Ben, I'm glad you check figures, because I sometimes screw up!

But what I'm confused about is why anybody even bothers with 2200 Gemasolar or 410 SolarReserve when we have a much better energy source ... nuclear. And if you think progress has been rapid with solar, just think about Chinese SMRs rolling out of factories. Dig a hole, bury the reactor and hook up a generator. What could be easier? Comparing that with solar+salt is like comparing an iPhone or similar with something hanging on a wall in a black and white movie. Solar is just a really bad technology. Big, very eco-unfriendly and literally a waste of space.

What is it that you don't like about nuclear Ben?

Geoff - What is it I don't I like about nuclear? Here are 7:
- Firstly there's the nuclear weapon proliferation.
-Then the risks due to systems that can and have failed e.g. Fukushima - projected 5000 deaths

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16792

- The cost to our grand children of storing spent fuel. Unless of course you bury it deep in rock and waste 90% of the energy. But it still has to be shipped safely to suitable locations.

- Nuclear fission fuels are finite - up to a few hundred years; sun and wind are virtually infinite

- Nuclear as we know it is big and centralized - big corporate control and secrecy; if a disaster happens it is a big one (Fukushima, Chernobyl).

- There are no 'fail safe' electricity generation reactors in commercial operation

- Big nuclear is generally inflexible, wouldn't be suitable for backing up variable generation from dispersed wind and solar, where it needs to be ramped up and down quickly.

When they produce a small, modular, flexible reactor that has all fail safe systems (as hypothesized in the WNA link above), I will get more enthusiastic about the role of nuclear.

Rhosty waxes lyrical about smaller pebble bed reactors but it appears there is only one small prototype in operation. There are only two SMR's operating. Commonest small reactors are in ships, maybe because they are under the water line and operating our at sea most of the time? They've been working on these small reactor designs now for 60 years. Why are there no 'fail safe' models in commercial operation in place of coal and gas?

PS I have not studied the myraid types of N reactors, most conceptual and some experimental. But you and I both know its not as simple as 'Dig a hole, bury the (small modular reactor - SMR) and hook up a generator.' This sort of statement doesn't help the debate.
Scanning through:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Small-Nuclear-Power-Reactors/,
it appears that there are only two SMRs in operation and they are 200- 300 MW, not really small.

Thanks for the list Ben. But you've only dealt with one side of the balance sheet and totally ignored the 1.8 million lives that nuclear has saved. This swamps any downsides you've mentioned.

You've also totally ignored climate change. Suppose the chance of avoiding escalating climate change with renewables was X (0<X<1 ... its a probability) and with nuclear it's (0<Y<1 also a probability), then consider the size of climate catastrophes ... like 20 million displaced in the Pakistan floods of 2010. Now ask how much bigger Y has to be from X to make nuclear preferable despite your list of misgivings. Climate scale events are so big that if nuclear gives us any chance of avoiding them we should take it. Why risk the planet on the technology which failed during the oil crisis of the 70s/80s when we can use the technology which killed that crisis? Why ignore the stuff which worked and go with the stuff which didn't? If nothing else, that history shows that Y is much bigger than X.

In addition, your list of objections is really very weak. 5,000 deaths ... eventually ... when? If you look at the atomic bomb survivors ... and these are people who got a seriously big dose of radiation, far, far bigger than anybody got at Fukushima ... those receiving less than 1 Sv had a median loss of life of 2 months. Compare that risk with the change in bowel cancer rates after red meat consumption rose in Japan ... it went from 20,000 cases per year in the 70s to 112,000 cases per year by 2012. This isn't a speculated rise, it's a measure rise. It has happened. I don't know why you insist on fail-safe for nuclear but not for anything else. You don't insist on fail-safe air travel or pork or ladders.

Let me know if you want refs ... they are all in GreenJacked.

Geoff I'll summarize in my last post on this.

The optimum energy mix to replace coal and gas will come down to price and politics (public preferences).

On price, have you read the paper on the Government website I linked to in a previous post? The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for all electricity technologies - coal, gas, renewables and nuclear:

http://www.bree.gov.au/publications/australian-energy-technology-assessments.

It's essential reading for this debate.

Nuclear is not the cheapest alternative - wind and solar are.

Fukushima is an excellent example of what happens when ill-informed public fear drives policy rather than science. Closer to home anti-vaccination nutters have caused deaths here just as the radiophobic Naoto Kan killed people with the Fukushima evacuation ... aided and abetted by anti-nuclear radiophobic conspiracy nutters from around the planet. So while I recognise that public opinion will be important we have to ensure that accurate science gets presented forcefully. In the age of the internet, that's a serious problem.

As for the rationality of the decision. The so-called "levelised" cost of energy is misnamed and doesn't capture all the externalities of the various technologies. It is about marginal costs of a unit of energy. Even so, nuclear is cheaper than solar+storage and comparing nuclear to solar without storage is like comparing trucks and bicycles. So if you look at Figure 9 (p.57 of the AETA report 2013 you linked), nuclear is cheaper and with a much lower variance in possible costs than any of the solar+storage option. That's the 2020 estimate. Trying to estimate out to 2050 has all kinds of additional problems. Currently solar advocates are busily both spruiking the low cost of the technology but crying foul about cuts in subsidies ... they don't seem to see the irony :). They talk about grid parity, which is another name for "grid bludging". The proper way to compare costs is to build two houses, connect one to the grid and count the cost, power the other with solar and what ever else you need to do to give it equivalent power (24x7 on demand). When people actually do this, they pay a bucket load of money for storage and they keep paying every time they need to replace the batteries. To scale this comparison up, just plan two cities and the power supply to both.

But the really big issue not captured by LCOE and the like is speed. If you care about climate change, then speed matters. Solar at scale is just so slow to deploy.

Geoff you read the AETA graph differently to me. For 2025 I see onshore wind and solar PV being by far the cheapest, then comes large scale nuclear. SMR's are about the same as solar thermal with storage but nuclear has the lesser cost range. Biomass using waste is cheaper than either.

That is the main reason I see the only possible value of nuclear as being fueled / controllable backup to wind and solar. So if they invent a flexible, fail safe SMR then it could have application if it were not for the problems I highlight below.

You should note that neither the cost of decommissioning the N plants or ongoing waste storage or the cost of weapons proliferation is included in the LCOE figures given in AETA.

PS I stress fail safe because no solar or wind technology is going to melt down and pollute large areas as Chernobyl and Fukushima have done, due to human or machinery failure or natural disaster.