As concerns about environment and power usage has grown, usage of nuclear power has become a controversy to many countries. Many debate to use it as continuing to use fossil fuels greatly harms our environment, and many debate not to use it as they are worried about the radiation and economic meltdown in the future as building a nuclear power plant costs billions.

My stance on this long debate is anti-nuclear. Firstly, the effects of radiation poisoning from the nuclear accidents, like the one in Chernobyl, was devastating. Other than that, the waste materials they produce emits radiation for thousands of years. And being exposed to radiation isn’t good either as we can see from the effects it brought to countries like Japan that had nuclear accidents before. For example, they couldn’t eat much food because some livestock got radiation poisoning and it can get transmitted to people if they eat them.

Also, although the power plants aren’t “emitting carbon,” the way they get their fuel, or uranium isn’t CO2-free either. In fact, uranium mines inevitably pollute our environment. Wastes they produce are very radioactive and high in temperature, harming our environment.

Furthermore, using nuclear power plants are very costly and can cost until $9 billion, and can take a long time to build. Another disadvantage is that there are finite resources that they can use and they don’t work forever. So they have to make another one again after so many years.

Other than those, having access to nuclear power is very dangerous as there are terrorist groups existing today and if they can get the information, it can get dangerous for the people as they can have nuclear power and make nuclear weapons that they can threaten the world with.