The Elizabethans worried they were running out of wood

I thought this was a really inspiring article by Colin McInnes, Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Strathclyde. He writes at Perpetual Motion.

"Fossil fuels represent energy which is not of our time; they represent energy from the sun stored in compacted dead plant matter. But nuclear fuels represent energy which is not of our place. Their immense energy density, about a million times greater than fossil fuels, comes from the final moments of collapse of ancient stars which fused lighter elements into uranium and thorium. Even the prophet of ‘peak oil’, M King Hubbert, a man beloved of growth sceptics, cleverly recognised that while fossil-fuel use will no doubt ultimately peak, nuclear fuels are essentially forever, because they are so energy dense.

Let’s be clear: there is no shortage of high-grade, carbon-free energy to deliver a future of shared prosperity. But we need the will, ambition and inventiveness to exploit it. We also need to recognise that we have only scratched the surface of nuclear energy. Even modern light-water reactors are woefully inefficient at turning the energy of collapsing stars stored in nuclear fuels into useful work. But through future innovation, we can tap almost all of that clean, compact energy considerately provided by nature."

Read on..  spiked-online.com