Abstract
Fission power plants take advantage of the dependence of the binding energy per nucleon binding energy per nucleon on the mass of nuclei. The binding energy of uranium is about 7.5 MeV/nucleon, that of the fission products is about 8.5 MeV/nucleon. Since the fission products are more tightly bound, they have a smaller mass per nucleon. The fission of a uranium nucleus, therefore, liberates a mass equivalent of 1 MeV/nucleon.
“The laboratory technician has succeeded in implementing by means of the atomic pile the Einsteinian principle of inertia of energy.”
Gaston Bachelard
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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Grupen, C. (2010). Nuclear Power Plants. In: Introduction to Radiation Protection. Graduate Texts in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02586-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02586-0_12
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02585-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02586-0
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