Is Nuclear Energy Worth the Risk? The capability for nuclear energy has always existed. However, not until December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago, did nuclear energy surface. Enrico Fermi made that discovery by making a chain reaction in a pile of uranium. How a nuclear reaction works is that a neutron is “shot” through a gram of uranium, which creates fission. This causes a chain reaction, thus creating a nuclear reaction or nuclear energy. This was the first man-made nuclear reaction. My argument is that nuclear power may be the so called “safe” and “clean” source of energy that we are looking for, but can we really afford to continue to use this source of energy. Is it “clean”? One problem with nuclear power is that currently we are unable to dispose of the waste that nuclear power plants produce. Furthermore, many of the power plants are unsafe and accidents do occur. They cause devastation to the environment and lives of people. I will provide you with evidence to illustrate that nuclear reactions have killed people. First, we might ask, “How do we acquire nuclear energy”? Uranium is a mineral mined primarily in Canada and is what we use to produce nuclear reactions. Canada plays a major role in this aspect of nuclear energy because Canada was the first to mine uranium and Canada is the largest producer and exporter. When Canada exports uranium, it tells countries that it exports to, that those countries should only be using the uranium in nuclear power stations and not in nuclear weapons. Canada, however, does not put many restrictions on the condition of the reactors where they send this uranium. Some argue that Canadians should put more conditions on the safety of the reactors not on whether or not use t... ... middle of paper ... ...CBCAeducation -This article is from the green peace point of view and states that Chernobyl should not be reopened and used as a power plant again. It also has many great arguments as to why Russian nuclear management is unreliable. 4 Chalk River Laboratories. Environmental Research Branch. (1993). Summary report, BIOMOVS Chernobyl scenarios A4 (multiple model testing using Chernobyl fallout data of I-131 in forage and milk and Cs-137 in forage, milk, beef and grain) and A5 (Dynamics within Lake Ecosystems) / by S-R. Peterson. Chalk River, Ont. : Environmental Research Branch, Chalk River Laboratories, 1993. 5 Myers, Lynne C. (1987). The Chernobyl Accident. [Ottawa]: Library of Parliament, Research Branch. -This book tells the story of the Chernobyl accident. It has many stories told by the people involved and affected by this incident.
The engineers in Visit Sunny Chernobyl created a new frontier past the safety zone because they want to test the limits of the reactor. What the scientists didn’t account for is that fact that the reactors already had the potential of a dangerous chain reaction. (Blackwell 6) Consequently, their boundary destroying led to catastrophic consequences and the total annihilation of a land area because of massive radiation. Blackwell thought Chernobyl was so horrific he expressed that no one should visit without a “working understanding of radiation and how it’s measured” (Blackwell 7). These are some horrific consequences that followed from surpassing the
On April 26th, 1986, operators at the Chernobyl Power Plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, ran what they thought to be a routine safety test. But fate was not on the side of these operators. Without warning, reactor #4 became unstable, as it had been operating at a low power for a possible shutdown and the reactor’s design caused it to be unsafe at this level of power. Internal temperatures rose. Attempts to cool the system produced the opposite effect. Instantly, the nuclear core surged with power. At 1:23 p.m., the reactor exploded. The first blast ripped off the reactor's steel roof. The second blast released a large plume of radiation into the sky. Flames engulfed the building. For ten long days, fire fighters and power plant workers attempted to overcome the inferno. Thirty-one of them died of radiation poisoning. Chernobyl was the worst nuclear disaster in history. It unleashed radiation hundreds of times greater than the atomic bombs exploded over Japan during World War II. [1]
The Chernobyl Nuclear has also affected the environment. Such as the food products in the Forest like mushrooms, berries containing high levels of long-lived radioactive caesium and this pollution is expected to remain high for several decades or so. For example, the accident led to high pollution of caribou meat in Scandinavia. Water bodies and fishes became polluted as well with radioactive materials. The accident has actually affected many animals and plants living within 30-40 km of the . There was an increase in mortality as in increasing of deaths in an area and a decrease in reproduction and some genetic anomalies in plants and animals are still reported
There are many sources of energy today, and the best source of it is constantly being sought after, one source stands out above the rest. Nuclear energy is simple in theory, yet it may be one of the most controversial sources of power. Nuclear energy works using reactors built to split the atoms (nuclear fission) of the fuel to produce heat. This heat evaporates the cooling agent (usually water) into steam which turns turbines to create electricity. Nuclear energy should be allowed, because it produces an abundance of electricity, as well as being a clean source of energy with no harmful emissions. Nuclear energy is the future of clean, environmentally friendly energy.
A - Plan of Investigation- For my Historical Investigation, I wanted to research the catastrophic nuclear meltdown that occurred on April 26th, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. My research question is: Could the Chernobyl disaster have been avoided, if so, which moments in the chain of events leading to the accident needed to occur differently? To carry out my investigation, I plan on utilizing the Internet, encyclopedias and finding books that explain how accidental Chernobyl really was, the variety of mistakes made by the Ukrainians, as well as the Soviets, and how these problems could be fixed in accordance to the time period. I will use Chernobyl, global environmental injustice and mutagenic threats by Nicholas Low and Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl by Adriana Petryna for references that can help me in my investigation.
