Yeah. It's like when the Greenpeace people hassle me, they always seem suprised that I honestly and rationally argue in favour of Nucelar energy.

Haven't seen "Molten Salt" before today. I can see that the rest of this day won't be as productive as it could be.

I was always a fan of Pebble Bed Reactors simply from a safety point of view.

Heh! The article is talking about PebbleBed reactors too!

I usually ward of Greenpeace by mentioning Golden Rice, something along the lines of 'your organisation makes kids blind'. Their neo-ludditism, not to mention their shameless attention getting tactics, has deeply turned me off them.

Every time I've spoken with someone who has a clue about power generation in this state they've pointed out a couple of things:

1) You don't want a single power plant that produces a significant percentage of the states energy requirements. Apparently having, lets say about 30%, of your energy production dependent on a single piece of infrastructure is not a clever idea.

2) A lot of the per kilowatt costings assume a governmental indemnity for accidents. ie The plant doesn't have insurance.

One of the beauties about an MSR is that they are very scalable - you can build multi-gigawatt monsters, or you can have small 100MW installations. That's about one third the power of the single-turbine Collie coal fired plant.

So far as I am aware, that cost/kW figure looked at fuel, capital, and social costs.

Of course that doesn't actually get past my main objection to Nuclear power, which is that the waste is a complete pain to deal with. And while people rabbit on an awful lot about how good modern containment technology is they fail to counter my cynicism surrounding the entire "Built by the lowest tender". Also combined with the fact that as far as the builder/designer is concerned the facility only has to work while they are alive and maybe not for the very long time I keep on being told waste has to be stored for.

But as the linked article points out, the amount of waste a 100MW MSR will produce over a 30 year lifetime totals just 1500kg, as opposed to 1500 tons for a light water reactor. That's 50kg per year, and all of it with a half life of under 50 years. Compare that to the 100,000 tons of toxic coal ash produced per annum in a medium sized coal plant. You can also compare it to the amount of polonium pumped directly into the atmosphere by a coal plant, or even the amount of toxic waste produced in the manufacture of solar cells. MSR waste really is quite manageable, and does not compare to the issues with obsolete, unsafe decades-old reactor models that most people are familiar with.

Yeah, I also had a look at the wikipedia article on them. It's cool technology, but the downside seems to be Tritium HF. Nasty stuff.

1) Agreed. For many reasons.
2) Yes, that is my understanding too, that many of the costings for nuclear energy are extremely dubious, and generally assume that governments are willing to underwrite the public liability insurance that is commercially too expensive to make nuclear power economically viable, which effectively is a massive hidden subsidy. You irradiate one little country, and your there goes your no claim bonus :-)
If nuclear energy is so safe now, they should convince commercial insurers, and then they wouldn't need said massive subsidies.

I'm all in favour of R&D for pebble bed, molten salt, etc, reactors, but most of these designs seem to still be in R&D or pilot phases. I don't think throwing money at the industry directly is a good idea until these are the designs they are actually proposing to build. I'm all in favour of cautious use of MSRs etc once they become standard designs.

The big problem with the nuclear industry in Europe and the USA at the moment is that, while they are clamouring for money and seeing a lot of opportunity to use climate change to sell themselves, if they get given the money (and Lieberman wants to give then half a trillion), they will probably use large amounts of it to prop up aging reactors for another decade or two.

Would solar exist without big government subsidies? The solar industry here in Australia apparently doesn't think so. They also tend to be less than forthcoming about issues like the carbon footprint of manufacturing, or the toxic waste issue. That should hopefully change with the next generation of technology, though.

The indemnity issue is somewhat complicated, but US reactors are covered under a $10 billion fund, with the private insurance industry currently being prepared to underwrite about $300 million per plant. That doesn't seem like much if you think in Chernobyl scale events, but with smaller, safer reactors it isn't that bad. Part of the problem is that the technology is still fairly new, so this probably won't change until a few pilot plants have been up and running for a while.

It is true that in Japan and Europe R&D on nuclear is rather overbalanced in comparison to expenditure on renewables, but that is in large part due to the money pit that is the ITER fusion reactor white elephant.

I completely agree with the issue of propping up old reactors. One of the big problems with MSRs is that there is little money to be made in refueling them, which is where most of the big nuclear firms make all of their dough at present, giving them little incentive to invest.

The indemnity issue is somewhat complicated, but US reactors are covered under a $10 billion fund, with the private insurance industry currently being prepared to underwrite about $300 million per plant. That doesn't seem like much if you think in Chernobyl scale events, but with smaller, safer reactors it isn't that bad. Part of the problem is that the technology is still fairly new, so this probably won't change until a few pilot plants have been up and running for a while.

