what`s the benefits of nuclear energy?
92796
nuclear energy is a hidden ,concentrated,compressed energy.You just leave it free and use it.it is everywhere and in everything.just get the technology to get it out .it is the ultimate source of energy,clean ,easy to use and will be in absolute abundance.
237029
Several.\n\nGeo-thermal is one of the best.  Basically, this is power derived from the heat of the earth.  Unfortunately, there are few places where this can be used.  Iceland, is a prime location for geothermal energy and they use it most effectively.\n\nWind Power:  quickly gaining in popularity, these are windmill powered turbines.\n\nSolar Power:  The sun is an excellent source of power.  Unfortunately, solar cells have been typically expensive to produce.  \n\nFuel Cells.  President Bush's pet project is to store hydrogen and use that as fuel.  Unfortunately there are some problems not mentioned by the president.  Hydrogen is the simplest element (smallest atom).  This makes it extremely easy to escape whatever container we put it in.  If you fill your cars fuel cell and let it sit for a couple of weeks, you will have an empty cell.  You need a lot of hydrogen to provide power.   You might need a bigger fuel cell than what is commonly suggested.  You might need a hydrogen tank the size of a car in order to go the distance usually provided in a sterotypical gas tank.  Benefits:  hydrogen is common and burns clean.\n\nNuclear power.  The big boogieman power source.  The sad truth is, we will have to expand nuclear power to keep up with demand if we reduce our fossil fuel consumption.  It's a necessary evil.\n\nTidal power:  Using wave action to provide power along coastal regions.  There are several of these types of power plants.\n\nHydroelectric:  using falling water from waterfalls, dams for fast moving rivers to power turbines.  One  of the best loved methods of producing "clean" power.  Drawbacks include altering the environmet and seriously affecting fish spawning.  Salmon populations have dropped enormously.
826107
Nuclear reactors are basically heat engines. As uranium fissions, the breaking apart of atoms releases energy, much of it in the form of heat, which can then be used to do work. In a nuclear-powered submarine, reactor heat produces steam to drive the turbines that provide the submarine's actual power. The development of compact, safe, and highly reliable pressurized water reactors for naval use in the early 1950s was the major technological achievement that made nuclear-powered submarines possible.\n\nHow Reactors Work\nNaval pressurized-water reactors include a primary coolant system and a secondary coolant system. The primary system circulates water, which is pressurized to keep it from boiling, in a closed loop. As water passes through the reactor, it is heated. It then goes through the steam generator, where it gives up its heat to generate steam in the secondary system. Finally, it flows back to the reactor to be heated again. Inside the steam generator, heat energy is transferred across a watertight boundary to the secondary system, also a closed loop. The unpressurized water in the secondary system turns to steam when heated. The steam, in turn, flows through the secondary system to the propulsion turbines, which turn the propellers, and to the turbine generators, which supply electricity. As it cools, it condenses to water and is pumped back to the steam generator.
1020736
Coal power plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants (because of Carbon-14, and the fact that they do not include shielding for radiation).  So, replacing coal burning plants with nuclear plants would be better for humanity.
320534
My brother-in-law is an electrical engineer and designs ultrasound equipment.  So he combines electrical engineering with the health field.  Maybe you could get into something like that.  \n\nNuclear is very well paid, but the jobs are hard to find.  Because of the sensitivity of nuclear, they are unlikely to ship the jobs oversees.  I think nuclear will be growing in the future in the US, because people are starting to realize that nuclear is actually less polluting than burning fossil fuels.
208864
Here is a little information about Nuclear Energy:\nhttp://home.clara.net/darvill/altenerg/nuclear.htm
548592
Atoms are the building blocks from which matter is formed. Everything around us is made up of atoms. Nuclear energy is contained within the center of the atom in a place known as the nucleus. Particles within the nucleus are held together by a strong force. If a large nucleus is split apart (fission), generous amounts of energy can be liberated. Small nuclei can also be combined (fusion) with an accompanying release of energy. Using this strong force that holds the nucleus together to produce energy is essentially what the field of nuclear power generation is about.\n  In the fission process certain heavy elements, such as some forms of Uranium, are split when a neutron strikes them. When they split, they release energy in the form of kinetic energy (heat) and radiation. The process not only produces energy but also additional neutrons that can be used to fission other Uranium nuclei and start a chain reaction.\n  In fusion, nuclei of light elements are brought together under conditions of high pressure and temperature, causing them to combine and produce new elements and energy.
