This six-part tale of nuclear technology begins and ends in the Land of the Rising Sun. As a homeless and careless twenty-year-old, I witnessed charred relics of my field’s violent nascence in Hiroshima. My visit gave me a poignant appreciation for the subsequent redemption of nuclear science as an instrument of peace.
To get to Hiroshima, I had bicycled over seven hundred miles from Tokyo along Japan’s oft-rugged Pacific coast. I maneuvered atop windy seaside cliffs, through narrow tunnels, and, in the more populated coastal plains, along large concrete tsunami walls. Every morning, I saw the rising sun over the calm sea on the Shizuoka coast, a surreal rewind of the setting sun I’d seen so many times over that same ocean as a teenager on the Oregon coast.
Exactly three years later, that peaceful sea would conceive violence. Those same large walls of concrete would meet an even larger wall of water.
On March 11th, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck forty miles off the Pacific coast of Japan. In all of recorded history, it was the most powerful earthquake to strike Japan, and one of the five most powerful to strike anywhere on earth. This mega-thrust quake raged for six minutes. Parts of northern Japan shifted eight feet closer to North America, and parts of the seabed lurched well over a hundred feet. The earth’s axis shifted several inches.
The sea heaved, and a tsunami was born. An hour later, it struck the shore. At worst, the wave exceeded a hundred feet in height. Eventually, it inundated over 200 square miles of the Japanese countryside. Over fifteen thousand people perished. Hydroelectric dams burst. Natural gas plants exploded.
The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant was among thousands of damaged structures. This plant consists of six separate reactors, all of them boiling water reactors (BWRs). The plant withstood the earthquake and initiated standard shutdown procedure—the fission reaction ceased. However, because fission products in the fuel generate heat long after fission ceases, the reactor must have sufficient electric power to continue circulating coolant and operate other safety systems. Although the earthquake cut off-site power sources, the emergency on-site diesel generators started up to supply the necessary electric power.
Then, a forty-five-foot wall of water came. The protective tsunami walls were only about twenty feet high. The plant flooded. The diesel generators failed. Without electric power, the plant could not properly operate its emergency cooling and safety systems. The cores of three reactors partially melted. Core melts always cause various materials to accidentally contact one another at high temperatures, often creating dangerous chemical mixes. Sometimes these mixes produce highly flammable hydrogen gas. Thus, the Fukushima I plant suffered a series of chemical explosions that further damaged the plant structures, eventually releasing radiation.
We spent the ensuing weeks fixated on media coverage of the unfolding events, as well as the international political discourse. The nuclear crisis was a major focal point, despite the fact that it contributed zero deaths to the total of over fifteen thousand from the tsunami. The bursting hydroelectric dams and exploding natural gas plants didn’t get nearly so much coverage. Most dismaying were two unfortunate themes: inaccurate information and political opportunism.
Unfortunately, he’s not a nuclear engineer.
On March 13th, two days after the earthquake and tsunami, CNN broadcast an interview with Bill Nye regarding the nuclear crisis in Japan. I hadn’t seen his familiar face in many years, and I was eager to hear what he had to say:
Bill Nye: “Cesium is used to slow and control the nuclear reaction: the fission.”
My stream of consciousness: No! Cesium is not something we introduce into a reactor for any specific purpose. It is inevitably produced as a product of fission reactions, and one of the central purposes of reactor safety is to prevent cesium (and other radioactive fission products) from contaminating the environment.
Bill Nye: “That is a pretty doggone extreme thing to be doing, to be pouring boron” into the reactor.
My stream of consciousness: No! There is nothing unusual or extreme about the use of boron in nuclear reactors. In fact, nearly all pressurized water reactors (PWRs) introduce boron (not cesium!) in order to control the fission reaction, as boron absorbs neutrons at a very high rate.
Bill Nye was wrong. He wasn’t just slightly wrong—he was blatantly, appallingly and embarrassingly wrong. His errors were more conspicuous than his polka dot bow tie. In that moment, I lost a piece of my childhood innocence. It was sort of like when I realized that Santa Claus wasn’t real, or that the stork was merely a euphemism for something heinous. It left a sour taste in my mouth.
