THERE ARE TWO FORMS OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

Nuclear fission involves the splitting apart of large atomic nuclei. Nuclc-ar fusion involves the coming together of small nuclei. 

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There Are Two Forms of Nuclear Energy see a small blue dot. This dot (painted on the photograph) is the approximate relative size of Earth. Clearly, when we... 

The nuclear fuels were created in the cosmic event that created the universe and were deposited in the earth as it took form. There are two families of nuclear fuels, those for fission (uranium and thorium) and those for fusion (protium [[//], deuterium, helium-3, and lithium). Only uranium fission has been developed as a commercial source of nuclear energy. Although fusion has been developed as a military weapon, the hydrogen bomb, it is premature to include the fusion fuels in the world s inventory of capital energy. The technology for controlled fusion is not available, nor is development of a controlled fusion process expected in the next several decades. When available it would increase the capital supply to a level greater than that from all other sources combined.16... 

Consider a molecule above a surface with the distance from the surface being normal to the surface. There are two competitive types of influence occuring (a) repulsion between the cloud of electrons in the atoms that form the surface and those of the molecule and (b) van der Waals nuclear attraction force. The nuclear attraction has a much shorter radius of influence and as a result of the balance of these two forces, there is a well in the potential energy curve at a short distance from the surface, as shown in Figure 2.1. Molecules or atoms that reach this well are trapped or adsorbed by this potential energy well and cannot escape, unless they obtain enough kinetic energy to be desorbed. 

There are two totally symmetric ( ,) normal modes and one b2 normal mode. (The convention is to use lowercase letters for the symmetry species of the normal modes.) The symmetry species of the normal modes have been found without solving the vibrational secular equation. Moreover, since there is only one b2 normal mode, the form of this vibration must be determined from symmetry considerations together with the requirement that the vibration have no translational or rotational energy associated with it. Thus (Fig 6.1), any bent XYX molecule has a b2 normal mode with the X atoms vibrating along the X—Y bonds and the Y atom vibrating in the plane of the molecule and perpendicular to the symmetry axis. On the other hand, there are two ax symmetry coordinates and the two ax normal vibrations are linear combinations of the ax symmetry coordinates, where the coefficients are dependent on the nuclear masses and the force constants. Thus the angles between the displacement vectors of the X atoms and the X—Y bonds for the ax modes of a bent XYX molecule vary from molecule to molecule. 

In practice, a range of fission products with masses similar to krypton and barium are formed when uranium is irradiated with neutrons. This reaction is important, as it is used to produce nuclear power. There are two vital features that make this application possible first, the amount of energy liberated and, second, the number of neutrons produced. 

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