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Nuclear Power Plant Essay

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What are Nuclear Power Plants? A nuclear power plant is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. A nuclear power plant can also be known as a nuclear power station. There are two types of nuclear power plants; there is boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors. In the United States about two-thirds of the reactors are pressurized and the other one-third are boiling water reactors. A question many people ask is, how is physics involved in nuclear power plants? Well the answer is nuclear power plants originally originated from a physicists. This led to a a great new discovery when a physicists and a chemists who got together and founded the first nuclear reactor project. As the years have passed more …show more content…

A nuclear power plant works by using a fuel called uranium. All nuclear power plants rely on this certain element called uranium that is used as nuclear fuel. There are two types of uranium; the first type is U-238 and the second is U-235. The most commonly used from these two is U-238. This fuel can most commonly be found in Kazakhstan or in places like Canada and Australia. Uranium consists of solid ceramic pellets that generate electricity. The process in by which uranium goes thru to produce electricity is called fission. What fission does is break Uranium into two smaller atoms. After this happens the smaller atom has more energy and it it uses the energy to heat the water and produce electricity. The heat produced by fission is converted into steam. The steam then drives the turbines and they spin to produce electricity. Since nuclear power plants don’t burn fuel they do not produce greenhouse gas emissions. It was a great idea that they came up with nuclear power plants because our dependence on fossil fuels has decreased by a lot. Our fossil fuels are running out because of the over use of them due to the very limited supply we have. Just like everything else in this world has pros and cons nuclear power plants do too. Some of the pros nuclear power plants have are low pollution rates; nuclear power have few greenhouse emissions, the greenhouse gases have decreased by about half due to the using prevalence of nuclear power.

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