This is assignment 1 done for the Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I(STU1231) at Harvard University.

1. Where do we come from? Where are we going?
Route Visualization of Nuclear Wastes in the United States

2. Theme: Mobility of Nuclear Wastes
Photo: Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant Hollywood, Alabama
I was interested in understanding the mobility of something that
we do not tend th imagine, or associate with mobility and also
something a lot of people do not prefer talking about. For this
assignment, I choose to depict the mobility of nuclear wastes.

3. Context
With over 3820 billion kilowatt hours used in the United
States in 2017, there are 60 nuclear plants that meets
this high demand of electricity. Among many
controversies over the use of nuclear power, one of the
crucial question is asked: where does the nuclear
wastes go after leaving the respective nuclear power
plants?
This project is an attempt to collect scattered
information to depict an overall picture of how nuclear
wastes travel within the united states. The travel routes
consisted of highways and railways are depicted
together the location of nuclear power plants and
nuclear waste sites, aiming to show where nuclear
power are coming from and where they are going.
Population density and cancer rates of the united states
are also visualized to show how close they are to our
lives, despite the fact we do not consider about this
topic in our daily lives.
Photo: Dry cask storages for nuclear wastes

4. Hypothesis
Through the data, I’m interested in answering the following question:
How close are we to nuclear wastes?
How is the mobility of nuclear waste affect our daily lives?

5. Data Collection
The following data was collected, and some were manually transcribed to visualize the final output.
• “Nuclear Waste Transportation Route” by Agency for Nuclear Projects , State of Nevada
• “Commercial Nuclear Power Reactors” by Nuclear Regulatory Commission, United States
• “Choropleth Map of Cancer Rate” by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,U.S. Department of Health & Human
Services
• “Population Density” by 2010 by United States Census, U.S. Department of Commerce
*manually transcribed