Energy

Twenty-first century life demands energy - transport, medical care, urban infrastructure, heating, lighting, computers, industry. Despite the best efforts of the environmental activists we haven't reached the point where we're ready to abandon all that just yet. However, when they campaign against the damage we're doing to the environment they have a point. The fertile lands of Europe and North America teem with clogging, polluting power-plants and the industrial behemoths that belch forth their toxic offspring by-products, whilst hopeless African farmers toil to drag a subsistence out of lifeless, dusty, arid soil.

But it costs too much to move, resite industry to Africa, and it isn't economically viable to transport food out to them when they don't have the money to pay for it. This is because the power companies look five, ten, perhaps fifteen years into the future: the corporation executives aren't looking to make a profit they'll be too retired to spend, now are they?

Let's take a look at energy production. Fossil fuel reserves are running out - the rate varies depending on whom you ask, but all accounts agree that they are running out. They are also, universally, polluting. Again, the opinions on how polluting vary, and the opinions on the effects of that pollution vary widely: why risk it? If there were another option, would it not make sense to take it? Of course...

Hydro-electric? Excellent source of power, save that it's geographically specific, and similarly limited unless you want to compound the pollution problem by decimating huge swathes of land behind artificial dams.

Wind, wave and tidal generators all bring with them resource problems, whereby the initial startup costs make generation by these methods prohibitively expensive. Of course, if we got rid of the money that wouldn't be a problem, but there's still a lot of work involved in maintaining such systems.

Nuclear - not after Chernobyl!!!

Which is a shame. Nuclear power is not without its drawbacks, but it does have some things going for it. Over the lifetime of the reactor, it actually works out to be little different in terms of price from fossil fuels, but it doesn't create the constant miasma of atmospheric pollutants. There is the risk of a spill, and there is the need to store the spent fuel after the cycle has been completed, neither of which are simple tasks.

It is, essentially, the choice between some unavoidable pollution and the risk of severe pollution. If the unavoidable were only minor then the choice would be difficult, but the fact is that acid rain, smog, global warming and ozone depletion are causing deaths already, and will only cause more if they are allowed to continue.

However, the immediate future might be nuclear fission, but the long-term future is nuclear fusion, and thanks to the work of JET, ITER and others, that future is closer than it was. Abundant, cheap, safe energy is but a hairs-breadth away - let us hope the governments of the world will pay for that hair.