Uranium: The good, the bad and the ugly.

Will here! I’m here to teach you, the reader, about the pros and cons to uranium use in general. First we’ll start off with some facts about Uranium; it has an atomic number of 92 and U as its symbol. Uranium was discovered by a German chemist named Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789. It is mainly found in Russia and Australia; both countries are rich in Uranium. Uranium can be used for both military and civilian uses but it is a non-renewable resource! So it will eventually run out whether we want it to or not.
Now that I have given a broad outline of Uranium I will continue on with the pros of uranium use. Uranium is a great source of energy as it produces as much energy as coal while using much, much less resources. It is also much cleaner than coal; it does not produce all of those nasty greenhouse gasses that coal emits. Uranium is also quite plentiful, although it is not renewable.
The cons of Uranium are quite large though, it is a producer of harmful, toxic waste that is very, very hazardous to humans. Because Uranium has such a long half-life this waste does not deteriorate for many thousands of years.
Finally those ugly points about Uranium, it is used in the military for both munitions and bombs. Depleted-Uranium is used in bullets as a high density penetrator, i.e. armour-piercing rounds. Atomic bombs, or A-bombs for short, are devastating weapons of mass-destruction and were responsible for the deaths of thousands in the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in World War 2. Uranium is a crucial part of the A-bomb, as is Plutonium, and provides the ‘Atomic’ to the bomb.
I hope this short over-view on Uranium has proved to be informative to you, the reader, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.

William Peciulis

The Good Side of Nuclear Power

Nuclear power costs slightly less than coal because like coal there are large amounts of uranium all over the world and it is so economical that 1 kg of uranium can produce 80 trillion joules (22.2 M watts) of energy, this same amount can be produced by 3000 tonnes of coal. As can be seen in diagram 1 nuclear energy cost roughly 2.5US cents per kilowatt-hour this means that it only costs an electricity user in American 2.5US cents for every kilowatt of nuclear Diagram 1

energy they use per hour.

This is a very cheap alternative in comparison to oil which is almost 18US cents per kilowatt-hour. Uranium may currently cost $99US a kilo in comparison to coal which costs only $107US a tonne but the difference is that the amount of energy produced by 1 kilogram of uranium ($99US) is equal to 3000 tonnes of coal ($321,000US) and with the added advantage that because it uses steam that is continuously recycled it produces no harmful smoke or carbon dioxide, this then means that it does not contribute to the greenhouse effect in any way at all. Nuclear energy is always slandered for its production of harmful radioactive waste but the waste that is produced is very small and unless it is improperly sealed it proposes no direct threat to humans. Nuclear power is a very safe alternative for energy because the only time it becomes highly radiated when it is its waste form. Nuclear power plants cost large amounts of money to build; this is because nuclear power plants have to be fitted with the best safety equipment because what happened with Chernobyl was caused by a failure in the reactor but it is very simple to stop these failures as long as the energy companies spend the right amount of money on their safety equipment. An average 500 M watt nuclear power station costs roughly $1,000,000,000 US – $3,500,000,000 US the cost depends on which country the power plant is built and also the area in which they are built.

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By Blake Anderson