Informative Speech Template Essay

Thesis: The uses of nuclear energy range from being a clean, renewable energy source to cutting edge medical procedures.

The Institute for Energy and Environment offered and alternative in 1999 for the management of nuclear waste. For short term storage the Institute for Energy and Research (IEER) recommended nuclear waste should be stored as near and safely as possible from where it was produced. IEER suggests that the sites need to be dry and as close as possible to the place where the waste was generated to avoid a potential terrorist disaster. The funding for the extra storage on the site should come from the Federal Governments Nuclear Waste Fund. For short term storage the Institute for Energy and Environment Research (IEER) recommended nuclear waste should be stored as near and safely as possible from where it was produced. IEER suggests that the sites need to be dry and as close as possible to the place where the waste was generated to avoid a potential terrorist disaster. The funding for the extra storage on the site should come from the Federal Governments Nuclear Waste Fund. Many repositories should be looked and studied for more than a decade and none prioritized. Finding a permanent and safe solution is very difficult and would require a lot of time because of the want for good science (Ledwidge,

•     Waste from nuclear energy stays radioactive for thousands of years. Great care has to be taken in storing this waste safely.

Disposal of the high level nuclear waste that comes from nuclear power plants continues to be a big problem. It has been challenging and costly to find safe ways to store this waste. According to a report from the U.S National Academy of Sciences, it will take 3 million years for radioactive waste stored in the U.S. as of 1983 to decay to background levels (thinkquest.org). Who wants this amount of waste stored in the environment where they live? Currently in the U.S. nuclear power plants produce 3,000 tons of this high level waste each year (thinkquest.org). If nuclear power continues to be produced, this amount of waste will only continue to increase, causing a bigger dilemma as to what to do with the waste. As the waste is removed from the plant it still contains a high level of radiation. Exposure to radiation whether it occurs in the moving process or leakage from storage not only has a negative impact on the environment but also can pose a major health threat to humans. Based on the level of exposure, symptoms to humans can range from nausea and headaches to damage of nerve cells, loss of white blood cells and even death (think .org). The potential risk of exposure is not worth human life.

Highly radioactive waste disposal has become one of the most controversial aspects of nuclear technology. As the amount of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from defense-related processing plants has continued to mount, the issue has become increasingly contentious and politicized.2 The politicization of this issue is especially evident in the site selection process of a permanent national repository for the disposal of highly radioactive waste.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 was enacted and passed by Congress based on bipartisanship between parties of congress, recommendations from various interest groups, and presidential leadership from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Authoured by the 97th U.S. Congress, this policy aimed to create both a safe and permanent repository to store highly nuclear nuclear waste left over from the production of nuclear weapons in the 1950’s. Up until the bill was signed into law, the disposal of nuclear wastes was widely unmanaged. Residue from reactors and other facilities were kept in temporary storage units, however they were considered ineffective in the long term.(Mcalester, 2010) As stated in a paper by Brett Madres (2011), nuclear wastes can remain potently radioactive for extended periods of time. Recognizing the need to create a long term repository to safely store nuclear wastes, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 due to bipartisanship efforts between the Democrats and Republicans, cooperation from numerous interest groups, and nuclear policy initiatives from both Presidents Carter and Reagan.

The main radioactive waste to be discussed is waste produced by nuclear power. It was narrowed down to be the best possible waste site; an action oversaw by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (Wald, 2014). The progress was ceased with the election of Democratic President Barack Obama. The reason this is valuable is because this was the time Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, which gives reason to believe her policy would not change as the presidential race

Additionally, the environment issues came to be severe effects after the nuclear bombing. An example being, at the plutonium production facilities at the Hanford Site in Washington State, the Atomic Energy Commission released billions of gallons of radioactive material into the Columbia River. Ponding basins where reactor effluent was stored to allow for sufficient radioactive decay were notoriously prone to leakage. Groundwater contamination at Hanford continued to be an intractable problem in the first decade of the 21st century, placing the Columbia at risk of further contamination. In the late 1980s, the U.S. government designated Hanford as a Superfund site. Cleanup of the site is estimated to run well into the billions of dollars, if it can be fully remediated at all. Other nuclear-complex sites

Yucca Mountains purpose is a housing storage for radioactive waste, the problem being it isn't running yet. In the early 90's scientist believed they could store cans buried deep in the Earth surrounded by dense rock.1 While Yucca mountain was picked over nine other sites it's has run into problems physically and through the community. One of the first problems the site ran into was water could be found traveling through the rocks to a well 15 miles away. I feel this issue could've been solved with careful monitoring. If the water did become contaminated, a device could alert someone to handle the situation. Or a barrier could be put in the ground that wouldn't allow the water to go anywhere. Though the barrier would have to go deep in ground further than the holding tunnels, it would give scientist time to extract the contaminated water and handle it

Due to the situation, that places us back to where we were on the crucial question of “What are we going to do with all the radioactive waste being discharged by U.S. nuclear power reactors?”. Although when you bear in mind the other radioactive waste streams made by converting and plutonium recycling, the amount of the long lived radioactive waste is not reduced. The French reprocessing company AREVA states that its process lowers the amount and endurance of the radioactive waste created by the nuclear power reactors.

