Book launch: The Power of Nuclear: The rise, fall and return of our mightiest energy source

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

From the pilot’s seat in the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, to Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, to the site in Finland where highly radioactive waste will be buried, Marco Visscher’s new book, The Power of Nuclear: The rise, fall and return of our mightiest energy source, tells the incredible story of nuclear power.

Providing a vivid account of the characters and events that have shaped the world’s most controversial energy source and our thinking around it, The Power of Nuclear weaves politics, culture and technology, to explore nuclear power’s past and future.

Join Visscher to discuss some of the key questions surrounding nuclear energy. How dangerous is radiation, and what should you do after a nuclear accident? Have nuclear weapons really made the world less safe? With all the focus on renewable energy, from wind farms to solar panels, should we bring the focus back to nuclear as the only viable way of producing the energy we need to power the world? Why do some still reject the evidence showing the atom can provide unlimited clean energy, free countries of their dependence on fossil fuels and combat climate change? Or in these unstable times, can we trust states and politicians to implement plans for nuclear energy properly?

SPEAKER
Marco Visscher
journalist; author, The Power of Nuclear: The rise, fall and return of our mightiest energy source

CHAIR
Dr Dominic Standish
writer and commentator on energy; professor, University of Iowa; author, Venice in Environmental Peril? Myth and reality