Nuclear Energy? Think about it!

What makes nuclear energy itself so dangerous is that every commercial nuclear reactor produces 400-500 pounds of plutonium in a year, along with other nuclear waste material. Just 10-20 pounds of plutonium is needed to make a bomb. An average nuclear reactor, therefore, produces enough plutonium waste to make 50 nuclear bombs in a year.

Lethally radioactive plutonium thus brings nuclear reactor technology dangerously close to nuclear weapons technology.

Nuclear energy is produced by fission, or the breaking down of atomic particles. The nuclei of uranium break into radio-active fragments as a result of fission and generate immense heat in the process. The breaking up of a uranium atom also creates one or two free neutrons. These neutrons, in turn, are absorbed by other uranium nuclei. These uranium nuclei then break up one after another in a chain reaction. The chain reaction culminates in a nuclear detonation.

In a nuclear reactor, the explosion is neutralised by fuel control rods, These rods also absorb some of the heat and many of the freed neutrons. The nuclear chain reaction is controlled. The heat produced is used to boil water and gene-rate steam, which, in turn, runs a turbine. The turbine generates electricity.

One of the most dangerous consequences of running a nuclear reactor is that it can release radioactive material into the environment
. A lethal radioactive byproduct of a nuclear reactor is plutonium, produced in large quantities.

Less than one-millionth of a gram of plutonium is carcinogenic. If one pound of plutonium is uniformly distributed through the earth, it will cause lung cancer to every inhabitant of this planet.

Even if the US nuclear energy industry is able to prevent plutonium spillage with 99.99 per cent perfection, it will still afflict 500,000 people with lung cancer every year for 50 years. Plutonium lives in the environment for at least 500,000 years, more than one hundred times longer than the entire span of recorded history. It is more than 50 times the geologically estimated time span from the end of the Ice Age to the present. It is more than 10 times the length of time that human beings have been in existence.

Once plutonium is made, there is no known antidote to its continuous poisoning of the environment. If plutonium poisons a living organism, its toxicity is not spent in the process. There is no threshold below which plutonium is safe. This distinguishes it from, say, acidic sulphur dioxide and mercury. How can we leave behind such a toxic legacy for future generations?

The US has not figured out how it should safely store or destroy hazardous nuclear waste material. It does not have a blueprint for disassembling, dismantling or decommissioning a nuclear reactor when it is past its productive life. As consumer rights activist Ralph Nader put it, "Nuclear power
has, in many ways, become America's technological Vietnam". Why does India want to invite catastrophe upon itself and the world?