“The energy from combustion comes from the rearranging of the electrons in the carbon and oxygen atoms before and after the combustion.”

But I think that you should define the nuclear reaction a little better; you write:

“The energy in the uranium comes from the rearrangement of protons and neutrons in the uranium nuclei.”

I also agree that the rearrangement of protons and neutrons in the uranium nuclei occurs, but there is much more going on than that.

Because the protons and neutrons fly off from the nucleus at very high speeds, they also penetrate into the adjoining atoms that are not breaking apart naturally, but once the neutrons or protons are captured by the atomic nuclei those atoms will also start to break apart, in other words, the non radioactive material adjoining the fission material also becomes radioactive.

If non radioactive material is made radioactive, then that newly radioactive material contains more energy than it did before being radioactive. Since heat is tied to the motion of molecules and molecules are made of atoms, if those atoms start to break up, then obviously the molecules will be subjected to more energy and therefore they will move/vibrate faster making them hotter.
Depending on the type of material that has become newly (more) radioactive, this extra energy from it can be very high or not so high per unit of time.
This EXTRA energy that has been ignited in non radioactive elements has been distributed into the biosphere during the nuclear age, and it has not been accounted for anywhere that I can observe on the internet.

Now imagine that we build a coal or oil furnace that contains 4,109.05 Terawatt hours of energy and we burn it at that energy level for more than fifty years, how hot would the surrounding of that furnace become and what would happen to the heat energy during that time period?

Hmm… you wanted the explanation to be simple, how about the following explanation.

During the nuclear age we have converted mass into energy and distributed the energy into the environment. Since energy can not be destroyed I would like to have confirmed evidence as to what has happened to the energy.

“Heat” is nothing more than molecular motion, the atoms and molecules vibrate more vigorously and we call it “heat”. The energy to cause this mechanical motion can come from either chemical reactions (the coal combining with oxygen in the air to form carbon dioxide and water, plus excess heat) or it can come from nuclear fission (a uranium nucleus splitting to form lighter nuclei, plus excess heat. The vibrations of the products of combustion as well as the products of fission are transferred to the surroundings by mechanical contact! Simple collisions.

The energy from combustion comes from the rearranging of the electrons in the carbon and oxygen atoms before and after the combustion. The energy in the uranium comes from the rearrangement of protons and neutrons in the uranium nuclei. In both cases, you get motion in the products, motion of the water molecules of your boiling pot, and motion of the potato molecules in your food. There is no difference between the motion (heat)caused by combustion and the motion caused by fission. The only distinction is that you get a lot more energy (per unit mass of fuel) in fission than you do in combustion. And the reason for this is that there is much more energy locked up in the atomic nucleus than there is in the electron shells surrounding those nuclei.

You seem to be confusing radioactivity with fission. The two are NOT the same. A radioactive atom will occasionally emit a high energy particle plus energy. Radioactive substances have unstable nuclei which periodically give off these particles, plus energy. This is a slow and gradual process, and occurs quite intermittently, the exact speed determined by the half-life of that isotope, or the amount of time it takes for half the atoms of that isotope to undergo radioactive decay. Most radioactive materials have half lives that range from months to milennia. Those with shorter half-lives all disappeared a long time ago! The few isotopes with short half-lives, from seconds to weeks, don’t stick around for very long, and are usually produced as a by-product of nuclear reactions. Consequently, they are quite rare.

SOME, (but not all) radio isotopes are fissionable, and they can be coaxed in a chain reaction to undergo wholesale disintegration in a relatively short time. The energy releases can be enormous, which is why we use them as power sources. By “enormous” I mean that the energy released is millions of times greater than the slow release of energy we get from natural radiactivity.

So for example, a pound of uranium may be radioactive, but you can handle it without even feeling any warmth, and the rate of radioactivity is so low (the half-life is so long) that it will take thousands of years before it all naturally decays to lead. By the way, I have actually held a pound of uranium foil in my hand. It was cold to the touch, and I was not burned by radiation. The only protection I had was a thin layer of paint on the foil, which protected me from being contaminated by that chemically toxic heavy metal. On the other hand, that same pound of uranium, in a controlled fission reaction, can push an aircraft carrier at flank speed for months!

