How do aircraft carriers work?

Aircraft carriers contain some of the most advanced technology in the world. Learn more about aircraft and aircraft carriers in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuffworks dot com where
smart happens him Marshall Brain. Every time there's a military
crisis overseas, we hear about nuclear powered aircraft carriers heading

(00:21):
over to investigate what does the nuclear powered part mean.
Let's say that you were to power an aircraft carrier
with gasoline. An aircraft carrier weighs about a hund thousand
tons and has engines that can generate two hundred and
eighty thousand horsepower. The ship would have to carry millions
of gallons of gas to stay at sea for any

(00:41):
length of time. Instead, the ship has a small nuclear
reactor on board. The reactor is like the reactor at
a nuclear power plant, but it's extremely compact. The heat
from the nuclear fuel generates steam, and the steam powers
the turbines that turn the propellers. The fuel for the
reactor is highly enriched urine um. A pound of this

(01:01):
material is about the size of a baseball, but it
contains the energy equivalent of about a million gallons of gas.
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(01:24):
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