Nuclear Energy: Good and Bad

Why do Nuclear Reactors explode? i thought its because of overheating, because when i saw a movie from the Discovery Channel, the isotopes are places in a vat of water to cool it off... so if we placed the nuclear reactors in a lab underwater, it would lessen the risk of exploding due to overheating, right?

Pls correct me if thats wrong. I still need to research about it more.

 

And the nuclear waste is stored there because it is still very unstable, and will be for many years to come... that's why they store it and many people worry about this wandering where it all goes. heh.

 

how about a nuclear power plant on other planet or the waste on other planet...

 

lets just throw it inside a volcano and let mother earth melt it. lol

 

hehehe, then the one at fault is mother nature. lol. that was just a joke!

but seriously, the Nuclear plant has 2 options for the disposal of nuclear waste, 1st: They could safely store it until the radioactivity of the waste dies out or something. and the 2nd one: They could sell it to the terrorist to put into bombs. heh ( mostly the 1st one is valid )

 

good thing in the Simpsons, Mr. Burns has a way to dispose nuclear waste. lol, let his employees eat it if they are late or slacking in work.

 

Hah! I may not be a Physics major, but I am an English major! Time for s-s-s-s-semantics! The particles are being heated so that they collide with each other! Normally, atoms want to stay the hell away from each other, but with enough heat applied, they end up colliding, fusing, creating new atoms, and firing off those light thingies that are hard to detect (I forget my physics).

 

anyway again your getting it confused with the LHC in Switzerland looking for the Higgs boson, which fires particles in the hope they will collide
i'm talking about the ITER which is fussing particles

two different machines that have nothing to do with each other

please note they are also using completely different particles

 

I know what the LHC is. The LHC is trying to (at least one of the experiments) recreate in some part what happened when matter was first created from the "big bang" (if it happened). You know, when hydrogen was going nuts for a good long while, fusing and unfusing, before settling down and creating other atoms, which is fusion. They're blasting protons at high speeds at each other to see if they can recreate that to some extent, and figure out that Higgs Boson oddity. Creating fusion the good 'ol fashioned way is applying massive amounts of heat so that atoms are moving around with so much energy that they collide, fusing, giving off energy as a by-product, and the scientifically named "thingies" who's name I forget blasting in all types of direction- as well as that dark matter that adds mass to things that we don't understand at all, but would hope to. But honestly it's been about 8 months since I actually read up on what they were doing, and I stopped following news after I heard it had a safety malfunction which made me sad cuz I really wanted to see how it would go. I'm probably remembering some thing wrong and you can say so. I do remember them mentioning they'll be shooting heavy ions like peanut butter or something like that at each other.