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Radioactivity

Nuclear Power - Generating Electricity.

Nuclear power stations get their energy
from a type of nuclear reaction called fission.
Fission means the splitting of a big nucleus into smaller nuclei.
Fission is the opposite of fusion.

A large amount of energy is released when the nucleus is split,
much larger than the amount of energy in a chemical bond.
If you add up the mass of the nuclei before and after fission,
you find that some mass has gone missing.
The process of fission destroys a little bit of mass.
This little bit of mass turns into a large amount of energy.
The energy is used to boil water to make steam.

Most nuclear power stations use uranium as their fuel.
Uranium-235 can capture a neutron and become uranium-236.
Uranium-236 is unstable and splits to form 2 smaller nuclei
plus an additional 2 or 3 neutrons.
These neutrons can be captured by other atoms of uranium-235
and so the process continues.
The type of process where one atom splits to release neutrons
which then cause other atoms to split which release more neutrons
which cause other atoms to split and so on is called a chain reaction.

The smaller nuclei produced by fission are themselves radioactive
and contribute to an ever increasing amount of radioactive waste.

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Copyright © 2008 Dr. Colin France. All Rights Reserved.