General Information About Nuclear Power
What is needed for nuclear power?
What are the products of nuclear power?
What has Fish Unlimited discovered about this emerging issue?
Nuclear power is a source of energy that is produced in a nuclear reactor. A nuclear reactor is a facility where highly radioactive uranium (U-238) is allowed to boil water, spinning a turbine and eventually producing electrical power. The nuclear reaction in this case is fission. The fission takes place inside a containment vessel. This process is mediated by control rods, which can be raised or lowered inside this vessel to control the amount of activity in the vessel. The fission creates heat, which boils the water inside the vessel. This water becomes steam, which turns the blades of a turbine, which in turn cranks a generator, producing electricity.
What is needed for nuclear power?
Some of the components necessary to produce nuclear power include the fuel rods and the cooling water for the reactor. The fuel rods contain radioactive uranium. The cooling water is drawn in from nearby waterways at a rate of anywhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 gallons of water each minute. This process destroys all organisms that are drawn into these turbines. Death may result from the turbines or heat in the system.
What are the products of nuclear power?
The goal of nuclear power is to produce electrical energy. However, there are some more serious products of nuclear power, many of which can be harmful. One is bomb-grade plutonium, resulting from the fission process. The uranium is contained in fuel rods, which, after being used, are still in a highly radioactive state. To temporarily deal with this, they are stored in water containment pools, usually on the reactor site. Another consequence of nuclear power is the water used in the steam loop. This water is discharged into nearby waterways every day during the operation of the reactor. At this stage, the water contains traces of radioactive nucleotides, such as cobalt-60, strontium-90, plutonium, cesium-137, and tritium. These nucleotides accumulate in the waterways and cause serious harm to the aquatic life by bioaccumulating in plant life, shellfish, finfish, and other forms of sea life, thus entering the food chain. Another problem with the flushing of the cooling water is that, upon entering the waterway, it may be up to twenty (20) degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding temperatures. This can cause heat shock for the aquatic organisms, resulting in the death of these organisms and change in the surrounding ecosystem.
What has Fish Unlimited discovered about this emerging issue?
We have discovered that, as far back as 1953, the then Atomic Energy Commission knew that very low, almost undetectable, levels of radionucleides would destroy the immune and reproductive systems of juvenile fish. Based on this, we believe that the operation of nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons testing plays a primary role in the decline of fisheries populations worldwide. We feel that the operation of nuclear reactors not only results in aquatic contamination which contributes to this, but, additionally, these reactors kill literally hundreds of billions of fish, plankton, crustaceans, and other sealife annually.
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