• ... that 1ES 1927+654, a galaxy in Draco, exhibited such extreme nuclear activity that it challenged conventional models of black-hole environments?
• ... that the medieval Castle Knob was the site of a Cold War nuclear monitoring station?
• ... that the British National Hospital Service Reserve trained volunteers to carry out first aid in the aftermath of a nuclear or chemical attack?

• WikiProject Energy
• WikiProject Technology
• WikiProject Military history

Seaborg spent most of his career as an educator and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, serving as a professor, and, between 1958 and 1961, as the university's second chancellor. He advised ten US presidents—from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton—on nuclear policy and was Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and the peaceful applications of nuclear science. Throughout his career, Seaborg worked for arms control. He was a signatory to the Franck Report and contributed to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He was a well-known advocate of science education and federal funding for pure research. Toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, he was the principal author of the Seaborg Report on academic science, and, as a member of President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education, he was a key contributor to its 1983 report "A Nation at Risk".

Seaborg was the principal or co-discoverer of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106, which, while he was still living, was named seaborgium in his honor. He said about this naming, "This is the greatest honor ever bestowed upon me—even better, I think, than winning the Nobel Prize. Future students of chemistry, in learning about the periodic table, may have reason to ask why the element was named for me, and thereby learn more about my work." He also discovered more than 100 isotopes of transuranium elements and is credited with important contributions to the chemistry of plutonium, originally as part of the Manhattan Project where he developed the extraction process used to isolate the plutonium fuel for the implosion-type atomic bomb. Early in his career, he was a pioneer in nuclear medicine and discovered isotopes of elements with important applications in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, including iodine-131, which is used in the treatment of thyroid disease. In addition to his theoretical work in the development of the actinide concept, which placed the actinide series beneath the lanthanide series on the periodic table, he postulated the existence of super-heavy elements in the transactinide and superactinide series.

After sharing the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Edwin McMillan, he received approximately 50 honorary doctorates and numerous other awards and honors. The list of things named after Seaborg ranges from the chemical element seaborgium to the asteroid 4856 Seaborg. He was the author of numerous books and 500 journal articles, often in collaboration with others. He was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person with the longest entry in Who's Who in America. (Full article...)

No recent news