Eli5: How are Nuclear Weapons different from Nuclear Power Plants?
In: Physics
nuclear power is 2 oxen yoked to a plow used by a farmer to grow crops
nuclear weapons are 10,000 oxen stampeding across a field, obliterating everything in their path
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.
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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