I read a long article in a newspaper in which some fellow argued that the world essentially had no more sources of energy and that the entire planet would just have to learn to cut back on consumption.

The writer was a foreign person. The article had not been written for South African consumption specifically; the editor had merely lifted it from a published source and reprinted it.

The article was baseless. I am amazed by some of the scientific inaccuracies that people merrily project to the public. History is littered with examples of very inaccurate scientific projections.

The article's author argued that the whole world was running out of energy. He said that fossil fuels were running out and that, even where there still were supplies, they should not be used because their use could affect climate change.

He said that supplies of uranium and thorium, the nuclear fuels, would not last very long. This, of course, is dead wrong – there is, essentially, an infinite supply of these fuels.

He also said that even solar and wind power would not work because you get no solar at night and you only get wind power when the wind blows. This is true. But his argument was that solar and wind would need such huge battery systems that they would have very limited use in society. That is true, but the argument is still baseless.

The writer made a number of blatant errors in the article, such as the claim that no country had a storage solution for high-level nuclear waste. Two countries do have; they are Sweden and Finland. That can be checked easily by carrying out about five minutes of research. So, either the author did not bother to carry out any research or intentionally covered up the truth.

My position is that the entire world will be using twice the energy that is being used now in 20 years or sooner. Energy consumption will then quite rapidly double again.

In fact, in about a century from now, the world will be using five to ten times more energy than is being used now.

As time passes, most electricity which is generated will be nuclear. That just stands to reason. Nuclear fuel is distributed around the world and, most important, so little is required that it is easy to move it around to anywhere you like. It is not like coal and oil, which need vast transportation systems.

There will be all sorts of nuclear reactor types, ranging from large-scale stations like the ones that South Africa will be building soon to small ones which, in principle, could be as small as a car. The roving spacecraft trundling around on Mars, called Curiosity, is nuclear powered.

So, the bottom line of all this is that, as the demand for energy increases, so must the ingenuity of mankind expand to find solutions. There will be many more standalone energy systems – whether they are nuclear or solar. There is no need to charge your cellphone off the national grid, as there are other ways.
The natural challenge to find a way of power- ing all the many things that need electricity will induce the creativity of people to find multiple answers.

Certainly, the world will not turn around and go backwards. Not a chance.