SciDev.Net

Advanced technologies are able to provide food for a growing world population, and mankind has the brains to "create" new resources. 

The fatal mistake of your editorial (see Technology Alone Will Not Solve Energy Crisis) is to start with the assumptions of the Malthusian Club of Rome, which, like the dire assumptions of Paul Ehrlich, have been proved wrong.

The so-called alternative energy sources that you promote can never provide the quality of energy needed to power industrial economies and lift the undeveloped sector out of poverty.

In contrast, nuclear power's energy-flux density is five to twenty times more than that of wood, coal, oil, and gas. Thermonuclear fusion has trillions of times the energy-flux density. Investment in the development of advanced nuclear power and fusion will pay for itself in the long run, by allowing nations to industrialise and develop, instead of devolving into more misery under your proposed "draconian restrictions."

Nuclear power is not only renewable (with reprocessing of fuel) but, in a fast breeder reactor, can create more fuel than is used to power the reactor.

We need 6,000 nuclear plants by the year 2050, to ensure that we keep up with energy demand and bring electricity to the nearly two billion human beings currently without it. Additionally, we need to develop fusion and make use of the fusion torch, whose temperatures are high enough to turn all kinds of garbage — including nuclear "waste" — into its constituent elements.

The solution is to think big, not to think small. Africa and Asia need big development projects, not small ideas. That word "sustainable" is simply a euphemism for policies that will ensure the death of millions of people.