Benefit Of Nuclear Energy - Free Essay Example

I dont know why nuclear energy has a bad rap, mainly it is because there are misconceptions about the safety of it and when people are uneducated they tend to fight against what is actually very beneficial. Nuclear energy is energy that is released either by splitting atomic nuclei or by forcing the nuclei of atoms together. Nuclear energy comes from mass-to-energy transitions that occur during atom splitting. This explains the well-known mathematical formula of Albert Einstein E = mc2. The equation says: E [energy] is equal to m [mass] times c2 [c denotes the speed of light]. This means that the mass is multiplied by the square of the speed of light. Nuclear energy is produced by a controlled nuclear chain reaction and creates heat†which is used to boil water, produce steam, and drive a steam turbine. power plants actually produce less green-house gasses than other energy sources.   Nuclear energy has led us, and the United States   to have become a major superpower in the world. The average global efficiency of nuclear power is 92%. Throughout the history of nuclear power, there were only three major natural disasters Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Over the past 25 years there have been more than 10 large disasters with fossil fuel energy the largest of them reset the BP oil. Nuclear power can come from the fission of uranium, plutonium or thorium or the fusion of hydrogen into helium. Today it is almost all uranium. The basic energy fact is that the fission of an atom of uranium produces 10 million times the energy produced by the combustion of an atom of carbon from coal. So, the real question is why arent we using it more? Its because there are misconceptions about the safety of it and when people are uneducated they tend to fight against what is actually very beneficial. Nuclear energy is energy that is released either by splitting atomic nuclei or by forcing the nuclei of atoms together. Nuclear energy is produced by a controlled nuclear chain reaction and creates heat†which is used to boil water, produce steam, and drive a steam turbine. Nuclear power can come from the fission of uranium, plutonium or thorium or the fusion of hydrogen into helium. Today it is almost all uranium. The basic energy fact is that the fission of an atom of uranium produces 10 million times the energy produced by the combustion of an atom of carbon from coal. Nuclear power plants need less fuel than ones which burn fossil fuels. One ton of uranium produces more energy than is produced by several million tons of coal or several million barrels   So all that we have to decide is what do we want more energy efficiency with minimal risks   or use of   other energy sources that are less efficient like coal or solar.Nuclear power plants can generate up to a million times more energy than coal, of oil. In France, nuclear power is the most widespread, supplying 80 percent of the countrys electricity.   By this we can see that nuclear power is beneficial. A protest movement exists, called Sortir du Nucleaire, or Get Out of Nuclear, but it appears to have made little headway. Nuclear energy was first discovered accidentally by French physicist Henri Becquerel in 1896, when he found that photographic plates stored in the dark near uranium were blackened like X-ray plates, which had been just recently discovered at the time. As of 2004, nuclear power provided 6.5% of the worlds energy and 15.7% of the worlds electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for 57% of nuclear generated electricity. Nuclear energy (nuclear power) accounts for about 19 percent of the total electricity generated in the United States, an amount comparable to all the electricity used in California, Texas and New York, three most populous states. There are 104 commercial nuclear generating units that are fully licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to operate in the United States. Of these 104 reactors, 69 are categorized a pressurized water reactors (PWRs) totaling 65,100 net megawatts (electric) and 35 units are boiling water reactors (BWR) totaling 32,300 net megawatts (electric). On June 27, 1954, the USSRs Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant became the worlds first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid, and produced around 5 megawatts electric power. Russia has begun building floating nuclear power plants. The 100 million ($204.9 million, 2 billion  ±) vessel, the Lomonosov, to be completed in 2010, is the first of seven plants that Moscow says will bring vital energy resources to remote Russian regions. The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is used to communicate the severity of nuclear accidents on a scale of 0 to 7. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Ukraine) was the worst nuclear accident in history and is the only event to receive an INES score of 7. Nuclear energy is released by three exothermic processes:   Radioactive decay, where a proton or neutron in the radioactive nucleus decays spontaneously by emitting a particle Fusion, two atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus Fission, the breaking of heavy nucleus into two nuclei. The sun uses nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. This gives off heat and light and other radiation. Nuclear energy is really making a comeback because nuclear energy has virtually none greenhouse gases emission and therefore isnt warming the planet and causing global warming like some other energy sources. Although, i do see the point of the other side when they say that it is hard to dispose of the waste is a problem because you have to deal with the problem of the waste, but with proper regulation of it the benefits out way any negative effects