Should I worry about nuclear power?

Nuclear power stations are not atomic bombs waiting to go off, and are not prone to "meltdowns".
There is a lot of U-238 in there slowing things down - you need a high concentration of U-235 to make a bomb.
If the reactor gets too hot, the control rods are lowered in and it cools down.
If that doesn't work, there are sets of emergency control rods that automatically drop in and shut the reactor down completely.


With reactors in the UK, the computers will shut the reactor down automatically if things get out of hand (unless engineers intervene within a set time). At Chernobyl, in Ukraine, they did not have such a sophisticated system, indeed they over-rode the automatic systems they did have. When they got it wrong, the reactor overheated, melted and the excessive pressure blew out the containment system before they could stop it. Then, with the coolant gone, there was a serious fire. Many people lost their lives trying to sort out the mess. A quick web search will tell you more about this, including companies who operate tours of the site.


If something does go wrong in a really big way, much of the world could be affected - some radioactive dust (called "fallout") from the Chernobyl accident landed in the UK. That's travelled a long way.
With AGR reactors (the most common type in Britain) there are additional safety systems, such as flooding the reactor with nitrogen and/or water to absorb all the neutrons - although the water option means that reactor can never be restarted.
So should I worry? I think the answer is "so long as things are being done properly, I don't need to worry too much. The bit that does worry me is the small amount of high-level nuclear waste from power stations. Although there's not much of it, it's very, very dangerous and we have no way to deal with it apart from bury it and wait for a few thousand years...


There are many different opinions about nuclear power, and it strikes me that most of the people who protest about it don't have any idea what they're talking about. But please make up your own mind, find out as much as you can, and if someone tries to get you to believe their opinion ask yourself "what's in it for them?"