Critical Analysis of Nuclear Power

Critical Analysis of Nuclear Power

Nuclear as the Alternative

Whether at home, work, school, vacation, or anywhere in the world, you are using energy.   Energy most commonly comes from sources categorized as fossil fuels, such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Coal burning power plants produce the majority of electricity used in homes and businesses.   Cars run on petroleum derivatives, and some of the local busses run off of clean natural gas.   When the fossil fuel supplies are depleted many things will cease to operate.   Due to this eminent truth, alternative energy sources will need to be used in order to make up for the cavity that fossil fuels will leave.   Nuclear power generation is a feasible source of energy that will play a vital role in the world’s future.
Nuclear power can be broken down into two different categories, fission and fusion; fission is the method controllable by today’s technological standards.   It is a power source that is efficient, powerful, atmospherically clean, widely useable, and cost effective. The United States and many other parts of the world could be powered through the future with the use of nuclear power.
Reactors are used to control the nuclear fission reaction.   Heat gets generated within the reactor core, creating steam and spinning the turbine.   Spinning the turbine for days requires very little nuclear material as opposed to the thousands of windmills or solar panels that would be needed to generate an equivalent amount of energy.   Fields spanning tens of acres would be required to construct the number of windmills to match the productivity of one nuclear power plant.   These windmills would then only be exposed to enough wind to spin a turbine fifty percent of the time, with the same percentage applying to solar panels in regards to sun exposure.   Therefore, while wind and solar energy are renewable resources that can be used to generate electricity on a small scale, they are not efficient for wide use.
An extremely powerful reaction known as...