Misconceptions of nuclear fission power

Nuclear fission is a way of producing electric energy. It is used in 31 countries in the world and there are over 440 nuclear power plants operating. About 60 more reactors are under construction. Nuclear fission provide about 11% of the world's electricity. Although this number is high compared to other sources of energy, it is nothing comparing to the high percentage of electricity produced by fossil fuels. 66% of world's electricity production relies on fossil fuels. We all know that the heavy usage of fossil fuels is a problem because we will run out of this source of energy one day. More importantly, the combustion of the fossil fuels releases CO2, which enhances the greenhouse effect, increasing global temperature and causing a lot of environmental issues. Nuclear fission can be a substitution of fossil fuels. It has a higher energy density than the fossil fuels do, and it doesn't produce CO2 when it generates power. However, it does produce radioactive waste that is harmful to living creatures. There are many reasons why the usage of nuclear power has not increased a lot although we know that it can serve as a good source of energy which does not speed up the global warming. One of the biggest reasons is people's misconceptions of nuclear fission.

Before the nuclear power is used to produce energy, it was used as a kind of weapon. Nuclear weapons were developed during World War 2. The power generated by the atomic energy can cause much more damage than a missile does. The power of the nuclear weapon is well known after the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. The images of nuclear bombs causing huge destruction are still haunting many people's mind. Those images also give people the wrong impression to nuclear energy. Many people think that when nuclear power plants lose control, it will explode like nuclear bombs, destroying everything within miles. That impression is very far from the truth. Although a lot of radiation will leak out when a nuclear power plant loses control, it does not create an explosion as great as a nuclear bomb causes. Another misconception of nuclear fission is that many people think that nuclear fission creates a lot of radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years. First of all, the waste produced by nuclear power plants is much less than the waste produced by coal power plants. The volume of waste produced by ten coal power plants is about 40 liter per person per year. Compared to that, ten nuclear power plants only produce about 0.84 liters per person of waste each year, which is not more than a bottle of red wine. Those waste can be divided into three levels-high-level, intermediate-level, and low-level. Only 3% of the waste is a hazardous high-level waste. About 7% of them is the less harmful intermediate-level waste, and the rest is the least harmful low-level waste. The radioactivity of high-level waste decreases a lot within 50 years while intermediate-level and low-level's radioactivity takes more time to decrease. The radioactivity of some low-level wastes does take thousands of years to decrease to zero. However, they are not extremely harmful, so it is not as terrible as most of the people think.

Many people think that nuclear power plants are unstable. They think those power plants may lose control anytime like a bomb that may explode any moment. I believe most of the people got this impression from the nuclear disasters in the history. Such as the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl and the one that happened in 2011 in Japan. However, when we analyze why those accidents happened, we will know that nuclear power plants nowadays are not as unstable as people think. The nuclear power plants in Chernobyl was constructed long time ago. The technologies back then were not advanced enough, and the nuclear power was not mature. New nuclear power plants are well designed and are very safe. Some may argue that nuclear power plant in Fukushima is new, but the accident still happened. Nevertheless, many people ignored a fact that the disaster happened under a very rare condition, the huge tsunami. The system of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima was very safe. The reasons why the accident happened is because the emergency power generators of the power plant were destroyed by the sea water when the tsunami flooded the place where the power plant located, so the power plant had no electricity to pump water to cool down the reactor, causing the reactor meltdown and the explosion. When we remove the factor of the immature technologies and rare events, nuclear power plants are actually very safe and stable.

In my opinion, what makes people have those misconceptions is the lack of education of science, I think we have to expose people to more scientific knowledge so that they can interpret whatever scientific news they see correctly and have a right attitude to science. The purpose of enhancing scientific education is not creating more scientists. The purpose of scientific education is to give citizens abilities to think and judge when it comes to science. I really hope people can be exposed to more knowledge about science and be more critical in the terms of science.