Nuclear Disaster Satire Travel Brochure & Journal

During this assignment, we were learning about radiation, and multiple Nuclear Disasters around the world throughout history. After we had had lessons on many of those nuclear disasters, we were assigned a project in which we could work with one person, and had to make a satirical travel brochure and journal encouraging people to visit our nuclear disaster location. My partner and I chose to do our brochure and journal on Chernobyl. The CHernobyl disaster happened on Saturday, April 26, 1986 in reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Powerplant in Ukraine. There was a sudden and unexpected power surge, and when the emergency shutdown was attempted, an exponentially larger spike in power surge occurred. This led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of steam explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to the air, causing it to ignite. The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and an extensive geographic area. The disaster caused 350,400 people to be evacuated and killed 9,000 more. The disaster also released Gamma radiation, which can only be protected by a concrete wall at least 3 feet thick, or lead.

    Overall, I really liked this project because I learned a lot about Chernobyl, that I feel like I would not have learned otherwise. I also thought it was a brilliant way to mix Humanities and Physics so that we learned about both at the same time while we also got to practice them. The thing that I am most proud of is our brochure because I love the way it turned out. I really like the satire and background that we used, while I also liked the slogan making and designing the bak flap because it made me feel like a kid again. If there was one thing that I could change, it would be to add the information about Gamma radiation in our Journal and Brochure because that is the only information that we were missing, and it kept us from getting a perfect score. The three Habits of the Heart and Mind that I feel like I used the most were Cooperation, Perseverance, and Perspective. I used Cooperation because I worked with a partner on this entire project. I used Perseverance because all of this work we had to do on a computer on special systems, and I am terrible with computers, and technology in general. I used Perspective a lot because we had to write the Brochure from the Perspective of a travel agent and salesman, and had to write the journal from the perspective of someone who had actually visited the nuclear disaster location. ​