Introduction

The nuclear power stands on the border between humanity's greatest hopes and its deepest fears for the future. The pursuit of nuclear energy for electricity generation began soon after the discovery in the early 20th century that radioactive elements, such as radium, released immense amounts of energy, according to the principle of massenergy equivalence. However, means of harnessing such energy was impractical, because intensely radioactive elements were, by their very nature, short-lived (high energy release is correlated with short halflives). However, the dream of harnessing "atomic energy" was quite strong, even though it was dismissed by such fathers of nuclear physics like Ernest Rutherford as "moonshine." This situation, however, changed in the late 1930s, with the discovery of nuclear fission. Nuclear power is the use of sustained nuclear fission to generate heat and electricity. Nuclear power plants provide about 6% of the world's energy and 1314% of the world's electricity Nuclear power is generated using Uranium, which is a metal mined in various parts of the world. The first large-scale nuclear power station opened at Calder Hall in Cumbria, England, in 1956. Some military ships and submarines have nuclear power plants for engines. Nuclear power produces around 11% of the world's energy needs, and produces huge amounts of energy from small amounts of fuel, without the pollution that you'd get from burning fossil fuels.

How it has started

The 1973 oil crisis had a significant effect on countries, such as France and Japan, which had relied more heavily on oil for electric generation (39%and 73% respectively) to invest

in nuclear power.Today, nuclear power supplies about 80% and 30% of the electricity in those countries, respectively. After World War II, the prospects of using "atomic energy" for good, rather than simply for war, were greatly advocated as a reason not to keep all nuclear research controlled by military organizations. However, most scientists agreed that civilian nuclear power would take at least a decade to master, and the fact that nuclear reactors also produced weapons-usable plutonium created a situation in which most national governments (such as those in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the USSR) attempted to keep reactor research under strict government control and classification. On June 27, 1954, the USSR's Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant became the world's first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid, and produced around 5 megawatts of electric power. The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall at Windscale, England, was opened in 1956 with an initial capacity of 50 MW (later 200 MW). The first commercial nuclear generator to become operational in the United States was the Shippingport Reactor (Pennsylvania, December 1957). Some local opposition to nuclear power emerged in the early 1960s, and in the late 1960s some members of the scientific community began to express their concerns. These concerns related to nuclear accidents, nuclear proliferation, and high cost of nuclear power plants, nuclear terrorism and radioactive waste disposal. In the early 1970s, there were large protests about a proposed nuclear power plant in Wyhl, Germany. The project was cancelled in 1975 and anti-nuclear success at Wyhl inspired opposition to nuclear power in other parts of Europe and North America.

How Nuclear Power Works

But what happens inside a nuclear power plant to bring such marvel and misery into being? Imagine following a volt of electricity back through the wall socket, all the way through miles of power lines to the nuclear reactor that generated it. You'd encounter the generator that produces the spark and the turbine that turns it. Next, you'd find the jet of steam that turns the turbine and finally the radioactive uranium bundle that heats water into steam. Welcome to the nuclear reactor core. The water in the reactor also serves as a coolant for the radioactive material, preventing it from overheating and melting down. In March 2011, viewers around the world became well acquainted with this reality as Japanese citizens fled by the tens of thousands from

the area surrounding the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear facility after the most powerful earthquake on record and the ensuing tsunami inflicted serious damage on the plant and several of its reactor units. Among other events, water drained from the reactor core, which in turn made it impossible to control core temperatures. This resulted in overheating and a partial nuclear meltdown

