This incident was about a nuclear power plant which overheated and exploded due to an earthquake followed by a tsunami. The Earthquake and tsunami destroyed the emergency generators which were cooling the reactors leading to a reactor overheating from the decay heat from the fuel rods. This disruption of cooling led to several nuclear meltdowns and the release of radiation/radioactive material. This resulted in the area becoming dangerous and radioactive. The area is still dangerous today.
Nuclear fission reaction
Nuclear fission is the splitting of nuclei and is used to power most nuclear power stations, including the fukushima one.
Nuclear fission generally uses Uranium 235 to generate …show more content…
This reaction releases a large amount of kinetic energy and also neutrons which can and will initiate more reactions if more uranium 235 is nearby. On average each reaction produces 2.4 neutrons (and typically produces between 2-3) and about 215 Mev. This energy is mostly released in the form of kinetic energy of the escaping particles, however since they can only travel very small distances their energy converted to the surroundings as heat, this heat is then surrounded by water and this water is turned into steam, The large amount of steam that is created from this reaction is used to turn turbines with convertes the heat energy into kinetic energy, this kinetic energy of the steam is converted into electric energy from the turbines. The balance of the energy come from gamma rays emitted during the fission …show more content…
This is possible because they each produce at least 2 neutron (which is the starting point for each reaction), this means that they will each cause more reactions sometimes even 3 from a production of 3 neutrons. Since these reactions make Kr92 and Ba141 along with around 200 Mev which means, that this chain reaction allows for a large amount of energy gain. This means the energy per kg of U235 is 83.14 Tera joules.
How these reactors can be regulated and controlled: turned on and off. To shut down a nuclear fission reactor you need to stop the aforementioned chain reaction: and stop the neutrons that are being produced which are causing more reactions ( as it is self propagating). To do this you have to introduce neutron absorbing material, which is easy to do as neutrons can be harmlessly absorbed on many different nuclei (which are called neutron poisons). These are introduced in the form of control rods which are pushed into the reactor core and will stop the chain reaction very quickly. These do not only turn it off, but can also control and regulate the reactions: By changing the amount of control rods present. A general control rod is made up of silver indium and cadmium, along with several other materials. In the case of the fukushima incident, the designers inserted the control rods which absorbed enough neutrons to stop the chain reactions,