Some of the most notable ones:
- 1942: Chicago Pile-1: the first human-made nuclear chain reaction.
- 1943: X-10 Graphite Reactor: an intermediate step between the nuclear chain reaction prototype Chicago Pile-1 and the full blown mass production at Hanford site. Located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
- 1944: B Reactor at the Hanford site produced the plutonium used for Trinity and Fat Man
A nuclear reactor made to produce specific isotopes rather than just consume fissile material to produce electrical power. The most notably application being to produce Plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons from Uranium-238 being irradiated from Uranium-235-created fission.
Articles by others on the same topic
A sequence in which particles released by one nuclear reaction induce further reactions. In a neutron-driven fission chain, neutron capture, leakage and non-fission absorption compete with neutron production. A sustained chain requires an effective reproduction factor of one; whether material is fissile material cannot be determined from a single positive fission Q value.
