Tens of thousands of coal miners have died over the centuries, and tens of thousands more have died or had their lives ruined or shortened by respiratory disease. Next week we commemorate a tragedy in which a school full of children was wiped out by a collapsing coal tip. Hundreds of millions of people are likely to become sea-level-rise refugees. Oil companies have got strangleholds on governments the world over (and no-one ever voted for an oil company to be in power). When you say that things can go horribly wrong with nuclear, it's only rational to put that in this context. So far, the things that have gone horribly wrong with nuclear have been caused by corner-cutting and bad planning, both avoidable. So far, we haven't worked out how to curtail the inexorable rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. When I was at school in the sixties, in science lessons we learned that carbon dioxide took up 0.03% of the atmosphere. Well it's just officially hit 0.04% and is still rising. When you have a problem you can't solve by tweaking, you need a different strategy. So-called green energy just makes us feel good about wasting it. And as long as real energy reduction and conservation are bottom of the priority lists of the US and China, there is only one answer, and that is nuclear power. And there's no time left to argue about it. I don't like the idea any more than you do, but we've run out of options.