In response to this debacle, what did CNN do? They invited Bill back to discuss the nuclear crisis again…and again. In these specious sequels, he suggested that the Japanese should “pave the thing over” instead of “trying to keep the reactor cool.” Such a notion is foolish, as paving over a reactor core would serve only to severely exacerbate the cooling crisis. All the while, CNN continued to lionize him as some sort of eminent “science expert.”
Not all scientists are experts in every area of science, and not all engineers are experts in every engineering discipline. For example, even a brilliant nuclear physicist of the highest caliber might not know the first thing about the engineering of nuclear reactor safety systems. Despite their common origin, nuclear physics and nuclear engineering are now very separate fields. Although there are many genuine “science guys,” generic “science experts” simply do not exist.
In the end, Bill Nye is still a great science guy. He certainly didn’t mean any harm, but CNN let him walk into a situation where he lacked very specific knowledge of a very specific subfield of science.
Ultimately, to me, this is all about media responsibility. When a crisis occurs, the media has a responsibility to provide accurate information to the public, and that includes choosing the right people to interview. When there is a nuclear crisis, the media should interview people who are experts in nuclear technology. When there is an aerospace crisis, the media should interview people who are experts in aerospace technology. When there is a culinary crisis, the media should interview people who are experts in culinary technology. This may seem obvious, but the media has a terrible habit of preferring to interview familiar media personalities with only very general knowledge (or even celebrities!) rather than people who have the real specific expertise.
Sometimes, only the boring people really know what’s going on.
Of course, the nuclear crisis in Japan was severe. Three reactor cores partially melted, chemical explosions breached the containment, and radiation was released into the atmosphere and ocean. This was a direct consequence of a catastrophic natural disaster of historic, unprecedented proportions. The earthquake and tsunami utterly devastated Japan, and the magnitude of the total ruin unfortunately dwarfed that of the nuclear component.
Nevertheless, as grave as the circumstances were, my principal worry was not the physical disaster. I didn’t fear the nuclear meltdowns. I didn’t fear the chemical explosions. I didn’t even fear widespread radiation sickness, especially not anywhere beyond Japan. The only thing I really feared, if you will excuse a paraphrase of Franklin Roosevelt, was fear itself.
The antithesis of this platitude is another that has permeated U.S. political dialogue throughout the past decade: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” The implication of the latter phrase is that for people in power, crises represent rare and precious opportunities to achieve political objectives. In the wake of crises and amidst ensuing media frenzies, there is a dangerous propensity for governments to make rash decisions with respect to long-term policy. People, myopic by nature, tend to lose sight of important long-term goals in favor of whatever peril seems to loom large at the moment.
Although President Obama has displayed his characteristic calm steadiness in affirming his support for increased nuclear energy in the U.S., other nations have succumbed to transitory public fear. Germany has pledged to phase out all of its reactors over the next ten years.
Italy instituted a one-year moratorium on the construction of new reactors. China indefinitely suspended all new reactor approvals. Israeli officials stated that their nation must rethink its plans to pursue commercial nuclear energy. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo attempted to close the Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear plant that supplies as much as 30% of New York City’s electricity. Many of these decisions were made less than two weeks after the earthquake, while the crisis was still unfolding and before anyone had time to ascertain—much less digest—what was really happening.
Evidently, people saw opportunities.
Nuclear energy is especially vulnerable to this sort of opportunism, as the word “nuclear” tends to incite an especially feverish reaction in the media as well as the general public. Hollywood-esque memes related to radioactive contamination and weapons proliferation have stoked up widespread fear of the word “nuclear.” This fear, which can exist only within a void of accurate scientific information, has led to a great irony: that many environmentalists—those who care most about a clean energy future—oppose nuclear energy, an essential means to achieve that future. Every unbiased quantitative study of future U.S. energy resources has concluded that we cannot meet our carbon emissions goals without a substantial expansion of nuclear energy. The numbers just don’t add up any other way. Tragically, this fear of a word, nothing more than fear itself, has made foes of should-be friends.
Just three days after the earthquake and tsunami, we launched the MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub, a blog devoted to disseminating accurate information about the unfolding nuclear accident at Fukushima, as well as nuclear technology in general.
In its first five days, this blog garnered well over one million hits from 176 countries. More than twice as many visitors were from Tokyo than from any other city. We received an outpouring of gratitude from the Japanese people.
