The recent report of the UK Committee On Climate Change is remarkably ambitious with its requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 42 per cent of the 1990 level within 12 years, that is by 2020.

However it can’t be done in the way suggested because energy efficiency, wind turbines and electric cars won’t make enough impact, and neither will it be possible to capture and store the CO2 from our current and proposed coal-fired stations. Such technology will not be available until at least 2020, and at the same time our ageing nuclear power stations will be on their last legs, often shut down as they are repaired.

We wouldn’t be facing this problem if we had followed the French example 30 years ago, when they built up to six nuclear power stations a year, and now produce three-quarters of their electricity this way with minimum CO2 and a sizeable export of surplus power.

However, the nuclear power industry suffered a very negative image with the expectation that it was dangerous following the meltdown at Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island scare in the USA.

Additionally, there wasn’t a simple way of getting rid of the radioactive waste, and with greater demand the limited supply of uranium fuel would not last long.

It’s also argued that such power stations would be a target for terrorists but perhaps the biggest worry has been the possibility that the current designs allow weapon-grade plutonium to be produced, and the fewer countries doing this the better.

But there is a design available for nuclear power that covers all these concerns and would meet all the planet’s electricity requirements, as well as allowing desalination of water, space heating in houses, powering electric cars and the closing down of coal power stations.

A 30-year research programme in the US was closed down for political reasons just before completion. They had all but demonstrated that an Integral Fast Reactor, a breeder reactor, would sort out all the above problems. They couldn’t make it meltdown, however hard they tried, and, as it only uses the spent fuel from the other reactors to make its own fuel, it has very minimal waste. It is impossible to get plutonium from it, and it can be underground so that it is safe from attack.

It will take longer than 12 years to build them, but the government should start now as well as granting generous bursaries to students studying nuclear technology.