How To Understand Nuclear physics?

ADMIN
12 Jan, 2022

Nuclear physics is perhaps the most challenging of all scientific fields. Theoretical models are developed and tested in test tubes and in the computer, but in the end, we must work on an experimental scale with tons of detectors and a thousand or more researchers trying to measure tiny changes in neutron radiation.


The problem is only so severe because, while both science and technology have improved enormously since the first nuclear reactor, the B reactor at the USSR reactor center in Sarov, was unveiled in 1954, it is still tricky for people to grasp. You cannot possibly understand the purpose of nuclear fission (deceleration of neutrons and its enormous energy) until you have experienced it in a reactor, can see how neutrons are produced, how fast they move through a reactor, how they break apart and re-emit, etc. It’s extremely difficult to describe it to someone who has never been inside a nuclear reactor.


My uncle was a physicist. He worked at the Max-Planck Institute of Atomic Physics in Germany. On a rare summer vacation he came to visit us in our home in Moscow and I was fascinated by his tales. He worked in the reactor department there. My father was his boss. In the early 1980s he came to our country on holiday. I was a young student and couldn’t make it through the physics curriculum but I did manage to get accepted into the Department of Physics at a leading research university. But it was very hard to complete the final year.


My uncle Boris took me aside, put an arm around my shoulders and looked at me dead straight. “Let me tell you something, my child,” he said, “and do you believe me? You will be able to do your physics with your eyes shut.” I was very young, and he wanted to make sure I was ready. He was almost 65 then. I didn’t believe him but I came back to the country from Germany in the end of 1982 and I did complete my physics degree with honors.


Almost 30 years passed. I remember one day I was sitting in a cafe at the university with my thesis adviser, Tikhon Khrennikov, another researcher at the institute, and we started talking about what a valuable experience those two years in Germany had been. My adviser said, “You will have the same opportunity in Russia, except it’s more difficult here.” It took me years to understand what he meant. My adviser was not talking about difficulties for me personally. He meant that Russians were not accustomed to producing nuclear fuel and the engineering involved. I was thrown into a new environment and, I believe, I was not ready for it.


Fukushima disaster


It was only during the Chernobyl disaster that nuclear physics began to catch on among many people in Russia, and things changed dramatically. Then, a serious crisis occurred with the accident at the V. G. Sibir nuclear power plant in Novosibirsk. At first, nothing could be done about the situation and the energy crisis caused serious problems, but then I was among the first to discover that what we had known about nuclear physics for years was the reality in reality.


Another example is the fact that the Nuclear Power Plant in Kazan, Kazan Nuclear Power Plant, was entirely supplied from nuclear fuels, and people didn’t pay a single ruble to the state budget. It was operated by the Federal Atomic Energy Agency. We met the workers of the plant. They were very scared of life after the accident. People said that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine had shown that the impact of the explosion and the nuclear radiation was so terrifying that the workers were dying in their own homes. The Kazan plant had an impact on life in this city. The nuclear engineers themselves did not know the effects of radiation exposure. They were involved in the research and development of new fuels and had no experience with a serious accident.

It was only after we raised questions that the authorities informed us that there were about 50 doses per year of radiation contamination. These doses per year were lower than the level for preventive radiological monitoring, and even higher than the level for someone who was never exposed to radiation. That is, if you aren’t exposed to radiation, your skin would have no reaction.


Most radio-astronomers have said that the strong radio signal emitted by the more than 2.5-million-kilogram neutron star merger of July 1—just hours after it was discovered—is a gamma-ray burst that was previously seen only when neutron stars merge. But how does this fit with what we know of neutron stars and gamma-ray bursts?


Neutron stars are believed to form when supernova explosions produce massive black holes, the remnant of which collapse in on themselves and collapse into a pair of stars. While some neutron stars, those that form a pair when one star hits
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