 What is the difference between fission and fusion?
 Which nuclear reaction, fission or fusion, normally involves low-mass nuclei? High-mass nuclei? Explain.
 In a nuclear reaction, does the total mass stay the same? Does the total energy stay the same? Why?
- How does nuclear fission influence your daily life?
- How is nuclear physics used to diagnose patients?
- Should a larger fraction of the country’s electricity be produced using nuclear power? Synthesize relevant information about nuclear fission from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, craft a cohesive report supporting your opinion, and provide properly formatted citations.
- A student is designing an investigative procedure using the interactive simulation of control rods in a nuclear reactor in Investigation 27A on page 811.
- What variable can the experimenter change?
- Write a well-defined question that can be answered using the simulation about the effects of leaving the control rods fully retracted from the reactor.
- Write down a testable hypothesis that can address that question.
- What observations should she include in the procedure to address that question and hypothesis?
- What limitations of the simulation might the student remedy by using an additional piece of equipment?
- Would it be a good idea to choose a different piece of technology, such as running the procedure on a real nuclear reactor instead of a simulation?
- The student wants the experimenter to measure the distance of the control rods from the top of the reactor and compare it to the size of a typical reactor. Is this a reasonable measurement to include in the procedure? Do you expect the experimenter to provide reasonable answers?
- How is radiation therapy related to nuclear physics?
- How is nuclear power related to properties of the nuclei of atoms?
- How is magnetic resonance imaging related to quantum physics?
- The gas in a ceiling fluorescent light has a temperature of 15,000 K. If the temperature is so high, why is it that we do not feel incredible heat energy coming from it?
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- Identify the unknown particle in the nuclear reaction equation
- How many atomic mass units are there in one kilogram of matter?
- If the nuclei of nitrogen-14 and lithium-6 combine, what isotope is the product?
- If neon-20 spontaneously breaks in two and one of the products is the isotope carbon-11, what is the other isotope produced by the reaction?
- What is the isotope X produced by the following reaction?
- Calculate the mass of a carbon-12 atom in kilograms.
- Calculate the mass of a carbon-13 atom in kilograms. Make sure to look up the mass of carbon-13 in amu.
- What is the charge of an atom of carbon-13 that is doubly ionized, i.e., it has had two of its electrons removed?
- What is the difference in the nuclei of the isotopes of oxygen-16, oxygen-17, and oxygen-18? What is the difference in their numbers of electrons?
- How much rest energy does 0.001 kg of matter have?
- How many atoms are there in one kilogram of carbon-12?
- Carbon-12 is a common isotope of carbon.
- How many protons and how many neutrons does this isotope have?
- What is the sum of the masses of these protons and neutrons? (The mass of a proton and neutron are 1.0073 and 1.0087 amu, respectively.)
- The mass of a carbon-12 nucleus is 11.9967 amu. What is the mass deficiency?
- Convert the mass deficiency to kilograms and use Einstein’s equation to calculate the binding energy in joules. (1.661×10−27 kg = 1 amu.)
- Calculate the rest energy of a proton, a neutron, and an electron in joules. (A proton has a mass of 1.673×10−27 kg, a neutron has a mass of 1.675×10−27 kg, and an electron has a mass of 9.11×10−31 kg.)
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