 Just how powerful is nuclear energy? Uranium pellets like this one fuel all nuclear energy in Canada. Just eight of these is enough to power your house for an entire year. It's about the same amount of energy as 400 kilograms of coal, or about 0.5 cubic meters of coal pieces, 410 litres of oil which would fill about two and a half of these small pools, or about 350 cubic meters of natural gas which would fill about eight of these train cars. So how do all of these give us power? The main idea behind most power plants is to produce heat. This heat is used to boil water, produce steam, turn a turbine, and power an electrical generator. The only difference is how the heat itself is produced. Fossil fuel stations use coal, oil or natural gas to produce heat, while nuclear stations use the heat from nuclear reactions. Energy from nuclear reactions comes from an atom's nucleus when it splits. The job of the nuclear reactor is to capture this energy. In a nuclear reactor, the radioactive element of uranium is compacted into fuel pellets and then placed into fuel bundles. So this is a fuel bundle. This is what gets put into the core of the reactor to produce the nuclear reaction. It includes uranium pellets that are stacked into these tubes here. As the uranium releases energy through nuclear reactions, water that flows around the fuel bundles is heated. This water surrounding the fuel bundle acts as a coolant to remove the heat from the reactor up through the pipes to the steam generator. The steam turns the turbine to generate electricity and heads out through the electricity grid. In Canada, all reactors are CanDo designs engineered by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited in partnership with Ontario Power Generation, GE Canada and over 100 other Canadian manufacturing and engineering companies. CanDo is an acronym that stands for Canada Deuterium Uranium Reactors. Its innovative Canadian design makes use of natural uranium and an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. So there are a lot of CanDo reactors in Ontario. It's a big part of the energy portfolio of the province. There's one reactor in New Brunswick and there was one in Quebec. On an international level, you can find CanDo reactors in Romania, South Korea, China, Argentina and also there are CanDo-like reactors in India and Pakistan. An important feature of the CanDo reactor design is the use of deuterium oxide, also called heavy water. A water molecule is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. In heavy water, the hydrogen atoms have been enriched with an extra neutron to create what is called deuterium. The heavy water is called a moderator because it surrounds the fuel bundles and moderates the neutron flow inside the reactions. When all the parts of this nuclear reactor come together, a thick layer of concrete shielding helps contain the energy. So you see how small this fuel bundle is. This is enough to produce sufficient energy to supply a house for a family of four, all the electricity that we need for 100 years.