Luciferase,

The capital cost of building a nuclear power plant is enormous - that's why there are comparatively so few of them.

Add up the total energy it takes to mine, process and manufacture all the raw materials, then add all the transportation and assembly costs. Almost every component is customised. You can't buy the bits from Bunnings.

Mining and processing uranium is currently cheaper than gas but global reserves are as precarious as oil and even more limited. If the whole world converted to nuclear power overnight, we would run out of known reserves in about 10 years.

Then the cost of decommissioning a nuclear plant is about 50% of the initial construction cost. There are about a dozen plants in the USA still in the process of being decommissioned years after they were turned off. The cost of cleaning up and decommissioning plants in the UK is over 70 billion pounds. That's not mentioned anywhere in the sales speil.

Now add the ongoing storage costs for the waste material and the efficiency is looking pretty sad.

Just saying.

Hi Wobbles,
yes, interesting points. However, the next generation of Small Modular Reactors *will* be assembly line, factory produced reactors. Today's LWR have a problem: over-pressured cores. Water wants to flash to steam and so is under incredible pressure (so the engineers tell us) and this means the core flange must be the one huge incredible bit of steel poured at the only foundry in the world that can do it!

But SMR's will be salt or sodium cooled. That means room pressure, and standardisation, and assembly lines. It's the difference between a hand-crafted Rolls Royce and a Hyundai on the factory line! Decommissioning is built into the construction cost, and reactors just 'sitting there' are intentionally parked in SAFSTOR mode for 50 years. It makes it easier and safer to disassemble them at the end.

Lastly, and this is the MOST important point! The next generation of reactors will eat nuclear waste. That means massive savings on the energy cost of obtaining all that uranium. The same uranium will provide 60 times the energy! That's a *massive* saving, and hugely increases the EROEI of the overall plant!

Please watch this 2 hour documentary about thorium, the greatest technology never sold! President Nixon really stuffed the world when he picked the wrong reactor to develop. (GE have that 'wrong' reactor ready to go in the S-PRISM, which can burn nuclear waste, but I'm thinking of public perception. I've seen even anti-nukes accept thorium reactors as necessary after watching this video!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

The opposing view to the video link above:-

http://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/dont-believe-thorium-nuclear-reactor-hype,4919

Personally I suspect the thorium nuclear plant is not the answer, but I have not devoted the time or effort into looking into the question, and anyway I just don't see the need to go that way at present. In Australia we should fully exploit hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and tidal power, before we consider expensive and polluting alternatives.

Hi Warmair,
The Independent raises some interesting points. I would agree that there is a lot of inertia around the known pathway. But as Weinberg said decades ago, it’s the wrong pathway! And it will take some time to develop, although not ‘many decades’ if China kicks off her large scale program again. (Currently stalled). President Nixon got it so wrong in so many ways! It’s not ‘commercial viability’ that ruined their chances but the military’s quest for The Bomb!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Weinberg
The beauty of these reactors is that while most of today’s Gen2 reactors need power to cool and control the reactor, Gen4 reactors like the thorium Molten Salt Reactor only take a *lack* of power to trigger a complete shut down of the reactor. They cannot “melt down” as the reactor is already a liquid! The fuel is in the coolant fluid, giving it a greater surface area to cool down in an emergency. Imagine your kitchen sink is full of boiling water, but there’s no plug, just a thin wedge of ice in the drain pipe: ice that’s only there because electricity is blowing a freezing gas across it. The moment the power fails, the ice melts and the boiling water flows away! That’s a thorium reactor in a nutshell. It’s also normal room pressure, meaning no pressure-cooker explosions as with water-cooled reactors.
As for the fuel cycle being more expensive: where on earth do they get that? The thorium is already mined: a waste product from mining rare earths! Not only that, but it eats ‘nuclear waste’ from other reactors, and can get 60 times the energy out of nuclear waste. YES the *final*, real waste product is more radioactive than regular nuclear waste, and that’s a *good* thing because it means they are fission products that will burn themselves back to safe levels in 300 years!
If you blow up a LFTR with TNT, the liquid salt dries at a few hundred degrees, trapping the radiation. There will be no radioactive cloud like Chernobyl. There’s no water

Max Green and others in favour:
If these nukes are so good can you tell me why they are not being built by the dozen by the big corporations?
And let's not forget that the Governments are bought by these companies, so there would be no problems passing legislation to allow them.

Start here http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html