What makes nuclear fuel rods hot

There are lots of different variables here, but, in at least one situation, they get to about twenty-eight-hundred-and-eleven-degrees celsius C.

This is about fifty-one-hundred degrees fahrenheit F. Past this, your shiny nuclear reactor will go into meltdown. While I was trying to get a quick answer to the half-life of the radiation from a meltown at the average nuclear power plant, I ran into this interesting tidbit:.

To prevent a post-accident nuclear reaction, steps have been taken, such as adding neutron poisons to key parts of the basement. Oh man. A neutron poison also called a neutron absorber or a nuclear poison is a substance with a large neutron absorption cross-section, in applications such as nuclear reactors. In such applications, absorbing neutrons is normally an undesirable effect.

However neutron-absorbing materials, also called poisons, are intentionally inserted into some types of reactors in order to lower the high reactivity of their initial fresh fuel load. Some of these poisons deplete as they absorb neutrons during reactor operation, while others remain relatively constant. The capture of neutrons by short half-life fission products is known as reactor poisoning; neutron capture by long-lived or stable fission products is called reactor slagging.

Thermo-acoustic nuclear fuel rods could scream for help when stressed, preventing nuclear meltdown. How hot a fuel rod in the nuclear reactor can get? You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. Inside the reactor vessel, the fuel rods are immersed in water which acts as both a coolant and moderator.

The moderator helps slow down the neutrons produced by fission to sustain the chain reaction. Control rods can then be inserted into the reactor core to reduce the reaction rate or withdrawn to increase it. The heat created by fission turns the water into steam, which spins a turbine to produce carbon-free electricity. All commercial nuclear reactors in the United States are light-water reactors. This means they use normal water as both a coolant and neutron moderator.

These reactors pump water into the reactor core under high pressure to prevent the water from boiling. The water in the core is heated by nuclear fission and then pumped into tubes inside a heat exchanger. Those tubes heat a separate water source to create steam. The steam then turns an electric generator to produce electricity. BWRs heat water and produce steam directly inside the reactor vessel.

Water is pumped up through the reactor core and heated by fission. Pipes then feed the steam directly to a turbine to produce electricity. Nuclear reactors are the heart of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear Fission Creates Heat The main job of a reactor is to house and control nuclear fission —a process where atoms split and release energy. Fission and Fusion: What is the Difference?