This semester has been a new experience for me, working one-on-one with a professor about a subject that I have been so interested in, nuclear power. I began the semester with very straightforward background research on the nuclear power industry, including how the power is produced, what types of plants are there and what are the key differences, the distribution of plants world wide, and the possible concerns that the industry might involve.
I then started to go more in depth on the three major nuclear disasters, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. I focused primarily on the Chernobyl disaster for a few reasons, namely that it was both a level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, and that it was the long enough ago that studies of different factors affected by the accident have been able to inform the larger public of the consequences. Due to the time frame since the Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdown and the connection to other natural disasters, I continued to study the Fukushima through the context of a thesis research proposal.
As the end of the semester approached, most of my work involved synthesizing my research over the past few months in a way that can be shared. This was really important not only to the class that I taught about nuclear disaster in the (Un)natural Disasters class, but also to my own conceptual understanding of the topic. Because I had been able to step back at the framework of my topic, I was able to use my semester of independent study to create thee different thesis proposals for my ENVS core class, all of which build off of my original thesis proposal and nuclear disaster. For each proposal I was able to connect the topic to different aspects of resilience, including vulnerability, pre-event conditions, and disaster types.