Nucleares: sí, por favor

The energy crisis unleashed by the war in Ukraine has served to bring to light the structural defects of the European energy system. The need to achieve strategic autonomy and reduce dependence on Russian hydrocarbons has once again put on the table what has been largely forgotten in recent years: nuclear energy. However, a stigma continues to weigh on her which, as the physicist Manuel Fernández Ordóñez demonstrates, has an exclusively ideological basis. This essay aims to value the real role that nuclear energy plays in today's society. The history of the human being is a story of conquest over energy resources, and the energy contained within the atomic nuclei is just one more. You will not find here any confrontation with renewable energy. The ecological crisis and the need for an energy transition are undeniable, and also that the time for fossil fuels is running out and must give way to new, more efficient and sustainable technologies. Nuclear energy can and should be, together with renewables, an essential element in this transition, since it is capable of producing enormous amounts of energy with minimal impact on the environment. Fernández Ordóñez shows that criticism of nuclear energy is based on myths, and that any attempt to decarbonise economies across the board will fail without it. Now that we have woken up from the naive dream of a world of cheap and abundant energy that we took for granted and never thought we could lose, we can only say yes to the most powerful, clean, reliable and secure energy source there is.