These pages explain the basics behind the NRU reactor. If you have a school project or are an interested person with little science background, these pages are for you. To understand what is happening in a nuclear reactor like NRU, you have to know something about atoms...
An atom is the smallest building block that nature uses. Everything in world around us is made from atoms, including ourselves. Atoms join together to make molecules. For example two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom can combine to make one water molecule H2O. Molecules sometimes assemble into larger structures, such as water molecules in a snow-flake. Whenever you break materials down into their basic building blocks, those are atoms. Atoms come in a variety of sizes, these are called elements. Examples of elements are iron, calcium, carbon and uranium. There are 81 stable elements and a number of unstable ones (currently 34, but more are being found over time). A stable element behaves just as it sounds, it is happy to sit there being an atom of some element such as hydrogen, and will sit there forever without changing. An atom of an unstable element has a desire to change into an atom of a different type.