Nowadays, our world is pondering about how we are going to generate electricity and get energy in general, in the future. As we are running out of resources, people are more and more concerned about it. A good temporary solution to the problem was to use Uranium to power nuclear power plants to generate electricity. About 20% of USA’s electricity is generated by nuclear power and even 77% in France (“Nuclear Power”). In this essay I will discuss whether Uranium has helped solve our world’s energy crisis or not quite. Uranium is the “fuel” of nuclear power stations. What happens inside the power station is a process called Nuclear Fission. Nuclear fission is a type of reaction where a neutron is shot at an atomic nucleus to cause the nucleus to split into two separate nuclei. In this case, Uranium’s …show more content…
By having Nuclear power plants, we risk having serious nuclear accidents, which may lead to fatalities and many people having to evacuate the area. An example of this is the incident of Chernobyl that occurred on the 26th of April 1986. What happened was the crew was going to test if the turbines in the power plant could produce enough energy to keep the coolant pumps running in case of the event of a loss of power, until the emergency diesel generator activates and substitutes. (“What happened in Chernobyl”). Due to this, 56 people were killed directly by the explosion and 4,000 – 985,000 by cancer and radiation poisoning (“Nuclear and Radiation accidents”). Another disadvantage is that Uranium is not renewable and has to be mined. This is a problem because Uranium ore emits Radon gas, which does occasionally cause lung cancer as it is mined with a method called open pit mining (“Uranium Mining”). Nuclear power plants also produce radioactive waste, which must be stored by disposal facilities for a period of time until it is no longer threatening (“Radioactive