Nuclear energy has been around for awhile. When discovered during the early 20th century man wanted nothing more then to harness the great amount of energy that Nuclear material brought with it. The problem was it had very finite life. It's common sense to know that if something releases a great amount of energy in a short amount of time, it will have a shorter life span. Nuclear fission was discovered during the late 1930's and from there the use of Nuclear energy has evolved ever since.
But is it worth the risks?
The world of the human being is filled with dangerous devices used to "improve" our lives. Take this laptop that I am using to write this blog post. At any point if it wasn't for the safety features installed this laptop could fill my body with volts of electricity, which if didn't kill me would hurt like hell. Or the Car......Humans are trying to make cars go faster and faster but a person hit over 30 mph or if you crash whilst going high speed is fatal. So why do humans like toying with danger?
There is no denying how much energy Nuclear fission provides. According to my research (Admittedly it is Wikipedia so take it with a pinch of salt) 6% of the worlds energy is provided by Nuclear fission, whilst about 14% of the worlds Electricity is provided.
The problem being, it is such a volatile process creating such energy. Everyone has experienced something giving way after years of wear and tear. Trainers will get holes, cars will fail to start, pens will fail to work etc. Now imagine for a second what the enclosure of the Nuclear reactor goes through. When we had regular missions into space, Nasa struggled to keep up with the maintenance of the shuttles as they destroyed their heat process plates so easy. And how do you preform maintenance to a high standard of safety on a reactor that has no qualms or worry's of who it kills.
The fact of the matter is, Nuclear power will often win its fight against man. According to information available (again this is Wiki so please take it with a pinch of salt) there has been 19 Nuclear and radioactive accidents from January 1961 until the latest one of March 2011. Of those 19 accidents only 5 of these accidents resulted in deaths (although the Fukushima accident claims the 3 deaths of workers were due to non-radiation causes) The biggest loss of life was 56 as a direct cause of the accident with 4000 extra cancer deaths, which was at Chernobyl.
When Nuclear reactions go bad, they leave a rather prominent mark to make sure we remember them by. Chernobyl has a huge area still inhabitable and Fukushima is following the same way (although not as big I think)
Below is a picture from 1996 which shows the different areas effected by Chernobyl's radiation leak. I tried to find a more up to date map but after a (very short) look I could only find this.
The red areas are completely off limits. And you pretty much want to avoid the pink areas too. Below is a map of Fukushima
Speaking of food, the whole point of this post was to comment on how the Japanese staple of rice has become unsafe for human consumption close to where the accident happened but I think I have waffled on enough now. I apologise about the length of this and if you got bored.
Till next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment