Eli5: How are Nuclear Weapons different from Nuclear Power Plants?
In: Physics
What is the difference between a stick of dynamite and a gasoline engine? Both are using chemical reactions to create energy. You can’t really make a gasoline engine explode violently unless you completely disassemble it into component pieces and reassemble the component parts into something more explosive. You can’t run an engine on TNT either, without chemically breaking it down and re-configuring it.
Nuclear power plants and nuclear reactors have the same sort of relationship. They both generate energy from the same nuclear source, but you can’t make a nuclear power plant work as a bomb, and you can’t make a nuclear bomb work as an effective power plant.
Nuclear power plants are designed to release nuclear energy in a very slow, controlled manner. This produces useful heat, which can be used to generate electricity. A nuclear bomb is designed to produce nuclear energy extremely quickly, the fast release of energy results in an explosion.
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