So you need not worry that the radioactive decay of our uranium reactor fuels will cause the earth to overheat. The amount of energy available from radioactive decay is insignificant compared to that available from fission of the same uranium. It simply doesn’t matter.

Besides, what would have happened if we had never made nuclear reactors or weapons in the first place? All that uranium would still be in the ground, as naturally occurring uranium ore, and it would still be radioactive and happily giving off heat! Its going to do that whether we mine it or not. Even if we never had discovered atomic energy, all the uranium in the world would still be in the world, locked up in minerals in the ground, slowly disintegrating. You can stop worrying about it. Fission power plants have a lot of drawbacks and problems, but global warming is not one of them.

Uranium is slightly radioactive (another way of saying it has a long half life). If you can induce that uranium to undergo a chain reaction, the fission products (pieces of split uranium nuclei) may also be radioactive (perhaps even highly radioactive). This is what that website you quoted meant about fission by-products becoming more radioactive as time passes. Radioactive byproducts (daughter nuclei) may have shorter half-lives than their parents. But the dynamic mix of radioactive species in spent nuclear fuel eventually reaches equilibrium, with new species replacing those which become inert. And eventually, all radioactive nuclei decay to stable isotopes.

However, the amount of energy (in the form of heat) due to that radioactivity is insignificant compared to the energy released during fission, and it is released over a very long time. You can convince yourself by looking up the amount of MeV (millions of electron volts of energy) due to radioactive emission from each nucleus and comparing it to the energy released by each individual fission event. Trust me, Johannes, compared to the latter, the former simply doesn’t matter.

If you’re really looking for a cause of global warming, don’t blame nuclear reactors. Blame the fossil fuel industry, their greenhouse gases, and the reactionary, greedy politicians and businessmen determined at all costs to protect their profits from regulation and taxes.

As far as the water molecules are concerned, I’m sure they don’t care what kicks them into higher velocity, but there is a huge difference in the way the energy sources work.

Imagine that we go on a unusual camping trip, our aim is to boil potatoes at a camp site.
Both of us have a similar containers and we get water from the well at the camp.

You take with you some coal and a means to light the coal. The coal needs to be heated before it starts burning, it may take some lighter fluid and a match to ignite or start the chemical reaction within the coal, when the chemical reaction from the heated coal becomes energetic enough, then you place the container of water on top of the burning coal and you can drop the potatoes into the water and soon you will have boiled potatoes.
After enjoying some boiled potatoes you wait for a while and the coal fuel runs out and ceases to give off any energy.

I on the other hand want to be different, I take a quantity of uranium metal with me, I also need to ignite the energetic process within the material; in nuclear physics the ignition is called chain reaction, It can be done several different ways, one method is to simply pile enough of the uranium in one place so that the natural fission reactions within the uranium will increase the number of atoms that are split in the pile. I’ll use this simplest method even though it requires a lot uranium. There is the problem though that this reaction could go out of control, producing more energy than needed, in that case the potatoes and most everything in the camp grounds would be fried instead of boiled. It is lucky that there are other materials that can can be used to slow down the reaction.

After I get the desired reaction going, I can put the container of water on the pile and boil my potatoes. There might be some concerns though, the potatoes might be hotter than your potatoes because the neutrons and gamma rays may have penetrated into the potatoes and given the molecules in the potatoes some extra motion, perhaps even making them radioactive. Another problem is that I will not be able to quench this fire, it will continue for a very long time, of course our great great grand children could boil their potatoes there also.

The question that arises is: What happens to the energy that heats the water in our mental experiment?

In your experiment the chemical reaction causes the surrounding molecules to move faster, in other words, generate heat, once the reaction stops the molecular motion returns to the level where it was before the reaction was started.

In my experiment, once I start the reaction I can not stop it, The reaction will continue at an accelerating pace, unless the material is distributed so that there is more space and also cooling between the segments of the energy producing material. Such action will only stop the accelerating pace but not the energy released in the form of radioactivity that causes the heating of the surroundings.
The induced splitting of the atomic nuclei will continue for a very long time, see the link below.

The oldest working reactor is in Russia, It was started on December 25, 1946:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-1_(nuclear_reactor)

http://www.ccnr.org/decay_U238.html

From the above site: “Depleted uranium remains radioactive for literally billions of years, and over these long periods of time it will continue to produce all of its radioactive decay products; thus depleted uranium actually becomes more radioactive as the centuries and millennia go by because these decay products accumulate.”

