Articles by: Darrin Durant

Author Biography:

Dr Darrin Durant is Senior Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on the relation between experts and citizens in democratic decision-making, disinformation and democracy, climate and energy politics, and nuclear waste disposal. His most recent book is Experts and the Will of the People: Society, Populism and Science (Palgrave, 2020), and of relevance to the nuclear cycle is Nuclear Waste Management in Canada: Critical Issues, Critical Perspectives (UBC Press, 2009). He Tweets @DarrinADurant

PODCAST: Setting the World on Fire: the new nuclear push

An audio recording of the Arena public discussion hosted by the Institute for Postcolonial Studies (IPCS).

Nuclear After-Life: From tragedy to farce, the claims of a nuclear renaissance

Non-hydro renewables have now overtaken nuclear power, with wind and solar alone reaching 10.2 per cent of global gross power generation in 2021.

Fusion Net Gain Is Manufactured Ignorance

Almost every word written about ‘net energy gain’ from a fusion reaction is a species of manufactured ignorance generated by managing uncomfortable knowledge, which is complicated by a tension between the desire to trust fusion experts but and the knowledge that those experts operate under powerful incentives to engage in hype.

Fusion Power: Big Energy fuses with Big Spin

On 9 February 2022 researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor, based at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in the United Kingdom, announced that ‘JET produced a total of 59 Megajoules of heat energy from fusion over a five second period’, during which JET ‘averaged a fusion power (i.e., energy per […]

The Nuclear White Elephant

…when we see right-wing politicians and commentators in Australia on the nuclear bandwagon, it seems little more than a culture war to wedge the political Left, creating a fight over technological feasibility to mask the lack of an actual energy policy.