In Modern Society, Where Most People Live

For 50 Years, Nuclear Power Stations Have Produced Three Products Which Only A Lunatic Could Want: Bomb-explosive Plutonium, Lethal Radioactive Waste And Electricity So Dear It Has To Be Heavily Subsidised. They Leave To Future Generations The Task, And Most Of The Cost, Of Making Safe Sites That Have Been Polluted Half-way To Eternity.

We Generally Write Best Of What We Ourselves Have Seen.

Viewed From A Distance, Or Through The Eye Of The All-knowing Ceo Of The Universe, The Crash Of 2008 Followed The Usual Pattern. A Long-lived Boom Driven By Cheap Credit, Going Back As Far As 1982 (though Subject To Interruptions In The Mid-1980s And 1990s, And In 2001), Came To Grief Because Of A Rise In The Cost Of Borrowing Money.

Of All The Failed Technologies That Litter The Onward March Of Science - Steam Carriages, Zeppelins, Armoured Trains - None Has Been So Catastrophic To Prosperity As The Last Century's Attempt To Generate Electricity From Nuclear Fission.

Europe And North America, We Are Told, Are Less Dependent On Energy-intensive Heavy Industry Than In The 1960s And 1970s. It Seems We Squeeze More Gdp Out Of A Barrel Of Oil Than In Those Benighted Days.