771693
CanTexan is on the right path. More specifically, Nuclear Reactors create Heat. This heat energy creates a Pressure in the transfer medium (Water -> Steam) and is transferred to Rotational Mechanical Energy in a turbine. The attached Generator produces Electrical Energy.
226918
This is a debate we're going to have to have here in the US soon...are the risks of nuclear power worth the benefits.  I think there's nothing wrong with nuke power, having worked around it for several years in the early 90's.  I think irrational fear is nuclear power's biggest obstacle.  People fear what they cannot understand.  They see Chernobyl and think that's going to happen all over again in their backyard, when the fact of the matter is that modern nuke plants are as safe as any other industrial facility handling volatile materials.  The UK would be well served by building new nukes and opening up research on alternative power sources simultaneously.
174097
That's a good one to bet on for an increasing job market in the future as energy costs continue to rise due to world demand from China and other developing countries. Of course there's nuclear medicine also, but my interest is in the nuclear electric power generating industry (fission). Longer term, scientists are working on the development of nuclear fusion which is the same process that our sun uses.
152530
NUCLEAR POWER\nIn the mid-1950s, nuclear physicists confidently predicted that nuclear energy would usher in a golden age for humanity: the cost of energy would be so low it would be "too cheap to meter." They predicted that, by the year 2000, there would be one thousand commercial reactors and one thousand "breeder" reactors producing unlimited amounts of power. Like the horse and buggy, oil and coal would become little more than historical curiosities.\n\nNuclear power has exceeded some of these early predictions. Its safety record, when compared, say, to the airline industry, is vastly superior. Compared to the air pollution and acid rain caused by the coal industry, its environmental record is admirable. It currently generates over 15 percent of the nation's electricity and has thus reduced the dependence on scarce fossil fuels. Some claim it may also reduce the impact of the greenhouse effect.\n\nIronically, however, this same industry is also teetering on the verge of collapse. Contrary to previous expectations, the United States now has over one hundred commercial reactors, the breeder reactor program is defunct, and there has not been a single reactor order since 1978, one year before an accident at Three Mile Island. Over one hundred reactor orders have been canceled, and costs have escalated so that the Nine Mile Point reactor in upstate New York will soar beyond $6 billion, or about six times the cost of a coal plant of similar power.\n\nNever in modern history has a major technology, with the full backing of industry and the government, come to such an abrupt halt. Well over $100 billion has been invested in nuclear energy, yet the people of California voted to close down an operating reactor, and the people of Long Island, New York, are closing down the fully completed $5 billion Shoreham reactor before it opens.\n\nUtilities that invested heavily in nuclear power have been driven to the wall by its mounting costs; the Washington Public Power Supply System went bankrupt, and the Long Island Lighting Co. incurred billions in losses. What went wrong? \n\nAlthough the reasons for this unprecedented collapse are complex, many of the problems can be traced to unwise decisions made in the 1950s. Specifically, when the Nautilus nuclear submarine sailed effortlessly beneath the North Pole, it touched off a stampede among corporations interested in the commercial development of nuclear energy. The 1960s marked the "gold rush" in reactors, when General Electric, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, and Babcock-Wilcox scrambled to bring this technology to the marketplace. In fact, Con Edison even applied for a license to build its Ravenswood reactor in the heart of New York City opposite the United Nations.\n\nBecause large plants are more economical than small ones, designers started with the small (40-megawatt) Nautilus reactor and essentially scaled it up many times to the current 1,000-megawatt design, without clearly thinking through the consequences. Decades later, this would lead to three serious problems. First, in retrospect, scaling up the Nautilus design was a poor choice to begin with because the light-water Nautilus reactor is highly susceptible to a rapid melting of the uranium core. Alternate designs (e.g., gas-cooled high-temperature gas reactors) were much more stable against a meltdown but were ignored. Second, this meant that elaborate and expensive emergency core cooling systems had to be installed, which would later add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the reactor and delay construction for several years. Third, no attention was paid to how reactors would be decommissioned after thirty to forty years of use or where the radioactive nuclear waste would be disposed of.\n\nIn 1957, a prophetic, but secret, report was issued by the Brookhaven National Laboratory, called wash—740. It estimated that a meltdown, a Class 9 accident, could cause $7 billion in pro
795838
Well, you can look them up yourself.  Just google "coal" and "benefits."\n\nHowever, here are some that you will need to quantify further; you know, specify exactly how much -\n\n* Coal is cheaper than other fuels.\n* Coal is extremely plentiful in the US, and therefore could greatly reduce our dependency on foreign energy sources.\n* The coal industry employs thousands of people.  Not just in the mines, but also transport.\n* Coal is fairly easy to use, just as it is mined - not a lot of refining steps.\n* Coal is a lot less explosive than, say, gasoline or natural gas.  Or nuclear plants.
