The future is looking very bright indeed for nuclear in the United Kingdom. In July, Sizewell C received planning permission. The project's ultimate cost, which is being constructed alongside French state-owned enterprise EDF Energy, is anticipated to be £20 billion. Last month, efforts to advance nuclear fission and nuclear fusion received a boost when former prime minister Boris Johnson contributed £700 million to the Sizewell C nuclear reactor on the Suffolk Coast. This process effectively smashes and rips atomic nuclei apart to release energy, not merge atomic nuclei.įission produces energy as fusion does but also creates harmful radioactive byproducts. This is the opposite of existing nuclear power plants that use nuclear fission. Since no materials can sustain direct contact at this temperature, the superheated atoms need to be drawn together by strong magnets inside a device called a "tokamak."Ī fusion reactor stops if anything goes wrong, so there is no danger of releasing this enormous heat, which is handy. They would have to heat hydrogen gas to more than 100 million degrees. The smashing and merging (fusion) of atoms released massive amounts of energy we can harvest to produce near-infinite power. For details about reactor types, see nuclear reactor: Nuclear fission reactors. All of the reactor types require a coolant to remove the heat generated water, a gas, or a liquid metal may be used for this purpose, depending on the design needs. Nuclear fusion is a scaled-down version of what the Sun does daily. In a fast reactor, fast fission neutrons maintain the chain reaction, and no moderator is needed. The experiments generated 11 megawatts of electricity (59 megajoules of energy) over five seconds to boil 60 kettles of water. The JET (Joint European Torus) facility in the UK broke its previous record for the amount of energy produced by fusing two types of hydrogen in February of this year. "What we are doing is fundamentally pushing the barriers of what's known in the technology world,” he added. “One of the reasons that ITER is late is that it is really, really hard," Professor Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, explained to the BBC. The ITER project is an experiment to test if nuclear fusion can produce more energy than it consumes, not power for people's homes.ĭespite having a scheduled launch date of 2050, it is now going over budget and behind schedule. When the reactor starts, uranium atoms will split, releasing neutrons and heat. today are filled with a specially designed, solid uranium fuel and surrounded by water, which facilitates the process. The STEP design is ambitious, but other reactor designs have frequently encountered problems.įor example, a massive facility is being constructed in the South of France with the cooperation of 35 nations. Nuclear reactors are designed to sustain an ongoing chain reaction of fission the reactors operating in the U.S. The International Energy Foundation cautions that developing a commercial reactor will be "challenging and costly."
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