Nuclear Science

Most of us are aware of some of the devastation caused as a result of Nuclear Science. The bombings of Hiroshima on the 6th August 1945 and Nagasaki on the 9th August in the same year.
And the explosion of reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl power plant just 3 kilo metres away from the small town of Pripyat in Ukraine on the 26th April 1986.
It should be noted perhaps that certain amounts of radiation isn't as deadly as we are led to believe. A good example is Radiotherapy, which is used to treat and occasionally cure some Cancer sufferers.
Microwave ovens do in fact produce a small amount of radioactivity, however it's non ionizing, therefore there is no risk of it causing cancer.
I plan to research some of this and record it in this blog, the idea is to eventually focus on Chernobyl and it's refugees.

First though a brief history of Nuclear science; the splitting of the atom, the discovery of which I feel is a good place to start.

Contrary to common belief, the Atom was not split on 1942 by Albert Einstein. It was in fact split in the Berlin Laboratory of Otto Hahn in 1938, with his student Fritz Strassman and friend Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn experimented with Uranium by adding Neutrons and detected Barium. Eventually convinced by Lise Meitner's suggestion that Uranium nucleus had been broken by the neutrons, this was in effect emitting radioactive energy.
When the neutron and the atom collide the atom splits, releasing more neutrons from the centre of the atom. If there are enough atoms splitting at one time, it is possible to produce an almost instantaneous chain reaction via explosion.
They were to publish papers of their results in 1939 naming the process "fission", resulting in Hahn being awarded the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1944.
However, although discovering a new source to generate clean energy, without the use of fossil fuels was a great breakthrough in science, there was the obvious threat that this could also be used to build bombs that would have devastating consequences.
They didn't have the necessary reputation at the time to warn of the potential danger to the world. It wasn't until the news reached the ears of other Scientists and eventually the more famous German born Albert Einstein agreed that the discovery would be lethal in Nazi hands, and so wrote a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, the then US President, warning of the potentially catastrophic possibilities.
Although the idea was to keep the discovery away from Nazi hands, much to the regret of Einstein, the Americans, deemed it acceptable to use the findings to build their own Uranium and Plutonium bombs. The result was the 1945 bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan, effectively ending World War II.
Ironic really that the Nazis war was to be lost as a result of German science.
In 1966 Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman received the Enrico Fermi Prize from the Atomic Energy Commission, the first time ever this was awarded to a non American.
In October, 1966 Lise Meitner received the Nobel Prize for her contribution to nuclear and molecular physics, she died in July 1968 and lays to rest in Bramley, Hampshire.
Otto Hahn also died the same year in Göttingen, Germany aged 89.
Both of them can be considered the founders of the Atomic age.