How exactly does nuclear power plants work? How are they able to generate electricity using radioactive things?
In: Physics
In a reactor core you have three major components, nuclear fuel, a moderator and coolant each of these have an important par to play.
The fuel is the source of all your energy most reactors have two parts to their fuel. One of these is mostly stable the other isn’t the unstable atoms will break apart and release radiation this is called decay. this releases different types of radiation but the one we need to focus on is neutron radiation. when our unstable atoms come apart neutrons are launched at nearly light speed. we want these neutrons to hit our stable atoms to make them break apart and release more neutrons, this the react in reactor.
These neutrons at light speed aren’t going to break apart our stable atoms so easily, first we need to slow them down. This is where our moderator comes into play. Imagine you shoot a bullet going 20x the speed of sound at a car, its probably going to create a small hole and pass strait through. Something similar happens to our atoms (albeit in a very different way). When the neutrons in our reactor hit our moderator they will bounce off it and the moderator will slow the neutron from the speed of light to about the sped of sound, this is what will be able to break apart our stable atom.
Wait but how does this produce electricity? well when each of our atoms comes apart it releases energy, and quite a bit of it a that in the form of heat. and this is the job of our coolant. although movies might say otherwise coolant is actually hot, because it needs to ferry all this heat produced in the reactor away. different reactors use different coolants but they all boil down to water in the end. when we heat up water it turns into steam and quite a bit of it can be produced form a reactor, we can then use this steam so spin a turbine a bit similar to one that the back end of a jet engine. this turbine then spins a dynamo which generates electricity.
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