Blog 24

In an article written by Matthew Wald about nuclear energy and its history, he talks about the current status of nuclear reactors in our world today. He brings up the changes in the technology of the reactors and also improvements in old technology and how it is becoming a large part of our modern energy production. “In 2009, reactors are producing more electricity than ever before, about 20 percent of the kilowatt-hours used in this country, by getting more power out of old plants.” (Wald 1) In other words, old nuclear reactors are being improved upon to produce much more energy; in 2009, they produced about 20 percent of the United States kilowatt-hours.

While nuclear power can be helpful, it has the potential to be extremely dangerous as well. One example is the Chernobyl nuclear accident, thousands of people were killed and there has been a giant increase in cancer rates surrounding the site of the meltdown. This is similar to the memory implanting in dollhouse, being able to implant dolls with the necessary memories to do jobs that others would most likely fail at seems like a great idea. What if it goes horribly wrong though? This has happened once already with alpha and the Dollhouse hasn’t seemed to learn from its mistakes just as we haven’t seemed to learn from ours in the case of nuclear reactors. Sure, we take some steps to improve our safety but we let ourselves get lulled to sleep, in 2002, here in Ohio, boric acid ate away a chunk of the reactor and left it vulnerable to failure. Luckily it was discovered before anything worse happened but we obviously aren’t taking the necessary actions to foresee potential problems.