♥luvbug♥21 asked: PLZ PLZ help me i hav tons of
hw and i cant get this question the answer is suposed 2 b on some
energy website but its not.. i would rly like if sum1 could answer!
Oh sry its a non renewable..but plz help
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energy with atoms?
It is the conversion of mass to energy! E=MC squared
Nuclear power is in a class by itself. The reason is in how usable power is made. In a conventional power plant, power comes from combustion of a fuel with air in a flame, which makes heat, which boils water which drives a turbine which turns a generator which makes the power coming into your house as electricity. With nuclear power, heat is generated by a nuclear process, fission. After the heat is made, everything downstream is the same. The only thing different is the source of the heat to make the steam. Like coal and oil, nuclear fuels used for fission are NOT renewable. Only a fixed amount exists, unlike wood which is renewed by growing more trees. Nuclear power comes in two forms, fission and fusion. Fission is where a moving particle hits an atom of fuel and splits it into pieces. The splitting liberates energy in several forms, light, radiation and kinetic energy of the moving fragments and several other emitted particles. What is different here is in what is being converted. In a conventional power plant it is simple combustion which is strictly a chemical process. In any chemical process, the elements involved do NOT change, but simply reorganize into a different combination. In a nuclear process, the elements themselves change into other elements. If I spilt an atom, it no longer has the same number of protons which is what MADE it the original element. Instead, I have pieces with fewer protons, which makes them NEW elements. In a nuclear power plant, it is converting matter into energy according to Einstein’s equation of E equals M C Squared. The nuclear conversion liberates energy, great amounts for a very small amount of matter. The other process is fusion, which is what is taking place in the sun. In the sun, pressure and gravity cause elements to fuse together, and in this process of fusing atoms, energy is liberated. In a Disney flick from the 50′s, I learned that 100 ounces of hydrogen is converted into 96 ounces of helium, with a loss of 4 ounces of matter, which comes out of the sun as energy. Think of the magnitude here. We are 93 million miles away and the sun is radiating energy in ALL directions, and only a very small part actually falls on the Earth. Think of a sphere with a light bulb at the center and a dot on the inside surface. How much light falls on the dot as opposed to what falls on everything which is NOT the dot! OK, so the problem with fusion is, we can not yet do fusion on a practical basis. The energy IN is great and to date, we have not gotten enough energy OUT to sustain the fusion reaction. I believe that one day soon, we WILL solve this energy in/out problem. Hydrogen as a fuel for a fusion reaction is for all practical purposes, nearly infinite, since a great part of the universe has abundant hydrogen available. Fusion is a GREAT solution as it creates NO radioactive byproducts and NO green house gasses, but we just have not yet found a way to make it WORK. The other process which we DO know is fission, splitting of heavy atoms. Fission works. Fission works well. Fission does NOT produce green house gasses as combustion does. The problem with fission is the byproducts, the stuff left behind after the original atom is split. Many of these byproducts are highly radioactive. Uranium is a metal and is in a raw pure form only a lowly radioactive material. If you had a new core of a reactor, you could have it in your living room and not suffer from exposure to the radiation it gives off. However, once it starts a nuclear fission chain reaction, the byproducts start building and even after a very short time, an hour, would be able to kill you in a matter of minutes from the radiation it will give off if unshielded. Not good. Spent fuel is the problem we face today. The only practical solution we have at the moment is to store the spent fuel until the radioactive byproducts decay naturally to become safe, which can take years, hundreds or maybe thousands of years. People are working very hard to overcome this storage problem of the waste spent fuel and I am confident they will one day resolve this problem. However, we need energy TODAY, so we have to balance the cost for the benefit, the cost of storing the byproducts for the benefit of the energy we can make. The political problem is another thing to deal with. MOST people think mushroom cloud when they hear the words, nuclear power. However, these same people are unaware of the fact the Navy has been steaming nuclear reactors without accident for over 50 years. I know, I was in the Navy (20 years) and I was in nuclear submarines, and I was running those power plants. OK, so there HAVE been accidents, like Three Mile Island, but in that accident, the containment building performed exactly as designed, preventing exposure to the general population from the effects of an accident which damaged the nuclear core of the reactor. Chernobyl was an accident AND it harmed MANY people in the surrounding area, but was NOT caused by
Edit; They cut off my answer…
the nuclear process but rather by the abject stupidity of the people running the plant! You can’t fault the plant for the stupidity of the people running it! If a drunk driver hits a pedestrian, who is at fault, the maker of the car or the driver? I have been a long supporter of nuclear power. Yes, there are problems, containment buildings and the spent fuel, which are problems we CAN overcome in time, and people ARE working these problems. The main problem with conventional power is the stack gasses, the results from combustion, which adds to the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Nuclear power does not generate greenhouse gasses. However, any power generation DOES produce a problem, heat pollution. The steam process requires huge amounts of cooling water to condense the steam back into water which can be pumped into the boiler section as feed water. All of the energy which went into converting water into steam comes back as heat given off into the environment when the steam is condensed later. Which is why you see all of those strange shaped cooling towers around power plants. So, from a political point of view, nuclear power is BAD, but from a practical point of view, I wonder why we are NOT building MORE. I see nuclear power as a short term solution since we do have problems yet to be resolved, like what to do with the waste, but I also see that we can use nuclear power as a stop gap measure until we DO find a solution of the storage problem AND it will relieve the problem of using fossil fuels from 3rd world countries to make us less dependent on external sources for fuels to maintain the power hungry economy we have today. I have no web source for my information. I only have my training and years in the Navy steaming nuclear reactors to go on here. My experience has shown that to me, nuclear power CAN be very safe if extended to the general public and I think it is a political thing as to why this has not been done already. The thing is, people do NOT understand that it is a physical impossibility for a power reactor like that used in a ship, to become a bomb. No ship reactor can explode and make a mushroom cloud. Melt down into a red hot pile of slag, yes, but a bomb, NO. It never ceases to amaze me how many people in the general population equate nuclear power generation with a bomb and a mushroom cloud…