Isaiah Taylor

How do you make sure that those neutrons hit those atoms?

Essentially, what you do is that you assemble uranium into a certain pattern with what's called a moderator.

So a moderator scatters neutrons geometrically.

So there's sort of a configuration of moderator, which in our case is graphite.

We use pure graphite.

It's essentially crystalline carbon.

and uranium and if you configure it the right way you can model it where if a uranium atom splits it releases a neutron and that neutron will hit the graphite and it'll scatter around and then it'll eventually hit another uranium atom

And that uranium atom will split, release two more neutrons, and those will scatter around.

And then hopefully those two will hit uranium.

Those will call two more splits.

And so you have four neutrons and then eight and then 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512.

That's an exponential growth function.

right so you have an exponential growth of neutrons that are especially more and more neutrons scattering around inside of this graphite core and the graphite is responsible for making sure they scatter back in to hit more uranium and eventually you have heat production right that that neutron uh production rate goes up and up and the heat goes up and up and so now you have a hot core and

and you can use that heat, right?

So what you do then is you take a fluid and you pass it through the core and the fluid gets hot.

And so you have hot fluid coming out of the reactor and you can use that hot fluid for useful things.

You can spin a turbine with it.

You can create hydrogen with it.

You know, you can heat a home if you really wanted to, right?

There's lots of ways you can use that heat.