Plus, for too many liberals, the distinction between nuclear weapons and nuclear power is emotionally too difficult. Any decent American knows that we should be ashamed of the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki, three days after the Hiroshima bomb for which we might have an excuse.

For my part, ascoss, I’d rather live next to (or downwind of) an Integral Fast Reactor power plant that’s got a few tens of tons of radioactive fuel, none of which can escape, than a comparable coal burner emitting millions of tons of poisonous gases, aye, and even radioactive thorium fly ash.

And I’d rather have a 1000 MW nuclear power plant at the bottom of my favorite range of mountains than 800 wind turbines, each 600 feet tall, over the same mountains, generating maybe the same total annual amount of energy, but without regard to the actual demand.

The crucial advantage of nuclear power is that chemical processes involve the atom’s electron energy, which is about a millionth of what holds the nucleus together.

So a very small amount of uranium, which produces an even smaller amount of waste products, gives you as much energy as millions of barrels of oil.
Or put it another way:
Uranium and Thorium are the product of the violent cataclysmic death of a huge star, an event that we call a supernova.
Fossil carbon was laid down during about 64 million years, by energy from our quiet little sun.
Our rate of consumption of fossil carbon could use it up, and all of the oxygen in our atmosphere, in a few hundred thousand years.

It’s not likely that we can find ways to use solar energy to keep up with that rate.

I have been touting the idea over at Energy From Thorium:

http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/v iewtopic.php?f=39&t=1569&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Crystal River has 4 coal plants and 1 nuclear plant. If the coal plants were converted to IFR, then the spent fuel they already have on site could run them into the 22nd century.

“In 1981, O’Leary and her husband established the consulting firm of O’Leary & Associates, where she served as vice president and general counsel. From 1989 to 1993, she worked as an executive vice president of the Northern States Power Company.
In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated O’Leary as Secretary of Energy.”

The chief of staff at the White House at the time was a guy named Mack MacLarty an FOB whose Wiki entry contains the following paragraphs:

“McLarty was born in Hope, Arkansas, and graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1969. He is a member of Sigma Chi Fraternity. He was elected to the State Legislature at the age of 23 and served as chairman of the state Democratic Party from 1974–1976.”

In 1976, he became the youngest member ever elected to the Board of Directors of the Arkla Gas/Arkla, Inc., a Fortune 500 natural gas company. In 1983 he became Arkla’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. During his tenure, the company was recognized by Forbes, The Wall Street Transcript, and The Financial Times for management excellence, in addition to his automotive endeavors.”

Killing the IFR and slowing nuclear development as much as possible was part of the plan to pay back the natural gas interests that helped to get Clinton-Gore elected.

Simple – reduce competition, drive up the demand, increase the price. Econ 101. By 2000, the price of gas had more than doubled. It doubled again by 2004 and again by 2008. Pretty effective plan, you might say.

(Gas price chart – http://www.oilnergy.com/1gnymex.htm#sinc e30)

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast

In fact, you have to process the nuclear waste, via some means that nobody knows how to do on a commercial scale, which is the real “big problem” with IFRs. It is yet another example of a problem that’s been solved in the lab but not on a commercial scale, and the nuclear industry’s track record in scaling these things up is, shall we say, poor.

Finally, how about a bit of historic perspective in your stories rather than just writing down what these people tell you?

One finally note, Ford put a halt to reprocessing and Carter only put the finishing touches on that option. Reagan re-instated the opportunity but most realized that it was way too expensive and nothing was done with it that the government wasn’t involved in directly.

A study of reprocessing in France around 2000 indicated that France took a multi-billion bath on reprocessing vs. once-through burial.

did he “show” this, or did he “claim” it? The difference is often quite important when the subject is long-dated claims about economic viability made by the nuclear industry.

No seriously. This smells like a spinny attempt to re-open the Uber-funding spigots that Bill Clinton cut off 15 years ago.

Now the “Nuclear Battery” from Hyperion and Toshiba’s 4-S that they want to install in Galena Alaska – those are interesting Micro power concepts.

Small scale and super simple in design: no control rods to get stuck, no cooling pumps to fail. They cost more per Kilowatt/hour but capital costs are way smaller. Because, you know: they are small and simple.

These will see Real World use in less than 5 years. No Bajillion dollars of further R&D and “feature creep” and scaling for production.