Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A fission fragment reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates electricity by decelerating an ion beam of fission byproducts instead of using nuclear reactions to generate heat. By doing so, it bypasses the Carnot cycle and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40–45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors.
The mere fact that an assembly is supercritical does not guarantee that it contains any free neutrons at all. At least one neutron is required to "strike" a chain reaction, and if the spontaneous fission rate is sufficiently low it may take a long time (in 235 U reactors, as long as many minutes) before a chance neutron encounter starts a chain reaction even if the reactor is supercritical.
Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) is a spherical tokamak fusion plant concept proposed by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and funded by the UK government. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The project is a proposed DEMO -class successor device to the ITER tokamak proof-of-concept of a fusion plant, the most advanced tokamak ...
A fission nuclear power plant is generally composed of: a nuclear reactor, in which the nuclear reactions generating heat take place; a cooling system, which removes the heat from inside the reactor; a steam turbine, which transforms the heat into mechanical energy; an electric generator, which transforms the mechanical energy into electrical ...
The world's first and only nuclear power plant that put Gen IV reactors into commercial use is Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant. The reactor is a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, started its building process on September 21 2014, [75] started to generate power December 20, 2021, [76] and was put into commercial operation in December 12, 2023 ...
Nuclear engineering was born in 1938, with the discovery of nuclear fission. [7] The first artificial nuclear reactor, CP-1, was designed by a team of physicists who were concerned that Nazi Germany might also be seeking to build a bomb based on nuclear fission.
During the nuclear reaction inside a reactor, the fissile isotopes in nuclear fuel are consumed, producing more and more fission products, most of which are considered radioactive waste. The buildup of fission products and consumption of fissile isotopes eventually stop the nuclear reaction, causing the fuel to become a spent nuclear fuel. When ...
Nuclear power can be described as all of the following: Nuclear technology – technology that involves the reactions of atomic nuclei. Among the notable nuclear technologies are nuclear power, nuclear medicine, and nuclear weapons. It has found applications from smoke detectors to nuclear reactors, and from gun sights to nuclear weapons.