Breeder reactorA breeder reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates more fissile material than it consumes. These reactors can be fuelled with more commonly available isotopes of uranium and thorium, such as uranium-238 or thorium-232, as opposed to the rare uranium-235 which is used in conventional reactors. These materials are called fertile materials since they can be bred into fuel by these breeder reactors. Breeder reactors achieve this because their neutron economy is high enough to create more fissile fuel than they use.
Discovery of nuclear fissionNuclear fission was discovered in December 1938 by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. Fission is a nuclear reaction or radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller, lighter nuclei and often other particles. The fission process often produces gamma rays and releases a very large amount of energy, even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay.
Elliptical distributionIn probability and statistics, an elliptical distribution is any member of a broad family of probability distributions that generalize the multivariate normal distribution. Intuitively, in the simplified two and three dimensional case, the joint distribution forms an ellipse and an ellipsoid, respectively, in iso-density plots. In statistics, the normal distribution is used in classical multivariate analysis, while elliptical distributions are used in generalized multivariate analysis, for the study of symmetric distributions with tails that are heavy, like the multivariate t-distribution, or light (in comparison with the normal distribution).
Gambler's fallacyThe gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the incorrect belief that, if a particular event occurs more frequently than normal during the past, it is less likely to happen in the future (or vice versa), when it has otherwise been established that the probability of such events does not depend on what has happened in the past. Such events, having the quality of historical independence, are referred to as statistically independent.
