Nuclear energy is the American’s largest source of clean electricity, which is affordable and reliable. Nuclear power plants produce nearly 20% of U. S. electricity. No other source of electricity can provide the combined benefits of nuclear energy: Large amounts of reliable and affordable electricity, long-term stability and green house gas emissions.
In my point of view, we shouldn’t get rid of the Nuclear Power plants. Because it’s already become a very important part of our energy life.
Here are what I learnt from my research of this topic:
1.Nuclear Power plants produce tremendous energy supply with clean-air benefit better than the new tech like solar energy, etc.
2.Nuclear Power plants is the lowest-cost producer of busload electricity.
3.Nuclear Power plants have low-level waste.
What do you guys think of these nuclear power plants?
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
theres have been debates whether or not to continue nuclear energy.
R&D too, for spent fuel reuse! http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-02/video-bill-gates-agrees-obama-we-need-nukes
I actually wrote an English paper on nuclear energy and found out that the mining and transporting required for nuclear energy is worse than the mining and transporting required for coal based energy. I was actually pretty shocked. Also, it takes around 5-6 years to build just one plant….imagine all the energy needed for that. With the energy needed to build these plants, it really doesn’t make up for how “clean” it is. I could give you a source for which I found that, but it’s on JSTOR and you either need an account with JSTOR. If you go to school (a uni. would probably have this), you can go to your library on your schools page and they might have “research help” or something along those lines. If they have it, they may have JSTOR on there and you just enter your library card info. If you happen to gain access to it, look up “nuclear energy” and there will be a whole article on why it isn’t so good. I forgot its’ title though.
Also, if one of those plants were to explode (take Japan for example), we would be in a really bad condition. Nuclear energy can cause a lot of cancer, so I would prefer not to have it. I personally rather go with solar energy…..
A lot of people aren’t going to agree probably, but that’s just my 2 cents.
I suggest reading: “Nuclear Power is not the answer.” – by Dr. Helen Caldicott. Big energy cartels (who are a very powerful lobby machine) manipulate the facts regarding the dangers of nuclear energy.. the expense of building nuclear power plants (which can not be insured by conventional means therefore the insurance policy = the taxpayer).. the true expense of milling and mining the uranium.. the storage of depleted uranium (which in many cases is discarded and introduced into U.S military munitions which is used mainly overseas) and the dangers it causes to the enviroment (especially the water table).. and of course the blatantly obvious.. the danger of complete meltdown and the longterm health consequences it may cause to human health (especially children).. we need to stop believing in lies of big energy and move into alternative (true energy) solar, charged cluster, perm magnets, 0 point energy, hydrogen fuel cells. hope this helps.
I am completly against them!
there are better and safer ways to get power.
It is true nuclear power cam make lots of power. But it is not today American’s largest source of electricity. It is France’s largest source of electricity, but not America’s.
You are wrong about #2. Nuclear power is not cheap. It is one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation. In the 1950s and 1960s some people claimed it would be cheap, but they were wrong as we now know. The lowest cost electricity is hydroelectric generators at large dams.
The opposition to them is that they produce high level waste. By that I mean highly radioactive waste. So your #3 is also wrong. And it is #2 that most of the opposition to nuclear power talks about.
Personally I think the waste problem can be handled by vitrifying it into a safe form that won’t pollute ground water and stored (not buried) under ground, but the people against nuclear power will never allow it to be done.
I am assuming you are still in school???
Report card is a good choice, but you have to find out what they actually want.
If you out of school, and on your own, any utility bill will work.
You have to ask what is acceptable
For many the mere mention of anything nuclear is enought to convert them into illogical misguided missiles (no pun intended).
If we want the power to stay on then in the short/medium term at least there is no option. There are so many huge vested interests now in so-called ‘green’ energy that they simply cannot be seen as altruistic saviours of mankind. Without the huge subsidies nobody in his right mind would build a windfarm. Nor solar or hydro: they are all so woefully inefficient and expensive. Here in the UK our electricity bills are going up by over 40percent to subsidise this madness. The tide is turning though as more people realise what a scam it all is.
You still need your conventional power stations to run – constatnly- for when the wind drops. And that is going to be all the time during really cold spells. What then? We had to import nuclear power from France last December.
I have noticed some people contradicting your points and so I felt the need to reply.
To those who complain about uranium mining, I really don’t know what metric is being used to say that it is worse than coal, but that is not true. The danger in a uranium mine is the radon gas, but that can be dealt with using using breathing apparatus. The other complaint about is that it produce large volumes of radioactive waste. How does something you dig out of the ground magically become nuclear waste. The ore that is removed from the ground is stripped of most of its uranium and is thus less radioactive than it was before it was extracted. It seems to me more like you are cleaning up a mess than making one.
Those who are proclaiming renewables like solar and wind to replace nuclear must not pay their own utilities. Utility companies are incorporating renewables to meet federal regulations. Some of those companies offer a ‘green energy’ option if you want your energy to come from wind or solar. Usually what that means is a 10% higher electric bill, at least.
The problem with insuring nuclear plants is that there are so few of them. Imagine insuring a car if there were only 100 of them on the road. If everyone has to have $ 1 million of insurance (a reasonable amount if you include property damage and medical coverage) then 1 accident means that the other 99 car owners would have to pay $ 10,000 each. No one would be able to afford cars if they had to pay out this much each time someone had an accident. It doesn’t reflect poorly on the cars safety (we all drive cars) it just reflects the economics of having a small number of insured people.
The issue of waste is one that I am most familiar with. The total volume of waste produced by nuclear power plants is minimal. If all the electricity you use for your entire life was produced by nuclear power the total amount of waste that you would be responsible for is equivalent to a pop can. The claim that we don’t know what to do with nuclear waste is completely wrong. We know of many ways to handle the waste that will insure public safety for millions of years. The only thing that we don’t know how to do is to get Congress to agree on one method.
Your list looks like a good start.
I think that so many people are against it simply because they don’t know what they are talking about. For instance, everybody says that nuclear energy is dangerous and that it will be the death of us all, but that’s not true. The byproducts from nuclear power plants is actually LESS radioactive than the byproducts from a coal burning power plant because uranium and thorium occur at natural, low-level, amounts in a piece of coal, but when you burn that coal, the fly ash has a mich, much higher concentration of uranium and thorium in it than before, making it about 10 times as radioactive as it was before the coal was burned. now, the difference between nuclear waste and coal waste is mainly in the disposal of it. The disposal of coal waste is that it is taken to a landfill and placed there, whereas nuclear waste (because its a higher concentration) gets properly disposed of. This process releases as much as 100x MORE radiation into the surrounding environment per plant than a nuclear power plant does.
Another thing is that everyone says that “things can always go wrong”, and do i need to remind everyone that chernobyl was caused when the graphite cores exploded and created what was essentially a dirty bomb? the fukoshima plant was not nearly as bad of an accident because of the fact that you did not have nuclear fuel rods being blown to pieces and scattered into the atmosphere around the plant. also, the fukoshima plant (which was made in the 1960′s and had, at least to today’s standards, inferior reactor shielding and back-up power generation) survived the 9.0 magnitude earthquake unscathed. It was not the earthquake that caused the problems, it was the tsunami that came after. and even then, those just flooded the generators and the reactors survived for 8 more hours before the melt-down began to occur.
Therefore, with all this information layed out before me, i am going to say that nuclear energy is a very, very safe form of energy.
P.S.: The chernobyl accident was caused when human error over-rode the emergency shut-down protocals and caused the reactor to overheat. Three-mile-island was caused because they did just about everything WRONG and caused a nuclear partial nuclear melt-down.