How to

Hurt the EARTH

By Greg Wattonville

Production

Hello Bakersfield

!

I am here today to show you how chemicals

have hurt our home the Earth.

How, you ask?

Well, lets take a look.

Earth the planet in the solar system that miraculously gave birth to life. What did technological advancement bring to the earth, the technology humans want most militaristic. Destruction is a human nature that can never be gotten rid of. Humans want to control this planet because humans can only think of themselves. Humans think they need weapons to maintain peace. If that’s the truth then why is it so cliché?

In mankind's search for power, chemicals were not only used in the fission, but fusion of an atom as well. This led to the most powerful weapons mankind had ever seen. The Earth has seen this destructive power many times over, but most notable are the horrific events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Today I would like to discuss a different

incident, one dealing with…

That’s right, you guessed it, Nuclear Power Plants.

Nuclear power plants generate electricity by

use of a nuclear reactor.

In the reactor, nuclear chain reactions are

initiated, however these chains are controlled

and sustained.

Where in a nuclear bomb, reaction after reaction takes place uncontrolled, and in

fractions of a second.

Welcome to the Chernobyl Power Plant.

On April 26, 1986 at 1:23 a.m. the experiment began. Soon after, a reactor shutdown was ordered, and the control rods were set to fully

insert, but they became stuck after being inserted only one-third the way. This made the reaction unstoppable. The fuel rods melted, with the

extremely high temps. the graphite moderator caught on fire, starting a huge graphite fire, and the reactor went.

The remains of the reactor were emitting 3,000-30,000 roentgens per

hour. A dose of 500 roentgens within a 5 hour period is fatal for humans.

The radiation was so intense the first firemen on the scene were fried instantly by gamma radiation.

We are now in the Zone of Alienation, a 30 Kilometer area

surrounding the Chernobyl reactor.

It was here that 135,000 people were evacuated. But What is the Zone,

really?

For the earth it is an infected scar. A scar that would take over 30 years to heal, but will never completely close.

For us, it is a ghost town. The only people that can be seen here now are

scientists and the military.

The radiation infection spread, far less intense

than the Zone of Alienation,

however still problematic as

seen in the more than 4000

diagnosed cancer cases.

We can’t change the events that led to Chernobyl's taste of fate. We can only hope to learn form it. However, seeing what chemicals have done to hurt our pure blue world, you must ask yourself, is the chance of destruction worth the power gained?

“Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it."

The End