Get your coffee because this is long, but I wrote it for you

In the swing of things, there is nothing more important than outside feedback.  We, as in the members of this class, started out with the mission of getting our message out to people that had not the foggiest idea of what we were talking about.  It didn't matter whether they had a technical background, a theater background, and athletic background, or even no background at all...we all wanted to be able to share something with anybody who would even give a sideways glance at what we were talking about.

Well, it might be that I am getting better at sharing technical information in a more digestible way, but I am not always getting the content across.  Why?  Because I just have not made people care!  Being from Mines, the first lesson you learn when trying to hit on women is that if you want them give you a nice smile, roll their eyes, and swivel in their chair back to their girlfriends all in one amazingly smooth motion, just mention a number.  I don't care who you are, the world in general does not want to get a math lesson from you.   They simply don't care!  The idea of mathematically proving a fact to someone before they will ever believe what you are saying is an idea that only resides within the scientific community.  The rest of the world only wants to hear what you have to say, they don't want to hear you prove it with data and statistics.  Operating under this assumption, I want to give you an idea of why I think that nuclear power is so important...and I want to do this without using a single number or piece of technical information.  Let's just see where this takes us.

Trying to explain something from your background to someone who does not operate in the same world as you can prove to be one of the most difficult tasks known to man.  I mean, could you imagine having to explain the idea of clock to the most isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle?  Try to tell them that when the clock states a certain symbol configuration that they have to engage in the defined activity for that symbol.  I mean, this is exactly what we do in our lives.  When the clock strikes 8:00 in the morning, we all start working.  When the clock says 12:00, we all eat.  When the clock says 5:00, we all get in our cars and go home.  It is like this little machine is driving everything that we do.  At least that is how the indigenous people of the Amazon jungle who have never seen a clock before would interpret this behavior.  To them, they work when work needs to be done, they eat when they feel hunger, and they go home when it is suitable.  They don't define themselves by a little device telling them when they should do things.  Yet, that is the only way that we can keep our society synchronized.  It is perhaps the most important organizational tool we have.

Communication is difficult when those we are communicating to don't operate by the same standards as us, and if they don't come from the same background as us.  Last week, I was involved in a series of meetings in Pueblo, Colorado where they are trying to get zoning approval for a nuclear power plant to be built.  There, I ran into a whole bunch of people who were of a different background than myself, and they were all very angry and vocal, sternly informing me that my type was a danger to their livelihoods.  Not only was this a distrust for the nuclear industry, it was also a distrust for science in general, which seems to be a growing movement as of now in the U.S., but this is a different story.

As far as me personally being a danger to them, I could never quite comprehend what they were saying.  They acted like I had no concern for human life and most of all, they acted like I was exempt from what I believed in.  It was interesting to say the least, but I really have to attribute this to a general misunderstanding.

Somewhere along the way, the scientist and engineer has made himself non-human to the world outside science.  Our world is as foreign to the rest of the world as the idea of living by a clock is to the people of the Amazon.  We are cold, calculating, and dangerous.  I can't say that we have anyone but ourselves to blame for this as I too am guilty of going to parties and spouting off facts and numbers to try and convert someone to my way of thinking.  It has not worked yet and the reason is not that people can't understand, but they won't understand!  They don't feel that it has anything to do with their humanity.

What my audience does not necessarily know about me is that I am a 22 year old boy that was born and raised in the prairie right outside Pueblo, Colorado.  My favorite place to be is outside!  Hiking, camping, fishing...you name it, I am a total outdoor nut.  My environment is one of the things that I cherish most in life, and I would dare to say that I experience it more than many of the people from Greenpeace that were trying to tell me that I didn't care about the environment.  What they don't realize is that I am on their side...at least in theory, but I will get back to that later.  I got up this morning with the sun, put on my running shoes and did five miles while enjoying the colors of the sunrise.  I then came back just like them and mixed my granola cereal with my Greek yogurt and had a healthy breakfast.  I care about my health, and I enjoy nature everyday.  Right before sitting down to write this, I went for a walk to gather some thoughts were I came across one of the biggest hawks I had ever seen.  Yet, I was the only one on the path that stopped and took time to admire what was sitting there.  Nobody else even seemed to care.  Yet, I am the nuclear engineer who gives no regard for the environment.

I love life, and I love to live it to the fullest.  Being 22 years old, I am in what most would call the reckless stage of my life, saying that I feel invincible and that I have no way to conceive of the value of my life.  Well, I would tell them that they are wrong.  I have to admit, I love to live life on the edge.  Life is about pushing yourself to the limit on 14,000+ foot tall peaks, or finding out what it is like to drive sideways doing donuts in your car, or standing outside and watching the lightning storm go over your house.  Do all these things pose risks to your health?  Of course they do, but here is a news flash for you:  Life is risky, and we are going to die!  The risks I take in life might hurt me, set me back in life, or even kill me, but it is the risks in life that give you life!  They are where you get the most benefit, even in the stock market.

We are human because we take risks.  We have a God given ability to understand the risk associated with what we do, and because of this, we are the only species in the world that deals with things that endanger us.  We don't just run away and hide like deer or rabbits, we take danger, learn to harness it and then we use it to our advantage.  We are the only species on the planet that harnesses the power of fire.  Any of you guys that have dogs, you know that they are not comfortable around fires.  Animals have a natural tendency to flea the danger that fire imposes on them, but us humans have learned how to make it work for us.  Is it still dangerous?  Of course it is!  People die in house fires every year, but at the same time life as we know it would not be possible without it.

