Eli5: How are Nuclear Weapons different from Nuclear Power Plants?
In: Physics
Nuclear fuel rods are basically the same thing as the coils on an electric stovetop, just instead of being heated by electricity, they more or less heat up all on their own. And keep releasing heat for a *long* time, just less and less over time. Very different from a nuclear explosion, which you probably understand creates a violent explosion.
Now, nuclear waste is not fuel that is “completely done”, it’s simply all the fuel rods that can’t release enough heat to continue being viable in making commercial scale power. They still heat up. A lot. And they stay hot for *many, many* years. It’s just one little extra “fuck you” nuclear waste has for us in the challenge of keeping it safely contained.
Fun fact: this “heats up all on its own” thing is the major contributing factor to why Earth’s core is still molten today. Radioactive elements in the Earth’s interior are decaying and heating it up, just like spent nuclear fuel rods do to their containers. This indirectly powers all geothermal processes like volcanoes, earthquakes (via plate tectonics), geothermal vents, and the dynamo that creates the global magnetic field. In a way, you could say these are all “nuclear-powered” phenomena.
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