“After I graduated from Wake Forest in 2010, I went to Japan to teach English. While I was there, the Tohoku earthquake happened. I lived there through it and after it. I was living outside of Sapporo in tiny town called Kuriyama. It was really small. I couldn’t buy Japanese beef while I was there because the cows were grazing on grass that had nuclear fallout on it. I couldn’t buy milk either unless it was from cows that were eating grass in Hokkaido because it was geographically out of reach from the accident. I couldn’t eat the fish either.  Experiencing the Fukushima nuclear disaster firsthand got me thinking about a career geared towards climate change and high-risk energy. Nuclear energy is much more high-risk than people tend to think because they don’t consider the long-term consequences of nuclear waste or the degradation of nuclear power plants and how hard it is to manage disasters.” – Jeannie McKinney, first-year MPP student at Sanford, studying environmental and energy policy #HumansofDukeSanford #MPP