There is no free ride, humanity needs abundant energy to thrive, we only have one Earth. We need to use all viable methods to produce clean energy. Nuclear power plants are currently the best we have, but we need them all and we need them soon.

That is simply false. nuclear has no promise, no chance of providing the energy we need, the highest cost, the most dangerous emissions. Not abundant in the slightest, not viable, not clean. The worst, or very nearly so. Soon is absurd, since nuclear is the slowest to install, a decade is typical. Why do you repeat the same falsehoods time after time?

Nuclear is carbon-free energy-dense and provides a reliable compact baseload supply of electricity, day and night, during summer or winter, independently of the weather.

"Wind Power Almost Perfectly Out of Phase with Demand"
http://www.realclearenergy....

"Nuclear power replaces fossil fuels, while wind has the effect of locking them in"
"But worse, due to its intermittent nature, wind requires significant fossilfuel capacity to ensure that demand is met. Wind is in fact enabled by fossil fuels, and locks in their use, while nuclear replaces fossil fuels, in particular the most polluting baseload coal plants."
http://www.heraldscotland.c...

Nuclear needs 100% backup because it needs to shut down, and it does so unpredictable and when it's hot and it's peak demand.

Solar and "wind can provide adequate performance when correctly integrated with hydro and fossil resources." FOSSIL RESOURCES!!!
http://judithcurry.com/2015...

Nuclear needs hydrocarbons. not fossils, just as solar and wind need hydrocarbons not fossils, simple concept, what are you missing? make the hydrocarbons from wastes, everything we harvest is eventually thrown always, that's plenty of backup energy, augment it with fuels made firstly from air, water and electric, it's still cheaper than nuclear even with 2 times peak installed. Carbon nuetral, carbon negative with biochar.

Solar, wind, wastes and hydro. nuclear can't supply even 5% of what we need if we had fuel. But it can't even do that, it's already short of fuel at just 2% of our energy demand.

Nuclear CANNOT provide more than
about 5% of our total power demand, we can't build them faster than
that.
https://daryanenergyblog.wo...

https://daryanenergyblog.wo...
renewables are 16% of our world energy, versus 2 or 3% for
nuclear.

http://www.nirs.org/climate...

nuclear produces much more CO2 than solar or wind.

Many countries have already depleted their uranium, and the quality of the ore is dropping, it's already .1% average. at .02% it take more energy to min and process than the nuclear power plant ever makes.

Nuclear's other emissions are also deadly. Millions of cancer from the radiation. LNT is correct. http://www.sciencedaily.com...
meta analysis of 5000 peer reviewed studies.

http://www.bmj.com/content/...
1-2% of cancer that nuclear industry workers get are from
radiation, proving LNT.

Why not? What do you think is preventing nuclear power from supplying more than 5% of total power? Does that statement even make sense? Why can't nuclear power plants provide process heat for industry and desalination? Why can't it produce synthetic fuels using CO2 from the air? What prevents us from using electric vehicles? What makes that impossible? Think of a submarine as a very isolated community on a submarine the reactor provides much more than 5% of the power required. The reactor provided heat, electricity, cooling, propulsion, water and even air to breath. Please explain what makes it impossible to supply more than 5% of energy needs of a community above the water.

Industry manufacturing capacity, folks read the links.

In other words, you have no reason? "Industry manufacturing" is limited how exactly? What about industry manufacturing is impossible to power with nuclear generated energy, but can be powered from solar or wind? Did I misunderstand your preferred sources of power?

I think he is saying, despite real-world examples to the contrary, that we can't ever manage to build enough nuclear power plants to produce 5%of our energy.
Of course Ontario Canada produces 60% of their electricity from Nuclear and France supplies almost 100% of their electricity from Nuclear, but in Brian's mind these examples are impossible.
Brian also insists that nuclear must be able to supply 100% of the world's power requirements or it cannot be considered as a viable source of power. Of course he never applies this standard to his favourite renewables: wind and solar.

List the companies that can make pressure vessels
for nuclear, and how many.

