The current world situation, as I write this, is that the United States and Israel are at war with Iran. The United States is in economic competition with China and political competition with Russia. The US is politically battling the European Union over communications and energy policies. The overriding world concern is “global warming,” sometimes rephrased as climate change because rising carbon dioxide levels are actually creating cooler winters in some regions of the planet.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room that nobody is paying any attention to is the fact that economically recoverable fossil fuels are rapidly running out. The economically recoverable fossil fuels that remain are of diminishing quality. They contain light or heavy distillates, not the middle distillates that are necessary for providing the diesel fuel that powers our farm equipment, truck transportation, commercial aircraft, and, in the United States, the majority of our railroads.

We needn’t shed blood, destroy our biosphere, or live in poverty in order to address our problems.  In short, we’re fighting over bigger slices of a dwindling pie when we ought to be applying our collective efforts to building a bigger pie.  The good news is we have the resources and the technology to make all the pie we could ever need; nobody need starve.  If we starve, it will be the result of poor decisions and actions, not the lack of resources.

Central to the production of our material needs is energy.  We can’t continue relying on fossil fuels because we will run out of economically recoverable resources long before we cause much additional global warming.  And in any event, solving global warming requires new energy sources, avoiding starvation requires new energy sources, so these issues are not at odds with each other.

Windmills and solar cannot alone solve our energy needs because they are intermittent sources, and in many regions they are least available when they are most needed.  International cooperation and an international HVDC power grid could allow us to make greater usage of these resources. Wind and solar power still are relatively short-lived and require a huge land footprint.

Instead, I would like to suggest an immediate rapid growth in the deployment of nuclear fission energy but not the traditional boiling water and pressurized water reactors.  Boiling water reactors operate at 75-80 atmospheres and pressurized water reactors at 150-160 atmospheres.  The problem with these pressures is that if there is a breach in the plumbing or the containment vessel, pressure is lost and the cooling water flashes to steam instantly, the resulting steam explosions do extreme structural damage and disperse radioactive materials potentially over large areas.