How A Nuclear Power Station Works
They are filled with a specially designed solid uranium fuel and surrounded by water which facilitates the process.
How a nuclear power station works. Nuclear power plants work in a similar way to simple cycle coal or oil plants but instead of burning fuel they smash atoms apart to release heat energy. All power plants heat water to produce steam which turns a generator to create electricity. As a result unlike other energy sources nuclear power plants do not release carbon or pollutants like nitrogen and sulfur oxides into the air. A nuclear power plant works pretty much like a conventional power plant but it produces heat energy from atoms rather than by burning coal oil gas or another fuel.
For every unit of electricity produced by a nuclear power plant about two units of waste heat are rejected to the environment. People who work. It s when an atom is split releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of heat. Contents 1 important buildings e g.
The hot water discharged from nuclear power stations causes thermal pollution to the environment. How nuclear power works. For more details see our main article on how nuclear power plants work. Nuclear reactors are designed to sustain an ongoing chain reaction of fission.
Commercial nuclear power plants range in size from about 60 megawatts for the first generation of plants in the early 1960s to over 1000 megawatts. The heat it produces is used to boil water to make steam which drives one or more giant steam turbines connected to generators and those produce the electricity we re after. Many plants contain more than one reactor. Expensive procedures are required to cool down the rods and to store them.
Nuclear power stations produce waste in the form of used fuel rods which are very hot and highly radioactive and with half lives of up to thousands of years. In this article we ll look at just how a nuclear reactor functions inside a power plant as well as the atomic reaction that releases all that crucial heat. Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions that release nuclear energy to generate heat which most frequently is then used in steam turbines to produce electricity in a nuclear power plant nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. In nuclear power stations that steam is made by the heat generated from nuclear fission.
France for example gets 72 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants and sweden gets about 40 percent from them according to a report from april 2018 source. A nuclear power plant is an industrial site that generates electricity from nuclear power released in the form of thermal energy through a nuclear fission chain reaction inside the vessel of a nuclear reactor.