Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuffworks dot com where
Speaker 1: smart happens him Marshall Brain. Every time there's a military
Speaker 1: crisis overseas, we hear about nuclear powered aircraft carriers heading
Speaker 1: over to investigate what does the nuclear powered part mean.
Speaker 1: Let's say that you were to power an aircraft carrier
Speaker 1: with gasoline. An aircraft carrier weighs about a hund thousand
Speaker 1: tons and has engines that can generate two hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty thousand horsepower. The ship would have to carry millions
Speaker 1: of gallons of gas to stay at sea for any
Speaker 1: length of time. Instead, the ship has a small nuclear
Speaker 1: reactor on board. The reactor is like the reactor at
Speaker 1: a nuclear power plant, but it's extremely compact. The heat
Speaker 1: from the nuclear fuel generates steam, and the steam powers
Speaker 1: the turbines that turn the propellers. The fuel for the
Speaker 1: reactor is highly enriched urine um. A pound of this
Speaker 1: material is about the size of a baseball, but it
Speaker 1: contains the energy equivalent of about a million gallons of gas.
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