Saturday, 1 September 2018

THE DOOR TO NUCLEAR ENERGY AND ATOMIC WEAPONS

NUCLEAR FiSSION

    Otto Hahn opens the door to nuclear energy and atomic weapons

Otto Hahn "the founder of the atomic age," was a German scientist who discovered nuclear fission in 1983 at the mounting tensions that would lead to World War II escalated. Fortunately, as an anti-Nazi, his genius was not used by Hitler.
       Hahn was born in 1879, graduated from Marburg University in 1904, and worked at University College,London, discovering the isotop radiothorium (thorium 228). Transferring to McGill University, Montreal, in 1905, he worked under Sir Ernest Rutherford before becoming a professor at Berlin University in 1906. There he discovered ionium the "mother substance" of radium, married and fathered a son. He also began his thirty-year collaboration with Lise Meitner, an Austrian chemist. After being conscripted to develop poison gases in World War I, Hahn wrote the book Applied Radiochemistry, which become the "bible' of U.S Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb.
        Hahn's most important discovery was made after he bombarded uranium with neutrons, leading to the splitting of the uranium nucleus into atomic nuclei of medium  weight - nuclear fission. In 1934 Hahn resigned from Berlin University in protest at the persecution of Lise Meitner and other Jewish colleagues. He procured Meitner a passport, enabling her to emigrate. Hahn was entered at the end of the War near Cambridge, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1945, Hahn spent the time before his death in 1968 warning against the atomic arms race and the dangers of radioactive pollution.  

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