The term considered most apt by the nuclear industry to describe the next 20 to 30 years for their business is “renaissance”. Not growth, or revival; these words are not large enough. In terms of scale and cultural associations, as a transformation from what came before, this is going to be a rebirth.

For several reasons, “the global nuclear renaissance”, to use the full, preferred title, is well named. To be born again, you need to have died; and from Chernobyl onwards, with exceptions such as France, Japan and South Korea, the nuclear power industry has been impressively still. The last time planning permission was granted for a nuclear reactor in the UK was 1987. No new reactor has been built in the US since 1979, when an accident at the Three Mile Island power plant caused the reactor core to melt. Of the 439 nuclear power plants in the world today, 70 per cent are more than 20 years old. While global electricity demand grew by more than 60 per cent from 1980 to 2004, the number of new nuclear reactors being built halved every 10 years. During the 1990s, early developers of nuclear power such as Italy and Germany promised to phase out their nuclear energy altogether, while the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority became a decommissioning body.