The Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Waste

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A Safe and Efficient Way to Use Nuclear Waste as Energy Nuclear waste may not be waste after all. It's possible that it can be put to good use. Nuclear waste is the highly radioactive material produced from nuclear power plants. Currently, high-level nuclear waste is stored on site at the nuclear reactor plants or buried deep underground. Instead of just disposing of this nuclear waste, we could possibly reuse it to make more energy. The History of Nuclear Energy Uranium was, and still is, an element used to create mass amounts of energy in nuclear reactors. Uranium was discovered in 1789 by a German chemist named Martin Klaproth. In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium produced radiation, and nuclear fission was finally discovered in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann1. Because of this, and Albert Einstein's equation (E=MC²), people were able to make the first atomic bomb. In 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed with one of these bombs, which only contained a ball of uranium the size of a basketball. After WWll, scientists thought of how to utilize uranium and made the first ever nuclear reactor in 1950. They decided to store all of the waste beneath the Nevada desert so it wouldn't affect anyone.…show more content…
To be exact, a nuclear reactor produces 12,192 megawatt hours (MWH) of power. To put in perspective, 12,000 MWH can power over 12 million houses! Also, nuclear reactors are extremely cheap to run and maintain. These reactors can also store power within themselves if there isn’t a power output and the stations themselves are only the size of a football field. Countries around the world saw the benefits of nuclear reactors and decided to build their own, with large numbers built from the 1960s to
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