Heres a little discursive essay on nuclear power
...e uranium re-used. Small amounts of uranium can produce a lot of power. One tonne of uranium produces the same amount of energy as sixteen thousand tonnes of coal. In this country, nuclear power provides for 24.5% of all electricity produced and in doing so saves twenty million tonnes of coal per year. However, nuclear power is also very dangerous. It can be very difficult and extremely costly to keep a nuclear reactor running safely and if things do go wrong thousands of lives at can be put at risk. In the UK, the subsidies to nuclear power from 1990 to 1998 were more than ten billion pounds. On the twenty sixth of April 1986, it did go wrong. In a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, a fire broke out in one of the reactors and caused an explosion. The radioactive fallout contaminated the land for hundreds of miles around. It was estimated that three hundred thousand people died as a result of the accident and thousands more were contaminated. Hundreds of livestock on the British coast were contaminated and could not be sold. As a result most had to be slaughtered. The number of people contracting leukaemia is also higher for the areas surrounding nuclear power stations. One of the main costs of nuclear power is the disposal of radioactive waste. Used nuclear fuel looks and feels the same as when it was new: a hard ceramic pellet about the size of the tip of your little finger. After use it is simply too weak to power a nuclear reactor economically. It is less fissionable, that is, less capable of undergoing a nuclear chain reaction. But it is also more radioactive therefore more dangerous. The fuel rods – metal tubes in which uranium pellets are inserted when they are manufactured – help to contain this radiation. The rods are grouped into bundles to create fuel assemblies, which are loaded into the reactor. It is not the uranium but the magnesium casing which cause the most problems. It has to be kept in lead and concrete lined containers for hundreds of millions of years before it is safe to be around without being contaminated. There is however another alternative, renewable ...