The Philippine Online Chronicles

The splitting of the atom creates energy that is so immense that it could power generators that produce electricity. It may seem mundane that just like in coal-fired power plants, nuclear power plants depend on the turning of water into steam in order to work the turbines that are connected to the generators. In essence, the nuclear material is being used as a fuel to, well, boil water.

As of 2009, almost 14 percent of the world’s power has been produced through the use of nuclear reactors. There are also a lot of warships, carriers and submarines that operate through the use of a nuclear propulsion system.

The science

The whole idea behind promoting nuclear fission is the creation of non-explosive reactions that could be used to provide heat. This heat in turn could be used to turn water into steam.

In the early part of the 1900s, scientists already knew that great energy could be sourced from the use of radioactive materials. Unfortunately, due to their very nature, they didn’t really last that long prompting others such as Ernest Rutherford – the person who discovered the electron – to say that research in nuclear energy was going nowhere.

The discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick allowed scientists to see that there was a neutral charge that could potentially get released once the radioactive element’s atom is split into pieces. Later on it was proven that a self-sustaining chain of nuclear reactions would start once the initial splitting – later called “fission” reactions in a hat tip to the field of biology – was started.

Nuclear energy would then be geared towards more peaceful uses after the Second World War that saw the use of the new technology to bomb two Japanese key cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). In 1955, the global regulatory agency for nuclear energy, the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA, was also established.

Nowadays, the preferred elements for these fission reactions include uranium-235 and plutonium-239. Highly enriched uranium can also be used. The enrichment of uranium is something that the IAEA watches a lot since it puts a country on the brink of producing a nuclear warhead.

The reactors that house the controlled reactions inside the power plant are typically in cooling towers. These are the very structures that malfunctioned during the most high profile nuclear disaster in recorded history in Chernobyl – then in the USSR, now in modern-day Ukraine.

Who has gone nuclear?

Around 40 countries have active nuclear power plants and reactors while a handful are thinking of building a new one that would effectively add them to the list of nuclear powers in a couple of years.

The United States sources 19 percent of its total electricity from the use of nuclear power plants and they have the most number of operable nuclear facilities in the world with 104. Their total production of electricity is roughly 27 percent of the entire world’s production. France is the most nuclear dependent out of all the nations of the world with a nuclear percentage share of 76.2 percent of the national electricity production.

Japan relies on nuclear energy for a quarter of their electricity needs through their 53 nuclear facilities which is quite a number for a country that is the size of Finland. Russia – despite its size – is less reliant on nuclear energy. It produces around 21,743 megawatts worth of electricity, making its output less than half of Japan’s. The largest country in the world has only 31 operable nuclear power plants.

Germany needs nuclear power plants for three-tenths of the country’s power needs. South Korea is also quite reliant on the technology at 35.6 percent. The site of modern day Chernobyl is still advocating the use of nuclear energy despite the history of the disaster that killed thousands and has exposed an untold number to levels of radiation that are thousands of times higher than the allowable figure.

Other countries who have nuclear technology within their territories include Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, China, Spain, Belgium, Taiwan, India, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Bulgaria, Brazil, South Africa, Hungary, Slovakia, Mexico, Romania, Argentina, Croatia, Slovenia, Netherlands, Pakistan and Armenia.

It is important to cite that the only African country that has nuclear energy capabilities so far is South Africa.

There are 15 countries that are mulling the building of nuclear facilities to augment their energy production. These countries include Bangladesh, Belarus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and United Arab Emirates. It is also worth mentioning that three Southeast Asian nations are planning to build nuclear power plants: Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Radioactive waste

There are claims that the use of nuclear energy is much cleaner that fossil fuels since it produces far less greenhouse gases than the burning of natural gas, diesel, oil or coal. This has also been featured in Al Gore’s award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Despite this however, it is quite undeniable that nuclear fission reactions would produce waste that would be something to deal with for thousands and perhaps millions of years.

Exposure to the highly radioactive wastes that are the refuse of nuclear power plants can be very detrimental to any form of life since radiation can cause mutations that often lead to serious health consequences such as cancer. The immense timeline that is considered in the treatment and disposal of the waste makes it more of an ethical question since there will be potentially hundreds and even thousands of generations that would have to pay for and manage the wastes produced by just a couple of generations’ worth of humans should nuclear energy take flight as the world’s major source of energy as the reserves of fossil fuels dwindle.

Geologic disposal or putting the harmful radioactive waste into deep pits in the Earth’s interior is a very attractive proposition. Keeping them below the earth’s surface reduces their ability to wreak havoc on animal and plant life.

Bataan nuclear power plant

The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in the town of Morong – a mere 100 kilometers away from the capital, Manila – is the Philippines’ first and only attempt to have a nuclear facility. It was almost thirty years in the making when it was first planned in the late 1950s. The facility had the potential to produce 621 megawatts of electricity.

Under the administration of Ferdinand Marcos, the bill for the power plant exceeded P2.3 billion and started becoming a very costly endeavour for the Philippines. The Three Mile Island incident in the United States prompted the cessation of construction in order to check the safety features of the plant. Over 4000 separate and distinct safety issues were seen by the inspectors and this even made people more wary about whether or not it was a good idea to have a nuclear facility so close to the capital in an area that was fairly densely populated.

A Westinghouse light water reactor was installed in 1984 just as the political situation in the country was starting to become more fragile and testy.

The ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 along with the Chernobyl disaster all but sealed the fate of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant to be mothballed. The debts incurred because of the construction of the power plant were only paid off in 2007 – more than 30 years after construction was started and 50 years since it was first put on the drawing board.

The IAEA visited the facility in 2008 when Angelo Reyes was still the sitting Department of Energy Secretary. The two recommendations of the inspectors included the organizing of more in-depth and detailed checks by committed nuclear energy experts that could give good insight when it comes to the general preservation and possible rehabilitation of the facility. The second recommendation was to iron out the necessary general requirements that are asked of countries who want to start their own nuclear programs. These requirements are meant to ensure that the country has the right amount of technology, know-how and facilities to deal with the actual production and possible contingencies and consequences that may stem from the use of nuclear energy. No figure was given as to how much rehabilitation would cost during the inspection. It was also unclear whether or not the IAEA deems the facility salvageable despite the decades’ worth of inactivity.