How Do We Obtain Nuclear Energy?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Steve Jones and I'm going to tell you how we obtain nuclear energy. Well the first thing to understand is that nuclear energy is a fossil fuel. It's not renewable so it's a fossil fuel. So the first thing they have to do is mine the uranium. The uranium is dug out of the ground in large quantities and then it has to be refined to remove the uranium itself which is a very small proportion of the actual soil that comes out of the ground. Once this uranium is taken out of the overburden, we refine it again to create fuel to put in to a nuclear reactor. Now, the fuel in the nuclear reactor has one function, basically to get hot. When uranium comes close to another bulk of uranium, if there's enough of it, we get what's called a chain reaction and this produces heat. The heat can then be used to produce steam, we then use the steam to drive a turbine, a steam turbine which rotates. The turbine then drives the generator. So the generator then produces the electricity which we could use in our homes. So that is how we obtain nuclear energy."