How Nuclear Reactors Work

A few weeks ago we recorded an episode of tech Stuff because of a seismic event in christ Church, New Zealand. Yet uh did a lot of damage, but hadn't resulted in a lot of human costs. Since then, of course, um, you know, we've had the earthquake in Japan nine point oh earthquake um, which, if you remember in the Seismology podcast, each each number in the Richter scale is ten times greater in intensity than the previous number, So a two is ten times more intense than a one. So nine

is an incredibly intense earthquake. What's what's interesting about that too? Just as a note, um, I understand that that was actually an aftershock of a six point two I believe magnitude earthquake. It was in the sixes. Yeah, it can sound kind of unusual to some of us that an aftershock would actually be more powerful than the initial earthquake. But you just have to remember those those plates that we talked about in the Seismology podcast are the pressure

is incredible. There's nothing else like it on Earth really where uh and if if those plates slip against each other, then your you can get a pretty massive earthquake or an aftershock. So um, of course, we we touched on how earthquakes are measured, the different devices have been used to measure them in the past. Um. And uh, you know, of course in Japan there were the earthquakes and aftershocks in the tsunami that followed, resulting in a lot of

property damage and loss of life. We're still not sure at this point how many people are gone. No, it's a tragedy that is definitely on a on a huge scale. We just don't know the extent of that yet. And um, although no one has really asked about this yet, we're kind of thinking that maybe people would want to know about the other major news event that has gone along with that, which was the the nuclear power plant that

has suffered catastrophic failures as the result of the earthquake. UM, and we thought it might be interesting to talk about how nuclear power plants work, and then we'll we'll go into exactly what the problem is in Japan. Yeah, with this, frankly, this could be a marathon episode. We could talk about nuclear power plants for hours because they are very involved.

So we decided to stick primarily to the general type of nuclear power plant being used in question, but also some of the others that have had major problems in the past, notably the Chernobyl reactor and the one in Three Mile Island in in the United States. So let's talk first about what a nuclear reactor is and how it generates power. Uh, of course, it's using a nuclear process, right, It's using decay. Really, it's we're talking about controlling the

decay of of uranium. Really, it's when you compare it to a coal power plant, um, and you and you take the very very basics together, this type of nuclear power plant is almost exactly the same type. You're using a new clear reaction to generate heat as you would for a coal fired power plant, right, exactly, you would you would burn coal to generate heat in a coal plant? So, yeah, same thing, you're trying to use heat to generate electricity. You use that to to generate steam. The steam turns

a turbine and a generator, which generates electricity. It's it's the nuclear reaction that makes it so very different from the coal plants that. Yeah, And you might ask, well, why would you want to use nuclear power in the first place. Well, there's several reasons. One is that, unlike coal, it doesn't produce uh, greenhouse gases. That's right, right, So when you burn coal, you're going to generate greenhouse gases and essentially carbon dioxide being chief among them, and uh

and that can contribute to lots of environmental problems. So in some ways, nuclear power, at least from a greenhouse gas perspective, is greener than coal technology. Also, you don't need as much fuel to generate power as you would with coal. It's it's actually an incredible skin you could be talking about, you know, a few pounds of uranium versus tons and tons and tons of coal. Yes, it wasn't that long ago that the uh, those of us in the United States were talking about the coal mine

the coal miners who are trapped in West Virginia. UM. And of course people start talking about the pros and cons of coal. Now of course we're talking about the pros and cons of of nuclear energy. UM. But yes, it requires far less uh um raw material to generate the nuclear reaction as it would for the coal fired power plants. Now, so you're you're talking about material where you don't need as much. You aren't genering greenhouse gases UM, and you can create an intense amount of heat very

pretty simply in the grand scheme of things. But there are a lot of concerns around nuclear power as well. For one, I mean, we're talking about radioactive material, and radioactive material that is harmful to human Yes, it's not just you know, lots of things radiate energy, and not

