{"id":125909,"date":"2021-08-06T00:41:45","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T07:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/nuclear-power-balls-may-make-meltdowns-a-thing-of-the-past"},"modified":"2021-08-06T00:41:45","modified_gmt":"2021-08-06T07:41:45","slug":"nuclear-power-balls-may-make-meltdowns-a-thing-of-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/nuclear-power-balls-may-make-meltdowns-a-thing-of-the-past","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear \u2018Power Balls\u2019 May Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Circa 2020<\/p>\n

\n

The basic idea behind all nuclear power plants is the same: Convert the heat created by nuclear fission into electricity. There are several ways to do this, but in each case it involves a delicate balancing act between safety and efficiency. A nuclear reactor works best when the core is really hot, but if it gets too<\/em> hot it will cause a meltdown and the environment will get poisoned and people may die and it will take billions of dollars to clean up the mess.<\/p>\n

The last time this happened was less than a decade ago, when a massive earthquake followed by a series of tsunamis caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan<\/a>. But a new generation of reactors<\/a> coming online in the next few years aims to make these kinds of disasters a thing of the past. Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient<\/a> than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they\u2019ll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium individually wrapped in protective shells. It\u2019s called triso fuel, and it\u2019s like a radioactive gobstopper.<\/p>\n

Triso\u2014 short for \u201ctristructural isotropic\u201d\u2014fuel is made from a mixture of low enriched uranium and oxygen, and it is surrounded by three alternating layers of graphite and a ceramic called silicon carbide. Each particle is smaller than a poppy seed, but its layered shell can protect the uranium inside from melting under even the most extreme conditions that could occur in a reactor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Circa 2020 The basic idea behind all nuclear power plants is the same: Convert the heat created by nuclear fission into electricity. There are several ways to do this, but in each case it involves a delicate balancing act between safety and efficiency. A nuclear reactor works best when the core is really hot, but [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}