How does a nuclear power plant work?
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There’s a few minerals that decay slowly over hundreds of thousands of years, producing about a million times as much heat as burning the same amount of coal. One such mineral that’s particularly famous is called pitchblende. The property of undergoing that sort of decay is called radioactivity.
Radioactivity is mostly useless on its own because the heat release is too slow to do anything with. But we’ve found particular ways of purifying certain radioactive minerals and arranging them in special shapes so the bits of material that are currently decaying interact with the rest of the material and speed up its decay. In a nuclear power plant, a purified product derived from pitchblende is arranged so it decays rapidly and gets hot, and the heat is used to boil water. The steam from the boiling water is directed into windmill-like structures called turbines, which spin and generate electricity.
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