Climate Change Series Part 3: Nuclear Fission, good? Or horribly terrifying?

It's a bird, it's a plane, NO, it's a NUKE.......lear power plant?

As you may have read, my last mini-series of posts were based on climate change. If you didn't see them, go check them out now! I'll wait...
Waiting...

Great! They were pretty awesome, I know. In this next series of posts, I want to focus on energy. We need to reduce carbon emissions but still need more energy than ever before due to a rapid growing population. So what are our options? A lot of you probably have heard of or already understand how renewable energy works. Great! But I want to go through some of the common technologies for renewable energy, how they work (for the unaware) and discuss their importance on our future, from my point of view. Let's get started!

As you may have guessed from the opener, which I may have somewhat borrowed from a famous comic book, the first post of the series is nuclear power.

OHH MY GOODNESS NOT NUKES! THOSE ARE DANGEROUS!

Well, let's see if I might just change your mind.

Now nuclear energy is fantastically powerful i.e. Hiroshima (bomb), Chernobyl (meltdown), and along with that great power, comes great... responsibility? Oops, wrong reference.

Or maybe not? Nuclear power has tremendous potential but is also dangerous in certain circumstances. First, let's understand nuclear energy in its simplest terms. Where does all its energy come from?

Well, nuclear gets its name from the nucleus of an atom. Atoms are the tiny things everything is made of. An atom's nucleus, like a core, is made up of two different things; protons and neutrons. Now before you click away because of how scientific this is getting, just hold on. I will help you understand this through my very very expert writing skills. We'll use a bag of marbles as an analogy to the atom.

There are yellow and blue marbles in the bag. Usually there are an even number, or very close to even number of yellow and blue marbles in the bag. Now, the bigger the bag, the more marbles can fit. Makes sense right? So we just learned that atoms have protons and neutrons and the bigger the atom, the more neutrons and protons it contains. Awesome, this is a good start! Atoms also have electrons but we'll leave those for another day.

Now, there is a force, called The Strong Force, that holds the nucleus together. If I've learned one thing from science, it's that scientists aren't very creative in their naming conventions. Anyways, when this Strong Force is overcome or overpowered, the nucleus splits, like literally tears apart. And that releases a TON of energy. This is where nuclear fission generates power.

You just learned what nuclear fission is! You're welcome, go tell your friends!

Now in history, well, very recent history and even today, fission is used in two ways. For power generation, and for absolute destruction.

Now since nuclear is such a big, and complex topic, I will split the post, much like the atom in a fission reaction, into two separate posts. This one focusing on nuclear fission, and the next on nuclear fusion. To me, fusion is the fun one, and where the world is heading in the next few decades. But I will talk more about that next time.

You may have heard of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. These are the two cities in Japan where at the end of World War II, the United States dropped the first nuclear bombs. There are images online of the destruction and fallout from these actions, which led to ending the war. But at cost?

Through the research and technology developed from building nuclear bombs, the concept was later adapted into a method of power generation. It was great! Back then, people thought that nuclear power from fission was going to yield free and endless power to everyone. It was thought as the power of the future, and it was spectacular, until one disaster in the Ukraine.

The main difference between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor is controlling the reaction. In a bomb, the nuclear fuel is free to unleash all it's power at once, in the uncontrollable fury of the explosion. But a nuclear power reactor uses the same fuel source and slows the reaction to a controllable rate.

Chernobyl was a city where a nuclear fission power plant stood, and still stands, sort of. Now I won't go into how a fission reactor works precisely, but essentially the reactor heats water to generate steam to crank a shaft to generate electricity. Now you can image that all the energy that is produced from controlled fission generates a lot of heat. If cooling of the reactor fails or doesn't cool the reactor sufficiently, the reactor can go into "meltdown". This is what happened to the Chernobyl reactor, causing nuclear waste and "fallout" to spread through the site and the city nearby.

Fallout is the release of nuclear radiation from unreacted nuclear fuel. Now I won't discuss radioactive chemistry or why nuclear radiation remains for so long, but Chernobyl is now a deserted ghost town that will not be livable for thousands of year. That is the risk of nuclear power.

But disasters like that hardly happen. The last one, in Japan known as Fukushima, was caused not by a systems failure but by a way stronger than ever expected earthquake resulting in a tsunami which left critical systems in the nuclear plant to fail, causing a meltdown. Unlike Chernobyl, not one death has resulted from the disaster at Fukushima. On the other hand, the release of nuclear waste water spilling into the ocean from the disaster is quite unfortunate and will cause devastating effects on ocean life and potentially affect us as humans.

It's not looking good for fission. I want to wrap up, since this one is getting a little long. In the 30+ years of humans harnessing fission to generate power, only two major disasters are a result of fission. On the other hand, the majority of fission reactor power plants have very little issues once running smoothly. They produce no carbon emissions as only water vapor, and provide "clean" energy all over the world, especially North America.

Maybe fission isn't so bad. Let's face it. Every form of power generation has risks, especially relatively new technologies. They will all have consequences. No one said it would be easy to provide power to 7 and a half billion people. That is what our generation is faced with.

Renewable energy is the future. In the coming weeks, let's explore the other sources of clean energy, and step closer to our goal of a new, clean, and habitable planet.

See you next time!