A Place to Stand

  This letter went out to papers across Britain. It first went to the Scotsman where it was written as a direct reply to an op-ed article by Michael Kelly saying the "end of the age of cheap energy guff but it wasn't published so I rewrote it. I found it was published in the Metro (free newspaper, not well known for the political content of its letters and with no link on Google News) on Thursday. It probably, thereby reached about 10 times as many readers as in the Scotsman. Bits edited out highlighted.

Numerous politicians, while one day lecturing us that "the age of cheap energy has ended" the next are lecturing Scottish Power for putting their prices up. The fact is that the only reason prices are going up, rather than sharply down, is because these selfsame politicians, of all parties, introduce extra fuel taxes to subsidise windmills while spending the last 2 decades vetoing the actual producers wishes to build inexpensive nuclear plants.

The age of cheap energy has barely dawned. There is enough uranium dissolved in sea water alone to keep the world economy going for billions of years - producing electricity at 1/10th what we currently pay (I guess that means 1/11th of what we will pay in the autumn). There is 4 times as much thorium. Before billions of years have passed, or even many decades, we will have solar power satellites and fusion, both of which can provide thousands of times more power than we use now.

However our Luddite political class, Britain & even the EU may make it illegal to use such power, just as the 16th C Chinese government made it illegal for citizens to own ocean going ships. That did not end the age of sail it merely ensured it would be a European dominated age. In the same way our politicians will not prevent the age of cheap energy, merely exclude us from it.

  The editing simplified it and I suspect their core readership knows little of Chinese history. The exclusion of the reference to fusion suggests that the editor understands the subject - fusion is certainly decades away, unless cold fusion turns good, and possibly hot fusion will never be fully practical because keeping a hydrogen bomb going at unvarying output is inherently difficult. There is no problem getting power and when there are several methods of doing it some will work but that overriding principle is more important than what particular methods will work.
Chinese solar satellite design (the Earth is China upside down - the Chinese compass points south)