By: Katherine Locke-Brubaker
Link: http://www.emagazine.com/magazine/nuclear-dilemmas?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EMagazineIssueFeed+%28E+Magazine+Print+Issue+Feed%29
Picture: This picture displays nuclear energy being transferred and readied to be put into a cooling pond where the nuclear rods are cooled until they're safe to be put in waste dumps and landfills.
Summary: Nuclear energy is actually an very unstable source of energy but is still be used daily. When the fuel is used and no longer is radio-active enough for energy-usage, then it is stored away into cooling ponds where the nuclear rods are cooled until safe. The problem is that when they're put into the ponds, they're still dangerously high in radioactivity and if they would happen to leak, then our health, homes, and everything we know will soon come to an end. Also, when in the ponds, the rods kill off all the aquatic life and pretty much everything else in or surrounding it, so clearly this is not a very healthy alternative in the first place. We can't seem to find a good place to store our nuclear rods after they're no longer usable because putting them in cooling ponds is killing off a lot of life, contaminating our water, making people sick, and giving off high amounts of radioactivity. The only real way to prevent all of this from happening, is to just stop nuclear energy as an energy alternative, but we all know that the government would still use use it under the table and there would always be a struggle for it, so clearly that's out of the question. It's making it safer and healthier that we have to focus on because the way we're doing it now, we're just killing off ourselves.
Opinion: I can totally agree with what this article has to say, our intense levels of nuclear energy usage isn't just killing our earth by being used in the first place, but after it's used in our local waterways and ponds. Again, what if there were to be a leakage or natural disaster that would knock down one of the towers or wash the rods up onto the land, we'd die in a matter of years. Not only would this affect u either, our surrounding wildlife and aquatic life would suffer a great deal as well, for they can't really leave the ocean or their jungles and forests. All of this, is actually what just happened in Japan when a massive Tsunami hit Japan and caused one of the nuclear cooling plants to fail. The rods overheated and soon, then, exploded, releasing TONS of highly toxic radiation. Everyone who stays in Japan will soon die from the over-exposure,along with many illnesses and mutations they acquired from the waste. It was such a big leakage that in fact, the nuclear radiation is now spreading throughout the world and has contaminated almost all the life in the ocean near Japan. This wan't even the biggest cooling systems they have either, so if you think this is a tragedy, let's just keep using nuclear energy and see what else we can kill. WE need to stop everything we're doing with nuclear energy even if it means stop using that kind of energy altogether, because everything is somehow being harmed by it. We need to stop it before it gets even worse than it is now.
Questions:
- What are some alternatives to using nuclear energy?
- What else could happen in the future if we don't change the way we're dealing with nuclear energy?
- What impact will the recent nuclear explosion have on your life and the families around you?
