Earlier this week I taught a class on nuclear disasters in the ENVS 311 (Un)natural Disasters class with Liz Safran. My goal for the class was to inform the students about specifics of the three major nuclear disasters to date, while also providing framework and a platform to discuss nuclear disasters in comparison to other types of disasters. The students in the class did a great job working through a topic that they did not know much about by pooling knowledge together and using what they did know about other disaster contexts.
The reading I assigned for the class was titled Fallout of Fear, by Geoff Brumfiel. Brumfiel’s article combined personal anecdotes with big-picture reporting to demonstrate the overall psychological affects that the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown and evacuation had on Japanese citizens.
I began the class by encouraging them, using only their knowledge from the reading and their understanding of other disasters, to create a list of ways that nuclear power is similar to or different from other technological disasters and natural disasters. When that list was exhausted, I went over each of the three major nuclear disasters, including: what happened at each site, health affects of neighboring populations, evacuation, clean-up, etc. I ended the presentation with an overview of the International Nuclear Event Scale, in which each event is ranked according to size and consequence. Using this scale, Three Mile Island is ranked a 5, while Chernobyl and Fukushima are ranked as 7.
After covering the key points of each event, I asked the class to revisit the question posed at the beginning. This spurned the discussion of whether or not any of these realities are enough to stop considering nuclear power as an energy security option. At the end of the period we started to specifically talk about the reading. I would have liked to schedule more time for this portion, because the students had a lot of insight and interest in the mental health of nuclear disaster victims.