[ Types: Radioactive Pollution ]

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Types: Radioactive Pollution

Overview

The 40's was the era where the first nuclear bomb is being developed, and that's why it's called the nuclear era. However, nuclear energy has already researched back since 1900. Nuclear era reached its greatest peak in the world war, by showing its massive ability of destroying things.

Nuclear energy is a form of energy that’s released by the splitting of atoms. Since scientists have found a way to make use of the energy, it has also been used to generate electricity.

Nuclear energy has been recognized as a clean energy because it doesn’t release pollutants such as CO₂ to the atmosphere after its reaction that could damage our environment. It's also known that nuclear energy has reduced the amount of greenhouse gas emission, reducing emissions of CO₂ for about 500 million metric tons of carbon.

Despite the advantage of nuclear as a clean energy, the big concern is the waste resulted from nuclear reaction, which is a form of pollution, called radioactivity. Radioactivity is a form of radiation (a form of energy that travels through space). Some elements in this world are naturally radioactive while some others are made to be. Radioactivity is emitted when a radioactive element become unstable and begin to decay in the attempt to regain their molecular stability. When an element decays, it emits energy and small particles. If it’s still radioactive, it will repeat the process, until it finally regains its molecular stability and stop decaying. The time that it takes for half way of decaying process is called half-life, and this differs for each radioactive element. It possibly takes up to 4.5 billion years (Uranium 238) and as short as 8 days (Iodine 131). This process constantly remains, not considering external factors such as pressure or temperature. This process is expressed in units called becquerels. One becquerel is equal to one disintegration of nuclei per second.

There are commonly three types of radiation, namely:

Alpha particles, can be blocked by a piece of paper and human skin.
Beta particles can penetrate through skin, while can be blocked by some pieces of glass and metal.
Gamma rays can penetrate easily to human skin and damage cells on its way through, reaching far, and can only be blocked by a very thick, strong, massive piece of concrete.

The Dilemma of Radioactive Waste

There is absolutely no good solution for radioactive waste. We can just wait for it to finish the decaying process, which is so time consuming, and harm the environment. Finally, the way out is to store them somewhere in isolated places or containers and keep them there until no radioactivity left. Some possible places that have been thought of are burying them under the sea and underground. Low-level waste is packed in metal containers and buried along swallow digging. While high-level waste is buried deeper under the ground, in an isolated location such as deserts and uninhabited valley. But this promotes dangers, if leakage happens, large portion of surrounding environment will be contaminated. Some ideas to fly them to outer space have also been exist—however this kind of solution is so expensive.

Sources and Methods

We can classify major sources that lead to radioactive pollution to the following categories:

nuclear power plants
nuclear weapon
transportation
disposal of nuclear waste
uranium mining

Please click here to view a comprehensive table explaining the above major sources.

Or click here to view numbers of nuclear power plants by country around the world.

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