Nuclear Food: Uranium Uranium is the fuel most widely used to produce nuclear energy. Nations such as Lithuania, France, and Slovakia create almost all of their electricity from nuclear power plants. The United States has more than 100 reactors, although it creates most of its electricity from fossil fuels and hydroelectric energy. As of 2011, about 15 percent of the world's electricity is generated by nuclear power plants. Removing the rods will allow a stronger chain reaction and create more electricity. The more rods of nuclear poison that are present during the chain reaction, the slower and more controlled the reaction will be. Nuclear poisons are materials, such as a type of the element xenon, that absorb some of the fission products created by nuclear fission. Rods of material called nuclear poison can adjust how much electricity is produced. The turbines drive generators, or engines that create electricity. The steam turns turbines, or wheels turned by a flowing current. The cooling agent, heated by nuclear fission, produces steam. A cooling agent is usually water, but some nuclear reactors use liquid metal or molten salt. The heat created by nuclear fission warms the reactor's cooling agent. The energy released from this chain reaction creates heat. Fission products cause other uranium atoms to split, starting a chain reaction. As they split, the atoms release tiny particles called fission products. In a nuclear reactor, atoms of uranium are forced to break apart.
The fuel that nuclear reactors use to produce nuclear fission is pellets of the element uranium.
Nuclear fusion vs fission reactor output series#
A nuclear reactor, or power plant, is a series of machines that can control nuclear fission to produce electricity. In the process of nuclear fission, atoms are split to release that energy. In fact, the power that holds the nucleus together is officially called the " strong force." Nuclear energy can be used to create electricity, but it must first be released from the atom. There is a huge amount of energy in an atom's dense nucleus. Atoms are tiny units that make up all matter in the universe, and energy is what holds the nucleus together. This is why fusion is still in the research and development phase – and fission is already making electricity.Nuclear energy is the energy in the nucleus, or core, of an atom. The reasons that have made fusion so difficult to achieve to date are the same ones that make it safe: it is a finely balanced reaction which is very sensitive to the conditions – the reaction will die if the plasma is too cold or too hot, or if there is too much fuel or not enough, or too many contaminants, or if the magnetic fields are not set up just right to control the turbulence of the hot plasma. Unlike nuclear fission, the nuclear fusion reaction in a tokamak is an inherently safe reaction. In conventional nuclear power stations today, there are systems in place to moderate the chain reactions to prevent accident scenarios and stringent security measures to deal with proliferation issues. This chain reaction is the key to fission reactions, but it can lead to a runaway process resulting in nuclear accidents. The result of the instability is the nucleus breaking up, in any one of many different ways, and producing more neutrons, which in turn hit more uranium atoms and make them unstable and so on. It is triggered by uranium absorbing a neutron, which renders the nucleus unstable. Fission and chain reactionsįission is the nuclear process that is currently run in nuclear power plants. Both reactions release energy which, in a power plant, would be used to boil water to drive a steam generator, thus producing electricity. However, fusion is combining light atoms, for example two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, to form the heavier helium. In fission, energy is gained by splitting heavy atoms, for example uranium, into smaller atoms such as iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, to name just a few.
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