From Robert Kisch.
I HAVE doubts about the whole climate change scenario. We have had global warming, global cooling and, as a safe term, climate change presented as government scare tactics.

The thinking may be good in that it encourages rapid improvement in fossil fuel use efficiency pending the revival of the nuclear programme.

Exxon Mobil produced some years ago a detailed research on climate change based on satellite data showing variations in climate over the millennia, backed up by ice samples and old tree rings. Ice samples in particular retain air samples which include volcanic eruption data and following effects (Jungfrau research station, which I have visited).

One scare story refers to rise in ocean levels with threats to coastal areas. Pacific islands are specifically quoted, linking global warming and ice cap melting and even the ozone hole observations. One must not forget that in historic times, land mass itself does move. In Roman times Rye was a busy seaport. The land has risen and the river is now only just navigable for a short length from the coast.

Herm Island, off Guernsey, has farming gateposts, slotted for the bars, visible at very low spring tides.

Other areas around Jersey have seen land dropping; an example is St Ouen’s Bay. Within pre-historic times, St Ouen’s Bay has seen the sea up to the cliffs forming the old west coast, now receded, leaving sea sand. Further evidence is St Clement’s Giants Causeway to France, now flooded.

These events cannot be due to ocean rise or fall. They must be due to land movement. This is particularly so in the Pacific Islands, where the geological fault leads to underwater eruptions and the tsunami flooding, and the loss altogether of some of the smaller developed islands.

The revival of the nuclear programme is the start of tapping into the vast resource of energy which does not pollute the atmosphere, has higher energy density than any other means of energy production, and in the electrical form is commercially distributed and viable in terms of return on investment.

Hydrocarbons will only have markets for plastics and, by molecular manipulation, other chemical, medical and biological products.

Electrically propelled vehicles will quickly be standard, initially with recharging points and battery exchange systems (refuelling).

End-of-life disposal will be assisted by the increasing percentage of salvage industry with barest minimum being true scrap. Even this can be incinerated using old technology for steam-driven turbine generators.

One must remember that the technology for reuse of the two per cent ‘hot waste’ from nuclear fission fuel-rod recycling already exists.

However, the real tiny volume does not yet justify Professor Carlo Rubbia’s (late head of CERN) radiation focus system. This focuses radiation on to hot lead, water pipes therein embedded, producing high-pressure superheated steam for turbine generators.
It is a chicken and egg situation.

If all the ‘hot waste’ now stored internationally was brought together for joint development of the project, it would be viable now.

The next generation of breeder reactor (the French Super-Phoenix) may well be overtaken by the fusion reactor, as harnessing the energy is developed from the cyclotron-type torous system now used for the JET (now ITER) prototype.