Nuclear Power

Lately governments (mine at least), have been assuring us that nuclear power is the way of the future. It produces vast amounts of energy without depositing endless tones of carbon into our atmosphere. It’s been around for forever, and now here it is to solve our problems. It’s too good to be true. And it is.

There are a few aspects of nuclear power that are missing from these commercials that feature flowers blooming, children playing, and clear blue skies.
Where do I start?

Let’s start with the most obvious. Nuclear power plants have a history of accidents and nuclear leaks. Let’s say that we have 100 power plants in our country (like the US) and only one of them has an accident in 20 years. That accident could be anything from a terrorist attack to a plane crash to the plant just getting old with the potential for leaks. I guess that’s a good average but that 1 accident will result in highly radioactive fuel leaking into the surrounding environment. This scenario has proven to cause cancers of all sorts for anyone or anything within miles of the area and will leave the area contaminated for generations to come.

Alright, now suppose that risk isn’t convincing and we can delude ourselves into thinking that as long as we take the correct precautions we can avoid an accident like that. Then I suggest we investigate the theory of nuclear power as ‘clean’ power.

It is true that the actual use of nuclear power for energy is ‘clean’ in the sense that there are no emissions during the process of extracting energy. However looking at only one step of a process is naïve, similar to if you were to conclude that a J.Lo movie will be an Oscar winner after seeing a preview.

The most common first step of nuclear power is extracting uranium from the ore and ore from the ground, a messy process to say the least and lucky for us Canadians we are the #1 exporter of uranium ore. At best, ore can contain 1% uranium which means that enormous amounts of ore needs to be processed to get even a little uranium. After the ore is processed it is left in a powdered state which is just as radioactive as uranium and is hazardous for approx. 250,000 years. The mining of uranium usually then contaminates the air, water, and land with radioactive chemicals and heavy metals.

After uranium is mined and then used for power there’s also the small issue of waste. Currently there is no safe way to dispose of radioactive waste. There are currently no examples of nuclear waste staying in an insolated environment for tens of thousands of years, which is about its half life.

That’s a lot of waste that isn’t going anywhere from the 441 nuclear power plants that are currently operating in the world.

Oh yeah one other thing: if uranium mining is being funded by governments for nuclear power plants, then isn’t there a potential for some of that energy being dedicated toward weapons?