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I never thought I’d see the day dawn when I came to praise ‘Saint’ Bob Geldof. Never mind the twenty years since Band Aid that we’ve endured his sanctimonious outpourings, the Dublin mega-gob should have been banished to the Seventh Circle of Hell for crimes against music for his output during the days of the Boomtown Rats.

However... Bob on nuclear power is a voice worth listening to. That nuclear is clearly the only sensible solution to the impending calamity of global warming is growing more obvious by the day. All these clowns who labour under the delusion that we’re all going to be saved by a mixture of wind turbines, stopping cows breaking wind and sticking a barrage across the Bristol Channel are just kidding themselves.

For a generation that was brought up on ‘Atomkraft Nein danke’ stickers on the rear of every 2CV, nuclear power has until now been beyond the pale. We were all alarmed by what looked like cancer clusters round Sellafield, and Chernobyl didn’t help, either. But we’ve got to have the courage to ignore the protestors at Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (as we should have done when they demonised GM food) and build some new atomic power stations fast.

If you assume that some of the global climate meltdown predictions are true, then what do we have to lose by going for an energy source that the French have used to provide a huge proportion of their needs for many years? We know how to do it and it’s available now.  As Bob has noted, ‘We may mess around with wind and waves and other renewable energy sources, trying to make them sustainable, but they’re not. They’re Mickey Mouse… to help the planet, we have to go nuclear fast.’

What’s the worst that could happen – we all wind up walking around with permanent glows like we’re in a Ready Brek advert...