548851
Some pros to this energy source are: 1) Vast new source of energy 2) Fuels (mostly hydrogen) are plentiful 3) Inherently safe since a malfunction results in a rapid shutdown 4) No atmospheric pollution leading to acid rain or "greenhouse" effect 5) Radioactivity of the reactor structure, caused by neutrons, decays rapidly and can be minimized by careful selection of low-activation materials. There is basically only one con to these energy sources though. Scientists have not figured out a way to make it efficiently. At this point they have sustained a reaction at the break-even point, which essentially means they used as much energy as they created to make the reaction take place.
888620
Nuclear fission—also known as atomic fission—is a process in nuclear physics in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei as fission products, and usually some by-product particles. Hence, fission is a form of elemental transmutation. The by-products include free neutrons, photons usually in the form gamma rays, and other nuclear fragments such as beta particles and alpha particles. Fission of heavy elements is an exothermic reaction and can release substantial amounts of useful energy both as gamma rays and as kinetic energy of the fragments (heating the bulk material where fission takes place).\n\nNuclear fission produces energy for nuclear power and to drive explosion of nuclear weapons. Fission is useful as a power source because some materials, called nuclear fuels, both generate neutrons as part of the fission process and also undergo triggered fission when impacted by a free neutron. Nuclear fuels can be part of a self-sustaining chain reaction that releases energy at a controlled rate in a nuclear reactor or at a very rapid uncontrolled rate in a nuclear weapon.\n\nThe amount of free energy contained in nuclear fuel is millions of times the amount of free energy contained in a similar mass of chemical fuel such as gasoline, making nuclear fission a very tempting source of energy; however, the waste products of nuclear fission are highly radioactive and remain so for millennia, giving rise to a nuclear waste problem. Concerns over nuclear waste accumulation and over the immense destructive potential of nuclear weapons counterbalance the desirable qualities of fission as an energy source, and give rise to intense ongoing political debate over nuclear power.\n\nhere:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Physical_overview
589939
On whether a country should have more nuclear power stations, or at least that is what the debate in UK is.\n\nFor:\n- Using nuclear reactor to generate electricity does not produce carbon dioxide like other methods.\n\n- Is extrememly efficient as it uses a very small amount of natural resources (uranium) and quite cheap in the long run.\n\nAgainst:\n- Where to put the waste?  At the moment no solution has been found.\n\n- There is the fear of meltdown and disaster, and as such few people want to live near a nuclear power plant.
