So,

We can't buy them yet.
We can't build them yet.
In fact, noone is actually building them yet.
Even if we built the earlier versions, we don't have anyone trained to build or run them and everything and everyone will have to be imported to start up.
We don't know how much it will cost.
It also seems all the resident climate 'skeptics' love the idea.

Sounds like you're on a winner.

@Bugsy Heh heh... that’s given me my first laugh for the thread.

The resident climate deniers can go to hell. My agreement with them in this area is coincidental. A heck of a lot of reputable people support both nuclear and IFR. I keep a list.

http://decarbonisesa.com/who-gets-it/.

People on the other side of the fence should stop leaning on the fact that some deniers support nuclear as a reason to stand against nuclear. It’s just immature.

What you have outlined is exactly what the ground looks like when something is new. When it is moving from proving and demonstration to commercialisation and deployment.

If you want replacement of fossil fuels with zero carbon generation based on some rather brilliant and incredibly safe technology you can place an order for now, you have any Gen III+ reactor to choose from.

You can look at IFR and say “too hard” or you can look at IFR and say “worth fighting for. I might suggest to my Government that they send representatives to the World Energy Forum and have Australia put its hand up to join the international effort to get these things rolling out”. Your call. Am I on a winner? Technologically, yes. Nuclear generally, IFR especially, distinguishes itself among zero carbon generation technology by actually packing the punch to break the back of the climate and energy challenges. The other challenges depend on other people, you being one of them. I never said we don’t need to fight. It just happens that this fight brings with it the possibility of victory against the threat of an unstable climate. I like that type of fight.

Ben, I couldn't agree more.

"People on the other side of the fence should stop leaning on the fact that some deniers support nuclear as a reason to stand against nuclear. It’s just immature."

I hope you don't think this is the reason I pointed out their support.

But don't you think it's a little bit bizarre?

They appear to spend spend every online minute telling us that climate change is scam, we aren't running out of fossil fuels and they don't affect climate anyway. In other words, there is no good reason to spend money on renewables or anything else and we can't even afford a carbon tax.

But yet when a technology comes along, which by the way seems to be rather expensive and requires a lot of safety precautions to make it environmentally acceptable and investment over time, and the only really good justification for it is to reduce our emissions and their effects on AGW, they are all over it like the proverbial fat kid on a smartie...

Logically they should be saying 'what? no way!', and yet they don't. Why is that?

@Bugsey

Like many people, I suspect many climate deniers have adopted their stance partly out of a desire to keep doing what they have always been doing. In some cases that means living a high energy consumption lifestyle with as low a tax on the fossil fuel that enables that lifestyle as possible. In other cases, it means selling as much fossil fuel as possible while sharing as little of the bounty as possible with everyone else in the form of tax payments to the general coffers.

In the case of the former, they like nuclear energy because it is just one more source of energy. Though I do not deny climate change and believe we should have taken effective action a long time ago, I kind of agree with that line of thinking. I LIKE doing things that happen to use a lot of power.

In the case of the second group, I often find them damning nuclear energy with faint praise, saying that it is pretty good as long as "they" can solve their waste issue or as long as "they" can figure out how to pay all of the incredibly high upfront costs without asking for any tax breaks or regulatory easing. The climate change denying purveyors of fossil fuels often support long term solutions like the IFR until it gets close to commercialization and begins to look like an immediate threat to their market dominance.

Interestingly enough, some of the fossil fuel pushers like to cast doubt on the science of climate change, but when confronted with facts they offer natural gas as a lower carbon bridge to a distant utopia where all power is somehow supplied by unreliable sources like the wind and the sun. They know that the "bridge" to that future will be very long and that the end will never be reached.

If I did not believe in climate change, there would be no point in going nuclear, as coal is cheap and plentiful.

Unfortunately the renewable energy sources have failed to live up to hopes, and we are faced with going nuclear or paying lip service.