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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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
One type uses solid nuclear graphite for the neutron moderator and ordinary water for the coolant. See the Soviet-made RBMK nuclear-power reactor. This was the type of reactor involved in the Chernobyl disaster. In the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, a British design, the core is made of a graphite neutron moderator where the fuel assemblies are ...
In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, a nuclear reaction is a process in which two nuclei, or a nucleus and an external subatomic particle, collide to produce one or more new nuclides. Thus, a nuclear reaction must cause a transformation of at least one nuclide to another.