How does a nuclear power plant work?
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It works exactly like a coal of natural gas fired powered plant. Instead of coal or natural gas they split atoms to create the heat to produce steam to turn of generator.
They generate a lot of heat, which turns water into steam, which is then used to spin a turbine that produces electricity.
In a giant pool of water, self-heating rocks are placed next to other self-heating rocks, which heat each other up even more. These also heat the surrounding water into steam. The steam is piped away to drive an enclosed fan that turns a generator which produces electricity.
Certain materials are considered fisile. That’s the technical term for materials that are made out of unstable atoms. The atoms in nuclear fuel are large and don’t hold together well. They tend to split into smaller atoms along with some spare parts. Those spare parts sometimes hit other atoms, making them more likely to split as well. When atoms split, they release the energy that was holding them together in the form of heat. We can capture that heat by immersing rods of nuclear fuel in water and letting that water boil. From that point on, a nuclear power plant doesn’t operate in any significant way from a coal or gas burning power plant. High presure steam from the boiling water forces turbines to spin, and those turbines are attached to dynamos, which use the motion magnets and coils of wire to create electric current.
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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