What is nuclear power? Is it safe and eco friendly? All I really know about it if from watching The Simpsons and hearing about chernobyl. But I somehow don’t think theres drums of glowing gloop laying around anywhere!
In: Technology
power plants work by boiling water, which creates steam, which spins a generator, that generates electricity.
the fuel source for boiling the water varies, it can be coal, it can be natural gas, or it can be nuclear power, or it can be geothermal.
some types of power plants bypass the boiling water part and just spins the turbine another way, ie hydroelectric, which uses water flow to spin the turbine, or wind power.
solar panels are slightly different which uses the photovoltaic effect to generate DC power, which is converted to AC using an inverter.
so nuclear power plants generate heat to boil water by fusion or fission, which fuses atoms or splits atoms. you have to carefully balance the rate of reaction with various factors. if you let the reaction get out of control, it’s basically the same as a nuclear bomb. so you have to very carefully and precisely control the reaction rate. if it gets too high, you might cause a reactor meltdown or in worst cases, an explosion. if it gets too low, you kill the fusion/fission process and have to restart it which takes a huge amount of initial energy.
so what happened in cherynobol was a defect in the design of the reactor which no one really understood at the time, and politics from the USSR which would rather have working reactors than not working reactors as a show of force/power, that combined with an untrained crew that didn’t understand how the reactor worked.
if you do it right, nuclear power is very safe and very efficient. the waste products can be problematic because they require very specialized disposal/storage methods.
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