Nuclear Power
So what is Nuclear power? Well, Uranium was an element discovered in the 18th century in trace quantities, and in 1938 German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann demonstrated that Uranium could be split into parts to yield energy. Calder hall in Cumbria was the first nuclear power station in the world to produce electricity. The power station was opened in 1956. World wide, there have been some serious accidents at nuclear power plants. The most well known incident happened in 1986, when a reactor exploded in Chernobyl, Ukraine. This incident released radioactive gases and fluids into the atmosphere. The effect was so dangerous, that just fewer than 16 million people are still affected by the radiation today, and 20 square miles of land is now uninhabitable around the site because of the radiation from that fateful day.
The energy produced by the splitting of the Uranium nucleus in the power plant is used as a heat source. This turns the water into steam, which then forces a turbine to spin. This same turbine is connected to a generator, and as the turbine spins, a generator spins at the same time, producing electricity. The reactor itself is sealed inside thick concrete and steel walls to prevent radiation escaping from the power plant.
Our Prime Minister, Mr Blair, said that the country could not rely on one new energy source to meet the coming energy gap, pointing out that renewable energy (such as solar and wind power) had technical problems.
By 2025, if the current policy is unchanged there will be a dramatic gap in our targets to reduce CO2 emissions. Furthermore, we will become heavily dependant on gas and at the same time move from being 80% to 90% self-reliant in gas to 80% to 90% dependent on foreign imports, mostly from the Middle East, Africa and Russia.
So why are we thinking about having more reactors? Mr Blair has been heavily influenced by the government chief scientist, Sir David King, who believes nuclear power in the future could provide 40% of electricity supply, double the current figure.
Speaking to Dr Peter Howarth from Loughborough University, any sites for potential new nuclear reactors would probably be more acceptable to a greater number of people if they were situated away from urban areas, but this would cause other potential problems such as access by emergency services
Good Points
Radioactive material produces more energy than the equivalent amount of fossil fuel. An example of this efficiency is: one nuclear fuel pellet about two centimetres long produces the same amount of electricity as one and a half tonnes of coal.
Bad Points
Waste from the power plant is toxic for many centuries and there is no safe way of storing it permanently, or disposing of it (associated decay products such as Thorium-230 and Radium-226 are known to remain hazardous for thousands of years). Transporting nuclear fuel can also be extremely risky (either from an accident or an act of terrorism, which was exposed by the Daily Mirror’s Tom Parry in which he planted a fake bomb on a train carrying radioactive waste). In addition, power plants that are not constructed or maintained properly can create major disasters, for instance Chernobyl.
There are many alternative energy sources to nuclear power that will not emit as many greenhouse gasses, and some of them would not even give off greenhouse gasses. These alternatives are, wind power, solar sower, geothermal energy, and water.
Wind power is when you use the wind to create electricity, by turning wind turbines, that are found on wind farms, the spinning of the turbines powers the generator, and allows it to create energy.
Solar sower is when you have solar panels. The solar panels absorb the light from the sun, and this brings power to where ever they are, through wires. The solar panels have a generator inside, but un-like wind power, the generator is powered by light and not a turbine.
Water does not actually produce energy. The way energy is abstracted from the water by a big wooden wheel that is turned by the current in the water. The water wheel is a turbine that is connected to a generator by steel poles on one side of the wheel that act like a piston. The poles that are connected to each other in the middle. When the wheel turns it causes the poles to move in and out of the joint in the middle, and the generator spins.
Geothermal energy is from two Greek words, geo which means earth, and thermal which means heat. So geothermal actually means earth heat. In Iceland, only three geothermal power plants produce 17% of all Iceland’s electricity. In New Zealand, only five geothermal power plants produce 18% of all electricity.
So, in cocnclusion, having looked into nuclear power and the alternative sources (renewable energy) available, I personally feel that the renewable energy is the best alternative, because, eventually if you carry on using nuclear energy, the country would probably run out of space to store nuclear waste safely. Also nuclear energy would run out, and renewable energy will all ways be around.
