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The explosion of the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb. The hydrogen bomb was the first device able to achieve fusion energy gain factor significantly larger than 1.. A fusion energy gain factor, usually expressed with the symbol Q, is the ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state.
With this heat, a coolant is heated as it is pumped through the reactor and thereby removes the energy from the reactor. The heat from nuclear fission is used to raise steam, which runs through turbines, which in turn power the electrical generators. Nuclear reactors usually rely on uranium to fuel the chain reaction. Uranium is a very heavy ...
Fusion reactors are not subject to catastrophic meltdown. [122] It requires precise and controlled temperature, pressure and magnetic field parameters to produce net energy, and any damage or loss of required control would rapidly quench the reaction. [123] Fusion reactors operate with seconds or even microseconds worth of fuel at any moment.
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.
This is a list of all the commercial nuclear reactors in the world, sorted by country, with operational status. The list only includes civilian nuclear power reactors used to generate electricity for a power grid. All commercial nuclear reactors use nuclear fission. As of December 2024, there are 419 operable power reactors in the world, with a ...
A boiling water reactor (BWR) is a type of nuclear reactor used for the generation of electrical power. It is the second most common type of electricity-generating nuclear reactor after the pressurized water reactor (PWR). BWR are thermal neutron reactors, where water is thus used both as a coolant and as a moderator, slowing down neutrons.
The tritium breeding blanket (also known as a fusion blanket, lithium blanket or simply blanket), is a key part of many proposed fusion reactor designs. It serves several purposes; primarily it is to produce (or "breed") further tritium fuel for the nuclear fusion reaction, which owing to the scarcity of tritium would not be available in sufficient quantities, through the reaction of neutrons ...
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.