Nuclear Power and Power Plant Essays

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Robert Shen
Mrs. Brown
Period 3
March 25, 2015
Nuclear Energy
Nuclear energy is one of most potential energy resource available right. Nuclear Energy is one of the most potential energy in the world. There is only 100 nuclear power plant operating during 2014, but they produce 5.5% of total electricity in the world. The Nuclear fuel, uranium, is a radioactive element. Nuclear energy has a lot of advantage. First, uranium, nuclear fuel, is a high energy element. Second, Nuclear power plant doesn’t emit carbon dioxide, which is a major cause of global warming. Third, nuclear power is one of the cheapest power resource available.
According to Euro Nuclear Organization, 1 kg of natural uranium corresponds to nearly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal. This means that you can save a lot of money on labors, transportation. In August 8 2011, the price of uranium is US $115 per kilogram. At the same time, the price of coal is around US $9.2 per kilogram. Form the math, we can know that for $115 of uranium can produce the same amount of energy as $128800 of coal. We can saving a lot of money just on resource price by using nuclear power. The saving of resource price will lower to price to generate energy, and it reflect on the electricity price that is on our utility bills.
A lot of people against the nuclear power is saying that the nuclear reactor is very costly. A lot of time the government doesn’t plan very well. So when they starts to build a nuclear reactor, sometime they found out that this place has a lot of work to do before building a reactor,Which makes the actual cost a lot higher than the actual cost. When this happened, the government will have no choice but abandoned the unfinished reactor. This kind of situation will only waste a lot of money and labor. And even a well-planned nuclear power plant will still cost much more than fossil-fuel power station. One of the advantage that nuclear reactor has is that a newer designed nuclear power station can last from 40-60 years, some nuclear power can even last about 65 years. In general, a fossil-fuel power plant can only last about 40-50 years. And the total cost to produce electricity by nuclear power is 27.42 dollar/MWh, but the total cost to generate electricity by coal is 37.20 dollars/MWh. So it is costly to build a nuclear power plant, but in a long run, it is actually cheaper than coal power station.
Another advantage that nuclear power plant has is that it doesn’t emit carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is one of the cause of global warming. And the coal power plant in the United States emit 1,562 million tons of carbon dioxide. That is 76% from CO2 emission from U.S. electricity generation, and around 29% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. In nuclear power plant, the generator itself doesn’t emit carbon dioxide, all the emission is limited to the fuel mining and transportation. And it is less than one percent of CO2 emission that are associated with electricity generation. Nuclear power plant has a huge advantage on CO2 emission.
Even though that nuclear power plant doesn’t have CO2 emission, but it is also very dangerous. There are a lot of nuclear disaster in the history, such as Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster, Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Three Mile Island Accident. Chernobyl and Fukushima accident are two of the most serious nuclear accident in the history. The aftermath of Chernobyl nuclear disaster was that the whole city had to be abandoned. The same situation happened in the Fukushima Nuclear accident. Over thousand of people die in the accident, and hundreds of thousands of child has genetic defects. It seem like that there is serious safety concern on nuclear power plant, but the following datas will proof that the point is wrong. Every Trillion Walt electricity generated, there will be average of 342 death of workers associated with coal power plant, and there will be average of 883 death associated with hydroelectric power plant,
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