How Nuclear Energy Works

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Steve Jones, and I'm going to explain how nuclear energy works. First of all, it is quite a simple process. Although this looks fairly complicated, it isn't really very complicated at all. We require for generation of nuclear energy, one of these two substances. Either uranium or plutonium. Uranium is naturally occurring, plutonium is not, and plutonium is the result of a working nuclear power station--it comes out as a byproduct. Inside the nuclear power station, there is a core of what we call a reactor. This is called a nuclear reactor, and the reactor has a core and the core contains fuel rods, fuel rods containing uranium, normally uranium oxide, but it doesn't actually matter. It's the uranium which is active. And these are the rods of uranium within the core. Also in the core we need a thing called a moderator. This is to make the reactor work. Without the moderator, the uranium will not undergo this nuclear reaction, and the whole thing won't work. In addition we have things called control rods which can be pushed into the nuclear reactor when it's working, and shut it down. And they do that by controlling the reaction in the core. All a nuclear power station does, on a nuclear reactor does, is produce heat. What we then have to do is take the heat away and once we've taken it away we can take it away and turn it into steam, which can drive a turbine, which drives a generator. This is exactly the same as in a conventional power station. Unlike most means of generating heat, the reactor is very economical on the amount of fuel needed. For example, here twenty-eight tons for a year of working, whereas a power station--a coal power station would need two thousand tons a week, this needs only twenty-eight tons a year. So we don't have large transportation of large amounts of fuel. But the fuel is a fossil fuel--it's not renewable. It has very dangerous byproducts which have to be stored for long periods of time. But remember there's only very small amounts of this fuel needed. So here we have basically the same device as in a conventional power station where you burn coal or gas, but the material is more dangerous. At the same time it can be built well outside a town. It can be built where it isn't going to do any harm to the local population. So here we have how nuclear energy is generated."