all of that energy is harmful. Yes. Just the other night I was watching, uh the CBS news report on radio activity, and a lot of people in the United States have been concerned that, first of all, the governments of Japan and the United States aren't being truthful with the amount of radiation being leaked in the atmosphere as a result of the explosions that took place at the

plant in Japan. UM. But they were One of the things that I think was interesting was they took a Geiger counter around to several different They were basically walking around New York City with a Geiger counter, and they went to the middle of the park and turned it on and it was picking up readings of radio activity. And they walked over to granite, a granite monument as a matter of fact, and UH and and took the Geiger counter. A geiger counter, by the way, as a

device that measures radioactivity. You hear clicking sounds and it has a needle. One of the UH. I think of it as an old style, but really I guess it's not. With the needle and it shows you roughly how much radioactivity is being gendered. And granted is naturally radioactive, and I didn't know that now. Of course, you can't take just anything UM and throw it in a nuclear reactor and have it react. You have to use a very

special UM type of material. Because to generate a nuclear reaction UM, you're splitting an atom, use a stray neutron to UH break apart the nucleus of another atom. And and some some elements are more likely to be are are are easier to do that with than others. You need something that's called fistle if you're using a effission reaction as the one as these reactors do. Fusion power right now is kind of beyond us as far as it takes more energy to create a fusion reaction than

we get back, I'll of it. But there is a lot of hope that in the future fusion will become the the power source for nuclear facilities. The Sun generates energy through fusion, not fission, so uh yeah, we haven't we haven't gotten there yet, but there are a lot of very very smart people working on ways to create fusion power plants, and it's quite a bit of research on on these things from Britannica. I like to to

use that, of course as one of my sources. Um and uranium two thirty five, according to Britannica, is the only naturally occurring fistle material that's in a ready state to be to be split apart this way. Um, there are other, uh different kinds of materials. We're we're talking about the nucleides um. Somebody probably correct my pronunciation. I think that's right, but those some of them basically as long as the atoms are in an excited state. Uh, they can be um. When they're hit with a slow

moving neutron, you can you can break them apart. Uranium two thirty five to thirty three, plutonium two thirty nine and two forty one um Plutonium two thirty nine. You actually create with your uranium two thirty eight and then you bombard it with neutrons. Yeah, materials that are fertile, uh can be that if you are different kinds of materials that if you add an extra neutron, you can they can become fiztle. Uh. Those are thorium two thirty two,

uranium two thirty eight, and plutonium two forty um. So these are very complex atoms and heavy atoms and very heavy atoms and um. There are are the kinds of materials required to be used in a in a core of a nuclear reactor, and uranium two thirty five will break apart naturally decays over time. But but that's not the You know, you want to have a controlled and a controlled reaction in order to be able to generate power, and you want to be able to do it at

a good time scale. Because we're uh, we don't have thousands of years to generate electricity. So with the uranium two thirty five, you actually would bombard it with neutrons in order to uh to speed up that reaction. Now, what that will do is that the the atom splits apart, it generates a lot of energy in the form of heat and radiation. The radiation comes in the forms of gamma radiation, beta radiation, and alpha radiation. Uh So, gamma

radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation UM. In fact, there are two major kinds of radiation. Electromagnetic radiation, which is some form of light. Uh it's it's photon radiation UM. That may not be visible light, but it is. It falls under the photon radiation. Then you have particulate radiation, which is when you're talking about an unstable uh atom particle shoots off essentially from the the atom. And uh So with alpha radiation uh uh or well, I'll start

with beta radiation. With beta radiation, you've got electrons being released. Right, alpha radiation, it's protons and neutrons being released. Now, protons and neutrons are much much much larger in comparison to electrons, and they move slower than electrons do. So alpha radiation, you get the protons and neutron splitting off. That's a particulate radiation that moves slowly. It can actually depending upon you,

