The major source of heat production in a newly shut down reactor is due to the beta decay of new radioactive elements recently produced from fission fragments in the fission process.
22.
"' Cold fission "'or " cold nuclear fission " is defined as involving fission events for which fission fragments have such low excitation energy that no neutrons or gammas are emitted.
23.
Some of these effects are due to the fission fragments being released by the explosion, so care was taken to design the bomb to be " clean " to reduce these effects.
24.
Using U-235 as an example, this nucleus absorbs thermal neutrons, and the immediate mass products of a fission event are two large fission fragments, which are remnants of the formed U-236 nucleus.
25.
Similar to how the fission-fragment rocket produces thrust, a "'fission fragment reactor "'is a nuclear reactor that generates electricity by decelerating an ion beam of fission byproducts instead of using nuclear reactions to generate heat.
26.
The rest of the energy, i . e ., the almost 95 % from fission fragments is an unwanted energy and must be continuously evacuated by a heat removal auxiliary system using a suitable coolant,.
27.
A newer design proposal by Rodney L . Clark and Robert B . Sheldon theoretically increases efficiency and decreases complexity of a fission fragment rocket at the same time over the rotating fibre wheel proposal.
28.
The idea was that with fuel being continuously pumped through the reactor and out again, small quantities of the fuel could be diverted and the nuclear waste, in the form of fission fragments, could be filtered out.
29.
Due to the extremely large value of the speed of light, c, a small decrease in mass is associated with a tremendous release of active energy ( for example, the kinetic energy of the fission fragments ).
30.
The remaining 93 % is kinetic energy ( or energy of motion ) of the charged fission fragments, flying away from each other mutually repelled by the positive charge of their protons ( 38 for strontium, 54 for xenon ).
