The Nuclear Power Problem

By: Cooper R.

         Imagine yourself in the middle of the worst nuclear storage disaster in human history; the sky is red with tiny particles that burn wherever they touch your skin. Your eyes sting and don't get better no matter how much you blink or rub them. You know that you are on your final breaths as the world seems to become a flameless fire around you. The brening is only relieved by your parting from this world and into the next. This could almost be you. 

       When a family of four moved to Simi Valley, California, in 2018, they had no idea that the family’s new home was within five miles of a former nuclear and rocket testing laboratory. This comes with the added Radioactive cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium-239 and tritium in their water source.  This could lead to cancer and other mutatious diseases. This is one just of 120,000 cases in the world of particles emitting ionizing radiation in the world.

       The staggering amount of nuclear waste that is produced by an average American household running fully on nuclear fuel every year would produce a staggering 30 grams of nuclear waste every year. This means with over 123.6 million households in the U.S. as of 2020, if all of America was running off purely nuclear energy that would equate to 4087 U.S. tons a year!

       This is assuming power only came from traditional reactors. However, 30g/year could be mitigated by using more fuel efficient reactors that recycle the nuclear waste by using a recycling plant to separate the fission products from the plutonium and the uranium to then be used again in the reactor as fuel once more. The grams per year using this method could be minagated to  0.3118445g/year when you use the recycling plant in tandem with the nuclear reactor.

       Another plus is that the nuclear reactor in tandem with the recycling plant is unlike uranium and plutonium that have a lifespan of 1,000,000 years; the fission product has only a lifetime of 300 years. That means less storage is needed and is overall cheaper to use nuclear power with the cost of 300 year storage facilities than for the cost of large 1,000,000 year storage facilities. And by bringing down the cost of the storage you could focus on the power distributing network to expand into places where power is not widely accessible. 

       The staggering amount of nuclear waste is stacking up, and the time to act is now or never; with more and more nuclear waste being made every day, the land for habitation also diminishes. In such a small world we are on, this will greatly restrict the goals for human civilization.This proves that nuclear waste management needs to be thoroughly revised for the hope of future generations.