In June, the nuclear community learned that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) planned to cut federal funding for the Nuclear Engineering University Program (NEUP) scholarships and fellowships. These fellowships provide funding to numerous elite graduate students, attracting them to the field and allowing them to pursue innovative research topics that might not otherwise be feasible. At least one startup company, Transatomic Power, has already been launched out of a NEUP-supported doctoral thesis. The cut was a surprise, as it was at odds with President Obama’s stated support for both nuclear energy and engineering education.
In July, I returned to Washington, D.C. for the first time in four years, since I had worked at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). I was a member of the Nuclear Engineering Student Delegation (NESD), a group of about a dozen nuclear engineering students selected from around the nation to lobby for nuclear-related issues in D.C. for a week each summer. This year, our aim was to restore NEUP funding, and we bore the added challenge of working under the shadow of Fukushima.
We worked closely with the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a nuclear energy advocacy organization headed by Marvin Fertel. We met with NRC Commissioner William Magwood, who was very supportive. We met with a representative of OMB and persuasively expressed the importance of nuclear energy education to the millennial generation. I met Senator Maria Cantwell from my home state of Washington, and I also met with aides to Senator Patty Murray, Representative Jay Inslee and others. Generally, members of the Washington State congressional delegation are privately in favor of nuclear energy for environmental reasons, although they are reluctant to overly support it due to local public opinion regarding the Hanford waste site. In all, student members of NESD visited offices of every U.S. Senator and a large portion of the House members.
In all of my meetings, I made the argument that "you don't have to be pro-nuclear to be pro-nuclear-engineering-education." Even if someone is completely opposed to construction of new nuclear plants, that person should still favor educating future generations of nuclear engineers to keep aging plants safe, manage the waste and ensure non-proliferation. Events like Fukushima should only reinforce the need for educating talented people who can respond to such events.
Despite our valiant efforts, the hectic and nearly calamitous fiasco to pass the 2011 budget stymied any real chance we had to restore NEUP funding that year. However, a few months later, we heard that OMB had reinstated NEUP funding to the proposed 2012 budget, which passed in December. The delegation played an important role in this restoration, along with much guidance and persistent effort from NEI and the American Nuclear Society.
Truth won; fear lost.
It really is that simple.
Some might argue that crises, which constitute short-term demands, can sometimes indicate long-term demands. This is true, but determining whether a crisis is an indicator or a fluke takes time. Let us not squander our energy security without ample time and careful reflection. We must root our energy policy in science, not fear.
We scientists and engineers of the millennial generation urge all lawmakers of the world to remain steadfast amidst public fear and the clamor of its mongers, the opportunists. The great challenge of statesmanship is to weather the whims and vicissitudes of daily politics, while remaining focused on the much longer arc of sound public policy. Lawmakers of the world, we hope you will rise to that challenge.
Mark Reed received his S.B. degree in Physics, as well as his S.B. and S.M. degrees in Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Nuclear Science and Engineering. To view his previous pieces in Fortnight—including an exclusive video tour of the MIT Nuclear Reactor—see Violent Nascence, From War to Peace, Nuclear Waste & Medicine, Nuclear Atrophy and Nuclear Renaissance.
To get to Hiroshima, I had bicycled over seven hundred miles from Tokyo along Japan’s oft-rugged Pacific coast. I maneuvered atop windy seaside cliffs, through narrow tunnels, and, in the more populated coastal plains, along large concrete tsunami walls. Every morning, I saw the rising sun over the calm sea on the Shizuoka coast, a surreal rewind of the setting sun I’d seen so many times over that same ocean as a teenager on the Oregon coast.
Exactly three years later, that peaceful sea would conceive violence. Those same large walls of concrete would meet an even larger wall of water.
On March 11th, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck forty miles off the Pacific coast of Japan. In all of recorded history, it was the most powerful earthquake to strike Japan, and one of the five most powerful to strike anywhere on earth. This mega-thrust quake raged for six minutes. Parts of northern Japan shifted eight feet closer to North America, and parts of the seabed lurched well over a hundred feet. The earth’s axis shifted several inches.
