Uranium-236 is an isotope of uranium that is neither fissile with thermal neutrons, nor very good fertile material, but is generally considered a nuisance and long-lived radioactive waste. It is found in spent nuclear fuel and in the reprocessed uranium made from spent nuclear fuel.
No fission products
have a half-life
in the range of
100–210 k years ...
... nor beyond 15.7 M years
Legend for superscript symbols
₡ has thermal neutron capture cross section in the range of 8–50 barns
ƒ fissile
m metastable isomer
№ naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM)
þ neutron poison (thermal neutron capture cross section greater than 3k barns)
† range 4–97 y: Medium-lived fission product
‡ over 200,000 y: Long-lived fission product
The fissile isotope uranium-235 fuels most nuclear reactors. U-235 that absorbs a thermal neutron may go one of two ways. About 82% of the time, it will fission. About 18% of the time it will not fission, instead emitting gamma radiation and yielding U-236. Thus, the yield of U-236 per 100 U-235+n reactions is about 18%, and the yield of fissile decay products per 100 fissions is about 82%. In comparison, the yields of the most abundant individual fission products like Cs-137, Sr-90, Tc-99 are between 6% and 7% per 100 fissions, and the combined yield of medium-lived (10 years and up) and long-lived fission products is about 32%, or a few percent less as some are destroyed by neutron capture.