Here's the view from the RSPB's nature reserve at Minsmere in Suffolk. The large building in the distance is the Sizewell B nuclear power station. It was the most recent to be built in the UK, being finished in the early 90s. I remember the political controversy about it. The upshot was that no more were built in the UK. It is a PWR pressurised water reactor. The fission reactions in the fuel rods cause thermal energy to be released. This energy has to be absorbed by a coolant and used to heat water elsewhere to make steam to drive a generator. It this reactor design, the coolant is ordinary water at very high pressure. This means that it is unable to boil even at temperatures of 300 degrees Celsius. The pressure stops particles from escaping the surface of the liquid. Radioactive gases are dangerous because they are hard to see and contain. Here the containment vessels need to be very strong to work at very high pressures. The water is also a moderator: it slows neutrons down. Slow moving neutrons are better at splitting Uranium-235 nuclei. The power station has an output of about 1200MW. That is roughly the same as the stated output of the wind farms at the end of Morecambe Bay, visible from Barrow. The wind farms will have a capacity factor of about 0.33 which means that actual output will be about a third of the stated value.