LFTRs do not need pressure vessels.

That's because they are science fiction. See, you tried to mislead again.

read the link. what a joke.

So you don't have a reason, I didn't think you did. Maybe you should take a critical look at your beliefs.

Did you notice the robot can't respond to complicated answers?

You shouldn't be so hard on yourself, your not a robot, just not very educated, that can be fixed, take some remedial courses.

See? fixed replies is all they have.

I'm still waiting for your answer, what inherent reason is nuclear energy limited to 5%? It is already producing 2/3 of the low carbon electricity in the USA, How much is solar producing? You do realize the "renewable" energy in your link was a mandated use of ethanol, not solar or wind. Are you saying we should stop developing solar, nuclear and wind because none of them have historically produced as much energy as a gasoline additive? Is that what you're trying to imply?

I'm still waiting for you to read the link from Dr Ryan.

But robots can't.

I read it before it doesn't answer my question, and neither did you.

Right Brian. Your comment is so nuanced and complex it could never have been written by a robot. (giant eye roll)
And really....is your argument so weak that you are now claiming that Michael Mann is a robot?
Yikes.
It shows how desperate you are to come up with any argument against anyone who sees nuclear power as a positive thing.

Yes, look at how out of touch with reality Brian is, I hope he gets help.

If the USA is to pursue nuclear power, we should at least do it using newer technology than our existing light water reactors. In the 50s to 70s research was done investigating so called Molten Salt Reactors. (now known as Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors) These reactors burn up 99%+ of their fuel and produce near zero trans-uranics (long lived radioactive waste like plutonium). They are also much safer as they operate at atmospheric pressures, and in the event of a shutdown, they simply drain out into a tank. There is no meltdown as the fuel is already molten, and no explosions due to lower pressure operations. I would recommend everyone read about LFTRs as thorium is extremely prevalent and is a found as a waste stream to rare earth metal mining.

If the USA is to pursue nuclear power, we should at least do it using newer technology than our existing light water reactors.

Regardless of how desirable that is, the NRC as currently constituted appears unable to license anything but a light-water reactor.  All the startups developing pebble-beds, molten-salt reactors, liquid-metal cooled FBRs, etc. have plans to build their prototypes outside the US.

Until the US gets a massive shift in the law which sets the NRC's authority and priorities (and probably cost-recovery mechanisms), light-water is what we've got.  We can still do plenty with light water, including thorium-based breeder reactors (a la the 1977-82 run of Shippingport).  If the law stays as it is, NuScale seems to be positioned very well to take advantage of a push to low- and zero-carbon base-load generation (and industrial process steam).

Your nuclear power plants already had TMI, when there was not supposed to to be an accident for 10,000 years. And you want less regulation? With out gov protection from liability and massive gov breaks, nuclear could not exist at all.

The answer is of course, scientific jargon. The fact that there have been MSR "incidents" is unimportant to the purity of the beloved.

The prototype they love so much, nearly blew up several times.

http://web.ornl.gov/info/ri...

Note, THESE ARE THE GUYS THAT BUILT IT.

"The reactor facility, called “Ole Salty” by some, was converted to lab and office space as the reactor lay in stand-by status. Then, in March 1994, samples of the off-gases in the process lines unexpectedly revealed uranium hexafluoride (UF6) and fluorine, a highly reactive gas. Where surveyors expected to find part-per-million concentrations, they found concentrations of UF6 of up to 8 percent and fluorine of 50 percent.

That, and the discovery of uranium deposits on a charcoal filter, prompted a precautionary evacuation of the MSRE buildings. Because the uranium had migrated outside the storage tanks, MSRE became a remediation project under federal and state auspices. But it was a brief disruption, and any risk of a criticality accident or release of radioactive gas was quickly minimized.

Engineers then had a more protracted challenge: How to remove both the UF6 that had collected in the piping and the very radioactive and chemically unstable uranium-233 that had collected in charcoal-bed filters for off-gases. Those filters were surrounded by a water-filled chamber, raising concern of a criticality accident that could have spread contamination for miles."

