Nuclear Power Consequences

There can be very few people who have not heard about the Chernobyls incident in 1986. Many people died of cancer and even today a lot of newborn children in the region are affected by this and other health problems. Nowadays, it does not exist a tangible solution for this terrible problem even when a lot of measures of healthiness are put in practice. Proponents of nuclear power argue that this kind of energy is a viable solution for almost all our problems concerned with global warming as nuclear plants do not produce smoke or carbon dioxide, as well as to those problems related to the scarcity of fossil fuels and other natural resources. A lot of people think that nuclear power is the energy of the future due to its reliability and allege that a lot of energy is generated from a single power plant. Besides, they strongly believe that nuclear plants almost never experience problems if not from human error, which almost never happens because the plant needs just few people to operate it. However, there is a very thin line between an incredibly reliable source of unlimited energy and a nuclear catastrophe, which would remain besieging us to the boundaries of time. It is partly true that nuclear energy could be the answer to a lot of the actual environmental problems we are dealing with today but we have to take into account also the serious problems a nuclear disaster could produce and actually has been producing. In the year 2006 the International Agency for Research on Cancer predicted an estimate of 16.000 excess cancer deaths from the year of the accident up to the year 2065. It could be argued that even if this nuclear power can help us to minimize the depletion of the ozone layer, it is clear that it would carry new environmental problems. According to EPA, all nuclear plants in the United States produce about 2.200 metric tons of radioactive waste per year. Water pollutants such as heavy metals and salts build up in the water in nuclear power plants. These pollutants can contaminate rivers and lakes and this can be harmful on aquatic life and the quality of water. It can be harmful if it is drunk by humans.

To sum up, nuclear energy as almost any kind of energy known by humans has terrific impacts on the environment so, it is important that we get consciousness about this and try to find the better ways of doing things without destroying our planet and take care of our health and think also that of future generations.