The sea heaved, and a tsunami was born. An hour later, it struck the shore. At worst, the wave exceeded a hundred feet in height. Eventually, it inundated over 200 square miles of the Japanese countryside. Over fifteen thousand people perished. Hydroelectric dams burst. Natural gas plants exploded.
The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant was among thousands of damaged structures. This plant consists of six separate reactors, all of them boiling water reactors (BWRs). The plant withstood the earthquake and initiated standard shutdown procedure—the fission reaction ceased. However, because fission products in the fuel generate heat long after fission ceases, the reactor must have sufficient electric power to continue circulating coolant and operate other safety systems. Although the earthquake cut off-site power sources, the emergency on-site diesel generators started up to supply the necessary electric power.
Then, a forty-five-foot wall of water came. The protective tsunami walls were only about twenty feet high. The plant flooded. The diesel generators failed. Without electric power, the plant could not properly operate its emergency cooling and safety systems. The cores of three reactors partially melted. Core melts always cause various materials to accidentally contact one another at high temperatures, often creating dangerous chemical mixes. Sometimes these mixes produce highly flammable hydrogen gas. Thus, the Fukushima I plant suffered a series of chemical explosions that further damaged the plant structures, eventually releasing radiation.
***
Half a world away, I was sitting at the annual research exposition of the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). Ironically, it was nuclear energy’s feature day at MIT. It was also recruitment weekend, as the newly admitted graduate students were visiting campus.We spent the ensuing weeks fixated on media coverage of the unfolding events, as well as the international political discourse. The nuclear crisis was a major focal point, despite the fact that it contributed zero deaths to the total of over fifteen thousand from the tsunami. The bursting hydroelectric dams and exploding natural gas plants didn’t get nearly so much coverage. Most dismaying were two unfortunate themes: inaccurate information and political opportunism.
***
Like many scientists and engineers of the millennial generation, I grew up watching Bill Nye. I was about five when he raced about my home city of Seattle as the local superhero “Speedwalker,” and about six when Bill Nye the Science Guy debuted. He told us why the earth orbits the sun, why the moon orbits the earth, why volcanoes erupt, how solids melt into liquids and why tadpoles become frogs. It was riveting. For some of us, he was even the original inspiration for our pursuit of careers in science and engineering. He has championed science education in the States, which we all believe is paramount.Unfortunately, he’s not a nuclear engineer.
On March 13th, two days after the earthquake and tsunami, CNN broadcast an interview with Bill Nye regarding the nuclear crisis in Japan. I hadn’t seen his familiar face in many years, and I was eager to hear what he had to say:
Bill Nye: “Cesium is used to slow and control the nuclear reaction: the fission.”
My stream of consciousness: No! Cesium is not something we introduce into a reactor for any specific purpose. It is inevitably produced as a product of fission reactions, and one of the central purposes of reactor safety is to prevent cesium (and other radioactive fission products) from contaminating the environment.
Bill Nye: “That is a pretty doggone extreme thing to be doing, to be pouring boron” into the reactor.
My stream of consciousness: No! There is nothing unusual or extreme about the use of boron in nuclear reactors. In fact, nearly all pressurized water reactors (PWRs) introduce boron (not cesium!) in order to control the fission reaction, as boron absorbs neutrons at a very high rate.
Bill Nye was wrong. He wasn’t just slightly wrong—he was blatantly, appallingly and embarrassingly wrong. His errors were more conspicuous than his polka dot bow tie. In that moment, I lost a piece of my childhood innocence. It was sort of like when I realized that Santa Claus wasn’t real, or that the stork was merely a euphemism for something heinous. It left a sour taste in my mouth.
In response to this debacle, what did CNN do? They invited Bill back to discuss the nuclear crisis again…and again. In these specious sequels, he suggested that the Japanese should “pave the thing over” instead of “trying to keep the reactor cool.” Such a notion is foolish, as paving over a reactor core would serve only to severely exacerbate the cooling crisis. All the while, CNN continued to lionize him as some sort of eminent “science expert.”
Not all scientists are experts in every area of science, and not all engineers are experts in every engineering discipline. For example, even a brilliant nuclear physicist of the highest caliber might not know the first thing about the engineering of nuclear reactor safety systems. Despite their common origin, nuclear physics and nuclear engineering are now very separate fields. Although there are many genuine “science guys,” generic “science experts” simply do not exist.
