Vanessa Holfeltz on Boiling Water in 5 Steps

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This week's Ignite episode starts with the simple premise that you are going to boil water. However we're going to attempt it via our own nuclear reactor. Using just 20 slides nuclear engineer Vanessa Holfeltz walks us through the steps of building our very own.

The steps are:
1) Get some uranium. Don't worry you can get that from the dirt in your backyard.
2) Enrich that uranium. The catch is that most of that Uranium is U238 and you have to sperate it fro the more valuable U235. It's hard and expensive to do -- after all Uranium 235 only weighs 3 neutrons more.
3) Make fuel pellets from the Uranium. You do this with lots and lots of Uranium 235.
4) Build a nuclear power reactor. If you don't already have your own you should expect some red tape.
5) Fission. You fire neutrons at the Uranium 235 and that ultimately generates heat.

Result: Heat to boil water
Bonus Step: Use the steam to power your home.

You can learn more on HowStuffWorks and Wikipedia. Thanks to Chris, Ponzi and Gnomedex for the video footage.

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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