China consumes hundreds of millions of tons of coal every year. How troublesome it is to load so much coal on the train and transport it from the coal mine to various places.
It is much easier to use uranium and thorium as fuel. 1 g uranium 235 can replace 2.5 tons of coal. If uranium is used to start a ship, the "coal cabin" is as big as a matchbox.
Uranium 235 is uranium with atomic weight of 235, and its content in natural uranium is about 0.7%. It is often used as "atomic fuel".
It is easy to imagine how convenient it would be to use "atomic combustion". Shanghai, the largest industrial city in China, consumes millions of tons of coal every year. If these coals are piled into a one-meter square coal pile, they can be piled from Shanghai to Harbin, which is about 2000 kilometers long. These coals are all shipped from other places, and hundreds of thousands of tons of coal ash after burning must be transported away. If uranium 235 is used instead of coal, it is about 10 kg per day, less than 2 tons a year, which is enough for Shanghai.
From this example, it can be seen that it is ideal to use atomic energy to generate electricity in areas where coal is not produced.
The world consumes about 2 billion tons of medium every year, and the volume of these coals is almost equal to a mountain of 654.38+0 billion cubic meters. How long can the coal in the world be dug? If the development of production is taken into account, coal may be exhausted in hundreds of years. So what should we do? From now on, the most realistic way is to replace coal with uranium and thorium. It is estimated that there are more than 20 million tons of uranium and thorium mines in the world. Using them as fuel is 20 times more energy than coal and oil in the world! Atomic icebreakers and nuclear submarines powered by uranium 235 have been successfully manufactured. Now scientists are studying using uranium instead of gasoline to fly airplanes. 1 kg uranium -235 can make the plane fly 65438+10.300 kg/h, which means that the atomic plane can sail around the world without landing. The dream of aviation scientists for many years is coming true.
Some people are still studying the use of uranium to start rockets. In space flight, it is very important to reduce the weight, but the fuel of the rocket is surprisingly heavy: a rocket weighing 100 tons uses about 90 tons of propellant, and less than one or two tons can be used except the weight of its own structure. If uranium 235 is used as propellant, only 50 grams is enough.
Uranium -235 is very explosive. If it is used to dig water conservancy projects, the workload of 1 kg uranium -235 is almost equal to 250,000 people working one day.