• Question: Does your work help the environment today or will it help it in the future in anyway?

    Asked by anon-201732 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily on 5 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Hopefully in the future with knowledge of the compounds I’ve made, it’ll help make decisions about how we clean up the Fukushima and Chernobyl reactor cores that were destroyed

    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      At the moment not really, but in the future, it could have a dramatic impact.

      Nuclear fusion has the potential to replacement fossil fuels as the UKs major energy resource. It’s clean and can be really efficient. Your lithium phone battery and 3 litres of ordinary tap water are all you need to supply enough power for yourself for 7 years. To compare that to fossil fuels, you’d need around 800 wheelbarrows full of coal to power yourself for the same amount of time. Sounds amazing right? That’s what the research into nuclear fusion is trying to achieve.

      I often hear students saying that solar power is a better alternative and they might be right, but it the potential of nuclear fusion is much greater. Rather than harnessing the power of the sun from afar, nuclear fusion is trying to recreate the sun on earth. 🙂

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      I don’t think my work directly helps the environment. Some of the radioactive isotopes that I’m studying for cancer treatment can only be produced at CERN in Switzerland at the moment, and I’m looking for ways that we can produce them efficiently in the UK. I guess that if these radioactive isotopes do become commonly-used in cancer treatment then my work will mean we can save energy by producing them in the UK rather than shipping them in from Switzerland whenever we need them.

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      My work isn’t really about helping the environment. It’s not destroying the environment either! Of course it’d be nice if all science research helped the environment, but there are still some things that need to be researched that have a neutral effect on the environment.
      Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator for my research is 100m underground, it has a smaller environmental effect than it would above ground!

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      Yes, it has the potential to help the environment in the future.
      Nuclear has it’s downsides, but it does not produce carbon emissions and contribute to climate change which is the biggest problem facing us at the moment.
      I want to make nuclear reactors safer and less wasteful so that we can build them and move away from coal, oil and gas which do have an effect on global warming.

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