As I sit here listening to the rain while Southern Europe turns to ash, this is a message to the Wokies, Greenies, Just Stop Oil, Tree huggers, Witchfinders and other tribes of the international TDandTS nation, the brain dead, the bigots.

Your rush to condemnation has damaged progress, humanity and the environment for far too long.

Now, don’t fret. I know that this will not make any difference to your views or your actions. Review, reflection and modification in the light of reality is way beyond your capacity. You will discount this and continue to crash and thrash your way through the world until you can sit in the desolation of your making, comforted as you wrap the tattered cloak of self-righteousness around your emaciated shoulders.

The UK government has just announced a programme to develop small and medium sized modular nuclear power plants.

Wow! No shit Sherlock!

NV SAVANNAH was launched in 1959. She was the first nuclear powered cargo ship.

Yes, WGJTWs, that was 64 years ago.

And it only took 4 years from inception to launch. She made her maiden voyage in 1962, after full commissioning and remained in service until 1972 apparently  with one refuelling.

It can be said that as a cargo ship, she was not a success. But in reality, she was intended to be a poster girl for the future, sleek elegant, easy on the eye. For maximum cargo capacity, she would have been far less attractive and the intention was to sell the concept.

Since then, things have moved on. Oh yes. This is what we have now:

Good innit?

And each one carries a nuclear propulsion unit. A small to medium sized nuke.

Tucked into the confines of a ship’s hull.

Still leaving loads of room for all the other shippy bits that are needed.

So, at present we have 35 nuclear power plants shopping about in the ocean. At least 26 of them military.

There is 1 container ship.  Out of 55,037 merchant vessels registered worldwide.

Oh, and that doesn’t include about 130 nuclear powered submarines worldwide.

Not so good.

While this was going on, onshore power generation units have concentrated on absolutely massive installations, not on small and medium sized.

And even there, development has more or less been stalled by opposition to the concept of nukes.

There have been accidents. Big ones and bad ones. But that will happen in the development of any technology. And the response is to learn what happened and not do it again. Not to run around screaming it is the end of the world.

Looking around the web, it seems there have been 7 major accidents in civil nuclear plants:

Fukushima Daiichi

Chernobyl

Three Mile Island

Enrico Fermi Unit 1

SL-1

Sodium Reactor Experiment

Windscale

Now, without diminishing the severity and the horror of these incidents, for an emerging technology, that ain’t bad.

In each case, detailed examination has shown what went wrong, and how to avoid it in the future.

We have another problem: The Great Western Railway.

This was a railway built from London to Bristol in the Victorian era as part of a project intended to provide in integrated passenger route from London to New York.

It was masterminded, developed, designed, engineered and nearly everything else except digging with a shovel by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He did it and it was a success. But it damn near killed him.

Frankly, that was the limit of a project that could be led by one man. But now, we have projects that will last ten, twenty years.

The rate or technological development is fast and accelerating.

This means that any of these long-term projects will be obsolete before they are even commissioned.

The UK has spent a fortune and decades on building an aircraft carrier. Now the war in Ukraine is being fought with drones. Drone technology, at all levels from domestic and hobby up to military, is developing so fast that it is unlikely that any aircraft carrier will usefully be deployed in the future, except as a drone launch and control point. Which could be done from a container ship.

Trying to build super-sized nukes is a waste of time. The future is with the small modular units.

Which have been in service in ships since 1959.

So what kept you?

The same people who objected to the first steam locomotives on the grounds, among other things, that a man cannot travel faster than a running horse and live.

This time, get it right.

Get behind the project and shove.