Nuclear Energy has almost become synonymous with danger and disease due to popular television shows such as HBO’s Chernobyl. If you were to judge nuclear energy purely on the perspectiveof these shows, you would probably think that nuclear power is a really bad idea and we should just demolish all nuclear plants right away. I wish instead to demolish your potential misconseptions on the topic… Not demolish any reactors.

How about we tackle the elephant in the room first, safety. A common misconseption about nuclear power is that it’s dangerous, very dangerous. This, however, is very far from reality. Nuclear Energy is actually the safest form of energy production we have, according to Markandya, A. and Wilkinson, P., 2007. Electricity generation and health, and statistica it has caused the least amount of fatalities out of all forms of energy production. This, I think, is the single biggest misconseption and so if you remember anything, it’s that.

As you can see from the table (see source above), nuclear kills practically noone per TWh (and yes thats including Chernobyl).

Would you rather you pump all of the toxic waste from your power plants into the atmosphere or would you ratherit was stored in secure containers deep underground?

Ok then, so some of you are probably now wondering about nuclear waste. This is a valid concern of course, however, I would argue that it’s a redundant one. Would you rather you pump all of the toxic waste from your power plants into the atmosphere or would you rather it was stored in secure containers deep underground. Fossil fuel emissions kill approximately 4.5 million people every year, nuclear on the other hand kills very few (if any). In fact, nuclear also releases no CO2 which is sorely needed with todays changing climate (the clouds you see billowing from the cooling towers are made up of water vapour). I would argue that solar and wind can only go so far and that we need nuclear in order to generate enough power for our contries whilst also ensuring the planets’ survivability. The reason for this is obvious, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, how are we supposed to power anything when thats the case? An argument against this would be using massive batteries to store up charge for when we need it, this is fine when it comes to powering homes but I don’t think it is particularly feasible for powering factories. Why make the issue of batteries up in the first place, just build a reactor already!

Energy costs are another big win for nuclear, in comparison to renewables nuclear offers much cheaper electricity. According to energycentral the French pay 18 euro cents per kWh whereas the Germans pay 30 euro cents per kWh. Guess who has scrapped all of their reactors in favour of solar and wind… Germany. France on the other hand is powered by 77% nuclear, the figures speak for themselves.

Now here’s an argument that may surprise you, nuclear power leads to fewer nuclear weapons. Now bear with me, the reason I say thisis down to the cost of mining uranium, many western countries that have already developed nuclear weapons are sitting on a massive stockpile of enriched uranium. This stockpile could be reduced and the enriched uranium used to fuel nuclear reactors. This would massively reduce costs for sourcing fuel and thus make them cheaper to run at the beginning.

I could go on all day about the misconseptions about nuclear but the point of this article was to highlight what I think are the main objections to building more reactors. In my not so humble opinion, nuclear is the only feasible way of meeting the planets energy needswhilst also keeping the planet in one piece.