Nuclear Engineers

"Humanity has to pay the price for its comfort" — that's what Ukrainian nuclear engineer Alexei Ananenko said when a journalist asked him in 2021 whether the world still needs nuclear power. Alexei Ananenko was one of the engineers working at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when one of its reactors exploded in 1986, in what later became known as the "Chernobyl disaster" — the largest nuclear radiation accident in history. Alexei Ananenko is the engineer who went on what was essentially a suicide mission to drain the water beneath the reactor core before radioactive material could reach it and send up radioactive steam that could have reached every corner of Europe and made it uninhabitable. Despite all that, he believes that without nuclear power, the world wouldn't have the electricity it has today. The Chernobyl disaster was, at its root, caused by human error, and despite its devastating effects, it's credited with paving the way for major reforms across nuclear reactors worldwide, which were equipped with far more safety systems until nuclear power became, today, extremely safe. So the question now is: why does the world need nuclear power more today — and in the future — than ever before? The terrifying climate change threatening our planet, driven by the carbon emissions from the fossil fuels used to generate electricity, has no safe, sustainable alternative once fossil fuels run out except nuclear power, since it produces no environmental pollutants at all. Generating electricity from nuclear power is also far cheaper than generating it from oil, natural gas, and coal, and even cheaper than renewable sources like solar and wind — many countries around the world have relied on nuclear power to generate electricity for decades. Nuclear power has other uses too, no less important than electricity — you may not know that the various medical imaging devices (X-rays and the like) used to diagnose most illnesses rely, in how they work, on specific amounts of nuclear radiation, on top of its uses in agriculture, food, and military equipment. From all this you can appreciate the importance of what nuclear engineers do in producing the world's nuclear power.

Meet the Writer: Waleed Abo Omiraa