Nuclear Energy (2938 words) Essay Example For Students

Nuclear Energy (2938 words) Essay Nuclear EnergyLet American Consumer Counseling Help you Get Out of Debt!Nuclear EnergyYou are watching the control panels andgages for rector two. Sitting comely you think about how easy your jobis. It is a joke! All day you sit around and watch the gages for reactornumber two just to make sure they maintain their settings. You dont evenneed to look at the gages either because a computer automatically regulatesthem without you. Life is so good. Suddenly all the sirens go of and thegages and displays spin wildly in every direction. The ground shakes andyou can hear the sound of a deep rumble. Unknown to you, the reactorscooling pumps have failed to cool the reactors core and in 3 seconds thetemperature went from 280 degrees centigrade to 4,000 degrees centigrade. The water that was in the reactor is instantly turned to steam which createstremendous amount of pressure in the reactor core. Above the reactor corethere is a 5 foot thick lead plate and above that there is a meter thickfloor composed of iron, barium, serpentine, concrete, and stone. The explodingsteam fires the floor up like shrapnel. The metal plate goes through thefour foot thick concrete roof like butter and reaches and altitude of sixtymeters. You can hear ripping, rending, wrenching, screeching, scraping,tearing sounds of a vast machine breaking apart. L. Ray Silver, a leadingauthor who covered the disaster at Chernobyl, said that within the core,steam reacts with zirconium to produce that first explosive in naturesarsenal, hydrogen. Near-molten fuel fragments shatter nearly incandescentgraphite, torching chunks of it, exploding the hydrogen. The explosionbreaks every pipe in the building rocking it with such power that the buildingis split into sections (11-13). You look down at your body and notice thatit feels hot and your hands look different. Unknown to you a tremendousamount of neutrons are hitting your cells and taking chucks out of yourskin. Suddenly everything goes black. The paragraph above describes the sceneof what happened at Chernobyl nuclear plant a few years ago. From thattime until the present many other smaller accidents have happened. Fromthese accidents many people have died and millions have been indirectlyaffected. Nuclear energy has far to many negative problems than advantages. From the mining of uranium to disposal of nuclear waist there are problemsof such magnitude that no scientist on this earth has an answer for. Nuclearenergy has so many problems associated to it that it should be banned fromthe earth. To understand the threat of nuclear energywe must first understand what happens in a nuclear reaction. Ann E. Weiss,who has written several books on the subject of nuclear energy, describedwhat happens inside a nuclear power plant. In a nuclear reaction the nucleiof its atoms split, producing energy in the form of heat. The heat makessteam which powers a turbine. Fission takes place in a nuclear reactor. The fuel used is pellets of uranium. In a modern reactor, half-inch longpellets of uranium are packed into 12 or 14 foot tubes made of an alloyof the metal zirconium. About 50,000 zircalloy fuel rods make up the reactioncore. To control a nuclear reaction control rods made of cadmium is usedwhich absorbs neutrons. With the control rods in place in the core, a chainreaction cannot begin. When the plant operators want to start the chainreaction they activate machinery that pulls the control rods away fromthe core. Once this is done a single free neutron is enough to set offthe reaction. As the reaction continues, a moderator slows the neutronsdown enough to ensure that they will continually split more uranium atoms. At the same time, the moderator acts as a coolant. It keep the overalltemperature about 300 degrees Celsius. Since the temperature at spots insidethe fuel rods may be as high as 1,100 degrees Celsius, enormous amountsof coolant are continually needed to keep the core temperature at the properlevel. When the plant must be must be shut down the control rods are loweredall the way back into the core. That brings the chain reaction to a standstill. The core cools, and steam is no longer produced (23-24). In all nuclearreactions use uranium and produce some plutonium. Since nuclear reactions produce a considerableamount of plutonium there are considerable hazards that come along withit. Nader and Abbotts, two men who have a great amount of experience inthe nuclear industry, comment that:Plutoniums major dangers include the factthat it is weapons-grade material, that it is highly toxic, and it is extremelylong-lasting: it will take 24,000 years for half of it to decay. In additionto the possibility that plutonium could contaminate the environment orthe population in an accident, there is also the danger that a terroristgroup could steal plutonium for the purposes of fashioning an illicit nuclearweapon. (63)Plutonium-239 is a man-made reactor by-productwhich emits highly energetic alpha particles. Even though alpha particlescan be stopped by a piece of paper that can be very dangerous to tissueif they are taken into the body by ingestion or inhalation. Expressingextreme concern over the issue of plutonium getting into the human bodyNader and Abbotts write:Experiments with dogs show that the inhalationof as little as three millionths of a gram of Pu-239 can cause lung cancer. John Gofman has reported that plutonium and other alpha-emitters, suchas curium and americium , when ina form that cannot readily be dissolved by body fluids, represent