![]() ![]() It consists of seven nuclear reactors, with a maximum capacity of about 8,000 megawatts. The world’s largest nuclear power plant is the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station in Japan. Nuclear power plants harvest the energy released by splitting atoms controllably. To make the chain reaction controllable, scientists developed ways to slow down the splitting, such as absorbing some of the split particles. When one atom is split, a chain reaction starts: The split atom will trigger another atom to be split, and so on. Because the lighter atoms don’t need as much energy to hold the nucleus together as the heavy atoms, energy is released as heat or light. To obtain energy from the nucleus, scientists came up with a process of splitting a heavy atom into lighter atoms. ![]() ![]() The force holding the nucleus together stores a huge amount of energy. The core of every atom, the nucleus, is made up of even smaller particles, protons and neutrons. Lose control and you release a lot of energy all at once in a nuclear explosion. Do so controllably and you can produce a steady flow of energy. One way to do that is to split atoms, the basic building blocks of all matter in the universe. To create energy, you have to convert matter to energy. Here on Earth, humans power machines mostly by harvesting energy: for example, harvesting the energy of falling water and converting it to electricity in hydroelectric power plants. The energy that the Sun gives the Earth’s surface every second is more than the total electricity generated from all power plants in the world in the entire year of 2018. Because the Sun is 93 million miles from us, only one-billionth of the Sun’s total energy output reaches the Earth, creating a world blooming with life. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to much energy can we create at one time without losing control? – Luis, age 9, Brookline, MassachusettsĪbove our heads there is a powerful energy source created by nature, the Sun. The four vectors representing a nucleus can break up into four vectors of other nuclei and release energy in the form of radiation or kinetic energy of the new nuclei.Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. It is possible to get energy by fission or by fusion of particular elements, which has led to the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. In nuclear physics because of the binding energy curve of the periodic table of elements , Proton antiproton annihilating even if they have small momenta, create a large number of pions, of course following quantum number conservation. ![]() So one way of turning mass to energy is by annihilation, particle hits antiparticle, quantum numbers add up to zero (by antiparticle definition)and then other pairs of particles and radiation can appear ,taking away kinetic energy. Charge, baryon number lepton number etc have to be conserved. There are quantum number conservation rules that matter composed out of elementary particles has to obey. The added four vectors give the mass of the proton ( in a complicated to calculate way) That is why it has a large mass of almost 1000 Mev whereas the constituent quarks and antiquarks have masses of mev and the gluons zero mass. What happens to the matter in the process? Do the atoms/subatomic particles just vanishĪll matter is composed out of elementary particles, in bound systems where there are a large number of four vectors to add to get to the invariant mass of the composite system. Mass is not stuff, mass is a quadratic coupling to the Higgs boson that leaves finite energy at zero momentum: So what happens to mass when the down decays into an up? Nothing. Note that most of the nucleon mass is once again binding energy. That 1.3 MeV is not binding energy, rather it is the quark mass difference coming from: The energy comes from the difference in the neutron (936.6 MeV) and (938.3 MeV) proton masses, which is about 1.3 MeV. Here the mass of the RHS is less than that of LHS, so the electron and antineutrino are energetic (in the neutron rest frame). The same is true for common nuclear reactions like spontaneous fission of uranium, with the caveat that some important nuclear reactions do involve the changing of fundamental particles, e.g., beta decay: Much of mass is just binding energy, so in a chemical reaction the electrons rearrange themselves and energy is released and the total mass of the molecules goes down (in an exothermic reaction, for example). ![]()
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