Argumentative Essay about Nuclear Energy in Australia

📌Category: Australia, Energy, World
📌Words: 1119
📌Pages: 5
📌Published: 28 March 2022

Good afternoon, Adjudicator, guests and the opposing team, St Patricks. The topic for today’s debate is ‘That nuclear energy is the future of electricity generation in Australia’. We as the negative team strongly disagree with this statement. And we agree with the scope and definition of the affirmative team. We define nuclear energy as the use of nuclear reactions to create electricity. I as the first speaker discuss how nuclear power plants have the potential to malfunction just like many have in the past meaning it isn't a reliable source of energy that has numerous risks. I will also discuss how nuclear plants are expensive to build and how this affects our economy. My second speaker will discuss the impacts nuclear plants have on our environment, communities and also our economy. Our third speaker will rebut and sum up our team’s case. 

Nuclear powerplants are based of radioactivity that is run by humans and technology. Therefore there could be the potential for malfunctions which can cause extreme explosions and radiocative waste to emit meaning communities and cities have to evacuate. For example, in Chernobyl 25 years ago there was a nuclear failure having to evacuate everyone. This was a result of human error and poor planning, and how if we start using nuclear energy this could have the same outcome for Australia. 25 years on, this area in Ukraine is still radioactive and uninhabitable. This event is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history, both in cost and casualties. Imagine if this happened in Australia today? How would this make you feel if you had to live through one of the biggest world disasters to date? There is a consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome months after the disaster occurred. With 60 people in total dying from this disaster, and some suffering with influenced risk of radiation-induced cancer, what if this happened to you and your family today? People had to evacuate their homes, contributing to the number of people that were in poverty at this time.

Allowing for nuclear energy to be the future of electricity in Australia, allows this cycle to repeat. Not only were a lot of people physically and mentally affected by the disaster, Ukraine’s economy was also detrimentally affected. The nuclear plant Reactor 4 costing 1.5 billion euros to build, which equates to approximately 2.3 billion Australian Dollars. The entire project cost 2.2 billion euros to build, which is nearly 3.4 billion Australian Dollars. This was a huge loss to Ukraine’s economy as it is considered the poorest country in Europe, so taking into account the large cost of the entire project, and the amount of money it cost to fix the outcome, this was a detrimental loss to Ukraine. 

The local economy in Ukraine was in deep devastation due to the result of using nuclear energy. Farmers could not sell their products because they were contaminated by radioactive materials, this deeply devastated the local economy and caused the citizens of these areas to no longer have a job, or a way to live safely. Although efforts have now been made to create clean food production, this food was not only expensive to produce but difficult to sell. Consumers would not purchase these products from these contaminated areas. These areas now are still significantly trying to make up for lost time and money, 25 years later. This could’ve been easily avoided by using so many different alternatives to nuclear energy. Imagine if your only way to make a living was to sell your product, that you put time and effort in to grow and overnight this is gone. How would you feel? You would feel lost and hopeless. If another alternative like solar panels instead of nuclear energy was used, imagine how different the outcome would’ve been. Lives would not have been lost, people would have not lost their jobs and life’s work, homes and families would not have been destroyed and taken away from each other. Using solar panels and wind turbines are 2 of many different alternatives to nuclear energy. Australia also has an abandoned nuclear power plant in Jervis Bay but was seen that the financial constraints were just too much. Australia has once seen that nuclear energy costs too much, what causes our view to change in the future? Let Australia learn from mistakes, don’t use nuclear waste.

The Sydney Morning Herald published that, a twin-reactor project in South Carolina, USA, was abandoned in 2017 after the expenditure of at least $13.4 billion. Over in New Mexico, the world's only deep underground nuclear waste repository was closed for three years following a chemical explosion in an underground nuclear waste barrel in 2014. Many small nuclear plants around the world are under construction but they have been subject to huge cost overruns and delays. The USA is one of the first countries to actually build and trial nuclear energy, but they are 1 billion dollars over budget AND 1 year behind schedule. Imagine if Australia was in this position? Why create many different nuclear power plants when we have so many alternatives? Why put ourselves into an untimely position that is going to hurt our economy? 

If we don’t use nuclear energy, what will we use? Well, we can alternatively use solar panels. There are many benefits of solar panels, as it is better for the environment as there are no direct greenhouse gas emissions because the electricity is made from sunlight rather than burning fossil fuels. It also allows for the owners of solar panels to save money and its low maintenance. On average solar panels cost close to $16,000. Whereas nuclear power plants cost $5,366 for every kilowatt of capacity. That means a large 1-gigawatt reactor would cost around $5.4 billion to build, this excludes the cost that comes to actually run the power plant to create electricity. Sure, our country may be able to afford 2 or 3 power plants, but imagine how many would be needed in Australia? Thousands for sure. This is just not an option to spend that much money on something that could backfire and create a massive disaster as seen in previous events. Solar panels are not just the only option. Wind turbines are also a great alternative as it uses the natural resources of the weather to power electricity.  

Morocco is home to one of the biggest solar farms in the world with the ability to power over 80 countries. They use the electricity that is generated from this and export the electricity all over the world. If australia did this we could power Australia as well as exports to other countries which is injecting positive money into the Australian economy. 

Not following the trend of building nuclear power plants would be a great decision for our country as a whole. Where there are so many different alternatives out there, why go with one that we know will contribute horribly to our country? With so many risks involved and so much money that needs to be spent, why would we go with this option? Nuclear energy is definitely not the future of electricity generation in Australia. Let Australia learn from mistakes, don’t use nuclear waste.

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