430638
Energy development is the ongoing effort to provide abundant and accessible energy, through knowledge, skills and constructions. When harnessing energy from primary energy sources and converting them into ever more convenient secondary energy forms, such as electrical energy and cleaner fuels, both quantity (harnessing more primary energy) and quality (more efficient conversion to secondary energy) are important.\n\nFuture energy development faces great challenges due to an increasing world population, demands for higher standards of living, demands for less pollution and a much-discussed end to fossil fuels. Without energy, the world's entire industrialized infrastructure would collapse; agriculture, transportation, waste collection, information technology, communications and much of the prerequisites that a developed nation takes for granted. A shortage of the energy needed to sustain this infrastructure could lead to a Malthusian catastrophe.\nEarth by night. Many parts of the world will demand energy as their economies develop.\nEnlarge\nEarth by night. Many parts of the world will demand energy as their economies develop.\n[edit]\n\nGeneral considerations\n\nAll the energy we consume is generated by using the four fundamental interactions of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force to create work. Fission energy and fusion energy are generated by electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force. In both cases the weak nuclear force provides significant energy through decay reactions immediately after (and during) the primary reactions. Most forms of terrestrial energy can be traced back to fusion reaction inside the sun, with the exception of tidal power, geothermal energy and nuclear power. Geothermal energy is believed to be generated primarily by radioactive decay inside the Earth[1]. Radioactive decay energy is generated by both the weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force. Tidal energy comes from the gravitational potential energy of the Earth/Moon system.\n\nMost human energy sources today use energy from sunlight, either directly like solar cells or in stored forms like fossil fuels. Once the stored forms are used up (assuming no contribution from the three previous energy sources and no energy from space exploration) then the long-term energy usage of humanity is limited to that from the sunlight falling on Earth. The total energy consumption of humanity today is equivalent to about 0.1-0.01% of that. But humanity cannot exploit most of this energy since it also provides the energy for almost all other lifeforms and drives the weather cycle[2][3].\nU.S. energy consumption by sectors.\nEnlarge\nU.S. energy consumption by sectors.\n\nWorld energy production by source: Oil 40%, natural gas 22.5%, coal 23.3%, hydroelectric 7.0%, nuclear 6.5%, biomass and other 0.7%[4]. In the U.S., transportation accounted for 28% of all energy use and 70% of petroleum use in 2001; 97% of transportation fuel was petroleum[5].\n\nThe United Nations projects that world population will stabilize in 2075 at nine billion due to the demographic transition. Birth rates are now falling in most developing nations and the population would decrease in several developed nations if there was no immigration[6]. Still, economic growth probably requires a continued increase in energy consumption. Since 1970, each 1% increase in the Gross world product has yielded a 0.64% increase in energy consumption[7].\n\nIn geology, resources refer to the amount of a specific substance that may be present in a deposit. This definition does not take into account the economic feasibility of exploitation or the fact that resources may not be recoverable using current technology. Reserves constitute those resources that are recoverable using current technology. They can be recovered economically under current market conditions. This definition takes into account current mining technology and the economics of recovery
205169
The greatest technological challenge of the 21st century is to meet energy demand in an environmentally sustainable way.  Nuclear energy is a carbon free energy; however, current fission technology leaves a deadly legacy - radioactive waste that is toxic for tens of thousands of years.  To put the energy demands of humans in perspective with nuclear energy, please see the lecture by Nate Lewis (California Institute of Technology).  In 2006, humans are consuming energy at a rate of about 14TW (14 trillion watts).  Using current technology, in order to generate 10TW of energy, we would have to build a new reactor every single day for the next 50 years.  This would be a monumental effort in stupidity and futility.  Furthermore, this would not meet growing energy demand, which is predicted to be ~28TW in the year 2050.  The clearest alternatives are wind energy and solar energy.  Practically, wind energy used globally can potentially provide ~2TW energy, meaning that solar energy is going to be our primary energy source.  The energy that strikes the Earth in 1 hour as sunlight is enough to provide humanity's energy needs for 1 year (~14TW).  However, this energy is diffuse, and we still need to develop low cost, efficient methods to convert solar energy to fuels and electricity. Research is progressing rapidly in this topic.  The world needs to committ massive resources to this right now.  \n\nThe second part of your question relates to cold fusion.  Interestingly, fusion is the source of sunlight, so using solar energy, is in a way, using fusion energy (we don't have to worry about the problems of containment and generating fusion pressures and temperatures).  There are a few research projects around the world that are working on finding useful methods for controlling fusion reactions for energy.  Perhaps the most well known involves a giant room with thousands of high energy lasers that are focused at a pelletized source of fusionable material.  In this scheme, the energy input from the lasers initiates fusion.  This technology is promising, but is far from being economical.  Research efforts should continue.