Due date: 8am, Friday Feb. 2nd
Reading assignment: Tsoufanidis, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Chapter 1.
The first step to talking about environmental and economic aspects of nuclear power is to have an understanding of the types, numbers, age, power level, and location of the power-producing nuclear reactors around the world. Include decommissioned reactors. Include planned and in-construction reactor (to the degree to which the information is available to you). In this assignment you are asked to collect this information and plot it on a world map. You are also asked to include in your map one other element besides the reactor information in order to give the plants some context. For example, you can include major road-ways (ArcGIS will have some standard map information you can pull from – you will lean this in the workshop on Friday), or you can include major water-ways, or you can include cities within a 50-mile radius, population within a 50-mile radius, farmland within a 50-mile radius, soil type, average yearly rainfall, prevalent wind direction, earthquake activity. All of these are elements related to reactor siting. You could also choose to map GDP per capita, electricity consumption per capita, world bank economic regions etc. Or you can also choose a piece of information that interests you personally – map the national parts, or the world heritage sites, or archeological sites, or ski resorts, or famous football stadiums or sports arenas, birthplaces of famous authors and so on. Feel free to be creative. Choose one of these and show it on your map along with the information for each of the plants around the world. The audience of the map is you after you will have graduated. Make the map personal. Make the map interesting. Make the map informative and a good reference to go back to in the future. This is not a map that goes on a powerpoint slide – it’s a map that you could print in large format and put on a wall, information-dense and high-resolution.
Learning objectives:
- Become familiar with nuclear power production around the world: location, types of reactors, age, power levels, new builds, decommissioned plants.
- Become familiar with ArgGIS and practice organizing and visualizing spatial data.
- Personalize this knowledge – put this information in a context of personal relevance to you.
Resources:
- NRC Information Digest NUREG-1350. Interestingly enough, they have a flikr version of their report graphics.
- IAEA Nuclear Reactors in the World. IAEA-RDS-2/37.
- Helpful Links/Slides for Geocoding/Illustrator
- Tips on displaying your points in ArcMap
Instructions:
- Make sure you’ve signed up on slack #ne571-general.
- Make an edublogs webpage, and send me the link to it, on slack.
- Create a world map of power reactors.
- Post your assignment on your edublog as an image, and as a link to your ArcGIS file(s).
- Optional: you may choose to accompany the image with a brief paragraph of text to tell me if there is something that you struggled with in particular, or if you came across something interesting that you’d like me to pay attention to, or anything else that you want to share about your process of making the map.
Grading rubric. 13 total points: 2p each for all plants around the world: location, age, power output, type of reactor. 2p context information. 1pt. easy to read the map. 1p include future plants. 1p include decommissioned plants and indicate year built and year decommissioned. 1-2 bonus points: creativity.
General Grading Comments on Assignment 1
Projection and color information