Yeah, that report seems to be on track but a little pessimistic with regards to how soon GenIV reactors might arrive. GE *has* the PRISM ready for the first country that will let it build one.

The real cost and safety advantage will come from LFTR's, and they can eat the waste of all the GenIII+ reactors we're building now. They're a way off, but once they get going they'll be modular, and broken down into their component parts on an assembly line. We'll be able to build them like we do airlines: one SMR a day!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

from Noel Wauchope
A pity that no-one wants to buy "Small Modular Reactors". Babcock and Wilcox, also Westinghouse pulled out of them - both citing poor economic prospects.

The current makers of these reactors, NuScale, SNC-Lavalin, are pinning their hopes on some tax-payer funded purchase. For example, an ignorant government such as Australia's present one, might be sucked into buying them.
Hence the big support from overseas companies for South Australia's shonky Royal Commission

As for the Power Innovative Small Module (PRISM) - that is an idea in UK, mired in controversy, and so far even the Conservative government and nuclear authorities have concluded that deep burial of radioactive wastes is cheaper and safer than the magical PRISM.

I simply don't see any alternative.

Renewables can do about half the grid, but once they get too high the either the backup costs start rising exponentially, or we turn back to ever more gas in winter. We've got to prevent what climate change we can with real world solutions, not magical wishy washy wishful Diesendorf or BZE thinking. Their 'efficiency gains' are highly suspect, as I don't think Australians would cop a 50% energy cut in 10 years! Please note that I'm all for energy efficiency and New Urbanism and public transport and all that, but there are limits to what efficiency can do.

Mother Jones puts it well:

>>"What people really miss about storage is it's not just a daily storage problem," says Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, a group that researches low-carbon energy technologies. "Wind and solar availability around the world, from week to week and month to month, can vary up to a factor of five or six."

Storage has to account for when the wind cuts out for weeks due to seasonal weather variation. It's easy enough to make ice one night to cool your building the next day, Cohen notes, but to save energy for three weeks of low wind you would need to store up enough ice to cool the building for that whole time.

Accounting for sufficient storage, then, increases the costs and scope of the energy transition. Jacobson calls for 605,400 megawatts of new storage capacity. US grid storage as of August 2013 totaled 24,600 megawatts, meaning a nearly 25-fold increase would be required to meet the roadmap. That's not impossible, but it's an effort that would not be necessary with continuous energy sources.<<
http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/nuclear-power-renewables-climate-change

The obvious step is to stop making radioactive trash.

Well I thought the obligation was to stop climate change the fastest way possible. The French cleaned up their electricity sector decades ago, and I see *absolutely no reason* to give into hysterical fear-mongering when modern nukes are safe and *far* more economical than renewables at taking the grid to 100%. Sure renewables can be cheap enough for the first half, but the last half is a killer. Unless you can show me a nation that is 100% wind & solar? They're the 2 most abundant renewable sources, so surely you can point to a nation that used them to power their whole grid? No?

Shame. Dr James Hansen calculates that nuclear power has *saved* about 3 million lives in America alone due to reduced coal burning. I thought coal, being 4000 times more deadly than nuclear power, *and* changing our climate, was the *real* enemy here. Can we at least agree that today's Gen3.5 nuclear would be infinitely preferable to coal?

If not, why not? Do you have a single rational reason when there's no nation on earth that has done 100% wind and solar yet? When batteries cost so much that just backing up ONE German winter week could buy nukes for their whole grid? When nuclear waste is not a problem, but a resource the world could burn for 500 years of clean energy, and the final fission products *are* trivial to deal with? This is a dream energy source, and you're reacting to childhood memes from Godzilla movies. It's time to get real!