know how how you're being exposed to it. Your skin can sometimes block alpha radiation just because your skin is thick enough where it's the particles are not moving at a speed sufficient to be able to penetrate the skin. Um. The beta radiation is different because those electrons are very tiny and they're moving really really fast and uh, and this is the sort of radiation that the sort of particular radiation that can actually cause pretty nasty deep tissue

damage if it hit to you. And then of course gamma radiation is really really high energy electro magnetic radiation, and that stuff is serious business. Uh. You know, gamma radiation can cause lots of problems in both immediate acute problems and chronic problems over time. So why would you want to use this, Well, it's because it gives off this this amount of energy, this this kind of intense energy.

It's really good at converting water into steam. So if you can control this reaction, uh and generate the right amount of heat, you're going to generate a lot of steam that's going to move through the system and eventually turn the turbine which is going to uh provide the power to the generator, and then you you create power for the power grid. And some countries rely very heavily on nuclear power to create to to supplement their power grid.

Countries like like France, it's nearly seventy of their power that comes from nuclear power. In the United States, it's more like it's funny because there are two, um, two different things to consider that you might not consider with some of the other forms of electricity generation. Here UM atomic reactions are deal with probability UM and they deal

with chain reactions. UM. I remember watching in one of my science classes a long long time ago an experiment that they did where they had set up we're not an experiment, but an an illustration. They had a plexiglass or clear plastic box and across the floor of it, the entire floor was covered with mouse traps set mouse traps. Each mouse trap had two ping pong balls on top of it and everything was still. So this is the normal state of the atoms that's supposed to represent the

normal state of the atoms inside the fuel. UM. And then there was a small hole at the top of the box, and the person said, Okay, this is what happens when you add the neutron. The stray neutron is another ping pong ball in this illustration, and the person dropped the ping pong ball into into the box, and of course it hit one of the mouse traps, setting

it off. The other two ping pong balls representing neutrons again, uh, jumped up from the mouse trap in different directions, and each of those set off more mouse traps, and each of those set off more mouse traps. Exponential growth. Yes. Now, of course in the nuclear fuel uh, you know, in that particular illustration ended and very quickly within a matter of you know, probably two or three seconds, because they were you know, forty mouse traps or something like that.

In nuclear fuel, this continues on UM, but they have to control that. They have to look at the probability that a neutron will continue, that there will still be stray neutrons able to generate more heat energy release UM. So when they want to what they call a slightly super critical uh level of reaction, because there's that means that there is more more than one fission per neutron so you're you're you don't want it to be a

little bit. You don't want to be underneath that. When it gets subcritical, that's when there are a few there are fewer neutrons available to make the nuclear reactions, which means that you would actually have to pour more power into the system to to shoot more neutrons into it in order to generate power. And of course, you know, the whole goal here is to make it as efficient as possible when you're generating electricity. Otherwise you're actually consuming

far more power than you are able to convert into electricity. Yes, when it's one spare neutron to a reaction, that's or to a nucleus of another atom, that's critical. That literally, that is what they call critical, and that's the reactive state of the the reactor core um. From what I understand, they do want it to be slightly super critical, but only lightly, and so controlling the reaction is very important,

and it's done in a number of different ways. Sure, let's talk a little bit about the way the fuel is put together and then we can talk about how that control happens. Yeah, I think that that would be excellent because that is a big part of how they

control the reaction. Yeah, so, so the uranium is enriched with uranium two thirty five right now for a nuclear facility, I was gonna say, we should might maybe explain what that means, because uranium two thirty five is naturally reactive, but there's only so much of you two thirty five found in a chunk of uranium. So enriched uranium is basically they've added more uranium two thirty five to the uranium overall to make it, to make it more reactive

so they can use it as nuclear fuel. And so for UH, you have to for for fuel for a nuclear power plant, you need to have added enough you two thirty five, So it's got two to you two thirty five and the overall fuel now you two thirty five is the same element that you're going to find in UH in nuclear weapons. But nuclear weapons require a much higher percentage of you two thirty five to thirty five within the uranium in order for it to be

