![]() The outlook for uranium has turned brighter with countries again embracing nuclear energy. The actual mass of a nucleus is always less than the sum of the masses of the free neutrons and protons that constitute it, the difference being the mass. Nuclei consist of nucleons (neutrons and protons), the total number of which is equal to the mass number of the nucleus. Powering a Clean Energy Future with Uranium The fission process may be best understood through a consideration of the structure and stability of nuclear matter. Nuclear reactors produce little waste or spent fuel, and only a small portion of that is highly radioactive. Nuclear power plants have the smallest land footprint per unit of electricity at 0.3m2 per megawatt-hour. If you take some uranium-235 and shoot a neutron at it, the uranium absorbs the neutron and becomes uranium-236. Nuclear power has the highest EROI of any energy source, returning 75 units of energy for every unit of energy spent in construction and operation. It turns out that nuclear fission isn't actually too difficult. ![]() ![]() ![]() The table below compares the energy density of uranium to other fuels, expressed in megajoules of energy contained per kilogram of fuel:Įnriched uranium-235, the fuel used by commercial nuclear reactors, contains 3.9 million megajoules of energy per kilogram of weight, which is magnitudes larger than the energy density of traditional fossil fuels.įor this reason, a relatively small quantity of nuclear fuel can produce significant amounts of energy through fission, translating into various advantages for nuclear power: Nuclear power ultimately stems from the radioactivity of uranium atoms, which yield great amounts of energy when split by the process of fission.īesides the radioactive nature of uranium, its energy density-the amount of energy it contains per unit of mass-is one of its exceptional properties, making it significantly more powerful than other energy fuels. A fissionable system (uranium-238, for example) in its ground state (i.e., at its lowest excitation energy and with an elongation small enough that it is confined inside the fission barrier) has a small but finite probability of being in the energetically favoured configuration of two fission fragments. ![]()
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