Nuclear power is renewable by many standards but nuclear fuel is not. This has led scientists to argue quite fiercely about the regenerative capacity of nuclear energy.
Renewable energy is an energy source in which the necessary resources are renewable on the human time scale. In other words, the resources to create it will not be exhausted when people use it because they are replenished naturally.
The most common examples of renewable resources include wind, sunlight, tides, waves, geothermal energy, and biomass. Humans predict the sun will continue to burn for at least another 5 billion years, wind is a natural by-product of heat in the atmosphere, tides are generated by the moon, and the geothermal activity of the earth is unsigned. termination signal. Biomass energy production, based on organic materials, is currently growing with abundant supply and is not expected to run out. As such, all of the above energy sources will be rapidly renewable and have virtually limitless availability.
Nuclear energy is derived from the core of an atom.
Non-renewable resources are resources that cannot be replenished at a rate equal to or greater than what they are consumed. This means that the supply of non-renewable resources is finite. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas… may have fueled the industrial development of the earth over the past two centuries. Humans’ tireless consumption and deep dependence on these resources leads to a significant increase in carbon emissions and leads to climate change. However, it also leads to an increasingly urgent need to use renewable energy sources with a smaller carbon footprint.
Nuclear energy is derived from the core of an atom. They release an amazing amount of energy (heat) and neutrons when separated during nuclear fission. Neutrons collide with other neutrons, thus splitting more atoms and releasing more energy. This is a chain reaction. From here, enormous heat is released and then used to generate steam that turns turbines and generates electricity.
In the core of nuclear reactors is uranium fuel , but only a small part of this fuel is used in most plants. This results in a large amount of nuclear waste being generated and then having to be stored safely. However, in recent years, scientific advances have allowed nuclear waste to be incorporated into the recycling process. Essentially, the plants will send waste back to the reactor to harness more potential energy.
This nuclear waste recycling process is quite expensive, involves careful chemical manipulations, and also produces waste in liquid form. The end product of this process has a much shorter half-life than traditional nuclear waste (hundreds of years versus millions of years).
Those who claim nuclear power are renewable have the main argument that carbon emissions are virtually nil. At the same time, the amount of waste in the production process is also manageable (and potentially reusable). Nuclear energy production does not directly produce any carbon emissions – which is quite different from consuming fossil fuels. It is the world’s second-lowest carbon-generating energy source, after hydroelectricity. At the same time, unlike waste from fossil fuel consumption, the particles and waste of nuclear fuel are very small in size.
The argument of those who claim nuclear energy is renewable comes from the potential to produce uranium . Currently, the available uranium that has been extracted could be used for the next 1000 years. Experts also believe that the actual amount of uranium may be much higher than this figure. At the same time, in the future when science develops, it can also be extracted from sea water or other sources in large quantities, enough to sustain nuclear energy for billions of years.
Those who argue that nuclear power is non-renewable argue that it is not currently possible to extract all the uranium available on the planet. Although there may be future scientific advances, this is still not possible so the resources of this form of energy are finite. In addition, the waste generated from nuclear power generation may be compact, but keeping it safe is still a major concern. In particular, because the half-life of Uranium-235 (the most common type of nuclear fuel) is in the millions of years range when it cannot be recycled.
As such, the current debate over whether nuclear energy is renewable or not revolves around the finiteness of uranium . To answer this question, we have to wait into the future to see if scientific progress will help make uranium infinite.