In the end, Bill Nye is still a great science guy. He certainly didn’t mean any harm, but CNN let him walk into a situation where he lacked very specific knowledge of a very specific subfield of science.
Ultimately, to me, this is all about media responsibility. When a crisis occurs, the media has a responsibility to provide accurate information to the public, and that includes choosing the right people to interview. When there is a nuclear crisis, the media should interview people who are experts in nuclear technology. When there is an aerospace crisis, the media should interview people who are experts in aerospace technology. When there is a culinary crisis, the media should interview people who are experts in culinary technology. This may seem obvious, but the media has a terrible habit of preferring to interview familiar media personalities with only very general knowledge (or even celebrities!) rather than people who have the real specific expertise.
Sometimes, only the boring people really know what’s going on.
***
While the dearth of accurate information about the crisis was disappointing, the preponderance of political opportunism in its wake was distressing.Of course, the nuclear crisis in Japan was severe. Three reactor cores partially melted, chemical explosions breached the containment, and radiation was released into the atmosphere and ocean. This was a direct consequence of a catastrophic natural disaster of historic, unprecedented proportions. The earthquake and tsunami utterly devastated Japan, and the magnitude of the total ruin unfortunately dwarfed that of the nuclear component.
Nevertheless, as grave as the circumstances were, my principal worry was not the physical disaster. I didn’t fear the nuclear meltdowns. I didn’t fear the chemical explosions. I didn’t even fear widespread radiation sickness, especially not anywhere beyond Japan. The only thing I really feared, if you will excuse a paraphrase of Franklin Roosevelt, was fear itself.
The antithesis of this platitude is another that has permeated U.S. political dialogue throughout the past decade: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” The implication of the latter phrase is that for people in power, crises represent rare and precious opportunities to achieve political objectives. In the wake of crises and amidst ensuing media frenzies, there is a dangerous propensity for governments to make rash decisions with respect to long-term policy. People, myopic by nature, tend to lose sight of important long-term goals in favor of whatever peril seems to loom large at the moment.
Although President Obama has displayed his characteristic calm steadiness in affirming his support for increased nuclear energy in the U.S., other nations have succumbed to transitory public fear. Germany has pledged to phase out all of its reactors over the next ten years.
Italy instituted a one-year moratorium on the construction of new reactors. China indefinitely suspended all new reactor approvals. Israeli officials stated that their nation must rethink its plans to pursue commercial nuclear energy. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo attempted to close the Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear plant that supplies as much as 30% of New York City’s electricity. Many of these decisions were made less than two weeks after the earthquake, while the crisis was still unfolding and before anyone had time to ascertain—much less digest—what was really happening.
Evidently, people saw opportunities.
Nuclear energy is especially vulnerable to this sort of opportunism, as the word “nuclear” tends to incite an especially feverish reaction in the media as well as the general public. Hollywood-esque memes related to radioactive contamination and weapons proliferation have stoked up widespread fear of the word “nuclear.” This fear, which can exist only within a void of accurate scientific information, has led to a great irony: that many environmentalists—those who care most about a clean energy future—oppose nuclear energy, an essential means to achieve that future. Every unbiased quantitative study of future U.S. energy resources has concluded that we cannot meet our carbon emissions goals without a substantial expansion of nuclear energy. The numbers just don’t add up any other way. Tragically, this fear of a word, nothing more than fear itself, has made foes of should-be friends.
***
As twenty-something nuclear engineering graduate students, we at first observed these events as if we were watching a horror film—enthralled, but helpless to alter the course of events. Like many of our professors thirty years ago in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident, we would be forced to watch impotently as celebrities stated erroneous facts, and political opportunists thwarted the future of our field. Would history repeat itself? Would another generation of nuclear engineers be lost? Fortunately, this time around young nuclear engineers weren’t impotent. As millennials, we had the internet. We had a voice.Just three days after the earthquake and tsunami, we launched the MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub, a blog devoted to disseminating accurate information about the unfolding nuclear accident at Fukushima, as well as nuclear technology in general.
