• Question: Does your work help the environment?

    Asked by anon-201732 to Andy, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily on 5 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201761.
    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      No, not really. It doesn’t harm it either, though! That’s one thing I slightly regret about my job: it’s very challenging and interesting, and I think humanity has a moral duty to study what the universe is made of at a fundamental level, but I could totally go with a 1-2 year sabbatical to do something socially or environmentally beneficial with my skills.

    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      In a way yes, as it’s trying to make nuclear energy safer and the clean up of nuclear accidents safer but it’s not as obviously helping the environment as some research

    • 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! Kind of. Maybe one day?
      The key problem facing the environment right now is global warming and climate change. Our primary energy sources coal and gas produce harmful carbon emissions.
      Renewables are great, but not advanced enough for us to completely rely on them yet. So we need another energy source that doesn’t produce greenhouse gases- nuclear power!
      But nuclear is tricky as it can be dangerous to operate and it produces radioactive waste, my work is exploring how to make reactor designs safer and perhaps use their own waste products as fuel- reducing the total amount of waste produced.
      However it takes a long time to design and build a reactor, so chances are I won’t know if I’ve helped for about 20 years(!)

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