fission

The reaction creates helium and not the long-lived radioactive waste of the fission process which is used in existing nuclear power stations.

Today, the plant is still buzzing with life: Nuclear fission, in the deep heart of the plant, continues to superheat water to 600 degrees at 150 times atmospheric pressure.

With calculations based on linear algebra, the research team demonstrated that -- analogous to radioactivity in atomic nuclei -- a magnetic quiver can decay into a more stable state or fission into two separate quivers.

Utsunomiya continued, "because we knew that most of the Cs in CsMPs is fission derived, we thought that analysis of the pollucite could yield the first ever direct images of radioactive Cs atoms."

Using a mechanism called paratomic fission, the worm starts forming and differentiating new head and tail segments from within a single body segment, producing what is known as a "chain of worms."