RADIOACTIVITY

India’s installed nuclear capacity will treble from the current 7,480 megawatt
(MW) to 22,480 MW. US, Australian, Indian and UK coals contain up to about 4
ppm uranium, those in Germany up to 13 ppm, and those from Brazil and China
range up to 20 ppm uranium. Thorium concentrations are often about three times
those of uranium.

Ten of these reactors – like the 500 MW Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at
Kalpakkam and the two 1,000 MW reactors at Kudankulam – are already under
construction. In addition, the government has granted “administrative and
financial sanctions” for building 10 more nuclear plants with 700 MW
Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors at Gorakhpur (Haryana), Kaiga (Karnataka),
Chutka (Madhya Pradesh) and Mahi Banswara (Rajasthan)

India’s nuclear establishment has pushed for rapid expansion of the country’s
nuclear power capacity.

In 1954, Homi Bhabha, the founder of India’s nuclear programme, said India
would have 8,000 MW of nuclear capacity by 1980. In 1960, the country was told
it would have 43,500 MW by 2000. In 1984, a decade after the 1974 nuclear test,
the country was promised 10,000 MW by 2000. The actual installed capacity was
about 600 MW in 1980 and 2,720 MW in 2000.

NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

In order to turn nuclear fission into energy, nuclear power plant operators
electric
al

have to control the energy given off by the enriched uranium and allow it to heat
water into steam. That steam then drives turbines to generate electricity

Enriched uranium typically is formed into 1-inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long)

pellets, each with approximately the same diameter as a dime. Next, the pellets are
arranged into long , and the rods are collected together into . The
bundl
ro es
ds

bundles are submerged in water inside a pressure vessel. The water acts as a
coolant. Left to its own devices, the uranium would eventually overheat and melt.
 To prevent overheating, made of a material that absorbs neutrons are
control
rods

inserted into the uranium bundle using a mechanism that can raise or lower them.
Raising and lowering the control rods allow operators to control the rate of the
nuclear reaction. When an operator wants the uranium core to produce more heat,
the control rods are lifted out of the uranium bundle (thus absorbing fewer
neutrons). To reduce heat, they are lowered into the uranium bundle. The rods can
also be lowered completely into the uranium bundle to shut the reactor down in the
event of an accident or to change the fuel

The uranium bundle acts as an extremely high-energy source of heat. It heats the
water and turns it to steam. The steam drives a turbine, which spins a generator to
produce power. Humans have been harnessing the expansion of water into steam
for hundreds of years.

In some nuclear power plants, the steam from the reactor goes through a
secondary, intermediate heat exchanger to convert another loop of water to steam,
which drives the turbine. The advantage to this design is that the radioactive
water/steam never contacts the turbine. Also, in some reactors, the coolant fluid in
contact with the reactor core is gas (carbon dioxide) or liquid metal (sodium,
potassium); these types of reactors allow the core to be operated at higher
temperatures

Chemical Energy
Water is a molecule formed by taking two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom,
thus making two bonds. The bond between oxygen and hydrogen, the bond
between oxygen and the other hydrogen. These bonds cost energy, how much
energy? 918 kilojoules per mol. This implies that there are about 1.5× 10-18 joules
of bond energy per molecule.
Here we can observe that the mass of a water molecule is slightly less than the
mass of hydrogen times 2, plus the mass of oxygen. This difference in mass is
called mass defect and it is associated with the mass of the binding energy. The
change in mass is the energy, is given by
E=Δmc2
Where,

∙ Δm is the change in mass

∙ c is the velocity of light

This mass defect is of the order 1010, a minor number. Thus, not a very considerate
situation.
Mass can be converted into pure energy. This is the second meaning of the
equation, where E = mc2tells us exactly how much energy you get from converting
mass. For every 1 kilogram of mass you turn into energy, you get 9 × 1016 joules of
energy out, which is the equivalent of 21 Megatons of TNT. When we experience a
radioactive decay, or a nuclear fission or fusion reaction, the mass of what we
started with is greater than the mass we wind up with; the law of conservation of
mass is invalid. But the amount of the difference is how much energy is released!
That's true for everything from decaying uranium to fission bombs to nuclear
fusion in the Sun to matter antimatter annihilation. The amount of mass you destroy
becomes energy, and the amount of energy you get is given by E = mc2.

ENERGY DERIVED FROM 1 amu OF MASS 1 a.m.u. of mass ,

i.e. Δm=1 a.m.u.=1.66×10−27 kg

We know, E=Δmc2

E=1.66×10−27 kg×(3×108 m s−1)2

E=1.494×10−10 J

1 MeV=1.602×10−13 J

⟹E=(1.494×10−10)(1.602×10−13)=932.58 MeV