Its uses
As of 2005, nuclear power provided 6.3% of the world's energy and 15% of the world's electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for 56.5% of nuclear generated electricity. In 2007, the IAEA reported there were 439 nuclear power reactors in operation in the world,operating in 31 countries. As of December 2009, the world had 436 reactors. Since commercial nuclear energy began in the mid 1950s, 2008 was the first year that no new nuclear power plant was connected to the grid, although two were connected in 2009 Both fission and fusion appear promising for space propulsion applications, generating higher mission velocities with less reaction mass. This is due to the much higher energy density of nuclear reactions: some 7 orders of magnitude (10,000,000 times) more energetic than the chemical reactions which power the current generation of rockets. Nuclear power has numerous uses ranging from powering space probes to powering homes. Typical to nuclear power are the very small amounts of fuel needed to produce very large amounts of energy. A pellet the size of a sugar cube could power a car for the whole lifetime of such a car if there were a practical way to harness the energy. In the production of energy, unlike in cars, such a practical way exists: the nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors provide 17 % of electricity in the US. Since the amount of fuel needed is very small, it can be contained during and after use insulated in from the environment. Hence the nuclear production of energy produces no harmful pollutants to the air or water and does not contribute to global warming. Additionally nuclear reactors give power to a number of ships and submarines. Some of the largest ships in the world are nuclear powered, including many aircraft carriers. A typical aircraft carrier has two nuclear reactors onboard. Again the small amount of fuel needed means that a nuclear powered ship can sail years or even decades without refueling. A nuclear submarine can sail circumnavigate the globe submerged, nonstop. There is yet another way to harness nuclear power: nuclear batteries. They use the heat generated by radioactive decay to produce electricity. Such batteries are used in remote beacons, space probes and even some surgical implants.

Nuclear power could be much more of use. Given the strain on environment that our current energy use causes, the non-polluting nuclear power is an economical and plentiful energy source that could produce nearly 100 % of our electricity, as is done in some countries already. The possibilities of nuclear power in space travel and seafaring are also used in a very limited way now. In future we could see nuclear rockets traveling to distant planets. Such rockets have already been tested by NASA on ground and in space.

Should I worry about nuclear power?

Nuclear power stations are not atomic bombs waiting to go off, and are not prone to "meltdowns". There is a lot of U-238 in there slowing things down - you need a high concentration of U-235 to make a bomb. If the reactor gets too hot, the control rods are lowered in and it cools down. If that doesn't work, there are sets of emergency control rods that automatically drop in and shut the reactor down completely. With reactors in the UK, the computers will shut the reactor down automatically if things get out of hand (unless engineers intervene within a set time). At Chernobyl, in Ukraine, they did not have such a sophisticated system, indeed they over-rode the automatic systems they did have. When they got it wrong, the reactor overheated, melted and the excessive pressure blew out the containment system before they could stop it. Then, with the coolant gone, there was a serious fire. Many people lost their lives trying to sort out the mess. A quick web search will tell you more about this, including companies who operate tours of the site.

If something does go wrong in a really big way, much of the world could be affected some radioactive dust (called "fallout") from the Chernobyl accident landed in the UK. That's travelled a long way. With AGR reactors (the most common type in Britain) there are additional safety systems, such as flooding the reactor with nitrogen and/or water to absorb all the neutrons - although the water option means that reactor can never be restarted. So should I worry? I think the answer is "so long as things are being done properly, I don't need to worry too much. The bit that does worry me is the small amount of highlevel nuclear waste from power stations. Although there's not much of it, it's very, very dangerous and we have no way to deal with it apart from bury it and wait for a few thousand years.

Disadvantages of nuclear power

The disadvantages of nuclear power include: the storage and management of dangerous high level radioactive waste; the possibility of proliferation of nuclear materials and potential terrorist applications; the high cost of building nuclear facilities and the small possibility of accidents. Of these, the most urgent is that of nuclear waste disposal. High-level nuclear waste can last for thousands of years before being safe again, so this is a major hurdle which must be overcome before nuclear power can expand. There are claims that nuclear power is simply not economical and that given the amount of time it takes to build nuclear facilities, we need another solution for the short term.

