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What part of a nuclear reactor would most likely contain plutonium?
Wiki User
∙ 9y ago
This part is the core of the nuclear reactor containing the nuclear fuel.
Wiki User
∙ 9y ago
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Why did they add boron to water to dump on the nuclear reactor?
Boron is a good absorber of neutrons and would be useful in preventing criticality, if the fuel had melted and was possibly going to form a critical mass. I don't know how likely this was, but it seems more of a precaution than a real necessity, at present anyway.
What is most likely to contain organic compounds?
natural substances
Is corrosives the chemical hazard in which perozide is most likely to fall?
Nuclear waste?
Is neptunium corrosive?
Neptunium is dangerous due to it's radioactivity- it is similar to Uranium or Plutonium. It is likely to be chemically poisonous, but the radiation effects outweigh the chemical hazards. Neptunium is rarely found in a pure state, and results from decay of other radioactive materials, such as Plutonium and Americium.
Which is most likely to contain organic compounds?
Biomolecules and other organic juices are most likely to contain organic compounds. Also, things like vegetable oils are also organic compounds.
How is plutonium used to produce heat and electricity?
Being a fissionable material plutonium is used as nuclear fuel in nuclear power reactors or as an explosive in nuclear weapons. The nuclear fission release a formidable quantity of energy.
What element is best suited for nuclear fission?
Plutonium, most likely, a man-made element, but mined Uranium will also do.
What will happen if the control rods in a nuclear reactor overheat?
Most likely they would warp and jam, however damage to fuel rods is likely from overheating long before any effect on control rods.
What do you get when you join one atom of Hydrogen and one atom of Helium?
This could not be done chemically. It would need a nuclear reactor. The likely product would be Lithium 5.
Which coolant in a nuclear power plant is the one most likely to contain boric acid?
The primary coolant.
How safe is the transportation of nuclear waste?
If done properly it can be as safe or safer than other transportation, especially if the plutonium and other transuranics have already been recycled to new fuel. But this is likely to get censored as many anti-nuclear people don't want it known.
What is a meltdown at a nuclear power plant?
A partial meltdown is a term for a type of severe nuclear reactor accident. In this situation, the cooling and safety systems of a reactor have failed to the point where the core overheats severely. In this instance, the nuclear fuel, which is welded inside tubes or plates, becomes so hot that it melts its way through the metal (called cladding) encasing it. This contaminates the whole reactor with highly radioactive material. A partial meltdown is generally contaned within the reactor vessel or the containment structure. But the reactor and associated cooling systems will end up highly contaminated with radioactive materials and be unusable.
What are the technical problems related to nuclear fusion?
Nuclear fusion requires very high temperatures and immense pressures to start and continue. The problems with a nuclear fusion reactor would be:- 1) the high temperatures would melt the container: therefore, the reaction would have to be stored in a vacuum suspended by a magnetic field and the reactor would have to be continually cooled. 2) nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars such as our sun: unless the fusion reaction was limited in size in some way, it would be likely that our planet is vapourised by the reaction.
A neutron is an unstable particle outside a nucleus but to start nuclear fission requires the slowing down of a neutron. How is nuclear fusion carried out in the case of uranium?
The neutrons released from Uranium are fast neutrons. In a reactor they are slowed down by a moderator. The moderator could be water, heavy water, graphite, among others. When the neutron is slowed down, it is more likely to create fission.This is what happens with the U-235. The U-238 does not fission, but it does transmute through a series of neutron absorption and beta decay etc. into plutonium which does fission also.
How can you measure nuclear energy?
For a quick indication of a nuclear reactor's power level, an instrument sensitive to the neutron flux is used. That is, it gives a signal proportional to the number of neutrons per second at the point the detection chamber is placed. By calculation, the signal can be related to the reactor power, but is not likely to be accurate, and chambers vary in sensitivity. Therefore to get an accurate figure the reactor power has to be obtained from thermal measurements, ie temperatures of the coolant and its flow rate, and the flux detector can then be calibrated to give a more accurate figure.
What happens when a nuclear reactor reaches the end of its life?
When a reactor has burned enough of its fuel that it cannot be made to go critical by pulling all the control rods all the way out, it has reached the end of its useful life. There is a lot of unburned fuel left in the fuel elements, but not enough to achieve criticality the way the reactor core is set up. (Only a small percentage of the fuel is actually burned.) Usually the operators of a nuclear plant will take a reactor out of service and refuel it a bit before this. And military reactors will be taken offline sooner and refueled because of the requirement that the reactor be able to be brought critical at what is called the "peak xenon" point. Generally speaking, the core is removed and put in a storage pool that provided cooling and shielding. The core will remain there until it can be disassembled into fuel bundles and the bundles packed up and moved to a long-term storage facility for a century or a few. It is unusual that the fuel elements are reprocessed to remove the remaining fuel because of the presence of a lot of extremely radioactive fission fragments.
Elements that contain high binding energies in the nucleus are likely to release stored energy through?
Nuclear fission process , ex.nuclear based power plant
