Potential Energy

When I started Potential Energy in May my secret hope was that I’d be able to find some kind of anti-nuclear info that stood up to scrutiny. I was hoping that I’d uncover something that backed up all of those bad things I’ve heard about nuclear power my whole life.
I failed.

Right away, even before I […]

Great! So the government announced that nuclear will be part of the future energy mix.
Apart from all of the issues Caspar and Kat have raised, the one thing that concerns me most is…
Marketing and PR.
Like it or not ‘nuclear power’ doesn’t elicit the most positive response from the vast majority of people. One of […]

Save the Planet. You know, I think it’s absurd and extremely big-headed of us to think that ‘we’ can save the planet. Anyone who’s read James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Theory’ will know that the Earth will do whatever it can to survive. The Earth will save itself. It might wipe us out in the process, but […]

Nuclear power supporters tout it as the answer to Global Warming. They claim that nuclear power is a low carbon power source and that it doesn’t produce dangerous air pollution in the way that coal-powered plants do. They point out that the nuclear industry has a much greater safety history than the coal industry and […]

One of my sites was hacked/hijacked by a spammer - the world’s most prolific spammer as it happens- so I’ve been dealing with the fall-out from that. It’s caused me quite a bit of hassle and has been sucking up my time.
Now that’s all finally back in order, I’d like to comment on the comments […]

Looking into the science of nuclear power as we’ve been instructed to do has shown me that there really isn’t anything wrong with nuclear power ’safety-wise’. Radiation, whilst deadly in extremely high doses, is not the scary boogeyman many of us have been lead to believe.
Of course, as we all know the issue is far […]

Carbon dioxide. Greenhouse gases. Pollution.
I don’t think anyone believes that we should increase our emissions of any of these (except perhaps “pollution”, but that’s another post) and they are used by both sides to discredit the desirability of the “other” solution.
“Building a nuclear power plant/building a wind farm will produce XX tonnes of carbon. […]

You are more likely to die:
A) In an airplane
B) Standing on a piece of furniture in your home
C) Because of changes in air pressure
D) Because of radiation poisoning (not just radiation from the nuclear industry, but from all radiation sources)
According to the US’s National Safety Council, in 2002, in America you had A) a 1 […]

I’ve been looking into the effects of radiation on the human body and have found that radiation is measured in three different ways- the becquerel, the gray and the sievert.
The Becquerel measures how much activity there is in a quantity of radioactive material. A measurement of one becquerel means that in a particular quantitity of […]

OK. OK. I was supposed to get this article up yesterday. My excuse: it’s half-term. For those non-Brits reading this, half-term is when all of the schools in the country have one week’s break. The kids are at home… with their parents…
I start every half-term full of energy, excited- ‘We’ll bake cookies!’ ‘We’ll paint pictures!’ […]