I was not born a geek, but by the time I was a 10-year-old buying books at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, my path was set. Some considered this as an unfortunate background, so I had to learn the hard way how to handle myself in debates  and how to answer aggressive questions. Below, I share what I have learned in defending my position, in the hope that it will help others.

Russia and Japan will build the first four of 16 planned reactors

I teach students of engineering. Many of them (although certainly not all) prefer logarithms to literature and algebra to anthropology. No doubt they get a fair share of that in my classes, but I try to include a bit of history whenever I can.

At a session on educational programs during a recent ANS meeting, a fairly new graduate student in nuclear engineering described a nuclear survey course that he had taken at his university. The graduate student had not studied nuclear engineering as an undergrad, and when he said, "I had never really heard of Chernobyl before I took this course," you could almost hear an audible gasp among the more, well, mature members of the audience.