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.
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A nuclear chain reaction is a sequence in which particles released by one nuclear reaction induce further nuclear reactions. In a neutron-driven nuclear fission chain, emitted neutrons can cause new nuclear fission, be absorbed without causing nuclear fission, or leave the material.
In a simple generation model, let be the mean number of chain-carrying neutrons in generation , and let be their effective reproduction ratio. Then . For the mean chain dies away; gives a steady mean population; and gives growth in this fixed-coefficient model. Thus a steady chain has reproduction ratio one, while a growing chain is also self-sustaining in the mean. This elementary generation model does not describe every timescale or spatial change.
Whether material is fissile material depends on reaction probabilities, neutron production and losses in a specified setting. A positive nuclear fission Q value establishes that the final products can release energy, but does not by itself establish the neutron balance.
