Nuclear Energy Term paper
While the free essays can give you inspiration for writing, they cannot be used 'as is' because they will not meet your assignment's requirements. If you are in a time crunch, then you need a custom written term paper on your subject (nuclear energy)
Here you can hire an independent writer/researcher to custom write you an authentic essay to your specifications that will pass any plagiarism test (e.g. Turnitin). Waste no more time!
You are watching the control panels and
gages for rector two. Sitting comely you think about how easy your job
is. It is a joke! All day you sit around and watch the gages for reactor
number two just to make sure they maintain their settings. You don't even
need to look at the gages either because a computer automatically regulates
them without you. Life is so good. Suddenly all the sirens go of and the
gages and displays spin wildly in every direction. The ground shakes and
you can hear the sound of a deep rumble. Unknown to you, the reactor's
cooling pumps have failed to cool the reactor's core and in 3 seconds the
temperature went from 280 degrees centigrade to 4,000 degrees centigrade.
The water that was in the reactor is instantly turned to steam which creates
tremendous amount of pressure in the reactor core. Above the reactor core
there is a 5 foot thick lead plate and above that there is a meter thick
floor composed of iron, barium, serpentine, concrete, and stone. The exploding
steam fires the floor up like shrapnel. The metal plate goes through the
four foot thick concrete roof like butter and reaches and altitude of sixty
meters. You can hear ripping, rending, wrenching, screeching, scraping,
tearing sounds of a vast machine breaking apart. L. Ray Silver, a leading
author who covered the disaster at Chernobyl, said that within the core,
steam reacts with zirconium to produce that first explosive in nature's
arsenal, hydrogen. Near-molten fuel fragments shatter nearly incandescent
graphite, torching chunks of it, exploding the hydrogen. The explosion
breaks every pipe in the building rocking it with such power that the building
is split into sections (11-13). You look down at your body and notice that
it feels hot and your hands look different. Unknown to you a tremendous
amount of neutrons are hitting your cells and taking chucks out of your
skin. Suddenly everything goes black.
The paragraph above describes the scene
of what happened at Chernobyl nuclear plant a few years ago. From that
time until the present many other smaller accidents have happened. From
these accidents many people have died and millions have been indirectly
affected. Nuclear energy has far to many negative problems than advantages.
From the mining of uranium to disposal of nuclear waist there are problems
of such magnitude that no scientist on this earth has an answer for. Nuclear
energy has so many problems associated to it that it should be banned from
the earth.
To understand the threat of nuclear energy
we must first understand what happens in a nuclear reaction. Ann E. Weiss,
who has written several books on the subject of nuclear energy, described
what happens inside a nuclear power plant. In a nuclear reaction the nuclei
of its atoms split, producing energy in the form of heat. The heat makes
steam which powers a turbine. Fission takes place in a nuclear reactor.
The fuel used is pellets of uranium. In a modern reactor, half-inch long
pellets of uranium are packed into 12 or 14 foot tubes made of an alloy
of the metal zirconium. About 50,000 zircalloy fuel rods make up the reaction
core. To control a nuclear reaction control rods made of cadmium is used
which absorbs neutrons. With the control rods in place in the core, a chain
reaction cannot begin. When the plant operators want to start the chain
reaction they activate machinery that pulls the control rods away from
the core. Once this is done a single free neutron is enough to set off
the reaction. As the reaction continues, a moderator slows the neutrons
down enough to ensure that they will continually split more uranium atoms.
At the same time, the moderator acts as a coolant. It keep the overall
temperature about 300 degrees Celsius. Since the temperature at spots inside
the fuel rods may be as high as 1,100 degrees Celsius, enormous amounts
of coolant are continually needed to keep the core temperature at the proper
level. When the plant must be must be shut down the control rods are lowered
all the way back into the core. That brings the chain reaction to a standstill.
The core cools, and steam is no longer produced (23-24). In all nuclear
reactions use uranium and produce some plutonium.
Since nuclear reactions produce a considerable
amount of plutonium there are considerable hazards that come along with
it. Nader and Abbotts, two men who have a great amount of experience in
the nuclear industry, comment that:
Plutonium's major dangers include the fact
that it is weapons-grade material, that it is highly toxic, and it is extremely
long-lasting: it will take 24,000 years for half of it to decay. In addition
to the possibility that plutonium could contaminate the environment or
the population in an accident, there is also the danger that a terrorist
group could steal plutonium for the purposes of fashioning an illicit nuclear
weapon. (63)
Plutonium-239 is a man-made reactor by-product
which emits highly energetic alpha particles. Even though alpha particles
can be stopped by a piece of paper that can be very dangerous to tissue
if they are taken into the body by ingestion or inhalation. Expressing
extreme concern over the issue of plutonium getting into the human body
Nader and Abbotts write:
Experiments with dogs show that the inhalation
of as little as three millionths of a gram of Pu-239 can cause lung cancer.
