Nuclear plants and seafood safety - Dissertation Example

The impact of nuclear plants on seafood safety has of late become a matter of grave concern, especially in the aftermath of Japanese Tsunami disaster and its fall out on the nuclear plants of Japan. Worldwide import ban on Japanese seafood was the immediate response to it. Though it is argued fish can be grown safely in the vicinity of a nuclear plant, the possibility of radioactive contamination cannot be ruled out as was found in the case of Sellafeld nuclear plant. Added to this, the thermal pollution caused by the effluent warm water from the nuclear plants has the potential to destroy the surrounding entire sea ecosystem, as was shown in the instances of massive algal blooms.

Above all, the sustaining risk of a nuclear accident and the consequences to sea food, as was shown in the sea food studies in the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant once again raise the question whether nuclear energy plants could be an option even. When a compilation is made of the available literature on the threat posed by nuclear plants to sea food safety, negatives are found to far outweigh the positives. Notwithstanding many positive aspects of nuclear energy, the recent earthquakes on Japan’s sea coastline and the consequent risks that emerged from Japanese nuclear plants, signifies a need for rethinking on nuclear energy.

There is emerging a major shift in the direction of discourses happening on the nuclear energy front in terms of choice and viability. The basic science of nuclear energy is that in the atoms of any element, the “composition of the central nucleus” can vary thus forming different isotopes of the same element which have “same chemical properties” but different weights (Murray, 2009, p.21). For example, hydrogen has three isotopes, namely, hydrogen (with a nucleus of one proton having positive charge), deuterium ( with a nucleus having one proton and one neutron) and tritium (with a nucleus having one proton and two neutrons)  (Murray, 2009, p.21). The protons and neutrons in the nucleus are under the effect of a binding force while the electrons orbiting the nucleus have a tendency to jump between the orbits (Murray, 2009, p.24-25). Only by supplying energy from outside can a nucleus be disintegrated into protons and neutrons (Murrey, 2009, p.25). There are exceptions to this in nature itself, manifest in elements with disintegrating nucleus and the phenomenon, radioactivity (Murrey, 2009, p.21-25).