Thursday, November 12, 2015

What I know about Nuclear Energy

-Nuclear Fission is where an atom, typically a heavy and unstable atom splits itself into two smaller atoms.

-Nuclear Fusion in the other hand is the opposite, where two light elements collides to form a heavier one.

-Nuclear Energy today is clean, meaning it does not produce any green house gases and therefore no Global Warming/Climate Change. However it does have its disadvantages such as producing indispensable nuclear waste and the threat that it may leak its radiation, impacting the surroundings and most importantly people’s health.

-Nuclear Radioactivity is deadly and if it happens, a whole city can become inhabitable by people, and people who used to live there will suffer from unpredictable disease due to the random mutation that happens in their cells when exposed to this radiation. Great examples of past nuclear disasters include the Chernobyl nuclear incident and the Fukushima incident that had happened recently.

-Nuclear Fusion is almost entirely clean, definitely significantly cleaner than nuclear energy today, since nuclear fusion fuses two light elements such as Hydrogen, it is mostly harmless and if leaked, not much of damage would be done, and speaking of which the byproduct of this reaction will form Helium, which is actually a useful gas, and having a great way to make Helium is like hitting two birds with one stone, creating energy and helium in the process.

-Nuclear fusion also is more stable, so people around them can be assured that they will be safe, and therefore making the cost of the construction of these fusion reactors less expensive, due to the unneeded extra protection.


-Nuclear Fusion is hard to achieve however, and requires the atoms to travel at immensely high speeds and colliding them perfectly, this is the reason we haven’t find any practical use of fusion reactors yet unless we don’t need to control their reaction, in this case we’ll just be making a fusion bomb. While nuclear fission only requires that the heavy atom (Uranium) is agitated with a neutron, which is much simpler as the uranium atom is unstable and will split easily.

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