weapons grade. So that's a pretty easy way to tell if someone's making weapons grade uranium is you measure how how the percentage of you to to thirty five in the fuel itself. If you've been following the news and you've seen pieces on where some countries are concerned about Iran enriching uranium. This is why you can enrich uranium for a nuclear power program, or it can also be

used in weapons. Right, So if you're enriching beyond that two to three percent, then that's a good indicator that you're looking at something more uh dangerous than the nuclear power plant. So the what the bits of uranium are actually formed into what what is called pellets, and they're about an inch long. They're about the diameter of a dime. So you can think it's kind of like a cylinder right now. These pellets are stacked together to form rods.

Yes they are. They are contained within a metal rod, yes, yes, so yeah, you can think of like a there's like a sheath, a metal sheath, and these uranium pellets are stacked within that sheath. Now, these rods are then grouped together into a collection called a bundle. And if if that's all it was, if that's all you had and then you started introducing neutrons into it, you would have no way to to modify to moderate that at all.

It would just the reaction would would increase and increase until either you would spent all the fuel or you had had a melt down. And meltdown essentially is when the fuel itself gets so hot that it melts um. So in order to control this, they have control rods. And control rods are made of material that are that absorbs neutrons, because as we were talking about, you know these neutrons that that fly off and hit uranium two five,

that's what initializes this reaction. So if you have material that absorbs neutrons, it's like taking you know, you're you're you're putting the brakes on things, and the control rods tend to be you can you can insert them either all the way down where they are going to control the reaction as much as possible, keeping in mind that there's still some decay heat that's going on here. It's not like it's not like you immediately switch it off.

It's just slowing it down to the point where you call it a nuclear shut down, but there's still heat. Or you can raise them all the way up and then just let the UH reaction go to full full blast. Cadmium and boron are two elements that are very good at absorbing stray neutrons, and you may have heard about born being introduced into the Japanese facility along with sea water.

We'll talk about that in a minute too, um, but those are those are also uh, those are useful because they're basically fighting over who gets the stray neutrons and that just slows everything down and helps right keep it under control. Now, inside this nuclear reactor, you also have to have coolant because and actually the coolant is what heats up to go and then usually you have a you have a coolant that then runs through another system that will heat up water and the water becomes steam

and that's what drives the turbine. Some nuclear power plants, and these are the ones that are kind of particularly dangerous, have the coolant system also driving the turbine, which means that you have radioactive material pushing that turbine because the coolant that encounters the actual rods is going to pick up radioactive material itself, will become radioactive. It's gonna have

radioacti particles running through that cooling system. So most of these cooling systems are are self contained and they do not cross over into the water system that drives the turbine. They just they just you can think of it as it runs up against the water system, and the heat from the cooling system is what generates the steam in the water system. Um. So, but you have to have that. If you don't have that again, the uh, the core can reach a temperature that's so high that the uranium

begins to melt. And there there's a lot of scary guesswork as to what would happen if you had a true meltdown, like a full on meltdown to the point where we're not really sure if the material would get so hot, like the reaction would continue to a point where it would just burn right through the reactor. Um that's a theoretical possibility, although we haven't actually seen that

happen in real life yet, Thank goodness us that's true. Well, the the movie The China Syndrome is about that, and I think most scientists would probably tell you that that's

a bit hysterical for what might actually happen. Uh. The the premise being that the core melts down, the fuel is melting, and it melts all the way through the center of the Earth again, from the United States to China, all the way through the the Earth that might be a little I think that's probably I mean, I'm not a scientist obviously, but I think that's a little extreme. I would definitely call that the worst case scenario. Yeah, I don't I don't know that it could actually go

