Well, the topic for this article is going to be about the different nuclear power plants, and their potential problems. Now unless you've been living under a rock, you've most certainly heard about the tragic disaster that struck Japan recently. A magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of Japan sent a tsunami straight into a good portion of Japan. As if that wasn't enough of a blow to the people of Japan, they now have to worry about a nuclear power plant that was in the middle of all this, and is potentially going to overheat and leak radiation into the surrounding areas. The cooling pumps lost power, so the nuclear reactors are heating up more and more as the time ticks away. It is critical that these cooling pumps get power to them, so they may hopefully cool the reactors down in time. Now this has also brought up concerns around the globe about nuclear power plants in general. What if some disaster like the one in Japan happened somewhere else near a nuclear power plant; are we prepared to do something about it? Are there enough safe guards in place to prevent nuclear plants from overheating? Some very good questions, which are being looked into by many.

Now we head on over to some more alarming news. According to [ www.nydailynews.com ] there were 13 close calls for nuclear power plants here in the U.S.A. that had the potential of leaking radiation into the surrounding areas, but luckily they did not tease us all with death too terribly much. The report further stated that some warning signs were ignored and not dealt with in a timely fashion. That is a big concern of mine, as why would anyone ignore a warning sign when dealing with nuclear energy… This is way more dangerous, then say, oil. Which we all know was another unfortunate disaster in the past, which resulted in the spilling of tons of gallons of oil into the ocean… After having stuff like that happen, more safety protocols should defiantly be enforced, and not taken lightly, as this is very dangerous stuff we are all messing with.

Now some call for the shutdown of all nuclear facilities. This could only work if you have some sort of way to produce the electricity that the nuclear plant was producing before you shut it down; else people would go without power. The current “green” power plants don't seem to be able to compete with a nuclear power plant though, unless maybe solar panels were installed on every house rooftop, with backup power plants for those cloudy days. But like any power plant solution, these things aren't cheap. No matter what approach is taken to replace nuclear power plants, millions of dollars will need to be spent. So the best solution for now seems to be to ramp up the safety requirements, so a nuclear disaster does _not_ happen anywhere period.