No scientific discovery comes out of nowhere, it costs countless discoveries made by scientist all over the world. The same was with nuclear energy. It all has started in Germany, in 1895, where X-ray was first discovered by Roentgen. As the information spread around the world, more and more started to gain interest in this field. Only a year after a guy named Becquerel another phenomena, that was later evaluated by Marie Curie and her husband – spontaneous energy production, which was named radioactivity. Again, the process had begun, Ernest Rutherford started analysing radioactivity and noticed that there are two types of rays – alpha and beta radiation. He later discovered that the vast majority of an atom mass is concentrated in the genre – therefore expose nucleus, sometime after he also suggested the existence of neutrons and gamma radiation. Thanks to his work, he is called the father of nucleus physics.
The whole science is based on previous experiments and acknowledgements. Hahn and Strassmann decided to look closer at the paradox called splitting of an atom. It tended to release a tremendous amount of energy. Apart from the good aspect of that energy, some also found it as a way to produce bombs, based on the chain reaction. In 1942, the first one was created. Unfortunately, this has lead to the drop of Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6th and 9th, 1945. The cities were devastated, with up to 250,000 people dead. It took many years for the world to realise the danger of it. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was signed on 20th September 2017 with the supervision of the UN.
Fortunately, not only was nuclear energy used to kill, but also to help. The idea of nuclear power was discussed earlier and has been found brilliant but one thing was anticipated to be impossible to overcome – calling the reactor. In 1951, an experimental liquid-metal cooled reactor in Idaho called EBR-I was attached to a generator in 1951, producing the first nuclear-generated electricity. Firstly it was used just to power the submarines as it wouldn’t need to refuel. The Shippingport reactor opened in 1957 was the first commercial reactor in the USA.
Seeing the success of the first nuclear power plant, through the 60s and 70s, many nuclear reactors were constructed for commercial usage. Its greatest advantage is that they work well and produce cheap, emission-free electricity with a very low mining and transportation footprint. France was the first country to strongly push towards it and ended up with 75% of electricity being from uncle power.
| World nuclear energy production through years 1965-2010 |
Nevertheless not everything was as perfect as it seems to be. From the late 1970s to about 2002 the nuclear power industry suffered some decline and stagnation. It was mainly due to labour shortages and construction delays. The world has realised that it is not as cheap as anticipate. A nail to the coffin of nuclear energy were the accidents in Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). The latter one has caused 42 acute deaths and possibly several thousand with long term high possibility of cancer. Additionally, the reactor explosion caused 350,000 people to be permanently resettled. These disasters contributed to the restriction of standards and further costs.
After almost 30 years of stagnation, wide awareness about climate change and need to restrict carbon dioxide emission (it is in a great part released during the combustion of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, to produce electricity). Furthermore increasing energy demand worldwide and the decrease of natural resources has also contributed to the idea of “nuclear renaissance”. Nowadays, more and more countries are looking favourably on nuclear energy and plan to increase the energy share coming from it.
In March 2013, famous climate scientist James Hansen co-publishes a paper from NASA computing that, even with worst-case estimates of nuclear accidents, nuclear energy as a whole has saved 1.8 million lives and counting by offsetting the air-pollution related deaths that come from fossil fuel plants.
1349 IB World School Journal 