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Introducing ethical sustainability dilemmas in nuclear engineering education
Gustavsson, Cecilia Al-Adili, Ali Frost, Robert Solders, Andreas
Gustavsson, Cecilia
Al-Adili, Ali
Frost, Robert
Solders, Andreas
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Date
2025
Educational Level
ISCED Level 5 Batchelor's or equivalent
Curriculum Area
Geographical Setting
Sweden
Abstract
Nuclear engineering is a technical branch where many questions of ethical and sustainable character are actively debated in politics, media and science. Both advocates and opponents of nuclear power use arguments that are normative and taken from ethical and/or sustainability theory to reinforce their standpoints. We believe that analysing and discussing these arguments in the safe context of higher education, is important for educating nuclear engineers with a critical mindset and for teaching them to go beyond mere opinions. The Bachelor of Science Programme in Nuclear Engineering at Uppsala University, Sweden, is a one-year programme with the aim of equipping students with an engineering approach to the nuclear technology field, and to make them well-prepared for a professional career in the nuclear industry. The programme contains physics and engineering courses in fields such as reactor physics, thermohydraulics, power engineering and nuclear safety, as well as an independent thesis work. In this paper we describe a project aimed at integrating ethics and sustainability, specifically in the context of nuclear power, into the programme. We discuss how to teach and assess these topics effectively. We demonstrate how to introduce the United Nations Agenda 2030 (UN, 2025) and its 17 sustainability goals, and suggest some exercises. We then describe how ethical theories such as utilitarianism, virtue ethics and deontological ethics can be presented and applied to engineering problems, and how ethical decision making can be applied to sustainability dilemmas. Finally, we give examples on some topics where ethical sustainability dilemmas exist in relation to nuclear power and discuss how student assignments (both written and oral) can be designed to stimulate student discussion and learning. The findings are supported by student evaluation reports from the sessions. As an outlook for further development of the programme, we offer suggestions on how to further strengthen the topic of ethics and sustainability throughout the programme by identifying ways to integrate and build upon these themes in later courses.
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Keywords (free text)
nuclear engineering, industry collaboration, thermohydraulics, engineering education, engineering for sustainable development, education for sustainabilty, sustainability in engineering