The most helpful feedback I received was to condense my information. Brevity is not a strength of mine, so this feedback was very necessary. I don’t think I was able to condense as much as I should have, however I did remove some extraneous information which I think improved the clarity of my essay.
I think the most interesting thing that I discovered was the argument against proof of my shift. Since the nuclear renaissance impacts a lot of what I do as a nuclear engineering student, I kind of thought that the shift was way bigger and more obvious than it actually is. I discovered that while there still has been a shift, it is not to the extent that I initially imagined.
I think the most important thing about the nuclear renaissance is understanding its benefits. Some of the statistics I found for my paper stated that nuclear energy causes 94 times less deaths per unit of energy production than natural gas, nuclear energy’s main economic competitor. This means that as nuclear energy becomes more widespread once again, thousands of people’s lives could be saved from the devastating effects of carbon pollution and climate change.
One of the main benefits of this project was conducting a lot of research. I ended up drawing evidence from around ten sources, which was quite a bit more than I have used in previous projects. Using this many sources taught me how to synthesize evidence to construct a cohesive argument for my thesis while not relying too heavily on one individual source.