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Shutdown is the state of a nuclear reactor when the fission reaction is slowed significantly or halted completely. Different nuclear reactor designs have different definitions for what "shutdown" means, but it typically means that the reactor is not producing a measurable amount of electricity or heat and is in a stable condition with very low reactivity.
A nuclear meltdown (core meltdown, core melt accident, meltdown or partial core melt [2]) is a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term nuclear meltdown is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency [3] or by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. [4]
Nuclear fusion is normally understood to occur at temperatures in the tens of millions of degrees. This is called "thermonuclear fusion".Since the 1920s, there has been speculation that nuclear fusion might be possible at much lower temperatures by catalytically fusing hydrogen absorbed in a metal catalyst.
Sand will fuse into glass if it is close enough to the nuclear fireball to be drawn into it, and is thus heated to the necessary temperatures to do so; this is known as trinitite. [39] At the explosion of nuclear bombs lightning discharges sometimes occur. [40] Smoke trails are often seen in photographs of nuclear explosions.
Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a military conflict or prepared political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can produce destruction in a much shorter time and can have a long-lasting radiological result.
A clean-up crew working to remove radioactive contamination after the Three Mile Island accident. Nuclear safety is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as "The achievement of proper operating conditions, prevention of accidents or mitigation of accident consequences, resulting in protection of workers, the public and the environment from undue radiation hazards".
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.
Emergency core cooling systems (ECCS) are designed to safely shut down a nuclear reactor during accident conditions. The ECCS allows the plant to respond to a variety of accident conditions (e.g. LOCAs) and additionally introduce redundancy so that the plant can be shut down even with one or more subsystem failures. In most plants, ECCS is ...