The Three Mile Island meltdown took place in Dauphin County Pennsylvania near Harrisburg. Lucky there were not any radioactive deaths due to the meltdown but 100,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes. The meltdown registered as a 7 on the INES scale which is the worst meltdown you could have. This led to three cores of the system melting within three days, releasing high amounts of radioactive material. Following a large Earth quake in East Japan that registered as a 9.0 which then caused a tsunami that disabled the power supply and the cooling system of the Fukushima system. The Fukushima meltdown was one of the worst in history.
There has been a number of nuclear meltdowns in the past including the Three Mile Island incident in the United States and the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in 2011. A nuclear meltdown is a severe nuclear reactor accident that occurs when the core of the nuclear reactor gets damaged from overheating. Here is an image of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.Īnother major problem with nuclear power plants is a nuclear meltdown.
Estimations say we have enough Uranium for another 70-80 years so we can’t rely on nuclear fission forever. Also, nuclear fission is not a renewable source of energy because we only have so much uranium and radioactive material on Earth. There hasn’t been a good solution as what to do with the byproduct, it can’t just be taken to the landfill. One of the biggest problems and controversies with fission power plants is the radioactive by product.
It is also important to be very careful while transporting such materials because of the threat to the environment. It is important to be very careful with these materials because they can contaminate streams and lead to serious health hazards. While mining radioactive ores people are exposed to naturally occurring radioactive materials also referred to as NORMs. Nuclear fission power plants have many negatives for starters the mining of radioactive material is not the cleanest process. This diagram shows the different parts to the nuclear power plant. Fission power plants come with many benefits unfortunately it has its negatives too. Nuclear power plants are also much more proficient than fossil fuels in that their fuel has a much higher energy density suppling ten million times greater energy than a fossil fuel atom releases. It is also very reliable producing a constant stream of uninterrupted energy and can run in any climate condition compared to renewable energy sources such as wind turbines that can only produce energy when there is wind. A nuclear reactor lasts about 40 to 60 years and the cost of uranium is relatively cheap. The next benefit is that nuclear power plants are somewhat expensive to set up but don’t cost very much to run. Unlike coal fired power plants and natural gas power plants that give off greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, nuclear fusion doesn’t give off any. First of all, nuclear power plants don’t discharge any gasses avoiding pollution. There are many benefits that come with nuclear fission power plants. Here is a diagram showing how fission works. There are sixty-one commercially operating nuclear power plants in the United States. The energy is released from rods as heat makes steam which is then used to make electricity by spinning a turbine similar to a traditional power plant. Today over 11% of the worlds electricity is produced from nuclear fission which is produced in a nuclear reactor that contains radioactive material, usually uranium, plutonium, thorium, or protactinium, which are heated up at an extremely high temperature and placed into water. Currently there is no such thing as a nuclear fusion power plant but many scientists and engineers are working on creating one however that’s a discussion for another time. Nuclear energy power plants are fission power plants, meaning a fissionreaction is happening to which a heavy unstable nucleus is split into smaller nuclei compared to nuclear fusion which is when two light nuclei combine together to release energy. Nuclear Energy is a newer form of energy supply and one of the most controversial forms of energy.
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