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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuffworks dot com where

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Speaker 1: smart happens him Marshall Brain. Every time there's a military

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Speaker 1: crisis overseas, we hear about nuclear powered aircraft carriers heading

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Speaker 1: over to investigate what does the nuclear powered part mean.

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Speaker 1: Let's say that you were to power an aircraft carrier

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Speaker 1: with gasoline. An aircraft carrier weighs about a hund thousand

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Speaker 1: tons and has engines that can generate two hundred and

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Speaker 1: eighty thousand horsepower. The ship would have to carry millions

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Speaker 1: of gallons of gas to stay at sea for any

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Speaker 1: length of time. Instead, the ship has a small nuclear

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Speaker 1: reactor on board. The reactor is like the reactor at

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Speaker 1: a nuclear power plant, but it's extremely compact. The heat

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Speaker 1: from the nuclear fuel generates steam, and the steam powers

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Speaker 1: the turbines that turn the propellers. The fuel for the

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Speaker 1: reactor is highly enriched urine um. A pound of this

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Speaker 1: material is about the size of a baseball, but it

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Speaker 1: contains the energy equivalent of about a million gallons of gas.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, does

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Speaker 1: that how stuff works dot Com, And don't forget to

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Speaker 1: check out the brain stuff blog on the how Stuff

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