Essay Example on Uranium vs Hydrogen Mining for fossil fuels or Capturing

After mining it is refined and purified and made into ceramic pellets I should mention that one of the Uranium pellets about the size of your pinky has the same amount of energy as 150 gallons of oil Then these uranium pellets are put into a reactor Uranium mines are operating in twenty countries and about half of world production of uranium comes from ten of those mines in six countries Canada Australia Niger Kazakhstan Russia and Namibia Uranium ore is fed into a mill where it is crushed then into water where it is ground into a fine slurry Sulfuric acid is then put into the slurry to dissolve the uranium ore and to leave the rock behind The uranium oxide concentrate or yellow cake is then dried and put into barrels If it is dried at high temperatures it is called khaki Most power plants have to have uranium enriched To do this the uranium has to be in a gaseous form They put it in a gaseous form by putting the uranium through a conversion plant This is where uranium oxide turns into uranium hexafluoride After the uranium is turned into gas the enrichment plant lets the uranium 235 continue on to make pellets This only accounts for about 15 of the uranium The remaining 85 or the tails portion is uranium 238 which has very little immediate use The Atomic Energy Commission has regulated radioactive waste since 1946 Radioactive byproduct is a result of splitting apart enriched uranium or plutonium Some of these byproducts are cobalt 60 cesium 137 and iridium 192 Most of these byproducts are put in pools in the nuclear power plants Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe It is found in anything from stars to sugar here is hydrogen almost everywhere but pure hydrogen is almost non existent in the Earth's atmosphere Hydrogen was named by a French chemist named Antoine Lavoisier 

There are three common isotopes of hydrogen protium tritium and deuterium Protium is the most common type of hydrogen then comes deuterium a stable isotope discovered in 1932 by Harold C Urey The last hydrogen isotope is tritium an unstable isotope was discovered in 1934 Deuterium and tritium are used in nuclear fission reactors There are also many other uses for hydrogen such as rocket fuel welding and producing hydrochloric acid Additionally hydrogen is used as a flushing gas in the tech world in the production of silicon chips filling balloons and it is also used in fertilizer Hydrogen is a very clean burning fuel because the only byproduct is water With this information I think we should use hydrogen as an energy source because it is very abundant and the hydrogen itself does not pollute the air The only issue with hydrogen is we are still trying to figure out how to obtain it without polluting the air The way we are getting hydrogen right now is through natural gas which we let that escape into the air as a pollutant We also need to find a way to store hydrogen safely We have many problems to work out with hydrogen energy but it is a very clean energy that we can use to fuel our our cars and maybe even heat or cool our houses if we can figure out the technology to effectively use it Sources Blaszczak Boxe Agata Facts About Hydrogen LiveScience Purch 23 Jan 2015 www livescience com 28466 hydrogen html How Is Uranium Ore Made into Nuclear Fuel www world nuclear org neclear basics how is uranium ore made into nuclear fuel aspx Backgrounder on Byproduct Materials United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission www nrc gov reading rm doc collections fact sheets byproduct materials html