Nuclear energy has been looked toward with its benefits of being a cleaner and more renewable source of energy. However there are also downsides to it considering the other side of nuclear war and weapons.
While nuclear energy is a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels it is also associated with some of the world’s most dangerous and deadliest weapons and not to mention nuclear disasters. There is a high cost and lengthy process to build nuclear plants. They are compensated by the fact that producing nuclear energy is not nearly as polluting as oil and coal. Nuclear energy is the energy source found in an atom’s nucleus, or core. It can be used to produce electricity by creating nuclear fission in a reactor through two kinds of atomic reactions: nuclear fusion and nuclear fission (most reactors have been built between 1970 and 1985 worldwide). Nuclear energy meets around 10% of global energy demand. In 2020 13 countries produced at least one-quarter of their total electricity from nuclear, with the US, China, and France dominating the market by far.
There are many advantages of nuclear energy. This cuts down on emissions, it is clean, and it provides pollution-free power with no greenhouse gas emissions. There are cooling towers in nuclear plants that only emit water vapor so they do not release any pollutants or radioactive substances into the atmosphere. Supporters of nuclear energy argue that nuclear power is responsible for the fastest decarbonization effort in history. Nuclear waste can be recycled for up to 90% of waste, it is not even remotely as dangerous as the toxic chemicals coming from fossil fuels. Nuclear power has the highest capacity factor, the plants requiring less maintenance, capable to operate for up to two years before refueling and being able to produce at maximum power more than 93% of the time during the year, making them three times more reliable than wind and solar plants.
On the other side of the coin there are the disadvantages. One of the most talked about disadvantages of nuclear energy is the nuclear weapon proliferation, a debate triggered by the deadly atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. This concern came back with the escalation in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. After the war the world saw the highly destructive effect of the bombs, causing the death of tens of thousands of people. Not only the impact itself but also in the days, weeks, and months after as consequence of radiation sickness, nuclear energy evolved to a pure means of generating electricity. The waste contains highly poisonous chemicals like plutonium and uranium pellets used as rule. They are extremely toxic for tens of thousands of years so for this reason they need to be meticulously and permanently disposed of. When nuclear does fail it can fail spectacularly.
The 2011 Fukushima disaster, while not killing anyone directly, led to the displacement of more than 150,000 people, thousands of evacuation/related deaths and billions of dollars in cleanup costs. Nuclear power is one of the most expensive and time-consuming forms of energy. These nuclear plants cost billions of dollars to build and they take much longer than any other infrastructure for renewable energy, sometimes even more than a decade.
The verdict is that nuclear power can be a highly destructive weapon, but the risks of a nuclear catastrophe are relatively low with highly advantageous energy capabilities.
Global Environmental Change 