Nuclear plant - part 1

How does a nuclear power plant works?

Power plants mainly have two main component. They are:

1. Energy producing component

2. Energy harvesting component that will turn it into electricity.

In this post, we'll be talking about nuclear power plant, the energy producing component part. Energy producing component is also considered the heart of the reactor. We'll get onto the next part in another post on energy turns into electricity part.

First of all, the energy producing component. Nuclear power plant obtains energy from the heat released during chain reaction of atom-splitting process. The science term for atom splitting process is called fission. In order to obtain an atom with huge amount of atoms, uranium is used. Uranium contains 235 atoms; each atom has a nucleus of 92-protons and 143-neutrons.

Anyway, how do we obtain energy from these atoms? Before that, we'll go back to a chemistry lesson.

First, fires up a neutron to the stable Uranium-235 and it will become Uranium-236, an unstable version of Uranium, called isotope.

The fission process of Uranium

Since uranium-236 is unstable, so it will try to become stable by splitting into smaller atoms such as barium and krypton. Now onto the awesome part of that process; as it splits, it will also neutrons. Two of them in fact. These two neutron will fire up another two stable uranium-235 atoms in that area. The uranium will become uranium-236 isotope, that is unstable. The process will repeat on and on as long as we desire, which is called chain-reaction.

So how do we obtain energy from these reactions? Super easy. As the atom splits/fissions occur, it also releases energy. The amount of the energy is really massive that it is said, a single nuclear power plant can power up to a million houses. [McGuire, N.Carolina]