Fission early research

One of most important aspects of the Cold War was the race to develop and deploy nuclear weapons. The early arms race was largely focused on nuclear fission, but by the 1950s the much more powerful fusion weapons were the main area of development. The competition, however, was not only military, and the quest for new elements became a minor but important competition, primarily between American laboratories and Soviet ones. Because the equipment used to do nuclear research was used to produce elements and material for weapons, the link between the synthesis of new elements and the arms race was direct if one side could produce a new element, it revealed that that side s equipment, resources, and scientists had an advantage over the opposition. Since the equipment, resources, and scientists were also part of the nuclear arms development system, the implication was that the advantage would extend to the weapons. Even without the arms race, the competition to synthesize new elements was fierce, since international scientific status and even Nobel Prizes could be gained by such work. 

Mid-1943 was in any case a season of great apprehension among the atomic scientists, who saw Nazi Germany beginning to lose the war and sensed that country s desperation. The Manhattan Project expected to produce atomic bombs by early 1945 if Germany had begun fission research in 1939 at similar scale it should have bombs nearly in hand. Hans Bethe and Edward Teller wrote Oppenheimer in a memorandum on August 21 ... 

In the early years of nuclear power development, the cores of several research reactors in the US were deliberatedly damaged by experimental power excursions in order to study the behavior of the fission products under such conditions. To be sure, the characteristic data of these reactors, such as the nature of the nuclear fuel, the design of the safety installations, the construction of the buildings etc., showed great differences from that of modem power reactors so that the results are of only limited value for the assessment of severe accidents. However, certain qualitative impressions can be derived from these results, as can be seen from the summary paper of Smith (1981). 

Rutherfordium, element 104, was first synthesized in hot-fusion reactions by research groups in Dubna (Russia) and Berkeley (USA). Early work in Dubna in which a spontaneous fission activity was assigned to °Rf [137-140] could not be reproduced by others. Later chemical experiments involving the formation of Rf in the Pu( Ne,jcn) reaction and the detection of a non-isotope-specific spontaneous fission activity in the chemical form of a volatile chloride demonstrated the fundamental change in chemical properties occurring beyond the end of the actinide series [141, 142]. The decay of Rf was eventually determined to be spontaneous fission with a half-life of 21 ms, produced in the reactions... 

It was soon clear to Oppenheimer and Groves that the project would need larger and better-equipped facilities than were available in New York City. They traveled across the country scouting locations for laboratories and other facilities that could be used by the Manhattan Project scientists. One such laboratory was found at the University of Chicago, where an early and decisive scientific achievement was realized in late 1942. A team of scientists under the direction of Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi had been recruited to build on the research of Hahn and Strassmann with the goal of not only sparking a fission reaction in the laboratory but controlling it as well. 

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