that far. But yes, that that is an exaggeration of what Jonathan's talking about, the idea that it would melt through the reactor. So the the problems that we could conceivably face with a nuclear power plant would involve something going wrong with the ability to insert or remove the control rods, really to insert them, because because if they're stuck there, all you really have is a dead nuclear

power plan. And yes, that is terrible and that it's gonna cost billions of dollars to fix, but it doesn't pose an immediate threat to the surrounding area. UM. You also have the problem with if if the water system, if the cooling system is UH in any way compromised, then you have the chance of the nuclear reactor overheating, which unfortunately we have seen happen before, and that can

cause UH massive problems down the line. Now, what happened with Japan is that the earthquake actually did not UH did not damage the reactors to the point where they were inoperable. In fact, what happened was that the control rods descended, as they should have in that instance to control that reaction. But again there's decay heat. It's not like it can shut it off immediately. It's just that

the reaction is no longer continuing, right, but still generating heat. Right. UM. Another thing to consider with regard to the Japanese reactor is that, uh, there were containment devices set up. When you build a nuclear power plant like this, this light water plant, UM, it is ideal to build a containment

area around the reactor course. UM. This is usually made with concrete, UH, very thick concrete in the case of the Japanese plant, UM, which for has has so far as of the time we're talking right now, prevented a major release of radiation. UM. The problem comes from what happens with spent nuclear fuel, which to this point we

haven't mentioned. At some point, when the fuel becomes subcritical and it cannot continue producing a nuclear reaction sufficient enough to continue the the electrical output of the plant, UM, they're going to want the people running the plan are going to run and replace it with fresh fuel. This can take weeks. Usually they do maintenance on the plant at the same time, because it's a good time the

plant shut down. So what they'll do is they'll remove the bundle of rods and replace it with new rods of with fresh fuel. But what do you do with the old rods. That's the tricky part because the old rods are very hot and they are very very radioactive. Yeah, it's just like it like Chris was saying, it's kind of like, you know, it's just that they're not generating the amount of energy necessary to run the plant, but they're still generating tons of like of energy and not

really tons. Don't write me and um, the they are very much dangerous to people and here's eventually they will be inert. But but eventually I'm talking like ten thousand years. Yes, we can't wait around that long. And because they're generating so much heat and so much radioactivity, they tend to corrode pretty much any container you put them in. This

is one of the aside from the potential for an accident. Uh, this is one of the things that can that makes nuclear power so controversial, is that this is the flip side of the green coin. Yes, Storing the nuclear fuel, the spent nuclear fuel is very, very difficult. Uh. Nobody wants nuclear fuel in their backyard. Um, and there's not even there's not a good answer for that. Storing it in caves is one solution. The question is whether or not people will go in there. Um. You know, a

thousand years down the road is still very radioactive. Um. You could say, well, why don't we shoot it off into space. Well, that's fine, except there's the potential for an accident. Rockets are not foolproof, and if you have an accident with the rocket, there's the potential that radioactive waste could be scattered across the roth's atmosphere in that again,

is something that no one wants to happen. So one of the first things they do when they remove the fuel from what I understand from the reactor core, is they put it in a containment pool. Water, as it turns out, is a natural shield against radioactivity. Uh. Not only is it cooling the very very hot rods with the nuclear fuel inside, but it also is shield doing some shielding against radioactivity. Well in the Japanese plant, when the power was shut off, ironically enough, Uh, the water

began to evaporate. It was boiling off. And that's the problem is that there when there's no more water surrounding the spent fuel. It wasn't the reactor cores, it was this the spent fuel. Uh, and the reaction is allowed to continue that generates hydrogen when the hydrogen is explosive. Yeah, it's It's a process called thermolysis. It's when heat turns water into hydrogen and oxygen breaks up the molecules into their into their component atoms, and you can you can

