Question: How many normal street lights would be able to be powered for one second using 1cm squared of waste uranium in a nuclear power plant

Megan Seymour answered on 4 Nov 2016:

Hi Olive, I think that is a great question!
Unfortunately the answer isn’t quite as impressive. The depleted waste uranium that we are talking about is ‘waste’ because it doesn’t contain very much nuclear energy at all. (Compared to more radioactive enriched uranium, that contains huge amounts of nuclear energy).
My research is about trying to use the waste uranium to make brand new molecules, which we hope will themselves react with things like nitrogen from the air, and help to make useful products (like ammonia, which is used for making fertilizers.) Usually reactions like turning nitrogen into ammonia use a huge amount of energy- but really good catalysts, like the ones we hope we can make from waste uranium reduce the energy you need to carry out reactions like this.
So, in short, rather than generating energy, I am trying to save energy!