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Hi, I'm Noah from Missouri, and can you
show us what the science of nuclear energy
will look like in the future?
Hi.
I'm Sarah, and I'm a senior reactor operator here
at the MIT research reactor.
I'm also a nuclear engineer, and I'm here
today to tell you about the future of nuclear energy.
Here at the MIT research reactor,
we do research on finding new technologies that
could be used in nuclear energy in the future.
So we're here in the control room of the MIT research
reactor where we monitor the temperature and the reactor
power level and other parameters to make sure that everything's
running smoothly.
So the basic physics that's going
on inside the reactor core, no matter what type of reactor
you have, is that there are atoms that make up the fuel,
and these atoms we bombard with neutrons
and then they are unstable and split apart.
So when an atom splits apart, it releases a lot of energy,
and this energy is in the form of heat,
and then the heat is used to make electricity
that you use in your home.
So the goal of nuclear engineering research
is to take this heat energy that's
released from splitting atoms and use it to make electricity
rather than using natural gas or coal, which are not as clean.
We don't actually do experiments on the reactor.
We use the reactor to test new materials.
These new materials that we test here
could be used to build stronger and safer reactors
in the future.
We may have reactors that are on land,
we may have reactors that are floating in the ocean,
we could even have reactors that are like batteries and sitting
on every street corner.
Even though we have all these different technologies
to build safer, stronger nuclear reactors,
the reason why we're not building them right now
is because they're very expensive.
But in the future, as the price of natural gas goes up,
we may be relying more on nuclear energy for electricity.
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