do the same thing with electricity, that's electrolysis. So it's the same sort of thing. It's just you pour enough energy into a molecule and you can break those molecular bonds. And that's exactly what happened. Hydrogen built up. But before we get to the hydrogen problem, I should also mention there were a lot of fail safe procedures in place at the Japanese plant. It's none of the Japanese were

not doing due diligence with safety. It's just that was the perfect set of terrible situations for this to happen. And it and it from what I understand, not to interrupt him, um, from what I understand, the plant was intended to survive and eight plus UH point Richter scale earthquake. Yeah, it was the tsunami that really hit them. Because here's

what happens. They lost power from the power grid, well the power plant had and they need power to pump water through the system in where to keep it cool. So the pumps run on electricity. So they switched to their diesel generators. But then the tsunami hit and the diesel generators were not above the tsunami levels, so they

were flooded and could no longer work. They also had battery power, but the battery power was only meant to last you know, I think it like a day, because the idea was that, well, we won't be without power for longer than that. But they could not get supplemental power in place to uh to cover the gap between the battery power and when they could get some other form online. And so the water stopped pumping and the temperature kept building and the hydrogen built up. Um and

hydrogen is incredibly flammable. It's explosive, and there was the hydrogen collected at the top of the facility. UH. Something set it off and there was that's what that big explosion was when we first you know, and there's been a uh, there's been other ones since then, but that initial explosion, people were worried that the reactor had exploded. That's not what happened. It was the pocket of hydrogen

that it exploded. And as uh, if you've been through a certain level of science, of course we have some younger listeners. The three things that you need for fire are you know, heat, a source of fuel, and air, and you would certainly have that with very hot fuel rods, air in the in the area, and then you know the source of hydrogen. So um, it was a very dangerous situation. Now uh people have said, uh, you know, this is going to be another Chernobyl. But Chernobyl was

a different situation. They did not have any containment in place, or what they did have some containment that it was not designed to prevent the kind of release that that occurred.

Chernobyl was interesting. So when we're talking containment, like Chris was saying, you're talking about a very thick concrete liner, usually there's a steel a steel like you can call it like a furnace, I guess, but it's a steel container that is lined with concrete, and then you have a big concrete building around that, so you've got two barriers of concrete and a barrier of steel in order

to contain the nuclear reactions. Chernobyl only had the basic container, did not have a secondary container, so if there were a failure, then there you have much more chance of

nuclear fallout. And in fact, the Chernobyl incident happened ironically during a procedure where they were trying to test out a safety feature because what Chernobyl was going to have was having some similar issues to the japan facility and that Chernobyl um they were worried about what would happen if power were lost, If they lost power from the power grid and they can no longer pump water through their system, so they uh they had these diesel backups,

but the diesel backups would would not really kick in until about a minute after the initial power loss, and that minute is a long time for these nuclear reactions to go unchecked, right with no water cooling them down. So one of the things that we're looking at doing was using the turbine as it slowed down to generate enough electricity to keep the pumps running for that one minute.

Before the diesel backups could kick in, and they were running a test and it was like the perfect set again, a perfect set of situations going wrong for that test

to fail. There was a power spike, and then while they were trying to react to the initial power spike, there was a second power spike, and that's when you had another explosion and release of steam and nuclear steam, and then there was the terrible fallout that happened in a huge radius around your noble Belarus in particular was hit really really hard by that radio and it was UH. And there there are levels of nuclear disaster. We give them a numeric UH assignment for how bad it is,

and it goes from one to seven. Chernobyl was a seven three mile island which happened in the United States nineteen seventy nine. That was a five, and the Japan incident right now is is listed as six. Of course, that can change over time and things get worse. Um hopefully it will not so, but yeah, because Chernobyl was was not as protective as it needed to be. That's

why the it was ended up being a seven. Like if it had had the right protections in place, it may still have been a terrible, terrible accident, but it may not have been as bad as it turned out to be. Three Mile Island was interesting and that uh, it was a combination of user error and mechanical failure. There was a valve that was open, and then the power to the valve was shut off, which normally would mean the valve would close. The valve would only open

when powered. There's a mechanical failure. The valve did not close, and because um the indicator on the console said that there was no longer power going to that valve, all the operators assumed that the valve was closed, but their readings were showing that the pressure and temperature were off, like the pressure and temperature of the core should not

have been what it was. Well, the reason why there was a problem was because the water was boiling off and there was this open valve and so there was an open you know, the pressure was not building the right way. But it took hours for them to figure out what the problem was. Actually, there was a shift change, and it was when someone from the new shift was looking at the problem that they figured it out. And

then by then the scare had really hit. Unfortunately, Three Mile Island wasn't as bad as it could have been. There was no There was only I think there's a partial melt down, which was scary, but it could have been so much worse if someone had not picked up on that mistake. Now as far as Japan goes, Uh, we talked about the boron uh and the seawater. Well, dumping seawater into the reactor is pretty much a last step because the seawater is going to ruin that reactor.

You're not gonna be able to use it again. Um. And the boron is there to help absorb those neutrons, like Chris was saying. Yes. Another another one of the problems that they were mentioning on the news yesterday as that the day we're recording this is that Um there they are currently this. This will show you probably when we're recording this. Uh. They were talking about the pumps that are in place. They wanted to be able to restart them. They've had trouble doing that and they're going

to have more trouble doing that now. Uh. They're hoping to again as at the time we're recording, to restore electricity to the plant so that they can go ahead and shut the pumps back on. But for the reactors UH in which they have introduced seawater, this is an issue because the seawater also clogs those pumps, so it is going to be even more difficult for them to contain the situations in those damaged reactors UH today than it would have been a few days ago when the

problem was first getting out of hand. Yeah, the issue was just that if they did not introduce the seawater, there was there was an increased danger of a meltdown because, like we said, this temperature just keeps on going. It's not even with the control rods in place, which the system did do UM, it does not eliminate that heat. You have to be able to circulate the coolant through

there in order to to maintain the temperature. And UM, because there was no way to circulate the coolant, they had a choice either they introduced the seawater and boron into the reactor core, or they take a chance on a meltdown. And and clearly the second option is not one that anyone wants to take. That that is not

an option, right. So there's a lot of concern actually that this this UH will really set Japan back quite a bit because they are very reliant on nuclear power and that um losing this facility, which it's quite possible that they will lose at least, uh more than half of the reactors in this facility, that it will really

impact their ability to create electricity. And the quake in general has really um, I mean, it seems it seems weird to say this because there are so many more important tragedies that are connected to the quake, But the quake itself could actually set back everything from electronics to computers, just because so much of it is manufactured in Japan and those manufacturing facilities were damaged in in the quake. That that's true. Um, Even places that weren't directly hit

by the tsunami are still suffering problems. Um. And from what I understand, the majority of flash memory used in all kinds of electronic devices cell phones, smartphones, tablets, MP three players, and all kinds of other things, the majority of it comes from Japan. Uh So this is likely to u to cause problems in the supply chain and disrupt um electronics manufacturers the world over. And of course, you know, those those people who who weren't directly hit

probably would like to get back to work. But this is going to be difficult for them to be able to move on and and do things that they want to do again. You know, even even people who weren't directly affected by uh, you know, losing their homes and losing friends and loved ones. Um, you know, this is this is difficult for for them as well. It's a major catastrophe. It's all. It's I was gonna say it's almost unimaginable to me, but no, I think I have

to say it's unimaginable. I I cannot comprehend the level of catastrophe this is. I mean, I see the pictures, and I see the video, and I hear the testimonials and it's all heartbreaking. But it's just there's I can't grasp it. It's beyond my ability. Um, and guys, I want to say this before we before we start wrapping up. We have some amazing articles on how stuff works dot Com, about nuclear reactors, about radiation, and about the Japanese crisis.

There's how nuclear power works, how Japan's nuclear crisis works, how radiation works. These articles are fantastic. I read through all of them in prep for this UH, this podcast and the writing on these are amazing. I mean, you get the Marshall brain and Robert Lamb and uh and and Deborah Ront's all did fantastic jobs. And my hat is off to them because they took a very complex, dense subject and they broke it down in a really understandable way. So if you want to learn more, I

highly recommend you check them out. Yeah. There there are so many other types of uh nuclear energy to the haven't touched on and talk anything about, uh some of the other new technologies that people are trying out now, um, one of them being the pebble bed reactor that they're starting to roll out in China, which, from what I understand, maybe to some degree safer there's less chance of something like a meltdown occurring because it uses a different method

of nuclear reaction, and that might be maybe we can look at that again when when this uh these issues aren't so fresh and we can uh uh you know, look at some of those. And I'm also interested in personally, and something that I read about and wired um a couple of years ago now or maybe about a year and a half ago, thorium using thorium, which is not nearly as radioactive as uranium. Of course it will carry for some people, probably for a lot of people, the

stigma of being labeled nuclear energy. But from what I understand, you can hold the piece of thorium in your hand and you should not suffer any ill effects because it's not the same kind of it's not as radioactive as as uranium or plutonium, and can be used on a smaller scale with uh, you know, the possibility. Like I said, I'm only reading this, but it doesn't look like there's nearly the possibility of uh, the kind of disaster that

we're talking about here. So there might be other kinds of technologies that will use in the future that can still harness the power of the atom without being so dangerous in the event of an act of you know, a nature event like this. And I imagine that this, this disaster will definitely make countries around the world rethink their their approach to nuclear power. Well, that's already that's

already happening in the United States. President Obama has ordered um a look at all the nuclear reactors currently in service to to just as a check up to see how they're doing. Germany, I think has taken all of theirs offline, um with the idea that they will evaluate

their safety. There were bills in many countries or laws already passed to extend the life of aging nuclear reactors that from one understand, are being rescinded one by one as people are rethinking the possibility that older reactors and

this the reactor in Japan was older too. Yeah. Um so, I mean there you know, as as we complain about very often, technology changes very quickly and it's hard for us to keep track of It's also changing in the nuclear industry as well, and there are new safe safety measures that might be implemented in a in a new reactor that wouldn't have been implemented in the nineties, seventies

and eighties. It's just the question of will it be politically feasible to implement nuclear power, because uh, it's one thing to to tell people that safety measures have improved and that, uh that we've learned lessons from these events that we can, um we can implement in the future. But there's it's such an emotional issue and uh it

has it does have problems. I mean, the nuclear waste is still a very very big and uh, there's not an easy solution to that, and as long as those still exist, I think we're going to see increased resistance to implementation of nuclear power, which I mean that's gonna be very frustrating for some people, although you have to admit that, um that the we've seen examples of things going wrong, and sometimes it's because people did not react the right way, and sometimes it's just that the perfect

set of circumstances hit in order for something to go terribly wrong. And you know, there there is the argument you could make that the likelihood of that happening is low, but there's also the argument of any likelihood is too much, right. So it'll be interesting to see where the future of

nuclear power goes. It'll be interesting for me to see if the the projects that are trying to make breakthroughs infusion power suffer as a result, because that is another form of nuclear energy, and uh, it's a frame form of nuclear energy. It's not the same as vision at all. But it could very well be that just because it has that association, that these programs could start to lose funding. So we'll have to keep our eyes open see what happens. Uh.

Our thoughts go out to everyone in Japan. And all those who are affected by this disaster. And it's absolutely a tragic event. And uh and we really feel for you guys. Um, if you guys want to talk to us about nuclear power, if you have your own thoughts you would like to share, please do so. You can contact us on Twitter and Facebook. That handle is tech Stuff hs W, or you can write us an email. That email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com.

Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride Delmode It today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you