John Gofman has reported that plutonium and other alpha-emitters, such
as curium and americium [other products of a nuclear reaction], when in
a form that cannot readily be dissolved by body fluids, 'represent an inhalation
hazard in a class some five orders of magnitude [100,000 times] more potent,
weight for weight, than potent chemical carcinogens.' The fact that plutonium
has a very long half-life, 24,000 years, makes it one of the deadliest
elements known and one of the most difficult to manage. (78)
The reason why plutonium is so dangerous
when it gets into the lungs is because plutonium releases radiation to
a small mass of the lung at a very short distance. This effect of radiation
from plutonium giving a concentrated dose to one small area is much greater
than if the same amount of radiation had been uniformly distributed throughout
the lung. Another problem with plutonium is its toxicity. Plutonium is
the most toxic of all elements. Fred H. Knelman, who was a senior executive
on the nuclear control panel in Washington D.C., wrote, "One pound of plutonium-239,
distributed to the lungs of a large population, could cause between ten
and fifteen million lung-cancer deaths" (32).
Plutonium is rapidly becoming more and
more common throughout the world because it is being produced all the time
in nuclear reactions. The Nuclear Control Institute, in Washington D.C.,
published a paper on the Internet describing the problem of plutonium production.
By the turn of the century, 1,400 metric
tons of plutonium will have been produced in the spent fuel of nuclear
power reactors, and some 300 tons of it will have been separated into weapons-usable
form. Less than 18 pounds (8 kilograms) is needed to build a Nagasaki-type
bomb. The amounts will continue to grow rapidly. By 2010, there will be
550 tons of separated plutonium in commerce, more than twice the amount
now contained in the world's nuclear arsenals. By that time, Japan will
have acquired an amount of plutonium equivalent to the present U.S. military
stockpile. ("The Problem", 2)
The quote above has a few hidden statements
behind it. First it predicts that soon other nations will have a greater
nuclear arsenal than the U.S.A. Also the quote says that plutonium is growing
to be an excess product from nuclear reactions and thus other countries
who are not economically stable will have a greater tendency to want to
sell some plutonium to power hungry politicians for money to help the economy
of their own country.
The subject of plutonium directly relates
to nuclear terrorism. The terrorists' holy grail is to build a nuclear
bomb. It is becoming increasingly easy to find the knowledge on how to
build a nuclear bomb. The only thing that is holding terrorists back is
getting their hands on some plutonium or weapons-grade uranium.
Christopher K. Mitchell, a student under
professor J. Ruvalds, wrote a research report in physics 177N class that
stated that when constructing a nuclear weapon, there would be two main
issues for a terrorist. The first issue would be the knowledge required
about building the bomb and making it work. Essentially, this knowledge
is not a great problem. For instance, anyone can purchase a copy of "The
Los Alamos Primer" for approximately twenty-three dollars. This book details
the work of scientist who participated in the Manhattan Project tests in
New Mexico. Inside the book, a terrorist could find the amount of uranium
needed to create a successful nuclear explosion. In addition, the book
details the different types of nuclear bombs and how to construct them.
According to Carson Mark, a nuclear weapons specialist, a terrorist group
would need some specialist, such as a nuclear physicist, a chemist, and
an explosives engineer to build a nuclear weapon. In addition, some specialized Multiculturalism in Canada essay Canada has long been called "The Mosaic",
due to the fact that it is made up of a varied mix of races, cultures and
ethnicities. As more and more immigrants come to Canada searching for a
better life, the population naturally becomes more diverse. This has, in
turn, spun a great debate over m Morality. It has been questioned by people,
honored by people and revered since the beginning of time. Yet even today
not one person can say what is morally right. It is a matter of opinion.
It was Dr.Victor Frankenstein's opinion that it was alright to create a
"monster". Frankenstein's crea Modern Education: Changing for the Future essay During the past few decades we have seen
a shift from Industrial work to Information technology work. Recently our
country has just recovered from an economic depression. This depression
was a "wake up call" for many people, as they saw highly educated professionals
loosing their jobs. Why, w
MLA Style
. EssayMania.com. Retrieved on 26 May, 2012 from
<http://essaymania.com/161831/nuclear-energy>More College Papers