How can you obtain energy from nuclear fission?

Answer 1

AS THE world prepares for the largest investment in nuclear power in decades, owners of uranium mines last week raised the prospect of fuel shortages. To make things worse, the reliability of estimates of the amount of uranium that can be economically mined has also been questioned.Volatile oil and gas prices, along with the threat of global warming, have pushed governments to reconsider nuclear energy, partly because it is a low-carbon technology and partly because uranium supplies seem plentiful.Mined uranium caters for about 60 per cent of the global demand for nuclear fuel. The rest comes from secondary sources, including stockpiles left over from the 1970s and 1980s, reprocessed fuel and the conversion of old Russian nuclear warheads - the so-called Megatons to Megawatts programme.But the supply may not be as secure as first thought. The price of uranium has plummeted from a peak of around $130 per pound of uranium oxide ($286 per kilogram) in 2007 to $45 today(see graph). Some of this decline is due to slumping fossil fuel prices and some from the uncertainty surrounding the industry.

Answer 2

This is usually done with the heat generated, either directly or indirectly boiling water to make steam to operate turbine-generators, making electricity. There are other ways, but they are much more rarely used usually in special cases: radio-thermal electric generators are used in some compact portable and spacecraft based reactors to reduce weight.

Answer 3

• In a reactor, bombard a critical mass of fissionable material with neutrons until stable controlled fission reaction occurs.
• In a bomb, rapidly assemble a supercritical mass of fissile material with explosives then bombard it with neutrons, an uncontrolled fission reaction occurs resulting in an explosion about one microsecond later.

In both cases I have oversimplified things and omitted crucial details in order to give a short none technical answer.