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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.
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 ...
1943 Reactor diagram using boron control rods. Control rods are inserted into the core of a nuclear reactor and adjusted in order to control the rate of the nuclear chain reaction and, thereby, the thermal power output of the reactor, the rate of steam production, and the electrical power output of the power station.
The reactor buildings of Bradwell magnox nuclear power station. The magnox reactors were considered at the time to have a considerable degree of inherent safety because of their simple design, low power density, and gas coolant. Because of this they were not provided with secondary containment features. A safety design principle at the time was ...
A nuclear microreactor is a plug-and-play type of nuclear reactor which can be easily assembled and transported by road, rail or air. [1] Microreactors are 100 to 1,000 times smaller than conventional nuclear reactors, and range in capacity from 1 to 20 MWe (megawatts of electricity), compared to 20 to 300 MWe (megawatts of electricity) for ...
Altman also chairs the nuclear fission company Oklo, which plans to build a micro-reactor site in Idaho. Nuclear fusion is the long-sought process of combining atoms that produces power without ...
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 smaller reactors created by Kairos, a nuclear-energy startup, are different from the towers most people think of when they conjure up an image of a nuclear reactor. The company uses a molten ...