Lawrence Solomon and Amory Lovins may delay future developments by a few years, but they cannot escape the fact that 1 kilogram of uranium yields roughly 50,000 kiloWatt.hours of electrical energy in present-day thermal reactors or 3 million kiloWatt.hours in fast breeder reactors. Both technologies are fully established, though the breeder is in abeyance at present because thermal is cheaper and uranium is abundantly available at low price. With presently known ore reserves, they would supply the world’s total energy needs for tens of centuries, with virtually no CO2 or any other atmospheric emissions. Nuclear waste disposal? It is already being done all the time as "dry storage" and locked-up retired reactor buildings, like "my" Douglas Point. Let sleeping dogs lie.

If I had a nasty suspicious turn of mind, which of course I do not, I might suspect that Larry’s – and Energy Probe’s – climate change scepticism is influenced by the fact that nuclear is by far the world’s major source of CO2-free energy, so that if the present much-less-than-half-hearted movement to avoid the calamities of climate change starts to get serious, it must logically mean a major shift to nuclear, not that logic is a prominent factor at the moment.

I am quietly proud of the fact that, under a few bright spots of political leadership, I and thousands of colleagues at higher and lower levels world-wide have been able to make the nuclear energy option fully available to mankind. If some people do not wish to capitalize on it, that is their loss – a 13th floor is not allowed in the 19 floor apartment building where I live! But nuclear is here, and here to stay, and whatever else happens, its users will not be nagged to move towards freezing in the dark.