An example of public science dialogue likely to encourage alternative conceptions:
"So uranium is made out of a number of different isotopes. Isotopes are just different atoms with different masses. So, there's two major isotopes of uranium, that's uranium 2-35 and uranium 2-38, and uranium 2-35 is the one that fissions, that if you hit it with a neutron it splits and it makes energy. And the other one doesn't, the other one doesn't do anything. So you typically want to enrich it for a nuclear reactor, to make it make energy, you want to make the 2-35 number go up, and that's what you do in an enrichment facility. They can do that in a number of ways, but the way that it is normally done is via a centrifuge which spins it round and round and round like a merry-go-round…The Zaporizhzhia plant is a fission plant so they're actively sort of splitting those uranium atoms up inside that reactor to make energy."
Professor Simon Middleburgh (School of Computer Science & Engineering, Bangor University) was interviewed on an episode (What happens when you bomb a uranium enrichment site?) of BBC Inside Science.
Read about conceptions of energy
Read about the nature of alternative conceptions
Read about some examples of science misconceptions
Read about historical scientific conceptions
