Yeah, my class went to Las Vegas…you may be wondering “why would a group of grade 11s go to Vegas for a project?” Well let me tell you.

So this unit was an interesting unit. Our driving question was “How is fear used as a defensive, political and cultural tool?” And we went to Tucson, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada to answer this.

This unit was mainly focused on the Cold War, along with bits of the history of Las Vegas and the mob. With these two main ideas in mind we had to come up with a much more focused question that related to fear being used as a tool. From there we were expected to figure out everything we’d need to film on the trip to answer our question in a video essay.

One part of this project that I really struggled with was actually coming up with a question. Marley and I were originally working together, with the general idea of whether feared or loved leaders are stronger. With this we were planning on focusing on the mob, and how the fear of them was used as a tool to create the thriving city of Las Vegas. This was all going great until we actually got on the trip.

Once we were on the trip Marley and I realized that our idea in fact wouldn’t work. After lots of discussion and trying to figure out what we actually were going to do we decided our projects would be best if we went separate directions. The main thing that inspired my new choice was this display at the National Atomic Testing Museum about atomic culture. I decided to focus my project on how atomic culture evolved as the fear of nuclear energy grew.

Throughout the trip I found information and got interviews to help me complete this project at all the interesting and fun places we went.

an abbreviated itinerary

Once I got back to the school I made another change to my project…Maria and I decided to work together. It made sense though because both of our topics ended up evolving into the exact same thing, and we knew we could create a much better final product by putting our information, footage and skills together.

We ended up focusing on how fear of nuclear weapons and energy in general affects people view of nuclear power. This was quite interesting because throughout our research we found that it has an unwarranted negative stigma, and we hoped to be able to change this a bit for anyone watching our video.

The first thing we were expected to do when arriving back at school was write an essay answering our question. This took a few revisions but we eventually got a solid essay that helped a lot with our final product.

I’m actually really glad that Maria and I worked together because we both have a strong work ethic, but working with her is always really fun. We often have different ideas, but this just helps us form even better ideas. We work well together because we always bounce ideas back and forth until we figure out the best way to get things done. Along with that, Maria is a really good video editor so she took more charge in that department, while I took charge when it came to actually writing the essay. Our combination of strengths tends to go well together.

Once the essay was finished we moved onto planning our video. We made a rough video outline to figure out what shots we wanted where and what our voice overs would be. One place we went wrong with our video was looking at the essay a bit too much. We kept looking at it while writing the script which ended up making our video almost seem like an essay with some visuals overtop, rather than visuals with only a few words being needed to explain it.

When it came to editing the video we used some clips from our trip, along with others that we found online.

All in all I really enjoyed the project and the trip. I think our final product was pretty good and am proud of what we managed to create despite both going through so many topic changes. Las Vegas and Tucson were both so much fun, and I hope that next time I’m in Vegas I’ll be 21.

Ever since the first nuclear test in 1945, nuclear power it has been having both positive, and negative effects on the world. It started off as being used as a weapon of mass destruction, but was soon made into a clean energy source. But nuclear power’s deadly history has lead to a great fear around it. Plants can meltdown, the explosion automatically killing many people, and the radiation silently spreading to cause even more damage. In the past nuclear power plants have gone completely wrong, and this fear is still shaping today’s current events.

For a while, during the Cold War, mutually assured destruction kept countries from bombing each other because of the knowledge that their target could just as easily bomb them. This idea has managed to keep the peace for many years. Nuclear weapons “are a type of weapon that countries spend enormous sums of money to develop but don’t actually intend to use.” But if a country is to get nuclear weapons, who isn’t afraid of destruction, and feels the devestation they could cause is enough to justify a nuclear attack, the story may change.

An unopened ferris wheel near Chernobyl

The fear of radiation is widespread, after all, its invisible and odourless yet has the potential to cause mass destruction. On April 26 1986, the a disaster occurred at the Chernobyl Power Plant. Fires and steam explosions released 5% of the radioactive core into the atmosphere. Some newspapers reported 2000 deaths caused by this incident, one even reported 500 000 deaths cause by Chernobyl, but according to a documentary we watched in class, only 56 deaths can be directly attributed to radiation after the incident. The reports of high death tolls were due to radiophobia. In fact, the fear of radiation was probably a bigger issue than the radiation itself. People began taking any little symptom and assuming it was an issue due to radiation even if it was nothing. This backed up the health system which made it hard to treat the more dire issues. According to the video “The threat of human health posed by radiation has been overstated” and it takes a lot more radiation to cause serious damage than originally thought. Nuclear energy is associated with nuclear bombs which creates more fear than it may deserve. This video does a good job of making people question whether or not our fear of nuclear power is warranted, because the benifits may outweigh the risks.

But the fear of radiation is still warranted. In The China Syndrome a reporter visits a nuclear power plant and witnesses something in the reactor that worries her. What she doesn’t realize is that there is such a big issue with the plant that it could cause a meltdown that would make an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable. The radiation at Chernobyl may not have caused too many deaths, but it still made the area uninhabitable and the threat was for sure there.

Today’s nuclear weapons are much more powerful than the ones dropped on Japan at the end of WWII so it’s in everybody’s interest that the mutually assured destruction policy stays intact. Nuclear weapons can be used as threats along with bargaining tools, they are more like political weapons than physical ones. For example, in 2015 Iran agreed to pause its nuclear weapons program in exchange for relief. The countries with nuclear weapons can threaten those without a nuclear program with their weapons, but in reality, World War 3 is in nobody’s best interest, so as long as the world remembers that, doomsday shouldn’t become reality. I may be optimistic, but I like to believe that humans wouldn’t destroy our home planet in nuclear war.

In the TV show The 100 the end of the world made a reality, but even then, the show shows us that our humanity keeps us from destroying each other, and was caused by an Arificial Inteligence hacking nuclear launch codes. It was the program’s lack of humanity that caused the eventual end.

Bomb Launching Scene in The 100: