A brown bag of two ham and cheese sandwiches, a bottle of water and an apple.
All that and a bag of chips will get students into the school year’s first Institute for Nuclear Security Brown Bag Luncheon, held Wednesday at 1:30 p.m in the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.
The panel will feature three UT professors and a moderator to speak on “Global Issues In Nuclear Security – Looking Ahead to the Next Decade.”
One panelist, Brandon Prins, professor in the Department of Political Science said this event will focus “broadly on issues concerning the international nuclear security outlook.”
“It’s timely in the sense that, in 2015, we have the non-proliferation treaty review conference,” he said at his office Monday.
The conference, slated for the United Nations offices in New York City, will bring together parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – one of the world’s most universally inclusive groups of countries –to review the terms of the agreement, a tradition upheld every five years since 1975. The United States and Russia, as the two countries with the most strategic nuclear missiles, are expected to factor largely in the conference’s agenda.
Prins, a researcher of conflict processes and foreign policy, will be joined by Howard Hall and Bruce Williamson. Hall, the director of the UT Institute for Nuclear Security, has experience leading scientific missions in nuclear and homeland security while Williamson, an economist, has designed and managed multi-year global research projects in more than 30 countries.
The three perspectives of UT faculty will form a lens to look at nuclear security, an international issue that has close ties to campus and the surrounding area. Knoxville’s relevance to the topic is one of the reasons UT has an Institute for Nuclear Security.
“We are in a region in which nuclear technology and nuclear material – nuclear warheads – is a core aspect of our economy,” Prins said. “People are dealing with it all over the place. There is a growing connection between (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) researchers, many of which deal with non proliferation issues.”
This unique proximity to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex gives the Institute for Nuclear Security a singular perspective on the issues.
Blake Palles, a 2014 alumni and Haslam Scholar who has returned to UT for graduate school in energy sciences and engineering through the Bredesen Center, attributes his own views on nuclear security to his undergraduate and graduate research experience in nuclear engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“I’m interested because I know the world is increasingly going to depend on nuclear power,” Palles said in a phone interview Monday. “You have to develop an infrastructure to ensure that it’s used safely and counter the risk of proliferation. And, you do that through security.”
