How to Use nuclear fission in a Sentence

nuclear fission

noun
  • Back in the real world, most people first learned of nuclear fission as a way to destroy an entire city in the blink of an eye.
    Washington Post, 28 Apr. 2022
  • If anyone has a good idea on how to put a nuclear fission power plant on the moon, the U.S. government wants to hear about it.
    Keith Ridler, orlandosentinel.com, 29 Nov. 2021
  • The Little Boy and the Fat Man were atomic bombs, or fission bombs, which set off a chain reaction of nuclear fission.
    Popular Mechanics, 26 May 2023
  • Yet more than 60 years into the space age, nuclear fission for spaceflight remains mostly a dream.
    David W. Brown, Scientific American, 27 Jan. 2022
  • The program consists of the development of two things: a nuclear fission reactor and a spacecraft to fly it.
    Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 25 Jan. 2023
  • And then there is Lise Meitner, the co-discoverer, with Otto Hahn, of nuclear fission.
    Naomi Oreskes, Scientific American, 19 Sep. 2023
  • The energy released by the nuclear fission process is then used to heat water into steam, which is then used to spin a turbine and create energy.
    Kylie Martin, Detroit Free Press, 28 Mar. 2024
  • An elderly New York couple next to us is talking about nuclear fission.
    Vulture, 26 Oct. 2023
  • Itself a by-product of nuclear fission, iodine-131 begins to decay after just eight days.
    Christiaan Hetzner, Fortune, 8 Mar. 2022
  • Hamilton’s team will investigate how neutrons move around and affect the chain reaction of nuclear fission, as well as how heat from fission moves through the system.
    Sarah Scoles, Scientific American, 9 Feb. 2023
  • The Fat Man, on the other hand, used a core of plutonium-239 that was ignited with thousands of pounds of conventional explosives, again setting off a chain reaction of nuclear fission.
    Popular Mechanics, 26 May 2023
  • But even if the world falls short of meeting the capacity numbers, the target’s real value may lie in spurring the world to embrace nuclear fission as one of many solutions for decarbonizing the grid.
    IEEE Spectrum, 23 Jan. 2024
  • The first step went fine: To stop the nuclear fission chain reaction, control rods with neutron-absorbing properties were inserted among the fuel rods.
    IEEE Spectrum, 16 Mar. 2011
  • Less energy is produced with nuclear fission, and the resulting waste is much more radioactive.
    Sara Lang, The Christian Science Monitor, 17 Jan. 2023
  • Inside, workers are preparing a new reactor—where nuclear fission will take place—for launch in early 2023.
    Morgan Meaker, WIRED, 13 Dec. 2022
  • Today, the art of turning heat from burning gas, nuclear fission, Earth’s core, the sun, and other sources into useful energy underpins modern life.
    Sid Assawaworrarit, IEEE Spectrum, 25 Nov. 2023
  • A week after German scientists discovered nuclear fission in 1938, a physicist at Berkeley drew a crude bomb on his blackboard.
    Marty Judge Community Voices Contributor, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7 Sep. 2020
  • Like a conventional nuclear fission power plant that splits atoms, a fusion plant would not burn fossil fuels and would not produce greenhouse-gas emissions.
    Henry Fountain New York Times, Star Tribune, 8 Oct. 2020
  • The hope is that in time, this process can be scaled up and done cheaply enough to create power that is carbon-free without the creation of radioactive waste that is the challenge with fusion's more problematic sibling, nuclear fission.
    Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY, 13 Dec. 2022
  • In 1938, using uranium, the physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch worked out the calculations that defined nuclear fission.
    Ngofeen Mputubwele, WIRED, 21 Aug. 2023
  • The process is known as nuclear fission and requires a neutron to collide with a uranium atom, which in turn releases an amount of energy that can have devastating consequences.
    Stephanie Kaloi, Peoplemag, 21 July 2023
  • Meitner and Hahn's discovery of nuclear fission also opened up the possibility of an atomic bomb.
    Ashraya Gupta, Scientific American, 14 Sep. 2023
  • Oklo is attempting to replicate the process of nuclear fission that occurs in nuclear power plants, with much smaller reactors.
    Paolo Confino, Fortune, 11 July 2023
  • The new rocket would harness the power of nuclear fission, in which a rapidly moving neutron crashes into an atom, splitting it into two smaller atoms and releasing large amounts of energy.
    Will Sullivan, Smithsonian Magazine, 9 Feb. 2023
  • That included about 3 gigawatts of wind and at least 8 gigawatts of thermal facilities — which rely on natural gas, coal or nuclear fission.
    BostonGlobe.com, 18 June 2021
  • Both old-school nuclear reactors and SMR designs generate electricity through nuclear fission, which is the splitting apart of atoms.
    Justine Calma, The Verge, 26 Sep. 2023
  • But for the coming decades, some analysts insist, nuclear fission’s reliability and zero emissions are the best choice to shoulder the burden of the world’s rapidly electrifying economies.
    Michael Koziol, IEEE Spectrum, 1 June 2018
  • Rather than splitting atoms apart, like our current nuclear fission reactors, fusion melds two atoms into one releasing an enormous amount of energy.
    Carl Engelking, Discover Magazine, 16 Oct. 2014
  • China recently demonstrated a Stirling power converter, which could be used on a future space nuclear fission reactor, on the Tiangong space station.
    Stephen Clark, Ars Technica, 4 Apr. 2024
  • Altman has also invested in nuclear fission startup Oklo which aims to make mini nuclear reactors housed in A-frame structures, and in the nuclear fusion startup Helion.
    Katie Tarasov, CNBC, 28 July 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'nuclear fission.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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