And in classic Donovan style, he refuses to defend or back up anything he's said, but just charges on with more nonsense to debunk.

Your nuclear power plants already had TMI, when there was not supposed to to be an accident for 10,000 years.

The connection of the water line to the instrument air line was a deliberate human action.  Sabotage is NO ACCIDENT by definition.

And you want less regulation?

All the NRC "safety" regulations up to that point failed to prevent TMI, because the utility was so busy ticking off items on the NRC's contrived checklist that they had no time or money to think about other threat models.

So what actually happened:  the PORV got stuck open, contradictory instrument readings led the operators to not do the right thing to treat the consequences, and the core melted down.  There were NO CASUALTIES; the defenses worked as designed, and were quite adequate to the task.  The appropriate thing to have done in the aftermath was to remove the core (which was done, some of it with hand tools; several meters of water makes a very good radiation shield), inspect the reactor vessel and systems (which was done; they held up very well and were judged suitable for service), then replace the core and bring the plant back up.  That last step was effectively prohibited by NRC regulations.  In other words, the thing that forced the plant to be decommissioned was not damage, but NRC policy.  THERE is your "financial danger".

The prototype they love so much, nearly blew up several times.

Wrong.  The MSRE required most of the salt inventory to be inside the reactor vessel, and much of it inside the graphite core moderator, to go critical.  Milligram or even gram quantities of uranium, even HEU, in charcoal somewhere cannot go critical regardless of geometry.  Surrounding LEU with light water requires a heavy-metal inventory of hundreds of kilograms to tons, as well as precise geometry.

If you had the slightest bit of skepticism you'd look at the phrase "chemically unstable uranium-233" and realize that the author is a scientific illiterate and a shameless fearmonger.  Or perhaps you are pushing this because you are also a scientific illiterate and a shameless fearmonger.

Note, THESE ARE THE GUYS THAT BUILT IT.

Wrong again.  The MSRE was finished in 1965, designed years earlier; the fear-mongering page you cite is dated 1998, after ORNL's nuclear research and researchers were long gone and replaced by "renewables".  In short, that bit of MSRE "history" was over 3 decades out of date when written, and written by its ideological enemies.

Of course, someone like you would never notice that the entire issue was due to letting the MSRE's salt mix sit for several decades.  Commercial MSRs would never leave precious fuel going to waste; they would immediately remove the uranium by fluorination to UF6 with recovery in a cold trap (which the MSRE's dump-tank off-gas systems did not have) and put it in a new reactor.  However, because of the POLITICAL decision not to do anything further, the U-233 was commercially worthless and was left to sit.

TL;DR from the beginning the problem was politics.  YOUR politics.

Jane fonda did it.

IAEA says we will start having uranium shortage by about 2025.

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTC...

Nuclear is out of fuel.

Do you understand?

Let's just stop with the science fictions and get serious about renewables. They have free fuels forever.

IAEA says we will start having uranium shortage by about 2025.

<sigh> So what diagram are you choosing to cherry pick now Donovan? BTW you do realize that this study is over 15 years old and based largely on another study that's 20 years old right?

Do you realize the 2014 report has the very same 2025 date in it? you folks lost this one, and it's freaking you out as it should.

Nuclear power is a dead end. 2-5%, who cares? out of fuel really soon, 10 years, hey you can argue a few more years, but the fact is:

Nuclear power fuel is on the same treadmill as fossils, and in fact is now at the point where the mining volume are similar.

and that's for 2-5% of the worlds energy!

what a joke!

solar and wind are 1/4 the cost, Lazard, and have infinite free distributed fuel.

folks, please, it's not even a question. nuclear is nothing, can solve nothing, and only provide massive million years wastes that we will suffer with longer than human being have existed.

Do you realize the 2014 report has the very same 2025 date in it?

For RAR only. Keep reading.

Nuclear power is a dead end. 2-5%, who cares?

