The United States is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power. It generated 790 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020, surpassing coal in annual electricity generation for the first time ever. Commercial nuclear power plants have supplied around 20% of the nation’s electricity each year since 1990.
Nuclear fuel is extremely dense. That It’s about 1 million times greater than that of other traditional energy sources and because of this, the amount of used nuclear fuel is not as big as you might think All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
Tsar Bomba, from the former Soviet Union, remains the most powerful nuclear device ever created. It was tested in 1961 over Novaya Zemlya. And the mushroom cloud it produced could be seen clearly from over 600 miles away.
In the event of a disaster, should you be exposed to nuclear material – remove all of your clothes. This will also remove almost 90% of the radioactive material you were just exposed too.
All nuclear power plants include a system to record data of all operating events (all types of faults, malfunctions, and incidents) in order to improve all safety measures mentioned above. This data undergoes constant analysis to draw lessons from experience and make any changes necessary to prevent the recurrence of such events.
The production of electricity using nuclear energy emits comparable amounts of greenhouse gases as wind, water or biomass energy. Solar releases three times more greenhouse gas emissions than nuclear energy. This makes nuclear energy more climate friendly than fossil fuel energy. Just for comparison, coal releases 30 times more greenhouse gases than nuclear.
Nuclear medicine is used to diagnose and treat many different diseases. It uses isotopes to explore the body. Another version of it is radiotherapy, which is used to treat certain cancers by using radiation to target and destroy cancer cells.
A Geiger counter is an instrument used for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation. It is widely used in applications such as radiation dosimetry, radiological protection, experimental physics, and the nuclear industry.
Nuclear power plants use large quantities of water for steam production and for cooling. Some nuclear power plants remove large quantities of water from a lake or river, which could affect fish and other aquatic life
In the entire history of nuclear energy production, there have only been 3 major disasters – Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl. In the past 25 years, there have been over 10 major disasters with fossil fuel energy – the largest of which was the BP oil spill.
The largest nuclear reactor is actually the Sun. It uses nuclear reactions, a natural process, to convert hydrogen to helium.
Nuclear fusion involves putting two atoms together to make one. The technology has never been implemented on a broad scale, so almost all nuclear power plants use nuclear fission – which splits one atom into two, and is considered more dangerous.