Atomic fission and its inventor

Otto Hahn is considered to be the inventor of atomic fission. The use of the unleashed by its discovery energy is now being questioned more and more.

Otto Hahn is the inventor of nuclear fission

• Otto Hahn, in Frankfurt on 8. Born March 1879 and in Göttingen on March 28th. Died July 1968, is the inventor of atomic fission.
• He was a chemist and also a true pioneer in the field of radiochemistry and discovered various nuclides.
• He worked as a director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, as president at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and founded the Max Planck Society.
• After World War II and the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he took a stand against that nuclear arming of the world powers and against the radioactive contamination of the world by uncontrolled Atomic research tests.
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• He was also very active politically and worked for international understanding and détente.
• Atomic fission took place for the first time as early as 1919, when the physicist Ernest Rutherford succeeded in converting nitrogen into oxygen by bombardment. Nuclear fission, however, was considered impossible at the time.
• Otto Hahn experimented for years on the basis of Rutherford's successes.
• Finally in 1938 he actually succeeded in obtaining the element barium by bombarding uranium.
• He wrote of this discovery to the physicist Lise Meitner, his long-time colleague, who correctly interpreted this event as the first nuclear fission.
• At 6. In January 1939, Hahn's experimental results were finally published in the newspaper “Naturwissenschaft”.
• In 1944 the inventor Otto Hahn received the chemistry-Nobel Prize.

The discovery of atomic fission had devastating consequences

• The era of atomic energy began with the invention of nuclear fission.
• As early as December 1942, the worldwide first nuclear reactor built in Chicago for the purpose of building nuclear weapons.
• The USA worked under enormous time pressure and the greatest financial expenditure on the construction of an atom bomb, which they also used with devastating consequences in the Second World War.

A peaceful use of nuclear power is possible

• The use of atomic energy, which resulted from the inventor Otto Hahn, is very helpful, especially in medicine for diagnostics.
• Since the nuclear reactor disaster in Chernobyl in 1986, the generation of electricity through atomic fission has become questionable.
• More and more nuclear power plants are being dismantled or shut down.