I suppose you probably see where I am going with by now and I do apologize for the rant getting here.  It is obvious that nuclear power poses risk.  The dirty secret is that everything poses risk though.  If you are afraid of being harmed by the the nearest nuclear power plant, statistically speaking you should also be making a career out of winning the lottery and never go outside out of fear of being hit by lightning and/or meteorite.  You should also be wary of the chair you are sitting on because you never know when a screw might fail and you will end up on the floor with a concussion and the base of chair sticking through your leg.  This is is more probable than being effected they the release of radiation from a nearby nuclear power plant (especially in the U.S.).

Why is it that people are so afraid?  It is a popular media disaster for a reason.  Think about it...you have this dramatic event with "meltdowns" and "explosions" and "radiation."  It has all the visual dangers as well as the scary element of the unknown.  This killer toxic that is invisible, powerful, and undetectable to most.  I mean, when painted like that, however inaccurate it may be, it plays on people's fear of the apocalypse.  It is a danger that they can't hide from, which makes it the worst kind of danger known to man.  It is easy to see why people think that we are playing with a force beyond our control.

But the truth is that we are not.  Just like with fire which is enormously dangerous to the human being, we have learned to harness and contain the power of the atom!  There have been accidents in the past, but being human, we learn from them.  Just an update to those stuck on Chernobyl, WE ARE NOT IN THE 80s ANYMORE!  We get smarter.  Our phones are not the size and weight of a brick anymore, there are computers in almost every household, we have internet everywhere we go, our cars have all the comforts of home, we can't ever be lost due to satellite navigation...the list goes on and on.  We are in an age where technology is advancing faster than ever before.  Why would anybody think that we would want to build any more nuclear power plants with the same technology we had back then?  I am sorry, but that is just an insult to my field.

In an effort to keep my long story from getting longer, let me finish by just saying that the nuclear industry is on the same side that environmentally conscious person is on.  Claims of companies only wanting to build nuclear power plants for the purpose of profit are insane.  They have the highest investment cost and risk associated with them out of all types of power generation.  This is not because they should necessarily be more expensive than other types of power generation, but largely because of the fears associated with them.  They are at risk of having construction shut down at anytime because of fear.  They have to build all new roads for the local area and new water reservoirs and many other types infrastructure because of fear.  Not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing.  Fear is what has made nuclear power safe, and without a fear and respect for nuclear power, there would certainly be many more deaths associated with nuclear power.  The fear though has made nuclear power the safest and most reliable form of power in the United States.  This is a simple fact, though it is argued away by organizations like Greenpeace spouting that the risk it poses makes it unsafe.  Its history has clearly proved otherwise, including the Fukushima incident.

I am in nuclear engineering because I believe it is one of the best power sources we can invest in for our future as well as for the future of our environment.  Why does Greenpeace oppose nuclear power?  Well, they didn't always.  Now though, they are being influenced by some other interests.  Mainly, the nuclear power industries only rival and the current producer of most of the electricity in the world.  Let me describe it this way.  Imagine someone makes his living off giving tours of the marshland in the southern parts of Florida.  He has a boat and sells his services to local tourists.  Also living in these areas though are animals such as Manatees, which are notoriously injured and killed by the boats being used on the marshlands.  One day though, there arises a need to drain the area of the marshland that the man gives tours.  This is the place where the man has established a thriving business and without it, the man has nothing.  So what does the man do?  He starts claiming that they can't drain the marshland because it will endanger the Manatees and other life in the marsh.  Though the man is not really concerned about the well-being of the animals being that he has been harming them for years, he will use their well being to save what he has established.

This has been the role of Greenpeace over the last decade or so.  The coal industry is being threatened by the only source of power that can compete with it, the nuclear power industry.  Though the coal industry cannot claim to have cared overwhelmingly for the well being of the people around coal-fired power plants or for the preservation of the environment, they can use Greenpeace to attack the nuclear industry and keep bringing up age old arguments about how dangerous and dirty it is for the future.  I must say that this move has been brilliant and has worked remarkably well to date.

So the irony here is who is actually working for the betterment of the future.  Greenpeace has claimed to be an organization dedicated to protecting the future of our environment as well as our safety.  They though are playing to the needs of the coal industry to help it keep on top.  Due to this, people like me, that is to say people going into the nuclear field, have been painted as dangerous and uncaring.  Yet, I know that I am going into the field because I know this is where we need to be to do the best thing for the world we live in.  I am not a technical expert in nuclear engineering, but at student.  All I am doing here is sharing my humble beliefs and I hope that you will take them from one environmentally conscious person to another.  Beyond politics, beyond science, and beyond beliefs there are some truths, but truth is always relative which leads us back to politics and belief.  Only science holds there to be absolute truths, but this is just another clock to our society.  It is totally foreign.  All I can do is give you a little of how I see it and maybe, just maybe you learned something about the nuclear industry here.  I just hope that I spark a little interest...I as you to open your mind and listen to more than fear.  I don't ask you to become technically fluent as that is ridiculous, but I ask that you listen to the opinions of the people trained in the nuclear field.  They are the ones that know the most about nuclear power and nobody else.  If you see them running, then I suggest you try to keep up, but until then, while they are still working headlong into the challenge of using the worlds most powerful resource, I hope that you might see there is some worth in it.