Scott Nolan

The water's heating up.

You can either keep that really pressurized like a pressure cooker and exchange the heat and run a steam turbine outside, or you can actually just let the water boil and use the steam there to power turbines directly.

So that's how reactors work.

And

A really simple analogy I give is it's almost like a compost heap.

It's like food scraps and yard waste spread out isn't going to do anything.

But you pile it enough, you start getting some heat production.

And that's essentially what a reactor is doing, except it's doing it with a much different type of reaction.

It's a nuclear reaction.

And it's doing it with uranium.

And so that's how every reactor works is just fuel held in some configuration with some element of control over how much heat's produced and some coolant that's around it.

Yep.

That's also enriched at conventional levels, 5%.

So the big reactors we see today, the ones with the Homer Simpson reactors, the ones with the huge cooling towers, those run on 5% fuel.

So in nature, when you dig up uranium, it's about 0.7% uranium-235, which is the fissile material.

And so you do this enrichment process to get it up to 4.95, 3% to 5%.

A lot of reactors want to run at 4.95.

And so you get it up to that level.

And that just means it's more potent energy.

And so for any given reactor size, you get that heat production happening at that enrichment level.