By Barrett Lile, Columnist
The 75-foot tsunami and 8.9 magnitude earthquake that struck northeast Japan on March 11 were not the end of Japan’s worries.
The two disasters, which have resulted in the deaths of more than 10,600 and caused more than 16,500 others to go missing, triggered the meltdown of the Fukushima plant, according to a worldnewsco.com article.
A meltdown is caused when the cooling systems in a nucle
Columnist: Barrett Lile
ar reactor shut down enough for molten fuel to melt into the reactor’s vessel, according to a myfoxphilly.com article.
In turn, radioactive waste is released, generally in gaseous form. Once a meltdown occurs, the site can remain contaminated with radiation for more than a decade, according to the article.
The reactor meltdown in Chernobyl in 1986 was a partial meltdown. It only expelled 5 percent of its radioactive waste into the atmosphere, killing two personnel workers on site, according to an article by the World Nuclear Association.
The radioactivity spread across 18 miles. Several weeks after the incident, 134 people out of 234 who were on site cleaning up the reactor’s debris, were diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Twenty-eight of them died, according to the article.
There was also a significant increase in thyroid cancer cases in adolescents due to radioactive iodine fallout, according to an unscearg.org article.
Exceeded exposure levels generally consist of more than 10 millisieverts of radiation. The average American absorbs 6.2 millisieverts a year, according to The Scientific American.
I don’t believe that nuclear energy is worth being harvested due to the many risks and dangers.
There are more than 440 operating nuclear power plants in the world. They provide 16 percent of the world’s electricity, according to a report by Edward Keller, professor of geology at University of California.
All of these plants use uranium 235 for fuel. Uranium 235 only consists of 0.7 percent of natural uranium. When the fission process is complete, only 1 percent of energy is yielded. The other 99 percent of the results are radioactive waste.
Though there has been talk of reprocessing the waste, no governmental plan has been officially proposed. Despite having almost one fourth of the world’s operating nuclear reactors in its country, the 104 reactors in the U.S. produce only one fifth of the country’s electricity. Yet, these dangerous reactors sit right next to major U.S. cities, according to the report.
The most dangerous of these locations is Buchanan, NY.
There are two reactors there, and they lie only 24 miles north of New York City. There are more than 17,452,500 people living within 50 miles of the reactors. Buchanan’s safety from reactor meltdowns were in the “bottom third” compared to the rest of the U.S. nuclear power plants, according to The Daily Beast.
It is only a matter of time before we must turn to an alternative fuel source when we have exhausted fossil fuels.
It is far too dangerous to turn to nuclear power as our new fuel addiction without refining how safely we can utilize it.
This column was originally published in the March 30 edition of The Campus.
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