Take a look inside Australia’s only nuclear reactor to understand how fission powers discoveries.
OPAL (the Open Pool Australian Lightwater Reactor) is a research reactor, which means that its products are used in a range of medical processes as well as to help answer many important scientific questions in fields as diverse as environmental science and material engineering.
It also produces 29% percent of the world’s irradiated silicon, which is used in the high-end manufacturing of hybrid vehicles and fast trains.
So how does it work? As the video explains, at the bottom of a pool is something called the reflector vessel, which contains less than 6 kilograms of uranium-235, the naturally occurring isotope of uranium that can sustain a fission chain reaction.
When a uranium atom is split by a single neutron, some energy and generally two neutrons are released. In the fission reaction, these two neutrons turn into four, which turn into eight, and then 16, and so on, to a maximum of 400 million million neutrons per square centimetre per second.
The reflector vessel then acts like a mirror and reflects neutrons back into the core to maintain fission.
Watch the video above to find out more about the neutron beams that OPAL can produce, and how scientists are using these.
Published: 05/01/2015