How to Use fission in a Sentence

fission

noun
Definition of fissionnext
  • That paper was the first to use the term fission for the splitting apart of the nucleus.
    — Ashraya Gupta, Scientific American, 7 Sep. 2023
  • The fission reactor starts with a heavy atom like uranium-235 and hits it with a neutron.
    — Rhett Allain, Wired, 10 Nov. 2020
  • For fission, the bigger the atom, the more energy is released.
    — James Conca, Forbes, 9 Nov. 2021
  • The internet is as much a force of social fusion as fission, if not more.
    — Krista Kafer, The Denver Post, 25 Oct. 2019
  • Back in the real world, most people first learned of nuclear fission as a way to destroy an entire city in the blink of an eye.
    — Washington Post, 28 Apr. 2022
  • If anyone has a good idea on how to put a nuclear fission power plant on the moon, the U.S. government wants to hear about it.
    — Keith Ridler, orlandosentinel.com, 29 Nov. 2021
  • But this work was only meant as a proof of concept of exciton fission in a solar cell.
    — Daniel Oberhaus, WIRED, 11 July 2019
  • So Way and Wigner crunched a bunch of numbers and came up with a way to generalize for all fission products.
    — Erica Huang, Scientific American, 24 Aug. 2023
  • Using this method, a slew of interactions could be traced over and over, yielding a map of how a fission weapon might explode.
    — Coco Krumme, WIRED, 13 Sep. 2023
  • Try to squeeze the Twinkie—that fission-fusion target—uniformly.
    — Sarah Scoles, Scientific American, 29 July 2019
  • On the contrary, the tremendous power of atomic fission was already known when World War II began.
    — Readers, WSJ, 4 Aug. 2023
  • Inside the core, uranium atoms split in a process called fission, which releases heat.
    — Manasee Wagh, Popular Mechanics, 11 May 2022
  • One is fission reaction—the sort used in power stations.
    — The Economist, 15 Aug. 2019
  • The first step will be to insert control rods to stop the nuclear fission chain reaction in the reactor core.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 Sep. 2019
  • Fusion is the opposite of the fission process that powers nuclear plants.
    — Taylor Wilson, USA TODAY, 13 Dec. 2022
  • But fission creates radioactive waste that can last thousands of years.
    — Jennifer Hiller, WSJ, 9 Feb. 2022
  • This process is known as exciton fission and means that the solar cell is able to use high energy photons from the blue-green part of the visible spectrum.
    — Daniel Oberhaus, WIRED, 11 July 2019
  • New Scientist reports that experts say the cost per megawatt of this plant is five times what a traditional fission plant costs.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 2 Dec. 2020
  • Yet more than 60 years into the space age, nuclear fission for spaceflight remains mostly a dream.
    — David W. Brown, Scientific American, 27 Jan. 2022
  • Fusion brings atoms together, while fission forces them apart.
    — Jeanette Beebe, The Christian Science Monitor, 31 Mar. 2022
  • Fusion is different from fission in other ways, as well.
    — Avery Hurt, Discover Magazine, 12 Dec. 2022
  • While both process deal with changing the nucleus of atoms, fusion — the joining of atoms — is a different process than fission, which involves splitting atoms.
    — USA Today, 16 Dec. 2022
  • But the larger the traditional fission plant, the more elaborate the safety procedures and structures must be.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 2 July 2020
  • Mixed and even negative opinions can serve as control rods for the fission of overly pious engrossment.
    — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 8 Feb. 2021
  • The industry is skeptical, but Sparc's gameplan seems to echo some fission reactor trends, too.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 30 Sep. 2020
  • The control rods—which can encase the fuel rods, blocking neutrons and halting the fission chain reaction—are actively held in place above the fuel rods by a motor.
    — Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica, 1 Sep. 2020
  • The primary fission stage is a low-yield nuclear weapon that then triggers the secondary stage, which sets off a much, much larger fusion explosion.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 10 Sep. 2020
  • In a thermonuclear weapon, often called a hydrogen bomb, the fission process is only the beginning.
    — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, 13 Dec. 2020
  • Instead of a fission reactor, Phoenix employs a small-scale version of a process that some hope will one day lead to fusion reactors (and which already lies at the heart of hydrogen bombs).
    — The Economist, 23 Nov. 2019
  • That involves blocking the fuel rods in the reactor, which stops the nuclear fission reaction.
    — WIRED, 28 Oct. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fission.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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