Informative Essay On Nuclear Energy

Harman Sidhu

Robison

Sophomore Honors English

23 May 2016

Nuclear Energy

“The sun uses nuclear fission to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms” (Davor). Since Einstein and others first realized the power of nuclear fusion, we have worked towards harnessing the energy of nuclear fusion to make power. However, it wasn’t originally meant to make power, instead we adapted the technology in the 1940s for the purpose of making atomic bombs. Since the cold war ended, nuclear disarmament has begun and nuclear energy has become much more prominent as an energy provider. Nuclear energy works by creating a reaction inside a reactor and using the heat produced by the reaction to drive turbines. Seems relatively safe but nuclear disasters such as the

But a common argument for nuclear energy is that it is actually cleaner compared to the nonrenewable energy industries such as the fossil fuel industry. Although it may be true that nuclear has much less carbon emissions it can be argued that it is overall much more destructive to the environment. Linda Harvey an environmentalist and a journalist who has written multiple times on nuclear energy states that “Apart from Innumerable poorly publicized incidents, the major ones are Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl has by some estimates resulted in up to 800,000 premature deaths” (Harvey). Not only is the environment effected but the humans that live near a nuclear disaster are also effected. Radiation destroys living tissues and is detrimental to human or any life (Harvey) . Harvey also points out that. “The nuclear industry not only digs up and distributes buried natural radioactivity while mining uranium, it renders the uranium hundreds of thousands of times more radioactive by the process of nuclear fission in currently operating power-generating reactors . The waste it leaves is fiercely radioactive and must be segregated from all biological organisms for thousands of years” (Harvey). Nuclear energy not only destroys the area where the waste is stored but it also renders most of the place where it’s mined out of useless and bare of life. Wherever the waste is stored life cannot grow so it’s much worse for the environment compared to carbon emissions from fossil fuels which have only shown to raise the global temperature not completely devastate an ecosystem. But the waste isn’t the only problem that nuclear energy has as explained by the Green peace organization. “In the contaminated regions around Chernobyl, for example, there has been a sharp increase in thyroid cancer, severe mental retardation due to prenatal exposure,