How to Use fissile in a Sentence

fissile

adjective
  • As a result, Iran is no longer days or weeks away from securing enough fissile material for a bomb.
    — Yarden Segev, NBC news, 9 Mar. 2026
  • There’s still fissile material, highly enriched, that was not there at the beginning of his first term.
    — NBC news, 10 May 2026
  • If it were enriched further to about 90%, that would be enough fissile material for roughly a dozen atomic bombs.
    — Yarden Segev, NBC news, 9 Mar. 2026
  • North Korea has continued to churn out fissile material and is no longer an isolated pariah on the world stage.
    — Washington Post, 2 July 2019
  • This is the ability to put enough pressure on the fissile material to detonate it and create a nuclear yield.
    — CBS News, 5 Jan. 2022
  • Amid the fissile atmosphere in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, a single mistake could unleash catastrophe.
    — Sam Kiley, CNN, 19 July 2019
  • The American side would like to all but eliminate fissile material in North Korea.
    — NBC News, 29 May 2018
  • North Korea is believed to possess roughly 50 warheads, with enough fissile material for up to 90.
    — Jasmine Baehr , Morgan Phillips, FOXNews.com, 1 Oct. 2025
  • Trump has repeatedly said Iran would not receive any sanctions relief until its stockpile of fissile material is removed and destroyed.
    — Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2026
  • When there are enough fissile atoms close together — a quantity known as critical mass — the particles ejected by fission can strike other fissile atoms, triggering more atoms to split apart and so on.
    — Umair Irfan, Vox, 11 June 2018
  • Experts say North Korea has as many as 60 nuclear weapons and produces enough fissile material to add another dozen each year.
    — Steve Chapman, chicagotribune.com, 21 May 2021
  • Initial actions could include locking in a freeze on nuclear and missile testing and halting fissile material production.
    — Kelsey Davenport, Time, 13 June 2018
  • For over a decade, his team had been working on an experimental nuclear reactor that runs on a lava-hot solution of fissile material and molten salt, rather than on solid fuel.
    — Colin Jones, New Yorker, 18 Dec. 2025
  • Most intriguingly, Obama proposed a new treaty to halt production of fissile materials intended for use in nuclear weapons.
    — Nathan Hodge, WIRED, 6 Apr. 2009
  • The aging facility about 60 miles north of Pyongyang was once the main source of its fissile material, turning out roughly enough plutonium each year for one atomic bomb.
    — Washington Post, 9 Oct. 2019
  • Once utilized as fuel, the molten salt is dissolved with fissile material, like uranium-235, plutonium-239 or uranium-233.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 12 May 2026
  • Criticality occurs when enough neutrons hit enough other fissile uranium atoms to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 June 2018
  • Under that deal, in exchange for the lifting of Western economic sanctions, Iran agreed that no fissile material — the makings of bomb fuel — would be put in the centrifuges spinning at the site.
    — Michael Wolgelenter, New York Times, 5 Nov. 2019
  • As for North Korea’s stockpile of fissile material, estimates based on scraps of intelligence have allowed arms-control experts to draw a few rough conclusions.
    — Jonathan Cheng, WSJ, 8 June 2018
  • Kim’s arsenal of 30 to 60 nuclear warheads remains and more fissile material is being produced daily.
    — Trudy Rubin, The Mercury News, 8 July 2019
  • While negotiations stalled, North Korea is believed to have continued to produce fissile materials.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 11 Sep. 2019
  • In essence, this would mean that alpha particles (helium nuclei) released by decaying uranium (or some other fissile material) would be focused through engine nozzles to generate thrust.
    — Matthew S Williams, Interesting Engineering, 10 Jan. 2026
  • Part of that perception stemmed from Iran's rapid manufacture of centrifuges, which are needed to produce the fissile material that could be used in nuclear bombs, in the 2000s.
    — Kevin Breuninger, CNBC, 6 June 2026
  • For instance, Canada’s role as a major supplier of fissile material provides the basis for a joint effort to make these new nuclear capabilities a reality.
    — Moritz S. Graefrath, Foreign Affairs, 19 Nov. 2025
  • His father, a former merchant marine who had retrained as a nuclear engineer, came to Richland to work for a plant that supplied fissile material to the Manhattan Project.
    — Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, 29 May 2017
  • But extending the concept to dissolving the fissile and fertile fuel in the salt certainly represents a leap in lateral thinking relative to nearly every reactor operated so far.
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 12 Dec. 2025
  • Those early nuclear reactors allowed North Korea to gain the technical sophistication, as well as a source of fissile material, for its future weapons program.
    — Joby Warrick, Washington Post, 9 Mar. 2018
  • And this means that Iran can distribute this capacity to a place that might be difficult to attack, difficult to discover and would allow Iran to quickly develop the fissile material for a weapon.
    — CBS News, 3 Nov. 2021
  • Under the agreement, Iran is allowed limited research and development on advanced centrifuges, which accelerate the production of fissile material that can be used to make a nuclear bomb.
    — Erin Cunningham, Washington Post, 9 Sep. 2019
  • McMillan initially promised to train fissile material handlers to be more heedful of plutonium-handling perils, for example, and to bring the inventory and safety documents guiding their work up to date.
    — R. Jeffrey Smith, Science | AAAS, 30 June 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fissile.' 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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