What is nuclear energy measured in and what is an example?
When, for instance, a uranium or plutonium nucleus fissions it releases about 190 million electron volts of energy. (See first link. The 10 MeV of neutrino radiation effectively disappears because neutrinos *very* rarely interact with anything, thus *their* energy creates no heat in the reactor.) In physics, the electron volt is a unit of energy. By definition, it is equal to the amount of energy gained by a single unbound electron when it accelerates through an electrostatic potential difference of one volt. It is typically used to measure very small amounts of energy. 1 electron volt = 1.60217653×10−19 Joules 1 Joule = 1 kilogram*meter^2/second^2 1 watt = 1 joule/second Nobody but a nuclear physicist is likely to use electron volts to describe how much energy a reactor produces over a period of time. Most people would simply describe a reactor as, for instance, a 900 megawatt reactor. This would be the sum total of all the fissions produced in that reactor which is called the thermal
