A nuclear power plant is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As in a conventional thermal power station the heat is used to generate steam which drives a steam turbine connected to a generator which produces electricity. As of February 2, 2012, there were 439 nuclear power plants in operation.
Nuclear power plants are usually considered to be base load stations, since fuel is a small part of the cost of production.
Read more about Nuclear Power Plant: History, Systems, People in A Nuclear Power Plant, Economics, Safety, Controversy, Reprocessing, Accident Indemnification, Decommissioning, Historic Accidents, Flexibility of Nuclear Power Plants, Future Power Plants
Famous quotes containing the words nuclear power, nuclear, power and/or plant:
“Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (16131680)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)