I feel lucky to have started my nuclear career at Nuclear Engineering International magazine, where I was able to learn the issues of the industry by reading and writing about them while talking to experts. Now I'm lucky to have the opportunity to write a monthly column for the magazine, which helps me stay up to date.
Each month brings the challenge of providing topical commentary in a monthly magazine, but none more so that this one. The only issue of the day – COVID-19 – demands that we consider what might come next even as everything changes around us. My thanks to the Editor, Caroline Peachey, for putting my column online early this time.
In the May issue I put forward the idea that the values guiding the world through this crisis are science, society and solidarity, and that they stand to influence global changes through the 2020s. Meanwhile, nuclear energy remains associated with the values of previous decades and may soon find itself even more socially stranded than it is now. However, the technology, the benefits and the best features of the industry all already align with a decade of science, society and solidarity. I say work in those areas should be boosted and made key to a revised value proposition for the 2020s.
You can read the full column here.
(Oh, for a moment I thought that was a cooling tower... But this is actually a real-life scene from the March for Science, which took place in 2017 in Washington DC)