• Question: what are nuclear rods made of? Wich atoms?

    Asked by anon-267421 on 5 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Juan Pereiro Viterbo

      Juan Pereiro Viterbo answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      Stable materials ( boron, cadmium, silver, indium…). They are there to help with the stability of the reactor… so they need materials that are can of absorb neutrons without undergoing fission. Otherwise you would have that the many neutrons emitted by the radioactive material would cause reactions and the neutrons emitted from those reactions would cause even more reactions and the neutrons from those reactions would cause even more and more reactions…. and then we have a problem…

    • Photo: Alex Leide

      Alex Leide answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      The nuclear fuel we normally use is uranium dioxide (UO2). This starts as a powder, then it is baked (scientific word is “sintered”) into small cylinder pellets about 1cm tall and 1cm diameter. These are stacked into long tubes made of zirconium alloy (I think one of the other scientists in this zone researches this material!) So these are mostly zirconium atoms with some additions of other types of atom to make it stronger. These rods are about 4-5 metres long, and can be inserted into the reactor to make lots of clean energy

    • Photo: Patrick Dalton

      Patrick Dalton answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      Typically they are made out of something called ‘Enriched Uranium’. This is also known as Uranium-235.
      Uranium-235 is special in that when it is hit by a particle called a neutron it breaks apart into pieces releasing energy and even more neutrons. These new neutrons hit other Uranium-235 atoms and break them apart too!
      This goes on and on and every time a Uranium-235 atom is broken apart it releases energy which we use to make electricity.

    • Photo: Adrien Chauvet

      Adrien Chauvet answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      The next -burning- question is: “What do we do with used nuclear rods?”

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 8 Nov 2020:

      Control rods are usually made of elements like silver, indium, cadmium, boron and cobalt. For this purpose, we use elements which can absorb lots of neutrons without breaking apart (fissioning) themselves, so they are quite stable in that sense.

Comments