Professor Ian Plimer

I had about 3,500 scientific references in that book.

I published that while I was in the university, and it wasn't liked.

So I guess it's if you're crazy or if you're sceptical about everything, which you should be as a scientist, you should be sceptical about everything, then I'm being quite consistent.

But I also had in the same building references

where I was in Adelaide, a climate institute.

And they were very generously funded, compared with my department, where people actually went in, became a productive member of society.

All of their graduates ended up working in another climate institute.

I don't see that as being productive for society.

Well, I think with all new technologies, you've got to actually fund it to a point where you can say, I don't think this is going to work.

And I think it's been wonderful to stimulate green technologies.

I'm yet to see any green technology that makes processes more efficient and more cost effective, but that doesn't mean you stop trying them.

And I think this green transition is going down the inevitable path

where Western countries will have more nuclear power.

That's the transition.

It's not a transition away from coal, because the annual consumption of coal keeps increasing.

And it has been doing that for about 120 years.

So what it's pushing us towards is looking at nuclear fusion even more, looking at

Other nuclear processes, there are some nuclear processes floating around where the cooling systems are very different, using, say, liquid sodium, are very different from water-cooled systems.

I think it's edging towards a technology boom where we will be changing the use of energy because every time you turn on a switch, you're using energy.

The amount of energy we humans are using individually is increasing enormously.