Nuclear Engineer

Can someone enlighten me upon the different parts located within a nuclear reactor along with details concerning the removal and treatment of wastes? One might possibly as well include the aspects involved in collecting energy.
I need to do a research project on this; any books or sites recommended would be of great help as well and even preferable.
I appreciate any guidance given to me, thank you.

That is a lot of ground you want to cover. Just addressing the safety aspects takes a book. Waste (spent fuel as well as lesser wastes such as derived from other materials and their irradiation) management would and does take up additional books.

Much of what you need to know about nuclear plant safety starts with the safety culture, which is addressed in some detail at my web site at http://technidigm.org/technuke/nuclear.htm .It will be a bit over your head, most likely, as it covers the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program nuclear safety culture more than the less focused culture found at most commercial nuclear plants.

There are also many websites to go to, such as that for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the one for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear utility sponsored organization that promotes the industry and also coordinates industry communications to a large degree. You can Google those sites yourself.

Overall, besides the culture and regulations, the safety of each nuclear plant depends on "inherent" safety features such as natural circulation of water through the reactor core to keep removing heat even when the reactor coolant water pumps lose electric power. Safety is also ensured by dedicated safety systems designed to automatically react to any conceivable malfunction that might cause the reactor core to overheat. There are many sensors, power supplies, pumps, and valves of various kinds that are installed in the nuclear power plant just to ensure safety. The systems are tested and inspected a lot to make sure that they work or would work under certain conditions.

Then we even assume that all that design effort, culture, and safety systems fail and put the reactor and the high pressure systems inside a containment building capable of preventing the release of radiation, something that the Chernobyl Reactor in the Soviet Union did not have. They also did not have an adequate safety culture, and their basic reactor design was even unstable in ways that require a degree in nuclear engineering to understand.

As to how the reactor works, it simply generates heat in a pressurized water environment so that the water does not turn into steam while it is in the reactor core area. That helps remove the heat from the reactor core’s heat transfer surfaces, a complex honeycomb of fuel tubes banded together to create a critical mass of fissile material but also a large heat transfer surface to allow easy removal of the fissile heat that comes out as heat to heat the reactor coolant water.

That pressurized hot water can be flashed into steam to drive a turbine generator to get a lot of electric power. That is called a boiling water reactor (BWR). Most nuclear power plants keep the water pressurized and pump it through a heat exchanger called a steam generator, which has thousands of heat transfer tubes that conduct the primary coolant water heat to the secondary system called the steam system. That steam then goes through the turbines to generate power.

All the turbine steam loses its energy passing through the turbines and has to be condensed using another tube and shell heat transfer component simply called the condenser. This exhaust steam is condensed to water so that it can be pumped back into the steam generator or reactor at high pressure for transferring heat again..

The condenser transfer the remaining heat to the environment such as a lake, river, bay, ocean, or one of those hyperbolic cooling towers that seem to be a nuclear plant icon these days. Coal fired plants use them too, sometimes, but no one pays much attention to coal fired plants, even though they released their waste directly into the air we breathe.

Nuclear plant waste is essentially metallic and can be recycled to recover extra uranium and the rest buried safely forever, as needed. Nuclear plant waste is only a problem in the minds of people who don’t understand it or simply don’t want to due to their need to grasp at anything to get the public’s attention and try to sway opinions against nuclear power, for no apparent reason as far as nuclear engineers can tell.

I have yet to meet an anti-nuke who understands the subject adequately to have an intelligent conversation on the subject, but that does not help you much with your research.