In its first five days, this blog garnered well over one million hits from 176 countries. More than twice as many visitors were from Tokyo than from any other city. We received an outpouring of gratitude from the Japanese people.
In June, the nuclear community learned that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) planned to cut federal funding for the Nuclear Engineering University Program (NEUP) scholarships and fellowships. These fellowships provide funding to numerous elite graduate students, attracting them to the field and allowing them to pursue innovative research topics that might not otherwise be feasible. At least one startup company, Transatomic Power, has already been launched out of a NEUP-supported doctoral thesis. The cut was a surprise, as it was at odds with President Obama’s stated support for both nuclear energy and engineering education.
In July, I returned to Washington, D.C. for the first time in four years, since I had worked at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). I was a member of the Nuclear Engineering Student Delegation (NESD), a group of about a dozen nuclear engineering students selected from around the nation to lobby for nuclear-related issues in D.C. for a week each summer. This year, our aim was to restore NEUP funding, and we bore the added challenge of working under the shadow of Fukushima.
We worked closely with the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a nuclear energy advocacy organization headed by Marvin Fertel. We met with NRC Commissioner William Magwood, who was very supportive. We met with a representative of OMB and persuasively expressed the importance of nuclear energy education to the millennial generation. I met Senator Maria Cantwell from my home state of Washington, and I also met with aides to Senator Patty Murray, Representative Jay Inslee and others. Generally, members of the Washington State congressional delegation are privately in favor of nuclear energy for environmental reasons, although they are reluctant to overly support it due to local public opinion regarding the Hanford waste site. In all, student members of NESD visited offices of every U.S. Senator and a large portion of the House members.
In all of my meetings, I made the argument that "you don't have to be pro-nuclear to be pro-nuclear-engineering-education." Even if someone is completely opposed to construction of new nuclear plants, that person should still favor educating future generations of nuclear engineers to keep aging plants safe, manage the waste and ensure non-proliferation. Events like Fukushima should only reinforce the need for educating talented people who can respond to such events.
Despite our valiant efforts, the hectic and nearly calamitous fiasco to pass the 2011 budget stymied any real chance we had to restore NEUP funding that year. However, a few months later, we heard that OMB had reinstated NEUP funding to the proposed 2012 budget, which passed in December. The delegation played an important role in this restoration, along with much guidance and persistent effort from NEI and the American Nuclear Society.
Truth won; fear lost.
***
Despite the perils of the Fukushima crisis and the even great perils of potential political reaction to it, the “nuclear renaissance” is still well underway. Unlike thirty years ago, the political salience of climate change precludes an en masse return to fossil fuels. While the events at Fukushima will certainly slow the renaissance, they will not halt it. A cataclysmic natural disaster doesn’t change the fact that nuclear energy is base load, scalable, and carbon-free: the trifecta of sustainable energy that no other technology can claim. As I have often stated in this series, nuclear technology is a dichotomy of barbarism and munificence. Borne of a violent nascence, it experienced redemption as an instrument of peace. However, the fulfillment of this redemption is not guaranteed. It requires firmly grounded energy policy. Energy policy must not be fickle; it must be steady. Crises often require quick decisions with respect to short-term policy in order to minimize damage and provide aid. What crises never require, however, are quick decisions with respect to long-term policy. Short-term policy should be based on short-term demands, while long-term policy should be based on long-term demands.It really is that simple.
Some might argue that crises, which constitute short-term demands, can sometimes indicate long-term demands. This is true, but determining whether a crisis is an indicator or a fluke takes time. Let us not squander our energy security without ample time and careful reflection. We must root our energy policy in science, not fear.
We scientists and engineers of the millennial generation urge all lawmakers of the world to remain steadfast amidst public fear and the clamor of its mongers, the opportunists. The great challenge of statesmanship is to weather the whims and vicissitudes of daily politics, while remaining focused on the much longer arc of sound public policy. Lawmakers of the world, we hope you will rise to that challenge.
***
Mark Reed received his S.B. degree in Physics, as well as his S.B. and S.M. degrees in Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Nuclear Science and Engineering. To view his previous pieces in Fortnight—including an exclusive video tour of the MIT Nuclear Reactor—see Violent Nascence, From War to Peace, Nuclear Waste & Medicine, Nuclear Atrophy and Nuclear Renaissance.