Keynote Speaker 1

Cheap and reliable power sources are essential for the further technical development. However, fossil energy is regarded as dangerous for our environment because the unavoidable C02 releases. There are technologies already capable to capture C02 instead of releasing it, but they are barely affordable for the developing nations those who are in the biggest need for new energy resources to accomplish their industrialisation. There was a hope that clean and abundant new form of nuclear energy that means the fusion-based nuclear power plants will solve our energy problem forever. Due the enormous amount of difficult and unsolved technical problems it became clear that fusion power is not going to be available not at least for several decades. On the other hand, the growing oil prices turned the bio-energy production economically profitable. However, the fields producing sugar cane and corn for conversion to fuel for our cars are missing from the food production. The population on the earth is growing exponentially we are at least three times more than we were 60 years ago. The "green revolution" that means intensification of the food production using fertilizers and pesticides was able to keep pace with this growth so far but probably it is going to slow down nowadays less and less new soils are available for intensification of the food the production. Emerging lifestyle of developing nations trying to eat more meat and less vegetables is turning the existing fragile balance of food production and consumption even worse. For the time being it looks like that the existing fission-based nuclear technologies are able to fill the gap of the missing energy production.