Yeah you were only out by 250% and 2% was something you seemed to make a big deal of until your number was shown to be wrong.

out of fuel really soon, 10 years, hey you can argue a few more years,

You refuse to accept that your cherry pick denotes only an estimated RAR shortage nor that there are caveats to the study that raise serious doubt about even RAR shortages given new technology (MSRs, both Uranium and Thorium) coming on-stream within a decade.

Nuclear power fuel is on the same treadmill as fossils, and in fact is now at the point where the mining volume are similar.

What??!! Not even close. You can't actually believe that.

nuclear is nothing, can solve nothing, and only provide massive million years wastes that we will suffer with longer than human being have existed.

Indeed there's a problem with current solid fuel, water-cooled thermal reactors. Way too much of the fuel remains. "Waste" you call it and yes that stuff has long lifetimes however don't assume that nuclear technology will remain as it is. In fact, the most promising new designs will start burning all that "waste" and leaving 1% of current "wastes" with half-lives of only 100s of years. All that without mining further uranium (or thorium) for many years! So much for your "running out of fuel" delusion.

All the pro nuclear folks have, when faced with the 2025 shortage prediction, is science fiction future fantasy tech that will save them. It's the same list they have had for 50 years: breeders of which one is operating and caught fire 14 times, and is super expensive.

The Thorium, which does not run in current reactor, and has half the RAR of uranium,

then uranium from seawater which would take the entire Rhine river's for of seawater being filter per reactor.

FACT: given current commercial tech, current RAR estimate, the shortages are predicted to start in 2025, and have been predicted for the same data for at least 14 years.

Some new ore has been found, but other ore deposits turned out more limited than estimated.

As usual nuclear fans don't understand the tech. every ton of uranium fuel requires at least 100,000 tons of ore are the average .2% Then there is often massive overburden to be removed, over 5000 times the tonnage of ore in some cases.

In Situ permanently contaminates our water source by injected acid into the ground and collecting a small percentage of the leachant to extract the uranium.

Sabotage, that's a good one.

The reprocessing system was never built, only lab test of the individual step were ever done. You precious prototype was a disaster.

And just like that prototype, commercial power reactors are in "SAFTOR" for 60 years instead of being decommissioned now.

Big money putting of the costs till they are dead and gone. Who pays? the citizens as usual.

And just like that prototype, commercial power reactors are in "SAFTOR" for 60 years instead of being decommissioned now.

Letting the cobalt 60 and about 3/4 of any Sr-90 and Cs-137 go away before bringing in people to do the work.

Big money putting of the costs till they are dead and gone.

There's this thing called "the decommissioning fund" that you would know about, if you weren't a professional disinformation artist.

The reprocessing system was never built, only lab test of the individual step were ever done.

It was a laboratory reactor, and the 1968 removal of the initial U-235 charge was successfully done in just 46 hours.

Of course, a professional disinformation artist would never bother to, you know, cite actual unbiased information about the issue.  Facts are your enemy.

Read the link to the ORNL molten reactor I gave you, you are talking about something else.

Removing the last spent fuels charge is not decommissioning. You got caught again trying to mislead people, you do that a lot, have you considered professional help?

Decommissioning cost are around a billion dollars, and they never end. The storage sites have to be maintained and guarded for a million years. When you look at the capacity factor of nuclear, you really should include the build and decommissioning times as well. That's drop nuclear below 50%. Solar and wind go up quick, and go down and are replaced on the same property quick. If you include the million years storage for nuclear, then nuclear has a capacity factor of 1/30,000th.

Its the nuclear industry that spend billions on pr and influence.

Read the link to the ORNL molten reactor I gave you, you are talking about something else.

ORLY?  Your link is a 1998 hit piece on the MSRE.  My link is a 1972 post-shutdown study on the MSRE.  AAMOF, my reference is a preliminary study about work that, if it had been financed at the time, would have completely eliminated the issues mentioned in yours.

To be a successful disinformation artist, you need to be believable and not ridiculous.

Removing the last spent fuels charge is not decommissioning.

