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The Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Power Plants

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Nuclear energy is the energy released during nuclear fission or fusion, especially when used to generate electricity. In order for humans to obtain this energy, they must build nuclear power plants. These plants are very costly: “Life cycle costs for nuclear power generation (in the USA) have been estimated at 12 cents a kilowatt hour, whereas life cycle costs for wind power in the same analysis is estimated at 4 cents a kilowatt hour” (Olson 2). Not only do nuclear power plants cost a lot of money to make and run, they also take up a lot of space. In nuclear power plants there are machines called nuclear reactors. This is where elements undergo fission. In nuclear reactors, certain changes happen, and the particles that are left over from these changes are very radioactive. This causes great danger to humans because certain radiation can penetrate the skin and damage living cells, possibly causing them to become cancerous which leads to serious health problems. Excessive radiation is not only harmful to humans, it also affects animals and the environment. Too much radiation is very harmful and can kill several different kinds …show more content…

The TED video stated, “ If we build these nuclear power plants, all that waste is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks and trains, moving through the country everyday. They are going to have accidents that can put materials into the environment that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years. Those trucks and trailers are also a potential terrorist target” (TED Talk). Accidents will always happen and if, and when, nuclear waste accidents occur, they could be devastating. They would release an amount of radiation into the air that is harmful for humans, animals, and the environment. Also, these trucks carrying harmful amounts of radiation can put a major target on our country concerning

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Over 20 percent of the energy in the United States comes from nuclear energy power plants. (Rinkesh, 2018) They so their best to get as much energy to the country as possible, but there are those out there who don’t agree with them. While there are downsides to nuclear energy, the pros vastly outweigh the cons. Nuclear power plants are a great way to get energy because they don’t let out much pollution, are very efficient, and are very safe.

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Nuclear power is when you use a nuclear reaction to create nuclear energy to generate heat. That heat is then use to create steam the steam spins a turbine to generate and harness the energy. The reaction happens very fast and can be hard to control if not properly prepared. I will talk about the many pros and cons of nuclear power and what happens when one melts down. The origin of nuclear power was in 1934.

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Nuclear Power Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and most cost effective form of producing energy. Around fourteen percent of the world’s electricity is powered by nuclear energy. During the 1950s the idea of nuclear power was to generate power for very cheap. At the time, President Eisenhower announced nuclear power’s birth during his “Atoms for Peace” speech in 1953. After that, the first nuclear reactor came online in 1957 and a quite of few more came along as well.

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All of the options for handling nuclear waste have potentially large environmental and health impacts. Waste disposal sites have the potential to contaminate the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. The impacts of a chosen method of waste management should be highly

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There are two main dangers: the risk of nuclear warfare and the nuclear disasters. If one thinks about Chernobyl, it is easy to understand why people are worried about nuclear power, as it can cause major suffering. There are, however, two good reasons for believing that nuclear technology is generally advantageous. The first of these is that there has not been

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It can be used to help diagnose and kill cancerous tissue, reduce pain, and reduce the size of tumors. Also, the radioactive material can be used to kill germs and prevent the spread of disease.” Because radioactive material has such a great impact on the medical field, having a nuclear power plant in the state would allow for a better treatment of germs and disease. Patients can be diagnosed with cancer in an early stage and can use radioactive material to help kill the cancerous tissue. According to “Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons,” “nuclear energy is a cheap source of energy.”

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Nuclear power comes from using enriched uranium fuel rods for reactions in the reactor core to generate electricity from steam-powered turbines (Endres, 2009). Unfortunately, this produces non-biodegradable waste which emit harmful radiation over their half-lives that can last thousands of years ("Dangers and Effects of Nuclear Waste Disposal",n.d.). Due to its hazardous nature, the only options to handle the waste is to either store it in casks at the plants in the short-term before relocating them to underground repositories for the long-term, or reprocess the waste to gain useful fuel back ("Nuclear Waste",n.d.). Unfortunately, reprocessing adds more waste than useful reclamation, so storage is the only option ("Nuclear Waste",n.d.). Building

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Nuclear Power is the use of nuclear reactions that release nuclear energy to generate heat. It is produced by an atomic reaction, capable of producing an alternative source of electrical power to that supplied by coal, gas, or oil. A nuclear reactor creates energy through a chain reaction that splits a uranium nucleus, releasing energy in the form of heat. Fast breeder reactors, which use plutonium as fuel, generate more energy than they expend. Plutonium is not a natural element.

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Producing nuclear energy is not only relatively expensive in regards to the environmental, social and economic costs, but also

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Developments in technology provide many different innovations for our lives day by day and these developments make human beings’ life easier. The usage of atomic nucleus in order to generate electrical energy is one of the biggest developments and innovations in engineering field and science. This advancement changed the perspective of scientists and gave them another point of view about generating electrical energy by using a new and unusual way. Thereby, the usage of new technology with atomic nucleus in generating energy brought many debates and different questions along with it. This study claims that although it is a generally accepted fact that nuclear power plants and nuclear energy have some bad impacts on the nature and human beings as they can harm people, plants and animals, nuclear wastes and radiation leakage are dangerous, they have numerous beneficial effects like being a big energy resource and an important political prestige for a country and reducing the dependency on fossil fuels as well.

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Lastly, nuclear power is a very viable source of alternative energy because it’s much more affordable then fossil fuels. A big problem with power in our time is that it is very expensive. With nuclear power we can get more energy out of fewer materials which will in turn save money. Douglas Gregory states, “One uranium fuel pellet – typically measuring about 0.3-inch diameter by 0.5-inch long—can produce the equivalent energy of 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 1,780 pounds of coal, or 149 gallons of oil.” (The Use of Nuclear Power Should Be Increased).

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Nuclear plants are too expensive to build. Mostly every nuclear plant is usually behind schedule and at least $1 billion over budget. This is before we take into account the cleanup and health costs, caused by waste, pollution, and meltdowns. In 1954, Lewis Strauss promised that nuclear power plants would one day provide energy “too cheap to meter”. Years later nuclear power plants still remain very expensive.

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The Chernobyl incident was in 1986 and a lot has changed both safety wise and technologically and now plants are much less likely to melt down. Evidence of over 6 decades of using nuclear power has shown that it is a safe way of creating electricity there has only been 3 incidents in the history of nuclear power that have shown that it may be unsafe to use, in the case of storing nuclear waste new method of storing the waste such as covering the waste and storing it underground in areas that are not seismically active are making the changes of leakage much lower also new methods of recycling the waste and using it again in the fission process are starting to be

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Nuclear energy may be the solution that eliminates our concern for energy production in the future, but it still remains a huge issue for the environment. Despite its wide use in many developed countries, nuclear energy poses many threats to both the

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Nuclear energy is something that we`ve all heard about. It carries risk and potential. When an atom (Uranium and Plutonium in nuclear power plants) is bombarded by neutrons, it can be split, causing fission. This fission releases more neutrons, which causes a chain reaction. Nuclear power plants use this use the heat that is created by fission to heat water that spins their turbines (“Nuclear Energy”).

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