It's not that new is it? I mean the MSRE was around in the 60's.

Also the fuel salts from MSR gives of Fluorine Gas when cold. Nice.

Oh, I agree on solar subsidies. We aren't going to make current solar tech efficient with mere economies of scale, especially on private homes, so subsidies on installation seem misguided to me. As far as R&D subsidies, sure - if anything, solar is comparitively underfunded as regards R&D.

There is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, where the cheap reactors have not yet had a chance to prove themselves. And you can't really blame the insurance companies - being really cautious is there job. So I can see a place for cautious government backing of pilot reactors and such. But I don't think the government should be subsidizing the current 'nuclear industry' as such.

Oh, and while molten radioactive fluorine salts are certainly not something for kids to play with, compared tp the unbelievably hideous gaseous uranium hexaflouride process that is still used for a lot of uranium enrichment, it doesn't sound to bad. And given that we routinely trundle trucks full of cyanide through residential streets etc, a bit of molten flouride salts sounds bearable. Though I'd rather not work there myself.

As accy points out, what's not to love about tritium fluoride? Radioactive, poisonous, and about the most corrosive substance on Earth. The potential quantities involved are largely only an equipment issue rather than a mushroom cloud one, though.

That's true but once the "environment" gets into your equipment then it has the potential to get nasty. The amount of tritium fluoride produced depends a bit of the amount of water vapor in your reaction vessel, if I'm reading things correctly. Which could of course increase if there is a failure.

Of course these are all preventable issues as long as you don't cut corners somewhere.

That last sentence is why I oppose blanket public underwriting of public liability.

we should make it leader of the WA libs

I'v always agreed that nuclear energy could be safe and clean,
if we scrupulously did everything required to make it so.
What makes nuclear energy dangerous is corporate profit margins.
Th question is not "can nuclear energy be safe?",
but "are we willing to pay enough per joule to make it safe?"

I'd say th safest form of nuclear energy
would be using the radioactive elements where they lie,
ie: hot rock & geothermal technology.
But aside from these, on th whole, i don't think nuclear's worth the effort,
we'd get better returns spending our R&D money elsewhere.
Solar is an excellent case in point.
We'r only seeing the beginning of real demand for PV cells,
and already technical advances have dropped cost, resource use and waste by an order of magnitude.
If we'd spent even a tenth as much on researchin PV cell manufacture
as we did on fossil fuels or nuclear,
we wouldn't be having this conversation now.

Nonetheless, nuclear will be foisted upon us in coming decades
as the only viable alternative to fossil fuels.
This has less to do with the available technologies themselves
than with large scale shifts in the power structures which grip our planet,
and each tech option's amenability to maintaining control, extracting profit etc.
To focus only on the technical details leads to Drexler's Syndrome.
That is, a failure to learn the lesson of history -
by and large, tech is not limited by tech,
but by economic, political and social factors,
& all those other things most geeks couldn't care less about.

Krjalk
I don't think the problem is the new tech, it sound like it has great potential on the surface. The problem is getting the industry with all it's self interest and bomb making potential to embrace it. It is cheaper to keep old style reactors running than to shut them down and clean them up properly. Therefore the industry and not really keen on closing them down.

To be honest I'm not surprise all you hear is Chernobyl when you mention nuclear energy. It terrified western Europe at the time especially given the USSR tried to hide it. Your talking new unproven tech with all the bad press of it's predecessor.

As for solar, I would rather see the 2 billion that the Government is going to invest in clean coal research or the subside it gives to the Queensland oil shale industry ( which is only fractionally less polluting than manufacturing oil out of coal, another bright idea being bounce around at the moment) put to actual use. The current solar subsidy put the infrastructure in place to produce 6 250 000 per hr for an average of 7hrs per day for 365 day of the year for 25 years on a dispersed power generating grid. And will continue to produce power after that at a declining rate for at least another 15 yrs. And If your intelligent about your installation, you can put in a system that for a few extra hundred dollars, that allows you to add more solar cells as the tech improve and becomes cheaper.

The problem at the moment is we are getting to the point of no return. If we don't do something now and I mean now, I honestly believe we are fucked. Renewable energy is proven current tech that is just getting better. And more importantly it is something that the average household can invest in. Yes Cheshirenoir I know that pebble bed reactors are old proven tech but let me see you build one in your back yard!

I can see nuclear has the potential of being part of a long term solution but what I think need now is short term action that actually produces results.