Why You Cannot Simply Turn Off a Nuclear Reactor: The Physics of Decay Heat
On December 2, 1942, beneath the stands of a squash court at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi and his team achieved something humanity had never accomplished: a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, produced just half a watt of power—barely enough to light a small bulb. Yet it demonstrated a principle that now generates about 9% of the world’s electricity, powering hundreds of millions of homes with the energy locked inside atomic nuclei. ...