14 DAY TRIAL // Nuclear power is currently used by multiple nations to produce electric current, without disposing large amounts of pollutants into Earth's already chocked atmosphere. In fact, the reaction taking place inside the nuclear reactor, hardly produces any kind of emissions, except for little amounts of radiation escaping the nuclear reactor core, and even those are well under the maximum level of radiation which a human being can support without sustaining severe injury, otherwise humans could not work in such facilities.
The general belief of uninformed persons is that nuclear power plants are highly dangerous and they are a disaster waiting to happened. That is not the case, since these facilities are extremely well planned, and have multiple protection systems. The most known nuclear disaster that ever happened in history, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in Ukraine in 1986, curiously happened during a test in which operators tried to see if the pumps that circulated the water through the nuclear core could push enough water to cool down the core, in case power failed. The plants operators, made a series of crucial mistakes, which in terms overheated the core, causing a disastrous explosion that spilled enormous quantities of nuclear material into the atmosphere and around the vicinity of the power plant.
A downside of the usage of nuclear power is that the depleted nuclear fuel that results from the highly energetic reaction gives off large amounts of radiation and needs special storage. Global Nuclear Energy Partnership or GNEP aims to reprocess the nuclear fuel spent, which could be shared with partner countries. Besides the reprocessing of the depleted nuclear fuel, GNEP also has on its agenda, the construction of a new type of nuclear reactors to be used to create hydrogen, and the upgrade of the Idaho National Laboratory.
Technologies needed to achieve GNEP's goals, currently under development, do not yet justify DOE's accelerated schedule for construction of facilities. Though DOE says that the program will save time and money, skeptics believe that is not the case, and actually the opposite will happen.
Although under great pressure, the GNEP R&D program has fallen behind on several of the programs currently running, such as Generation IV, one of the key elements of the construction of the Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative. The committee reviewing the program's progress has also looked into the problems regarding the Idaho National Laboratory, and found that the program is actually being considerably under financed.