Interpreting a Disaster: Public and Private Knowledge

For October 10th, students will find FIVE historical news articles from the Times of London, from 1950s-70s, on the Windscale disaster. Compare them with what we know today, and look at the speed with which information was (and wasn’t) made available at the time. Write a narrative of what a reasonably informed member of the public would have thought about Windscale, and the safety of nuclear power, on the basis of what you find. Search not only on Windscale, but on nuclear power, nuclear weapons, etc., and narrow down your searches by looking at specific things you found interesting from the documentary and readings. Length: 800-1000 words. Due by Oct. 10th at 10pm, uploaded in a comment on this post. Ensure that you format your paragraphs to leave an extra line of whitespace between them (indentations are stripped out by the comment system) and also include a numbered list of sources at the end of your essay–you can refer to your sources by number throughout your essay as long as you give full bibliographic information in the source list at the end.

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