100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada you can find the remnants of the abandoned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. The safety of storing waste at Yucca Mountain has been an ongoing debate not only for Indian tribes and local communities around the mountain, but a topic that has concerned many people in Nevada and Washington D.C. The topic itself is a very tricky one to grasp at this point because a quarter century after it was signed in to be the national nuclear waste site, there is still no real waste site; what is left is an empty site yet to be fully developed. In 2008 a number of states had their nuclear waste in reactors transported. The site was once used to store nuclear waste if only temporarily, but was shut down because of funding issues. Still,just because the site is abandoned does not mean Yucca Mountain could not still become a center for nuclear waste. Technically it is, by law, the national center for nuclear waste. So what exactly is the problem that Yucca still poses if it is a pending abandoned project? Since

The use of nuclear power and nuclear weapons is forcing humankind, and indeed the whole ecosystem, to participate in a particularly cruel and totally uncontrolled experiment. The United States can not afford continuing to raid the environment with long-lived radioactive materials that are scattered to the wind and embedded in our soil, exposing large populations, and foisting health impacts - such as: “high instances of infant mortality and more than six thousand cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents according to a 2008 UN report” - (6) on unsuspecting future generations who have no choice in this matter. With this in mind, nuclear energy also puts out more carbon dioxide, puts out more air pollutants, enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up than real renewable energy systems, namely wind, solar, geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power and, the radiation exposure will force animals and insects out of their homes, or possibly kill them as to what happened in Chernobyl. Moreover, nuclear power enhances nuclear weapons proliferation. (Ted Talk) Due to the fact, that the people haven’t yet came up a solution to where to store spent energy. Moreover, short- and long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel has been a challenge for the industry and policymakers. Spent fuel, if not disposed of properly, could contaminate water supplies or be used by terrorists to create a dirty bomb. This

The site was in operation for 44 years and was decommissioned in 1987 (Wald, 1998). During this period, approximately 110,000 tons of nuclear fuel were processed at Hanford Site (Wald, 1998; Gephart and Lundgren 1998). It produced 73 tons of nuclear weapons and reactor fuel-grade plutonium during the time of its operations (Gephart and Lundgren 1998). The production of nuclear weapons and nuclear fuels generated huge quantities of highly radioactive waste which was stored in underground storage tanks.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) addresses spent fuel storage debate by pools or dry casks, highlighting key points and questions and answers. All U.S. nuclear power plants utilize cooling ponds, or pools, to store spent nuclear fuel. The USNRC deems these cooling points sufficient; however, many others do not, especially if pools ever experienced loss of water and the rods were exposed, thereby melting down and dispersing radioactive material. Case in point: look no further than the near disaster, miraculously averted, at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011. The pond supporting Reactor 4 was compromised and losing water, nearly exposing the rods; until miraculously, a nearby water line was broken, filling the pond inadvertently, and avoiding complete disaster. Had this water not cooled the spent rods, avoiding meltdown and radioactive fall-out, none other than Japanese Prime Minister Kan believed the very existence of Japan was at stake. Therefore, although more expensive, dry casks may provide a safer and more secure alternative to temporarily store spent rods and waste fuel going forward, in

Currently, the most common way to manage HLW is to store it in a geological repository which is a tunnel under the surface in a stable geological location far from the population. However, this technique proves to be unsafe since there is a possibility of there being a leak and the nuclear waste being released into the environment. Even a small leak can result in a large catastrophe (Xie). The long-term effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fully demonstrate the dangers that radioactivity exposure can present. Radioactivity exposure resulted in the increased risk of Leukemia, breast, thyroid, and lung cancer as well as degeneration of nuclei of cells among the survivors of the atomic bomb (Roe). Transmutation provides a way to change the long-lived fission products into short-lived ones. The change occurs when the atom is bombarded with a nucleus in a nuclear reactor (World Nuclear Association). Partitioning is performed along with transmutation and it is the process through which radioactive isotopes are taken out of the HLW for transmutation (Abderrahim). Transmutation and partitioning can reduce the nuclear waste problem in magnitude.