Removing the uranium from the fuel salt eliminates any possibility of it being volatized and winding up in pipes and filters.  As I wrote before, "because of the POLITICAL decision not to do anything further, the U-233 was commercially worthless and was left to sit."  But you're a disinformation artist, so you'll deny clear words that debunk what you say long before you say it.

Decommissioning cost are around a billion dollars, and they never end.

An early-type BWR near me was decommissioned and the buildings totally removed.

The storage sites have to be maintained and guarded for a million years.

The fission products fall below the activity of the original uranium ore in about 500 years.  You still have some things like Pu-239 in spent LWR fuel, but that's nuclear fuel and can be completely consumed in fast reactors; there's no reason to leave it just to sit except anti-nuclear ideology.

When you look at the capacity factor of nuclear, you really should include the build and decommissioning times as well.

But you don't include abandoned wind farms.  You really have a bad case of "nuclear is bad and I will grasp at any straw to demonize it".  You also exaggerate "renewables", counting large hydro when touting total generation but downplaying it elsewhere.

Its the nuclear industry that spend billions on pr and influence.

Yeah, really.  An industry that's hamstrung by absurd NRC decisions (like the Vogtle base mat rebar spec decision that delayed work for months) has "influence".  In truth, nuclear industry leaders are wimps.  That's why you find it so easy to attack them.

All it would take to destroy the Green propaganda about a "renewable economy" is to actually build one and show the public the bill.

Science fiction and excuses. and still out of fuel. Even the IAEA agrees.

You can't burn it, there is no reactor for that. stop claiming you can.

Why bother? We don't need nuclear. We don't need coal. We don't need oil. Sun and wind are extraction-free and waste-free energy. Read Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free Future free download from Institute for Energy and Environmental Research http://ieer.org/projects/ca...

Fantasy solutions make us all feel better but the reality is that we need ALL low carbon power sources to replace fossil fuels. People who say otherwise are either lying to you or have not the faintest clue how extremely difficult the transition will be.
Even if we use ALL low carbon power sources it is not assured that we will be able to reduce our CO2 emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe.

Nuclear is the slowest to install and the most expensive, we don't need ALL, we need only GOOD ones. Nuclear does not qualify.

Nuclear is the fantasy, with only 2 years of proven reserves, which is optimistic as far as being useful, and can only be built to about 5% of our power needs. As wells causing millions of cancers and costing over twice solar or 4 times wind.

Solar and wind are now available cheaper than any other sources.
http://www.lazard.com/media...

The IAEA says that we will have uranium shortages starting in 2025, then getting worse fast.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTC...
"As we look to the future, presently known resources
fall short of demand."

Nuclear is the slowest to install and the most expensive

But it was very fast and also the cheapest when AEC rules applied.  The problem is not with the technology, the problem is with the regulators and their enabling legislation.

France had a dramatic decrease in carbon emissions in around 10 years, almost exclusively with nuclear power.

And France is going renewable, what does that say?

It says that France managed to decarbonize in about a decade using nuclear power and now they have the luxury of fine tuning their power system.
Now that they have a low carbon footprint, they can take as long as they need to experiment with other low carbon sources and see what else works and what the true costs are and what issues will arise.
I say we should follow France as a proven, real world example of what can be done using nuclear power first to knock CO2 emissions down quickly. After we decarbonize then we can play around with other sources of low carbon power.

Prove it.

BTW, the CO2 numbers don't include mining in other countries where the get their uranium, nor the power they import from other countries. Nor does it include other GHG. nor are the number all that reliable.

Actually those CO2 numbers do include mining and refining, unlike the numbers for solar and wind which do not include transportation, landscaping and back-up power.

No they don't, you just lied. link to the study.

Accounting for emissions from all phases of the project (construction, operation, and decommissioning) is called a lifecycle approach. Normalizing the lifecycle emissions with electrical generation allows for a fair comparison of the different generation methods on a per gigawatt-hour basis. The lower the value, the less GHG emissions are emitted. http://www.world-nuclear.or...