If we want to cut GHG emissions by 50% or more, the major part of the solution is clear (IMO). It’s nuclear generated electricity.

Cheap electricity provides water and produces liquid fuels for energy carriers for transport fuels. I suspect the mention of ‘cheap’ nuclear has stopped most people in their tracks. Why?

Regulatory ratcheting has increased the cost of nuclear by a factor of four to 1990 (according to Bernard Cohen) and probably double again since. Nuclear has been regulated to its high price. If not for the excessive regulation it has suffered for the past 50 odd years, it would be far cheaper. It would also be safer. It would have progressed through the development stages like other technologies have progressed through, but which have been prevented for nuclear.

The commercial airline industry is a good parallel. It is also a complex system which has accidents and kills people. It has accidents and kills hundreds of people at a time, thousands per year. But it is continually improving. Air travel costs have been coming down and safety increasing for the past 50 years. We accept the small risk of being involved in an accident because of the enormous benefit of low cost air travel. If we had regulated more stringently over the past 50 years, air travel would be more expensive now, there would be less air travel, the world would have lower GDP (because of less face to face communication and less commerce) and we’d be worse off. Importantly, air travel would be less safe than it is now because it would have had less development.

Development of the nuclear industry has been choked and constrained. So nuclear generation is not as safe and it is more expensive than it would have been if it had been allowed to compete and develop on an equal footing with other electricity generation technologies.

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Nuclear fuel is 20,000 times more energy dense than coal and oil in the Gen III reactors and potentially up to 2 million times more energy dense in Gen IV reactors. That means many things: nuclear fuel is virtually unlimited in the Earth’s crust so can power all our energy needs indefinitely. A golf-ball size piece of uranium can provide all the energy needs of the average American for their whole life (that is all the energy needs for all the products, services and direct energy a person usesd for their whole life). Secondly, high energy density means negligible mining, negligible transport of fuels, negligible storage space. Negligible storage space and cost means the energy security problem is solved; i.e. countries can hold effectively unlimited energy in storage for as long as they want.

In WWII, the US was building aircraft carriers in 100 days (from the start to fully equipped and fully loaded with aircraft and weapons). If USA could do that 70 years ago, the industrial countries could certainly produce small modular nuclear power plants at whatever rate the world needs them. They’d be built in factories, shipped to site and returned to factory for refuelling (similar to submarines refuelling cycle).

How could we do this?

Remove all the impediments we’ve imposed, over the past 50 years, that are preventing nuclear electricity generation from being cost competitive with fossil fuels. This included the distortions we’ve imposed on our energy markets, such as tax breaks, subsidies, feed in tariffs, and masses of regulations to favour one technology or another.

No other intervention in markets is needed. All we have to do is remove the impediments we’ve imposed by 50 years of wrong-headed interventions.

Once we have cheap electricity, then we’ll be able to produce water and energy carriers for transport fuels to meet our needs

This author is definitely not sufficiently knowledgeable to be trusted.

From the style used by the author, I have gained the impression that he is well meaning and genuinely interested in this topic. In fact, I would say that he is caught, as so many others, between concern about anthropogenic climate change and concern about nuclear power generation. Unfortunately, he has failed to achieve anything approaching balance on the latter subject, apparently as a result of knowing nothing about it.

I could go on and on about the errors, exaggerations and half-truths in the article, but I will pick only one, which has been overlooked by previous writers.

Quote: "<b>Security.</b> This would turn out to be a nightmare, all the more so with small thorium reactors."

Any author who does not know that thorium fuelled fission power plants are not IFR is displaying a huge lack of knowledge and needs to go back to school before writing on the topic of IFR reactors.

<i>OnLineOpinion</i>, by publishing this tripe, has displayed a need for better editorial guidance.

Professor Brook collaborated in preparation of a small book which was published several years back. It is an excellent starting point for those who are interested in fission energy, either for or against. Barry Brook wrote half of a book, the other half of which was written by one who opposes fission power. I recommend "Why Vs Why... Nuclear Power". It costs less than $20 and is probably still in print.

The author says this:

"Given that climate scientists are warning that climate change is near to becoming irreversible,"

What rot! What does that mean; that the near to ideal conditions prevailing during this interglacial are going to continue forever? That we are going to have perpetual climate change in the future, as opposed to what we had in the past: perpetual climate change.

Is it a statement of the author's acceptance of entropy? No doubt she is familiar with the Maximum Entropy production principle which defines all natural process, including the climate; in which case, fair enough!

I note Peter Lang's comments. I don't agree with Brooks' views about AGW but I do agree with him about IFRs; they are the real McCoy and they work.

Fukishima gave the nuclear industry a black eye, and deservedly so because it was severely outdated technology. France which uses updated nuclear technology is a template for the nuclear industry while the rest of Europe is going bankrupt in the dark through the fraudulent investment in the scam of wind and solar.

And IFRs are leap year ahead of what is in France. Instead of giving $13 billion to wind and solar start-ups over the next 3 years this witless government should be investing in nuclear.

And, as well as nuclear, Thorium. Why isn't Thorium ever mentioned at official levels in this debate. For a good analaysis of THorium see:

http://sciblogs.co.nz/guestwork/2011/12/19/is-thorium-energys-silver-bullet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciblogsnz+%28SciBlogs.co.nz%29

Miss Wauchope does not claim to be an expert in nuclear energy. She has sort the expertise of Arjun Makhijani, President of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Dr Makhijani has experience in electrical and nuclear engineering but he is also the author of the book “Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy (2007)” which might give some indication of his personal views about nuclear energy.

It is unfortunate that Miss Wauchope didn’t also seek the expertise of less biased nuclear experts. In particular experts with first hand experience of building liquid metal fast breeder reactors. This is what Professor Brook has done over several years to develop his views on this topic. He has been in extensive communication with scientists at Argonne National Laboratory who built the forerunner of IFR called the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II before the project was curtailed in 1994 for political (not engineering) reasons. The Professor has even visited the mothballed EBR reactor along with the key designers and builders.

Perhaps Barry will provide his own comments on the veracity of this opinion piece. But at this stage I know which version I would put my money on.

For years, the idea it might be possible to extract energy from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom at low temperatures has been in disrepute - "cold fusion"

Recently scientists are seeing heat, which can only be coming from nuclear reactions, during experiments with hydrogen loaded into nickel and palladium.

Robert Godes has been working in this field and says that he has a reliable heat-producing device, and understands the physics behind it which he calls the Quantum Fusion Hypothesis. Godes has shared his insights with scientists at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories and SRI International. Both have verified that it does work and they can now produce heat from hydrogen.

Godes' hypothesis is interesting, first of all, heat coming from infusing hydrogen into nickel or palladium is not coming from "cold fusion" in the classic sense, it is not a deuterium fusing with deuterium reaction as takes place in the sun which requires extremely high energies.

What seems to be happening is that when hydrogen is "loaded" into nickel or palladium and subjected to the proper kind of an electromagnetic pulse, the hydrogen nucleus which is a positively charged proton acquires an electron which turns it into a low energy free neutron.

Now a low energy free neutron is something nice to have for it quickly combines with other protons to form deuterium, tritium and finally quadrium. The quadrium only lasts for an instant before undergoing a process called beta decay turning it into helium. This is where E = MC2 comes in. The beta decay of quadrium results in a loss of mass which is turned into heat. If all this pans out, it could be one of the most important secrets of nature that has ever been discovered, our energy problems would be over.

Godes says that if the reaction is done properly, the nickel or palladium which is only used as a matrix to hold the hydrogen in one place is not consumed in the reaction. For those sceptical, visit www.brillouinenergy.com