Key context: thermodynamics dictates that heat engines waste a lot of energy.
Credit: Karin Kirk
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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How much of your EV charging money goes out the power plant smokestack, into the river/cooling tower, or heats up the air around the electrical wiring though?
i’m a proponent of EV’s, even when they charge from fossil powered grids, because of the thermodynamic efficiency gain.
But ragememes, no. Let’s not be like that.
In most places, at most times of day, a lot less.
Why? First, because a lot of electricity is generated using wind, water, solar, and nuclear. Those don't have that problem (ok, nuclear wastes a lot of heat, but really, who cares). The second reason is that power plants that burn stuff tend to be a lot more efficient than internal combustion engines; the best case is combined-cycle gas turbine power plants, which turn over 60% of the energy available into electricity, as compared with a gasoline engine which turns about 20% of the energy in the gas into motion.
So this made me wonder: How do nuclear plants produce the heat? Like, I know they're using nuclear materials to boil water and generate steam to turn turbines, but how is that accomplished? Are the fuel rods just naturally hot (in terms of thermals not just the radiation) or are they running current through them to make them hot enough to boil water? I always assumed the former, but maybe I've been wrong this whole time.
It's basically the former: the radiation given off by the atoms breaking apart triggers more fission when it bumps into other unstable atoms, which just keeps compounding if you have a bunch of fuel in one place until it gets REALLY hot and melts.
To prevent the meltdown you put control rods throughout the fuel which absorb the excess radiation and keep the fuel at useful temperature, roughly like how a fuse is built to burn at a consistent speed rather than simply exploding.