Electrical Power from Nuclear Source: Ecological Challenges and Economic Benefits - Dissertation Example

The paper tells that a demand for the electrical power is rising as the population is growing. Electrical energy is adopted as one of the basic requirement of humans and in the urban life it is nearly impossible for a person to have a day without the utilization of electrical power. In older times, the wing mills were utilized to extract the mechanical power from the wind and then it was utilized to separate flour from the wheat grains or for some other purposes. In the modern world, most of the works is done by the utilization of the electrical power.

Electrical power can easily be transmitted from one place to the other and it can easily be converted to any other form of energy. The power generation system is only the transformation of energy from one form to another. However, mostly electrical energy is generated by the utilization of the mechanical energy, which is attained by the thermal energy from coal or other fossil fuel materials, geothermal energy, nuclear thermal energy or solar thermal energy and sometimes directly from the mechanical sources like hydrodynamic energy, wind energy, tidal energy.

The mechanical energy attained from the thermal energy rotates the shaft of the electrical power generator, converting the rotator mechanical energy to electrical energy. However, the photovoltaic solar cells directly convert the solar energy into direct current (DC) electrical energy. As the law of conservation of energy states, “Energy can neither be created nor can it be destroyed, although it may be converted from one form to another”.. l power, wind power, tidal energy, hydropower, geothermal, solar thermal power and electrical power from the geothermal energy are also utilized t generate the electrical power (Breeze p2-8).

However, many countries like Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and United States of America emphasize more to utilize the renewable resources as compared to the conventional methods due to the environmental concern but conventional energy generation systems are still utilized mostly (Lozanova 2008). Nuclear power provides the thermal energy and the rest of the process is same as in the thermal power generation system like the conversion of thermal into super saturated steam that runs the turbine of a steam turbine generator utilizing the aerodynamic energy in the steam that generates the electrical power by rotating the shaft of the generator.

Nuclear power is attained from the fission reaction, in which, mostly Uranium is utilized as the core material of the reaction. In this reaction, the nucleus of the atom splits into two smaller nuclei (Moore, Stanitski & Jurs p709). The reaction is accompanied with the release of massive amount of energy and the reaction continues. The fission reaction splits the nucleus of Uranium into two smaller element nuclei and then smaller nuclei split further to smaller nuclei and then the reaction continues making a chain of reactions.

After each split a large amount of energy (nearly infinite) emits that is in the form of thermal energy. The attained thermal energy is then allowed to change the state of the water from liquid to gas, which then runs the turbine of the electrical power generator. Nuclear power is not considered as the sustainable resource to generate the power, as the fuel rods or Uranium rods after the use are considered to be waste