How Is Nuclear Energy Used Today?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Steve Jones and I'm going to tell you how nuclear energy is used today. Basically nuclear energy is very very expensive initially to produce and power stations and so forth are quite large and therefore the uses of nuclear energy have to be on the side of a power station in general. So naturally the production of electricity through nuclear power stations is the number one use of nuclear energy. In fact countries like France, something like 40% of their energy is produced by nuclear power stations and this is particularly in a place where maybe there are no big rivers to use hydroelectric power or there is no other resources other energy resources like oil. So nuclear energy is a good alternative and obviously it has its advantages. Now military uses are a different matter because military uses are restricted to large nations. You have to have a lot of money to have a nuclear bomb and to maintain it because nuclear bombs don't last forever and they have to be reprocessed so after a while they don't work any more. So military uses are restricted mainly to the big powers. One military use as opposed to bombs, etc. is the use in reactors in ships. Some of the ships are big enough including the submarines, are big enough actually to have nuclear reactors in them and both Russia and America have huge fleets of nuclear submarines and these are nuclear powered submarines and they might also have nuclear weapons on board like the Triton Missile System. In addition America also has large aircraft carriers each of which has two large nuclear reactors powering it. The advantage being that of course it has to refuel once a year in American. Now as other large aircraft carriers do every two weeks or so at different points in the world so it keeps the fuel under your own control. Unfortunately the beneficial uses like medical uses depend very much on having a nuclear reactor handy so there are medical uses and there are diagnoses using nuclear reactor material. Treatment of for example cancer can be done using material that comes from nuclear reactors so there is that beneficial use as well. So that is briefly what kind of useful things nuclear energy can be used for."