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Nuclear energy - Renewable energy
by Ray Matally
Category : News and Society |
One of the major requirements for sustaining human progress is an adequate source of energy. The current largest sources of energy are the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas. But they will last quite a while but will probably run out or become harmful in tens to hundreds of years. Solar energy will also work but is not much developed yet except for special applications because of its high cost. And nuclear energy is likely to remain cheaper. Nuclear energy can come from the fission of uranium, plutonium or thorium or the fusion of hydrogen into helium. Today it is almost all uranium. The basic energy fact is that the fission of an atom of uranium produces 10 million times the energy produced by the combustion of an atom of carbon from coal.
Other than hydroelectric energy, nuclear is the only technology besides fossil fuels available as a large-scale continuous power source, and you can rely on to be running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Wind and solar energy are intermittent and thus unreliable. How can you run hospitals and factories and even a house on an electricity supply that disappears for three or four days at a time? Wind can play a minor role in reducing the amount of fossil fuels we use. Nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
The United States with less than 5% of the world's population consumes roughly 25% of the world's energy. Some might argue that this is egregious, while others would say that it is simply a yardstick by which the world's largest economy is measured. But for whatever the reason for our vast consumption of energy, the fact remains that in order to consume you first have to produce.
There are various myths that associated with nuclear energy. Each concern deserves careful consideration.
Myth no 1: Nuclear energy is expensive. In 2004 - the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. Advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future.
Myth no 2: Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years - They are highly radioactive at first, but the most radioactive isotopes decay the fastest. About one cubic meter of waste per year is generated by a power plant. It needs to be kept away from people. After 10 years, the fission products are 1,000 times less radioactive. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. It will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal.
Myth no 3: Nuclear plants are not safe - Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. Our Nuclear Power Plant technology is far superior today than it was when that plant was built. Did you know that the media totally embellished the number of deaths in the Chernobyl accident by about 10-fold?
Myth no 4: Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons - This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy. But just because nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.
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