nuke power plants basically work like this. you generate some heat. which turns water into steam. which turns a turbine. which turns a generator. which makes electricity to run this computer and millions others like it. easy peasy. the heat can come from many sources. usually we burn stuff. but sunshine works too. we can also use nuclear fire. there are two ways to boil water with a nuclear furnace. the hard way is to enrich uranium and plutonium until it's just about to the point where it's going to spontaneously detonate. which would be bad. so you have to spend a huge amount of effort to make sure that doesn't actually happen. that design is called a light water reactor. the other design is called an integral fast reactor. basically you pile up a bunch of radioactive materials until it gets really hot. since it's not enriched there's no chance it'll explode. and it consumes its own waste products. and if it gets too hot it kinda melts and spreads out and cools off. sorta self regulating. it also generates its own fuel. it's not exactly a perpetual motion machine. but for all practical purposes it's pretty close. so why don't we build ifr's instead of lwr's? heh. i've already answered that. lwr's run on the same stuff used to make nuclear bombs. if we don't have lwr's then we can't divert any enriched uranium into making weapons that we will never use. makes perfect sense right? if this were a rational world we'd decommission (blow up) every lwr on the planet along with every enrichment facility. and subsidize the construction of ifr's instead. obviously we don't live in a rational world. sigh. timmer for president.  ¶ 8:00 AM