This talk of using plutonium is hair raising. The reality that the nuclear industry has produced so much of the dreadful, intractable stuff.

The point that the plutonium has to be dealt with is well made and a 'motherhood statement' - it's too dangerous to be left or even buried anywhere.

I'm willing to accept that a demonstration IFR be built - in a country that produces the plutonium and all of it should be dealt with there. No other country should ever be conned into taking this waste. If it works safely then that type should be built near the existing reactors that produce plutonium and no more conventional reactors should be built.

Cease any technology that produces more Pu, even if that means closing conventional reactors.

Nuclear may well be as 'low carbon' as solar thermal but it's far more polluting. Solar thermal costs will soon come down to below nuclear and there's no decommissioning or waste issues with it. I know which one I and for that matter the general populace would prefer.

"IFRs are just a fantasy for techno-optimists and, fortunately, that is all they will ever be."

How stupid is that. You've got a technical article which calmly and logically goes through all the defects in the previous post on IFRs, and how IFRs can be built and safely operated and all we get in response is the usual green and pro-AGW claptrap.

Hey Ben

Having written your second OLO article its rather obnoxious of you to bag people like michael_in_adelaide and myself who write sincere criticisms.

Your responses (in these your 12th and 13th comments on OLO) include:

"sigh...foolishness...you don't even know this much, why should we listen to your fear-mongering...[and]..is just bizarre."

are unbecoming of an author (in my view).

I suggest you try harder to be civil.

Pete

Peter, If I thought the criticisms were sincere, or if, for example, the comments were framed as queries, I would respond altogether differently.

But I don't find them sincere. It is almost as if yourself and Michael in adelaide have done almost everything you can to avoid engaging with the content of the article, which is factual, well-structured and referenced, and instead just jumped onto the comments as quickly as you can with scary sounding stuff that makes no sense for the benefit of other people's potential confusion. In the case of michael this includes attacks on a well regarded academic. Given the stakes of this issue, this type of thing frustrates me hugely.

So call me old fashioned, but I think civility in comments goes both ways, and includes readers not going out of their way to engage in, yes, fear-mongering in response to the effort of the authors.

I'll gladly meet you at the halfway point.

@Roses1, you had better prepare yourself... the IFR makes plutonium from uranium as it goes along. That's a key feature of how it works, but not the full story.

What is different is that word "separated". The UK have stockpiles of separated plutonium. While it is civil reactor grade, not weapons grade, having separated plutonium hanging around it still of concern. So an IFR or PRISM would help dispose of this.

But, using an IFR to get rid of the rest of the high level nuclear waste includes a process that turns some of the uranium in that waste (that cannot burn as fuel) into a type of plutonium (which can then burn as fuel). But as described in the article it never becomes separated and never leaves the site. So in case someone tries to scare you with the idea that "IFRs make plutonium", there is truth in that. Just not the whole truth.

Plutonium is a metal, not a monster. Provided we are not trying to do the wrong thing, and the IFR has been designed to make the "wrong thing" all but impossible, plutonium does not need to be feared.

That the IFR reactor has not been commercially built yet is not surprised considering the minute fraction of the total cost of generation is concerned with the price of fuel, and the cost of power generation is going to be higher than conventional nuclear power plants. If one compares these with non nuclear waste fuelled power plants, the cost of running these plants is several times more expensive than coal powered stations. These make a profit from disposing of waste that would otherwise cost a fortune in landfill. The reprocessing the spent rods and re enriching them for conventional reactors whilst burning the plutonium and other nasties in a small IFR reactor is a permanent solution to the waste issue. As far as highly enriched uranium (ie 20%,) the equipment used is exactly the same as enriching to 5%, and so claiming that this aids proliferation is a furfy.

With regards the liquid sodium coolant, the pipes would be sheathed in pressurized inert gas, and a leak would result in inert gas leaking into the sodium. Which would be rapidly detected. This is a common solution used for high voltage cables and hydrogen cooled generators, and is well proven.

Rhosty, no one has built solar generation that is cheaper than coal. If you look hard at the accounts this is rubbish. The best estimate yet is about 5-10x the cost of coal generation.

Roses1 - "Solar thermal costs will soon come down to below nuclear" Really? You know this how? Or is this just another motherhood "wish" from the greens.