A nuclear reactor is essentially just a metal barrel with a bunch of neutrons whizzing about and causing some metal to fission and release even more neutrons, right? So how does the addition of a non-metal such as boron or a metal like cadmium into steel prevent the atoms within the control rods from destabilized as well? Is it something to do with the molecular structures of the resulting alloys?
In: Physics
so the way a reactor works at a gcse level is that a neutron is fired into a uranium 235 atom, which then becomes unstable , which then splits, which then releases more neutrons – the new atoms are the things that form nuclear waste. i imagine that the atoms can absorb many neutrons before becoming unstable – they only last for a certain amount of time ( 6 – 8 years) – my gcse explanation
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