an inhalationhazard in a class some five orders of magnitude more potent,weight for weight, than potent chemical carcinogens. The fact that plutoniumhas a very long half-life, 24,000 years, makes it one of the deadliestelements known and one of the most difficult to manage. (78)The reason why plutonium is so dangerouswhen it gets into the lungs is because plutonium releases radiation toa small mass of the lung at a very short distance. This effect of radiationfrom plutonium giving a concentrated dose to one small area is much greaterthan if the same amount of radiation had been uniformly distributed throughoutthe lung. Another problem with plutonium is its toxicity. Plutonium isthe most toxic of all elements. Fred H. Knelman, who was a senior executiveon the nuclear control panel in Washington D.C., wrote, One pound of plutonium-239,distributed to the lungs of a large population, could cause between tenand fifteen million lung-cancer deaths (32). The Geology of The Massif Montgris EssayIn Grand Junction, five thousand houses, a school, a church, a supermarket,and a hospital were built on tailings, thus creating situations where peoplelive and work in buildings emitting radioactivity. (81)In towns that have been built on mill tailingsthere is a great increase in health related costs because of an increasein cancers and radiation induced diseases. Corinne Browne and Robert Munroego comment on the effects of living in an environment that has radiation. In the early 1970s, a pediatrician in GrandJunction noticed an abnormally large number of children being born withcleft lips and cleft palates. A study showed that there was a far higherincidence of leukemia, hydroencephalitis, and subtle birth defects in theGrand Junction area than in surrounding counties. (81)A person could then conclude that the nuclearindustry is mostly to blame for the nation wide increase of cancers anddeaths. Is the nuclear industry really benefitting the nation or is itjust making the world into a radioactive dump which takes thousands ofyears to clean up?One last major problem with nuclear energythat needs to be touched on is the storage of nuclear waste. Nuclear wasteincludes all contaminated parts that have had contact with any source ofnuclear energy and all products of a nuclear reaction that was discussedat the beginning of the paper. There are several problems that relate tothe storage of nuclear energy. At a nuclear storage facility, there aresecurity officers, technicians, scientists, and regular staff which makesure the facility is safe. In the paper, Uranium: Its Uses and Hazards,it states the half-life of some radioactive isotopes. Uranium-238 whichhas a half-life of 4.46 billion years and that uranium-235 which has ahalf-life of 704 million years represent most of nuclear waste stored atnuclear waist facilities. (1) This means that people will have to be monitoringthese facilities for about ten billion years. Fred H. Knelman is very concernedabout the time and man power required to run these storage facilities. Knelman wrote :There must always be intelligent peoplearound to cope with eventualities we have not thought of.Reactor safety,waste disposal, and the transport of radioactive materials are complexmatters about which little can be said with absolute certainty. Is mankindprepared to exert the eternal vigilance needed to ensure proper and safeoperation of its nuclear system? (39)The searching for proper storage facilitiesand places has always been one of the top priorities of the nuclear industry. The problem is that no one wants a nuclear waste facility in there backyard. Literally billions of dollars has been spent just on looking forplaces to store nuclear waste. Nuclear energy has many short term benefitsbut many more short term and long term problems. If anyone of the lethalpotential problems develop and get out of control than the world is inserious trouble. Can the world afford to be dancing with death? Just thinkif a nuclear plant exploded because of a terrorist attack how our liveswould be changed forever. Are we unselfish enough live without a few comfortsnow so that our children can have a brighter future? A nuclear disasteris the worst thing that can happen to this planet because it threatensthe whole future of the human race. Nuclear energy is not worth the risk. The problem of nuclear energy such as terrorism, plutonium production,uranium mill tailings, and waste storage problems make nuclear energy toorisky for humans to even experiment with. Nuclear energy holds our futurein a tight grip so we must do something about it. Works CitedCorinne Brown, and Robert Munroe. TimeBomb, Understanding the Treat of Nuclear Power. New York: William Morrow Company, Inc, 1981Knelman, Fred H. Nuclear Energy The UnforgivingTechnology. Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1976. Mitchell, Christopher K. Nuclear Terrorism.14 Nov. 1996 Available : http://www.nucl.com/terror.html. Nuclear Waste: The Big Picture. 10 Nov. 1996. Available: http://www.sfo.com/~rherried/waste.html. Portzline, Scott D. Nuclear Terrorism.10 Nov. 1996. Available: http://www.nci.com/terrorism.html. Ralph Nader, and John Abbotts. The Menaceof Atomic Energy. New York: W.W. Norton Company Inc, 1977. Silver, L. Ray. Fallout From Chernobyl. Toronto: Deneau Publishers Company LTD, 1987. The Problem. 10 Nov. 1996. Available:http://www.wideopen.igc.org/nci/prob.htm. Uranium: Its Uses and Hazards. 20 Nov. 1996. Available : http://www.ieer.org/ieer/fctsheet/uranium.html. Weiss, Ann E. The Nuclear Question. NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1981.