Waste High-level radioactive waste is very dangerous. It lasts for tens of thousands of years before decaying to safe levels. It is highly radioactive and is a major barrier to the expansion of nuclear power. If there is to be a "nuclear renaissance", a sophisticated method of dealing with this waste must be refined. This point itself has sparked a surprising number of debates.

For example, how do you write "danger" on a concrete box, when in 5,000 years the word "danger" may no longer exist? What symbols could we use to let people know to leave it well alone? As you can see from the graph below, the radioactivity of nuclear waste takes about 10 000 years to return to that of the original ore. The black line, indicating the total waste products, is the important one.

Accidents Consider the words Chernobyl, Three Mile Island or, more recently, Fukushima. Do these provoke an emotional response in you? Some people were (are) so terrified of the threat of radiation and various other scary things from previous accidents that even the idea of such things happening again makes them completely averse to nuclear power as a whole. In terms of disadvantages of nuclear power, this is also a big one. Whatever improvements in safety the nuclear industry has developed, public opinion may very well rest in these events. Proliferation Some forms of nuclear reactor, known as "breeder" reactors produce plutonium, which can, conceivably, be used to make nuclear weapons, most likely in the form of a "dirty bomb". This is a conventional explosive mixed with radioactive material with the intention of spreading the material across a wide area to do even more damage. There are other reactors which do not have this problem, but it is another issue which must be addressed before the possibility of a nuclear future can be taken seriously. In fact, there are reactor designs, and fuels for them, which would also significantly reduce the amount of waste produced. Fuel Nuclear fuels are, physically, even rarer than fossil fuels. Fossil fuels at least are made on Earth, albeit over millions of years. Heavy elements like Uranium are only made as stars die, in supernovas. Our solar system actually formed from the remains of another star, at which point heavier elements were made. Essentially, once they're gone, they are well and truly gone. Only in particle accelerators can heavier elements be made.

Advantages of nuclear power

The advantages of nuclear power include: its efficiency and high energy generation from small amounts of fuel; the low greenhouse gas emission; nuclear power is extremely reliable, can be operated continuously and it has a good safety record. The many advantages of nuclear power are the reason the idea is being considered seriously once again. Nuclear power is the only developed source of energy which could feasibly replace fossil fuels. Efficiency Nuclear plants can produce a large amount of electricity, up to about 2GW, which is comparable to coal plants. More importantly, however, is the amount of fuel required to generate this energy. At the atomic level, the thermal energy released in a fission event is 200MeV, compared with only a few electron-volts produced each time a hydrocarbon molecule is broken down by burning carbon-based fuels. As a result, a single nuclear-reactor fuel pellet just 1cm long can produce the same amount of electricity of 1.5 tonnes of coal. Reliability There is no need to worry about interruptions to the power supply: as long as there is uranium, there will be power. This is a stark contrast to most renewable energies which depend on the activity of the weather. As a result of this, nuclear power would be suitable for providing a base load which would be present at all times. Pumped storage and renewable could then provide temporary energy to cope with spikes in demand. No greenhouse gases There are some greenhouse gas emissions associated with the life cycle of uranium, as gases are emitted as it is mined and transported and so forth, however this is significantly less than the emissions associated with the burning of fossil fuels. Essentially, nuclear power would be "carbon-zero" if the the uranium were mined and transported in a more efficient way. There are of course issues with radioactive waste, however.

Supply It cannot last forever, but at least the fuel is more easily accessible than oil. 24% of uranium resources are in Australia, and 9% in Canada . These are hardly politically unstable regions. Safety We frequently hear reports of explosions at gas plants, accidents at oil refineries, even dams breaking. The fact is that nuclear power has in fact caused fewer deaths than fossil fuels. It could be argued that this is because its implementation is not as widespread, but the fact remains: as long as the reactor is well designed and waste is properly dealt with, the risks of death are minimal.

Reference http://www.google.co.in http://www.howstuffworks.com http://howtopowertheworld.com http://en.wikipedia.org http://wiki.answers.com