• Question: How will your work affect the world in 10 years time?

    Asked by anon-201696 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Hopefully my work will mean that we have a better understanding of the properties of some of the compounds that have formed in nuclear disasters, but could also form when storing used nuclear fuel. There are a number of physical properties, like how easily something dissolves or how it affects the strength of the material it’s in, that could have implications for the stored fuel or the clean up of the nuclear disaster. My work is also a lot more fundamental, so I’m literally just trying to make new compounds to prove they can be made and open up a new sub-field of study. Maybe in 10 years time people will be studying new varieties of my compounds, maybe not!

    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      It’s unlikely that my work will affect the world in a significant way in 10 years time, in engineering terms, 10 years is quite short! But the building blocks of the work that Materials Scientists like myself carry out, means that Nuclear fusion – the holy-grail of sustainable energy resources – might be cost effective within 20-30 years.

      20-30 years might seem like a lot of time, but once this energy source is cracked, it will be able to provide energy for everyone for millions of years. I’m guessing my answer above is a bit boring for you (I’d agree), so I will also tell you what the affect will be in 100 years time.

      The most interesting effect on the world would be politically. Nuclear power enables countries to become self-sufficient or independent from other countries, it means you don’t need to borrow energy and give favours for it later. Countries like Russia have very large non-renewable energy stores such as gas and they pipe these to European countries such as Poland and Germany. If any of these countries get on the wrong side of Russia, then Russia is able to turn off get its way by threatening to stop the pipe supplies! Nuclear power means that these unproductive political bullying can be stopped.

      If you’re interested in how geography affects politics then have a look at this book: “Prisoners of Geography” by Tim Marshall.

      Sorry for the long answer!

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Hopefully my work (along with the work of lots of other people who work in the same area) will mean that we will be able to use different radioactive atoms to treat cancer. At the moment a lot of radiation therapy is ‘one size fits all’, so the amount of radiation someone with a certain type of cancer gets is always the same. This works well and is safe but hopefully these new atoms will allow us to personalise the therapy to the person, so we can work out exactly how much radiation someone needs to treat their cancer. This should mean that the treatments will work even better as we will be able to see how well someone is responding to the radiation, and plan their therapy specifically for them.

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I think my impact will be localised to particle physics, but I hope that will feed into public awareness of what we are doing to understand the universe’s most fundamental elements. In the same way as our discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 was a big deal for science communication, and gravitational waves was in 2016/17, I hope that the new LHC run starting in 2021 is going to finally provide evidence of new particles, which will then tell us something about how our so-called Standard Model needs to be extended. We currently suspect this based on arguments from the structure of our theories, and the observation of something “dark matter”y by cosmologists… but so far we’ve been ruling models out with our data rather than actively discovering new things.

      A lot of my work is also on understanding how to make better predictions, which involves some clever maths and computing techniques — maybe some of that will turn out to be useful in business, and certainly the scientists that we train up who then go on into non-science jobs do have impact. Big science like the Large Hadron Collider experiments also requires that we develop a lot of ground-breaking technology, and while it won’t be obvious to everyone, that stuff goes out into the real world. The world-wide Web and a lot of medical imaging came out of particle physics, for example.

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      It might take longer than 10 years for my work to affect the world to be honest! To be able to study particles, we need to push forward the boundaries of technology, computers and engineering. These new technologies, computers and engineering techniques can then be used in the rest of the world. Three examples that came as side-benefits of particle physics are: the World Wide Web, particle accelerators to treat cancer, touch-screen technology.

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      Potentially if my reactor design is built, it will help make nuclear energy safer, cheaper and more efficient. If it gets built in the UK I might even have helped power some of the things in your house!

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