Production of Nuclear energy

Now, before you can make you opinion on this, its import to know how exactly nuclear power plants work. We all know in general that nuclear fission means splitting one atom in two separate pieces, and the natural consequence is radiation. But it’s interesting to know that this isn’t something that we created and that radiation is complete natural thing. For example, uranium is a metal which constantly undergoes spontaneous fission, but extremely slowly. This is the reason why uranium is mainly used in nuclear power plants where scientist produce inducted fission to gain large quantities of energy.

Uranium is common element on Earth and it’s famous for its extremely long half-life of 4.5 billion years. Half-life is the time that uranium takes for half of its atoms to decay, so this is why it’s still present in very large quantities. Here, it’s important to know that we talk about uranium called U-238 which makes 99% of the uranium on Earth, while Uranium U-235 makes up about 0.7 percent of the remaining uranium found naturally. There’s also U-234 which is the rarest and which is formed by the decay of U-238. It’s interesting that U-238 goes through many different stages which finally result in creating a stable isotope.

Naturally, we would need very large quantities of uranium for nuclear power plants to work, but we use enriched uranium, where smaller amount of enriched U-235 can produce very large quantities of electrical power. For power plants to work we need from 2-3% enrichment which is very small in comparison with nuclear weapons were U-235 is being enriched to 90%. The uranium acts as an extremely high-energy source of heat. It heats the water and turns it to steam. The steam drives a turbine, which spins a generator to produce power. Humans have been harnessing the expansion of water into steam for hundreds of years, but simply in different forms.

Nuclear list: