3マイル島. 3マイル島. 沈黙した災害.

Controlled nuclear fission reactions are used to generate electricity. Any nuclear reactor that produces power via the fission of uranium or plutonium by bombardment with neutrons has six components: nuclear fuel consisting of fissionable material, a nuclear moderator, a neutron source, control rods, reactor coolant, and a shield and containment system.
Nuclear Fuels
Nuclear fuel consists of a fissile isotope, such as uranium-235, which must be present in sufficient quantity to provide a...

Conducting a three-phase short circuit test on an unloaded synchronous machine helps understand its impact on the system. The AC fault current's oscillogram, with the DC offset removed, reveals that the waveform amplitude decreases from an initially high value to a steady-state level for one phase of the machine.
This behavior occurs due to the magnetic flux produced by the short-circuit armature currents. Initially, these currents follow high-reluctance paths but eventually shift to...

Determining the subtransient fault current in a power system involves representing transformers by their leakage reactances, transmission lines by their equivalent series reactances, and synchronous machines as constant voltage sources behind their subtransient reactances. In this analysis, certain elements are excluded, such as winding resistances, series resistances, shunt admittances, delta-Y phase shifts, armature resistance, saturation, saliency, non-rotating impedance loads, and small...

Many heavier elements with smaller binding energies per nucleon can decompose into more stable elements that have intermediate mass numbers and larger binding energies per nucleon—that is, mass numbers and binding energies per nucleon that are closer to the “peak” of the binding energy graph near 56. Sometimes neutrons are also produced. This decomposition of a large nucleus into smaller pieces is called fission. The breaking is rather random with the formation of a large...

Nuclear transmutation is the conversion of one nuclide into another. It can occur by the radioactive decay of a nucleus, or the reaction of a nucleus with another particle. The first manmade nucleus was produced in Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory in 1919 by a transmutation reaction, the bombardment of one type of nuclei with other nuclei or with neutrons. Rutherford bombarded nitrogen-14 atoms with high-speed α particles from a natural radioactive isotope of radium and observed...

In a beam of charged particles created by a heated cathode, the particles move at different speeds. However, many applications need a beam with uniform particle speeds. An arrangement known as a velocity selector uses electric and magnetic fields to pick particles with a particular speed from the beam.
A particle with charge q, speed v, and mass m enters an area from the top, where the magnetic and electric fields are perpendicular both to the particle's motion and to one another. The magnetic...