Download Nuclear Power Plant - A Brief Summary and more Lecture notes Electrical Engineering in PDF only on Docsity! NUCLEAR POWER PLANT Nuclear power plant is a thermal power station which generates electrical energy from heat and it is basically a factory for making lots of electricity enough to power a city of around 2 million people. Nuclear energy is the world’s second largest low carbon source of electricity. Approximately 10% of the global electricity is being generated by nuclear reactors. As of April 2020, there are 440 nuclear power reactors in the world with a combined electrical capacity of 390 GW. By far the largest nuclear electricity producers are the United States with 809,359 GW/hour of nuclear electricity in 2019. The nuclear power plant consists of numerous buildings and facilities. The most important of which are as follows: A containment building where the nuclear reactors are housed. It is made of 2 meters thick reinforced concrete. Inside the containment building, a large tank called calandria, which is the heart of the nuclear reactors. A turbine generator building, it houses the turbine and the generator. A controlling building, for monitoring and controlling the nuclear reactors. The fuel is naturally occurring uranium that’s processed into small pallets. Then the pallets are sealed into metal tubes which are welded to form a fuel bundle. The fuel bundles are then inserted in a large tank called calandria which is the heart of the nuclear reactor. Typically, more than 200 of these rods are bundled together to form a fuel assembly. A reactor core is typically made up of a couple of a hundred assemblies. In order to allow a nuclear fission, to proceed in a controlled manner, a control rod exist. The control rod can be moved up and down to control the fission rate of uranium. The nuclear power plants produce electricity using the heat that comes from splitting uranium atoms and the process is called nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is a nuclear radioactive decay process in which the neutrons on the uranium atom, then the uranium atoms split into two and it releases three neutrons. Each process releases two uranium atoms and three neutrons. A chain reaction of atoms splitting and ensure that there is a constant source of heat, meaning that it generates lots of heat. This heat is used to convert electricity. Let’s explore how they produce electricity from heat. The calandria vessel is a cylindrical vessel housing lots of lattice tubes which are filled with heavy water moderator. That flows around the fuel bundles. Heavy water is found in all water, rivers and ocean. An average 1 out of every 7000 drops of water is heavy water. It is 10% heavier than ordinary water because it incorporates a heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium. During the nuclear fission process, the heavy water flows around the fuel bundles. A chain reaction of splitting atoms releases a tremendous amount of heat into the heavy water then the heated heavy water flows through a closed loop system that’s pumped through the reactor to a set of a steam generator where it transfers the heat to ordinary water. When that water boils, it turns into steam. The steam is transported at high pressure through pipes to a large turbine where it pushes the blade and turns a shaft connected to a rotor in the generator causing the rotor to spin the spinning rotor is a large electromagnet that producing rotating magnetic fields. Due to this process, electricity is generated then it transferred to the transmission line.