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) succeeded in splitting the uranium atom and the Nobel Committee later awarded him the 1938 prize for physics. At Columbia University in New York, Fermi realized that if neutrons are emitted in the fissioning of uranium then the emitted neutrons might proceed to split other uranium atoms, setting in motion a chain reaction that would release enormous amounts of energy.(1) Fermi had succeeded in taking one of the first steps to making an atomic bomb.
It was Italian-born physicist and Nobel winner Enrico Fermi, and his colleagues at the University of Chicago who were responsible for this success (“Nuclear”).
After the United States developed the atomic at the end of World War II, interest in nuclear technology increased exponentially. People soon realized that nuclear technology could be used for electricity, as another alternative to fossil fuels. Today, nuclear power has its place in the world, but there is still a lot of controversy over the use of nuclear energy. Things such as the containment of radiation and few nuclear power plant accidents have given nuclear power a bad image. However, nuclear power is a reliable source of energy because it has no carbon emissions, energy is available at any time, little fuel is needed for a lot of energy, and as time goes on, it is becoming safer and safer.
Flanary, W. (2008). Environment effects of the Chernobyl accident. Retrieved November 1st, 2013 from /http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/152617
“Face it. Nukes are the most climate-friendly industrial-scale form of energy” (Power, Reiss, Pearlstein, 655). This statement is what I’m trying to promote through my argument. It also ties Inconvenient Truths: 10 Green Heresies by Matt Powers, Spencer Reiss, and Jonanna Pearlstein and Nuclear Power is Best Energy Source: Potchef Stroom together by bring out the main point all authors are trying to get across. Global warming has been a big concern for years now and one of the biggest causes for it, is the burning of fossil fuels to get energy. People that live in the United States of America use a huge amount of energy in their daily lives and that amount continues to grow with our population growing with it. My purpose of this piece is to persuade people to switch to nuclear power for a cleaner energy source because it’s the cleanest energy source.
There is a range of safety concerns in regards to nuclear power with one of these being the effects of radiation resulting from a nuclear accident. Research shows that there is a link between exposure to radiation and the development of cancer (Zakaib 2011) whist Preston (2012) express’s concerns that people exposed to radiation may not be able to see the effects of radiation exposure for several years as was the case in Chernobyl. Furthermore, people are unable to move back into the vicinity of reactors that have been involved in an incident due to their fear of radiation as is the chase in Fukishima (Cyranoski & Brumfiel 2011) and in the areas surrounding Chernobyl (Berton 2006). Governments are increasingly becoming more stringent in the levels of radiation in which people are exposed to with this evident in Fukishma, where the Japanese government evacuated people living within a 30km radius of the plant (Evacuation Orders and Restricted Areas n.d.). As a result of nuclear accidents and the resulting radiation, support for nuclear power has diminished due to safety concerns.
Chernobyl was the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century. On April 26th, 1986, one of four nuclear reactors located in the Soviet Union melted down and contaminated a vast area of Eastern Europe. The meltdown, a result of human error, lapsed safety precautions, and lack of a containment vessel, was barely contained by dropping sand and releasing huge amounts of deadly radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. The resulting contamination killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the environment. The affects of this accident are still being felt today and will be felt for generations to come.
One of the most significant environmentally damaging instances in history was the Chernobyl incident. In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in Ukraine exploded. It became one of the most significant disasters in the engineering community. There are different factors that contributed to the disaster. The personnel that were tasked with operating the plant were unqualified. The plant’s design was a complex one. The RBMK reactor was Soviet design, and the staff had not be acquainted with this particular design. As the operators performed tests on the reactor, they disabled the automatic shutdown mechanism. After the test, the attempt to shut down the reactor was unsuccessful as it was unstable. This is the immediate cause of the Chernobyl Accident. It later became the most significant nuclear disaster in the history of the
The use of nuclear power in the mid-1980s was not a popular idea on account of all the fears that it had presented. The public seemed to have rejected it because of the fear of radiation. The Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union in April of 1986 reinforced the fears, and gave them an international dimension (Cohen 1). Nevertheless, the public has to come to terms that 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. Fear of radiation may push nuclear power under the carpet but another fear of the unknown is how costly is this going to be? If we as the public have to overcome the fear of radiation and costly project, we first have to understand the details of nuclear energy. The known is a lot less scary then the unknown. If we could put away all the presumptions we have about this new energy source, then maybe we can understand that this would be a good decision for use in the near future.
Nuclear energy is generated by a process called fission. Fission occurs within the reactor of a nuclear power plant when a neutron is fired at an atom of uranium causing it to split and release subsequent neutrons.1 These are able to crash into other uranium atoms causing a chain reaction and releasing a great deal of heat energy.