Nuclear Chemistry Essay

Vanessa Jimenez (period 3)
Nuclear Chemistry Essay In today’s society, nuclear chemistry has slowly been introduced and taking over. Nuclear energy is even being considered as an alternate source of energy that is to be beneficial to our environment. More people are using nuclear power and it can be seen in a long range of our medical technology. This however, is not a good thing for the future of society. While nuclear energy does present some benefits to society, overall it causes too much damage to the environment and therefore individuals. To begin with, nuclear chemistry produces too much environmental waste which causes a lot of damage to the environment. For nuclear energy, the main source that fuels it is uranium. Uranium sources are just as finite as things like coal and cause a larger sum of environmental waste that is very costly to get rid of. This waste is a result of the process of mining, refining, and transporting the uranium. Furthermore, the waste produced form the uranium lasts a long time in the environment. Often this waste can last up to 200 to 500 thousand years causing various amount of pollution to the habitats that surround it. For this reason, nuclear energy has always been questioned because it causes the waste can be a danger to animals and humans. Even though it is suppose to be considered as a benefit to the environment, the amount of waste produced from turning the sources into energy produces too much pollution, which means in reality it is not a benefit but a negative thing for the environment. Not only is it harmful to the environment, but it is also harmful to human beings. Working at any energy site is considered to be risky, but working at a nuclear energy is site is a bigger danger to individual. Most of the time at these sites, there are a lot of unknown risks that come with working here. To make matters worse, no one takes responsibility for the accidents that occur at the sites which means that the person who get in accident at work won’t have their injuries covered and will have to pay for everything by themselves. Additionally, nuclear energy also can be very destructive. The most well known use for nuclear chemistry is the making of nuclear weapons. These weapons have for a long time been a huge danger to humanity. A great example would be the atomic bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during the times of World War II. These bombs wiped out a large area of the cities killing more than 80,000 people in Hiroshima alone. These types of weapons put humanity and society at risk because we never know when people want to use them. Even though there have been many negative consequences to using nuclear chemistry, it has in some cases provided benefits to the society. For instance, advances in nuclear medicine have helped find a way to get rid of cancer. Nuclear medicine uses advanced technology, like the cobalt-60, to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer. This is seen to be a benefit toward our society. . However, exposure to radiation can often be deadly and have a variety of negative effects on a person. Very large doses can be lethal and smaller doses can even produce cancer over the years. This means that we have a chance of catching something worse than what we originally had or in worse cases death. Therefore, even though it does help get rid of cancer, over the years it can still produce the cancer again or even cause the person to die. In conclusion, nuclear chemistry overall is not a real benefit for the environment, society, and individual. Procedures for turning sources into usable energy are causing too much waste and the radiation process can be deadly. The society should rethink about have nuclear energy as an alternate source of energy and try to find other treatments for cancer that do not include too much risk for the health of a person. If in the future people want to try to use nuclear energy, then they should try to limit the dangers that it can inflict on our society.