About Nuclear Energy

History and Origins
In 1896, the French physicist Henry Bequerel found that certain substances, such as uranium salts, produced penetrating radiations of an unknown origin. Bequerel thus accidentally discovered radioactivity.

Pierre and Marie Curie carried out studies withl uranium, horium and pitchblende. They discovered in their experiments the existence of two substances – polonium and radium – and concluded that man could produce radioactivity by building radioactive elements by means of bombarding some chemical elements with alpha particles.

Years later, Ernest Rutherford said that it is not only radioactive elements that have an energy reserve inside them, but that atoms also do. Rutherford’s atomic model was the beginning of a chain of models that were successively improved over time.

J.J. Thomson’s model was static, as he assumed that the electrons were at rest inside the atom and that the whole was electrically neutral.

In 1913, Niels Bohr improved the hypothesis of the atom’s structure. One year later, Rutherford gave the name of proton to a positively charged particle that had been detected in experiments with cathode rays.

Rutherford achieved the first nuclear reaction when he exposed nitrogen gas to a radioactive source of alpha particles, which caused the transformation of the nitrogen atoms into oxygen-17 atoms.

Some time later, in 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron To do so, he measured the mass of the new particle and deduced that it was similar to the proton mass but with an electrically neutral charge. Thus he concluded that the atomic nucleus was composed of neutrons and electrons.

Otto Frich and Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fision when they deduced that uranium, on capturing on of the neutrons used to bombard it, split into two fragments, and this was accompanied by a large amount of energy – much more than what could be produced by any other reaction known up until then.

Chain nuclear reactions would arrive in 1938 when Otto Hahn and Friedrich Strassmann discovered that transuranics are obtained on bombarding uranium nuclei and that these also fuse in certain nuclei.