Creating a New System for Electricity

“Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.” Bill Gates means that nuclear energy will be the future of the world. And also the whole world uses about 44,000,000 kWh of electricity every day (Greenbang). For such enormous amount of electricity, we need to use nuclear energy. According to multiple studies, using nuclear energy can produce an enormous amount of electricity, require a lot of money to use it, provide a good environment to for earth, and be really safe.

Not like other kind of power plant, such as thermal power plant, solar power plant, nuclear power plant can create huge amount of electricity. As we know, nuclear power plant is a complex machine, knowing how nuclear power plant works is really important. Nuclear power plant is still using heat to create steam and spin the turbine to produce electricity. The processed that generate the heat is called fission. Inside the reactor, there are some uranium rod and some carbon rod called control rod. Usually fission will happen inside the reactor between the uranium rod, if the reactor gets too hot, the system will slide down the control rod to reduce fission in order to reduce the heat (“Nuclear Power Reactors”). Because nuclear reactor using special way to produce electricity, it create an enormous amount of electricity.

In 2012, the “average” nuclear power plant in the United State generated about 11.8 billion kilowatt-hour of electricity. There were 65 nuclear power plant with 104 nuclear reactor that generated a total of 769 billion kilowatt-hour of electricity (“How Much Electricity Does a Typical Nuclear Power Plant Generate?”). For that such enormous amount of electricity has been generated, it is really important that a country has nuclear power plants, because “a typical 1000 megawatt reactor can provide enough electricity for a modern city of up to one million people. (“What Is Uranium? How Does It Work”)”

One of the main part of the reactor is the fuel that nuclear reactor use. Uranium has a melting point of 1132 oC, for that high melting point, there is really hot in the nuclear reactor (“What Is Uranium? How Does It Work?”). For this reason, nuclear reactor can create massive amount of steam then spin a strong turbine.