Your letters on energy supply and climate change (June 20) make it sound as though we are able to survive solely on ‘green’ fuels. Not so!

While property owners agonise over fracking, Nimbys squeal over nuclear power, and ‘greens’ enthuse about ‘renewables’, we are left with dwindling reserves of useful fuels and a relentless tightening of their uses. We are unthinkingly phasing out our fossil-fired generating capacity and our existing nuclear power stations – in which technology we were once world leaders.

Instead, we are tethering ourselves to the fickle trickle of solar panels and temperamental bird-chopping windmills, while relying more on the whims of alien suppliers of the supposedly ‘less-dirty’ oil and gas.

Some reasonably straightforward solutions occur to me. First of all, stop this scaremongering nonsense about man-made global warming. This is simply an extravagant delusion inflicted on the gullible by this nation’s enemies. All but an insignificant part of the effect is due to variable solar activity, and most of the rest by ubiquitous water vapour, which we cannot control. Heaven help us when the sun doesn’t shine so brightly at the onset of the next Ice Age, which may well have begun already!

Secondly, develop the use of alternative nuclear fuels to those based on uranium-235, in order to avoid the residue they leave of extremely long-lived radioisotopes.

There is a school of thought centred on the use of thorium for this purpose, by converting it into uranium-233 in power-generating breeder reactors.

We were developing these in the 1960s, before the de facto closure of the UK’s nuclear industry by short-sighted politicians.

U-233 leaves nuclear waste residues of much shorter half-lives than those of U-235 – of the order of decades compared with millions of years. They are thus far more manageable, dramatically easing the problem of their safe long-term storage.

Meanwhile, we should continue to use our existing fossil fuels carefully and efficiently, as all good engineers are trained to do, and – if you have to – continue the search for a practical form of thermo-nuclear power generation – if one exists.

Is this too much to ask a decent government to organise?

Roderick Taylor (ex-nuclear power pioneer), Bourne End