Radioactivity is the energy that heats the water in a nuclear reactor. Uranium is more energetic when it is taken out of a nuclear reactor than it was when it was placed in there.

Conversion of energy from one form to another always involves inefficiencies. It has to do with thermodynamic losses in the conversion process. When you create steam in a power plant to drive a turbine for electrical generation, most of the energy carried in the steam is lost as waste heat. It makes no difference whether this steam was created by nuclear fission, or burning fossil fuels. The steam turns the turbines, and then condenses into water, which is still very hot. This hot water is then dumped into a stream or the ocean, or lost by evaporation in a cooling tower. It has nothing to do with radioactivity, its just how steam engines work.

In fact, all heat engines have similar waste heat losses, even internal combustion engines. When gasoline is burned in an automobile engine, only a relatively small amount of the energy in the fuel goes into moving the car. The vast majority (about 70% I believe) goes out the tailpipe in hot exhaust gases, or is radiated out through the cooling system–fan and radiator. These are not losses due to friction, even in a hypothetical perfectly lubricated mechanical drive train you still lose about three quarters of the energy in the fuel to the atmosphere.

Engineers try to minimize these losses by using the waste heat to pre-heat feed water to the nuclear reactor (or the boiler of a fossil steam plant), or cascading the steam through multi-stage turbines, (each optimized for a different pressure/temperature regime), but at each step the efficiency drops, and the total efficiency of the system never exceeds the so-called Carnot efficiency (after the physicist who figured this out). This efficiency is always around 30% for heat engines using a working fluid. You can improve the efficiency somewhat at higher temperatures and pressures, but there are still theoretical limits. No matter what you do, the bulk of the energy in the fuel is lost as waste heat. The locomotives and steamships of the late 19th century had already achieved the maximum efficiency allowed by thermodynamics. We haven’t been able to improve much on their work because this is not a question of engineering refinement, we are up against a fundamental physical law.

Your statement “70.5% of the power was wasted and converted into heat through various reactions with the energetic particles created by nuclear fission.” is incorrect. That 70.5% is lost as waste heat because of the laws of thermodynamics, not because of anything having to do with nuclear power. No matter how you generate the steam, after you spin the turbine (or push the pistons), the steam condenses into hot water which still contains a lot of unusable energy–waste heat. Radioactivity has nothing to do with it.

“With a complete combustion or fission, approx. 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.”

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
“Nuclear (fission) power stations, excluding the contribution from naval nuclear fission reactors, provided 13% of the world’s electricity in 2012. The share of the world’s primary energy supply, which refers to the heat production without the conversion efficiency of about 33 %, was about 5.7%. Its share of the global final energy consumption (actually useful energy, i.e. electric power) is below 2.5 % “

According to this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country “In the year 2014 nuclear power plants generated 2410 TWh., of electricity.”

If I understand it correctly that the two thousand four hundred and ten Terawatts per hour, represent less than 2.5% of the total energy generated by nuclear power plants, then more than 70.5% of the power was wasted and converted into heat through various reactions with the energetic particles created by nuclear fission. Meaning that approximately 4,109.05 Terawatts worth of energy was generated per hour for a full year, 8766 hours* 4109.05 = 36,019,932.3 Twh total for the year.

If that amount of energy was producing heat for a period of, say 50 years, then I think that the amount of heat should be noticeable somewhere.
1 Terawatt = 1,000,000,000 kilowatts, 1 kilowatt = 1,000 watts.

There are various web sites that explain nuclear activity, but they fall short of the type of information that is needed to figure out the total energy that is generated by all the nuclear activity that is happening in our environment.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Radioactivity+in+the+Atmosphere

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=radioactive+waste&qpvt=radioactive+waste&qpvt=radioactive+waste&FORM=IGRE

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-mass-and-volume-of-all-the-stored-nuclear-waste-in-the-world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Introduction/Physics-of-Nuclear-Energy/

It seems to me that the efficiency of any nuclear power plant is very low and most of the energy that is generated is in the form of radioactive isotopes that are distributed into the environment, possibly contributing to the global changes in the environment.

There’s a Bad Moon Risin’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUQiUFZ5RDw