It's common to think that nuclear energy is one of the cheapest energy sources available. This is the biggest lie ever, in fact if you count what it takes to produce 1 kW of electricity, it's not cheap at all. I won't go very deep into the price details for now. I only want you to consider what is needed to produce electricity from this source.
First of all we need a power plant. There are actually several classifications for power plants that exploit nuclear energy, depending on the type of reactor they use, but to make things easy we'll classify them by generations. Five are the generations of reactors, the fourth of which is still under development and the fifth has been considered only theoretically. Nuclear power plants, apart from the generation of the reactor they use, are one of the most sophisticated, dangerous and complex energy systems ever designed to boil water to generate electricity. Several are the security systems and extensive backups used in a nuclear power plant to avoid accidents (I'm only talking about the reactor itself now) and each reactor needs about a thousand people to make it work smoothly. As you know, big and complicated things that require a lot of specialized personnel are also very expensive to maintain. Do you think that the construction of such a structure is cheap? No, it's not. Building and running a nuclear power plant is not cheap at all. So, how is it possible to consider the energy it produces the cheapest? And, what about the fuel?
Yes, exactly, what about the fuel? Obviously the fuel needed to activate a reactor is not found at the supermarket round the corner. Once found, it's not ready to be used yet, needs some special (meaning EXPENSIVE) treatment and after use becomes waste. And what a waste! Unlike a banana skin which is depleted in a very short time without leaving any danger into the environment, the waste of a reactor is dangerous for more than a hundred years to come if we are talking about low level waste and more than a thousand if it's high level waste. Yes, you are right, this means more money to spend trying to hide this waste in some secure place in order not to poison us in any way, hopefully! How possibly may it be cheap and safe as someone dare say?
Exploiting nuclear energy for electricity purposes is a very dangerous choice that accident after accident, disaster after disaster, has demonstrated not only its inconvenience but also its uselessness.
Of course we are aware of a really small percentage of nuclear accidents and that's why we all think it's the safest resource, but let me tell you that in the past 50 years countless accidents have occurred all across the world killing, poisoning and damaging people as well as the environment. You don't have to take my word as it is, just put in the search box of your favorite browser some keywords such as "nuclear accidents", "civilian nuclear accidents" or "nuclear disasters" and you'll be shocked of what will come out. It's very interesting to see that only in the past 20 years most of the accidents have occurred in Europe and in the States.
If after this you still think that this is safe and cheap energy you should start questioning yourself about many things in life.
Author: Sam Deias
About the author:
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Sam Deias is an educator, expert and researcher in the electric energy field, passionate for life,
nature and technology, especially focused on improving methods.
Article source: Free Education Articles.
