Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford, on why society as a whole – not just shipping – must embrace nuclear power. National prosperity depends on what we do – that is on our productivity. A call to raise this may seem coercive – a suggestion that everybody should work harder. But as the population ages and the birthrate declines, this seems unlikely. There must be another way. In the past a major uplift in productivity has occurred whenever a new source of energy has been engaged. Energy is a scientific synonym for effort and so productivity rises as a new mechanism relieves us of extra work. What can we learn from how this happened in the past? Does this provide an answer today? If so, why hasn’t it been tried already? A million years ago in the Promethean revolution the world accepted fire into the home. The public education and safety discipline required must have triggered major social change. Whatever the disruption, its effect was far outweighed by the leap in productivity and the quality of life that followed. The supremacy of humans over other creatures was firmly established and, although its dangers persisted, human prosperity never looked back. We may surmise that communication and education were key. Distrust and secrecy were unhelpful. All children were brought up to respect fire safety, as they are today. Then 250 years ago in the Industrial Revolution, the combustion of fossil fuels enabled engines to do the work of humans. The increase in growth was phenomenal. The ability to provide energy at the required time and place was crucial. In the 19th century natural science called this energy source “chemistry”, and later it gave birth also to electronics, with a further saving of effort and increase in productivity. However, not until 1924 was a universal one-line explanation provided by the wave mechanism of quantum physics. Matter is composed of atoms, each containing electrons and a nucleus. The quantum calculated behaviour of atomic electrons accounts for chemistry and electronics precisely. The very same calculation applied to the nucleus of an atom gives a value of energy a million times greater. In 1931 Winston Churchill wrote an article comparing the productivity of human effort, fossil fuel and nuclear energy. “The coal a man can get in a day can easily do 500 times as much work as the man himself. Nuclear energy is at least one million times more powerful still. The discovery and control of such sources of power would cause changes in human affairs incomparably greater than those produced by the steam-engine four generations ago.” He was quite right, although nobody knew then how to unlock this energy, a problem that was solved in 1938. Nuclear power stations were built successfully from the 1950s onwards, but the energy was treated with extreme caution and its deployment largely suppressed in a dark age that lasted for another 70 years. Meanwhile, the burning of fossil fuels continued despite the effect on the natural environment. Only in 2015 was it agreed that this should cease. And in September 2024, when the inadequacies of intermittent renewables to provide for an expanding economy became clear, 14 major banks and foundations met at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and agreed that a tripling of nuclear investment should be funded. So, at last, the transformation that Churchill foresaw nearly a century ago can begin in earnest. The energy needed to power artificial intel