A Half-Life History

Throughout history, we have always searched for ways of improving people's lives.  This evolution can be seen through how we have powered our lives.  Even into today, the argument continues as to what is the best way that we can power our cities in the future.  Will we continue to use fossil fuels or will be change to more renewable resources like solar power or wind power?  One of the ways that we can power our world, is through nuclear power.  However, the use of this source of power is a hotly debated topic through our country and the world.  This blog will look at the issue of nuclear energy.  We will be presented points from both proponents and opponents as well as cases throughout history in the hopes of better understanding nuclear.

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Now that we are through the business part of the post, let's look at the history of nuclear energy.  To understand the history of nuclear energy, we must dive into a little bit of high school chemistry (If chemistry wasn't your thing, and you blocked all memory of chemistry from your mind, you might want to skip this paragraph).  In chemistry, there are two types of nuclear reactions.  There is a fission reaction, where an atom is split into two smaller atoms, and there is fusion, where two smaller atoms combine to create a larger atom.  Of the two reactions, fusion is considered much safer and more powerful, but too much energy is required to perform the reaction.  For this reason, we only have fission reactors at this time (On a side note, do you know of any natural fusion reactors? Hint:  They're in the sky).

The Nuclear Energy Institute says that nuclear plants make energy as follows.  The energy from fission reactors are indirectly used in nuclear power plants.  The nuclear reactors are immersed in water.  Inside the reactors are radioactive atoms, the most common being uranium.  These radioactive atoms are unstable due to having to many neutrons in their nuclei.  A uranium atom splits and a neutron goes shooting off, and hits another atom to make it split and shoot off another neutron.  This chain reaction of uranium atoms being split and shooting off neutrons continues on to the other atoms.  As the uranium atoms are split, energy is released, which warms the water surrounding the nuclear reactor.  The warming of the water then creates stream as the water comes closer to boiling.  The steam coming off of the water then rises and spins turbines.  The spinning of turbine produces electricity.  This electricity can then be sent off to power everything from the lights in your home, to the toaster to toast your toast.  Now that we understand the way nuclear plants work, we can look at the history of how they came to be.

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The history of nuclear power goes back over a century as told by What is Nuclear? (If history isn't your thing either, I apologize for the next section as well).  The site went on to say that the scientists then discovered fission by shooting uranium with neutrons.  After this discovery, scientists continued to develop their understanding of nuclear power and eventually created bombs using nuclear power.  These bombs were then used to end World War II.  After this, the first nuclear reactor used to generate electricity was created in 1951.  Before nuclear reactors were used to create widespread power, the were put into submarines (The first submarine with a nuclear reactor was called the USS Nautilus, but it was not captained by a man named Nemo).  Later on, the first commercial nuclear reactor was built in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.  Since then, the number of nuclear power plants across the country has grown tremendously.

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Now that we have gone through the history of nuclear energy, as well as the how nuclear reactions occur and how nuclear power plants work, we have a basic understanding of nuclear energy and how we came to our current issue (I'm sorry if chemistry and history are both things that are not very interesting to you, but they were necessary to understand this debate).  Over the next several weeks, we will look at the benefits and consequences of nuclear energy.  Next week we will look at the benefits of nuclear energy.