GLOBAL WARMING

Oil and Electricity
New Sources Of Power
Nuclear Power

 

I don’t think anybody would argue with the fact that renewable energy sources, and the reduction of pollution is an imperative objective.

Whether one believes in man’s precipitation of Global Warming or not is a complete irrelevance. The fact is that it would be a very good thing indeed to reduce all sorts of pollution, and particularly atmospheric pollution, for all sorts of global reasons.

So let us not get bogged down in a pointless debate about global warming.

To bring the issue into greater perspective, and as a reality check, I saw a statistic the other day which said that if the United Kingdom were to close every single one of it’s gas and coal fired power stations tomorrow, the Chinese will have replaced the pollution output with their own brand new coal fired power stations within eight months.

However, there are also many reasons why we should be looking to become less dependent on oil, if only because of the international terrorist issue. We certainly cannot afford to allow the people of the middle eastern states, traditionally a hot bed of political and religious unrest, to be able to dictate to the Western World on issues of natural resource power (oil, gas, electricity etc).

Moving the scientific world forward into new discoveries of power sources, be it for our own electrical supplies or indeed motor transport, is a difficult and time consuming process.

I am sure wind and tide resources will have a role to play in the production of nationally accessible power, but time is moving on, and we cannot afford to be held to ransom (again?) by the oil producing nations in the Middle East. They nearly destroyed our way of life in the mid-seventies, and as we have seen from recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan, international terrorism can and often does spring from many of those countries, and could very well hold us to ransom again.

Whilst the scientific community tries to discover new sources of future power, we need to protect ourselves, and that must surely mean building a new generation of nuclear power plants.

The French learnt this lesson many years ago, and they now derive over 80% of their electrical power from nuclear energy. They even sell some of it to us. Perhaps that is why they were less concerned about Iraq than we or the Americans were. The point is, we now need to build huge sources of nuclear power.

I believe that we must put nuclear power on the international stage as it is impossible to see how we can deny it to other emerging nations.

They will acquire it eventually anyway, and so they may as well have it now, but with our help, co-operation and guidance. If we think we are going to be able to keep these emerging nations in the dark ages, whilst we languish in the luxury of new power sources which we can keep to ourselves, then we need to look at the emergence of international terrorism, and then rapidly think again.

For us as a nation, and probably for the World itself, in terms of pollution, currently there is no viable alternative to nuclear power. In fact, from the point of view of World pollution, we have probably got to make sure that every nation has access to it as soon as possible.