Is fission reaction considered natural or artificial? As I learned, nuclear fission doesn't occur w

lifretatox8n

lifretatox8n

Answered question

2022-05-19

Is fission reaction considered natural or artificial?
As I learned, nuclear fission doesn't occur without the control of a human made nuclear reactor, by hitting a neutron to a fissile isotope. Thus, the fission reaction is considedred as a part of 'ARTIFICIAL REACTIONS' category.
But, I've just noticed in a wikipedia article (Natural nuclear fission reactor), that nuclear chain reactions had occurred on Earth about 2 billion years ago, what proves that fission existed naturally before.
Another additional question I was wondering is: Is there any chance that a natural nuclear chain reaction can re-occur on Earth?

Answer & Explanation

Sage Guerra

Sage Guerra

Beginner2022-05-20Added 10 answers

There isn't really a difference between "natural" or "artificial" reactions. All reactions are just "things that can happen". Some things only happen in certain circumstances, and those circumstances may be very unlikely to occur without being specifically engineered, but there is no reason in principle why they could not happen naturally.
There is evidence that there have been natural fission reactors on earth and there is no reason in principle why it could not happen again, although I don't think we know of anywhere that looks likely to go critical in the near future and as the earths uranium radioactively decays to other elements it becomes less and less likely.
Nubydayclellaumvcd

Nubydayclellaumvcd

Beginner2022-05-21Added 5 answers

For a fission chain reaction to spontaneously happen in uranium there are some requirements to be fulfilled. A) there should be at least 4% U-235 in the mix of uranium isotopes. B) there should be a moderator to decrease the energy of the neutrons which result from the fission of a uranium core.
2 billion years ago the percentage of U-235 was large enough to sustain a chain reaction. Furthermore there was water seeping in the uranium which acted as a moderator. The heat from the fission turned the water into steam and stopped the chain reaction. This went on and off. So there was no continuous chain reaction for a billion years. Since then radioactive decay decreased the percentage of U-235 as it's half life is shorter than that of U-238. so no fission chain reaction will spontaneously occur in the earth crust.

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