The Great Socio-scientific debate...A.K.A. Nuclear Energy..

This past couple of years we've seen some crazy things happen, and when the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant started having trouble after the earthquake and tsunami, the issue about the safety of using nuclear power came to the forefront again.  So much so that Japan has recently said they will phase-out nuclear power by 2040.  I think that this would be an interesting topic for a chemistry class (or other science class) to look into when they start discussing fission and the heavier elements. 

I think that several good connections to the Nature of Science, using this topic, can be made through carefully planned instruction.  If I were to use this example of a socio-scientific issue as a supplemental way to teach about our modern understanding of the atom, I would definitely touch on these three aspects of the Nature of Science: social, theory laden, and culturally embedded.

The ideas that are important for understanding nuclear energy started with one important aspect of NOS - the social nature of science.  The Manhattan Project was a collaboration of epic proportions with the goal of researching the process of a nuclear chain reaction.  The knowledge necessary for such a program grew out of the collaborative efforts of some of the greatest scientific minds: Einstein, Fermi, and Bohr just to name a few.

The social aspect of the nature of science leads straight into the theory laden aspect.  Each one of the scientists I just listed came to the table with a distinct knowledge and skill set that depended on the areas of science they worked in and the focus that they had before the Manhattan Project.  What we know now is based on the work that was done and knowledge that these scientists brought with them. 

Today the culturally embedded nature of science plays an important role in the debate over whether or not nuclear power should be used.  The pictures of victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fact that Chernobyl cannot be inhabited for at least another half millennium (on the short side), and the radiation that came out of the Fukushima Daiichi Plant all have an impact on whether or not scientists or the public want to tackle this issue.  Another face of the culturally embedded aspect of NOS in this debate can be seen in the desire to find alternatives to coal and oil as fuel sources.  Even though countries around the world want to find something to power their grids that releases little or no pollution, they tend to turn to wind, solar, and hydroelectric energy before nuclear, even though nuclear power plants are sometimes 40% more efficient energy producers.  Why is that?  Because of the tragedies that I just mentioned, there is the pervasive idea that nuclear energy will never be safe.

My job is not to help students come to a decision about whether or not nuclear power is the future of energy production.  I want students to understand where the idea of using the energy contained in an atom came from, what changes these ideas caused in our understanding of the universe, how what we bring to the table affects what conclusions we draw.  If they come to a conclusion about the use of nuclear energy, more power to them because they made an informed decision when other people might not have done the same.