Analysis: Looking beyond nuclear is not just a political standpoint, it's essential

Nuclear has always been in a doubtful position, because it's treated as an everlasting fuel. But there are only 50-100 years left of uranium resources needed for nuclear power.

That's not long and we should be using our skills to develop alternative approaches. The point was always going to come in terms of international electricity generation of how you provide for baseload, given that a lot of renewables are intermittent. Where does that energy come from? Do we use clean coal carbon sequestration or do we use nuclear? There has never been a privately owned and operated plant in the world. They're not profitable. In the 50s they were flagged up as being too cheap to meter, but they're actually too expensive to go anywhere near and we're still spending billions de-commissioning some of our old stuff. We'll have to do that again come 2016 when the next generation start coming apart.

At some point, someone was going to have to ask, can we really continue kidding ourselves that this is viable, and I think that point has been reached. Fossil fuels have given us an access to power that was almost too cheap and now our societies are addicted to cheap power and energy, especially road fuels. Most people consider it their right to access cheap energy, whereas in fact that didn't really come until the industrial revolution a couple of hundred years ago.

We're now starting to say that the industrial revolution was a blip. We were all spoiled children. Welcome back to the real world. Rather than worrying about where our power generation is going to come from, we actually need to be more careful about what we use energy for, how much of it and how good we are at conserving it.

The general population seems to have no idea how serious or how imminent the whole energy problem is. We will lose somewhere 20-30 per cent of our existing generating capacity in the two years from 2015 and at the moment there isn't any replacement. Nobody seems to mention it. We need a proper joined-up debate about what the issue is and how we move forward. Otherwise it will hit us like a big stick and we'll have no idea what to do.

• Dr Alan Owen is director of the Centre for Understanding Sustainability in Practice at Robert Gordon University.