It should be clear by now that neither the Emissions Reduction Fund nor the Renewable Energy Target are particularly effective at reducing emissions. That's despite the exceedingly generous LGC subsidy now about $85 per Mwh, roughly double the wholesale price of coal fired electricity.

Therefore we have to change tack. Progressively replacing coal baseload plants with nuclear will make serious inroads into emissions. Aiming to radically reduce emissions but ruling out nuclear is like boxing with your hands tied.

If I lived next door to a nuclear reactor, I'd probably be exposed to more radiation, if I were also a frequent flyer, or lived in a stone house made from quarried granite!

In any event, the nuclear reactor I'd want to live near to would be a thorium reactor.

And for any number of reasons! one would be the reaction is one that produces heat, rather than a possible nuclear thermal explosion?

And thorium is a fifties technology abandoned because there was no weapons spinoff!

Critics have noted that prototype thorium reactors have yet to produce more than 40 MW. However the indians are working on a 300 MW generator, which they hope to have in service by 2016?

Others are working on miniaturization, which may cost as little as $1000.00 and power around ten houses for a lifetime, and needing only triennial inspections? That's just a $100.00 per household, per lifetime?

This is where the nuclear promise is, as endless cheap as chips power and buried safely deep in solid bedrock beneath our very feet, eliminating all those gold plated transmission lines.

Moreover, we have enough thorium to power the world for up to 700 years; or ourselves for considerably longer, if we're smart enough to keep it here as our own source of ultra cheap carbon free power and competitive high tech manufacturing edge!?

Thorium reactors consume as much as 95% of their fuel, and such waste as they do produce is far less toxic than than produced in an uranium reaction. And thorium waste is eminently suitable in long life space batteries. As may be required in the interminable satellites the world puts into orbit and not just around home planet!

Moreover, uranium reactors only consume around 5% of their fissile fuel material, the rest being highly toxic waste.

Given the way they use fuel, one can fuel a thorium reactor for life with just a truckload of highly refined material?

And that is where they outperform coal, which in a lifetime, may use up millions of comparable truck loads of washed fuel!?
Rhrosty.

Unfortunately, by the time we educate the unscientific community, it will probably be too late and the bloody greenies who want to save the world, will have destroyed it.
David

Tom Quirk,

Thanks you for this excellent post. It's so good I reblogged it on Climate Etc. here:
https://judithcurry.com/2016/02/06/week-in-review-energy-edition-2/#comment-763621

Also see my comments immediately above this and another further down thread: https://judithcurry.com/2016/02/06/week-in-review-energy-edition-2/#comment-763374

Also see my post (19 January 2016): "Is nuclear the cheapest way to decarbonize electricity?" https://judithcurry.com/2016/01/19/is-nuclear-the-cheapest-way-to-decarbonize-electricity/ This is a discussion of an excellent analysis by ERP; excerpt from my Introduction:

"A recent report by the Energy Research Partnership (ERP), ‘Managing Flexibility Whilst Decarbonising the GB Electricity System’ compares the total system costs of decarbonizing the electricity system in Great Britain for various proportions of seventeen technologies. The analysis considers and does sensitivity analyses on important inputs and constraints that are seldom included in analyses intended for informing policy analysts about policy for a whole electricity system. The ERP report has policy-relevance for other electricity systems and the methodology should be broadly applicable.

The ERP is co-chaired by Prof John Loughhead FREng, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). ERP members include a broad spectrum of stake holders from electricity industry, academics, government agencies and NGOs."

The report has three main conclusions. I suggest there should be a fourth (the author doesn't endorse it):

"Given the inputs used in the ERP analysis, the results show all or mostly nuclear is likely to be the least cost generator technology option for achieving deep decarbonisation of the GB electricity system, e.g. to meet the 100 g/kWh and 50 g/kWh targets."

Read this post and comments - especially those by the ERP Senior Analysis and lead author of the report, Andy Bolton, ERPUK and my discussion with him.

Would love to see a nuke plant replace the coal fired power station closing down at Pt Augusta is SA. Yellow cake is railed right past it now. Why not stop be processed into fuel rods and used as based load to all the wind and solar farms near by.
A nice gas fired one to handle the fast demand changes.

We could then use the vast brown coal deposits to make oil.

Cobber despite past practices I don't think Pt Augusta is a good place for either seawater cooled thermal plant or desalination. Type Pt Augusta SA in the Google Earth search box and you can see how the gulf narrows to a tidal creek. Water temps hit 30C in summer and salinity is elevated.

The coal stations were built there because of the rail line from Leigh Creek. Ditto Pt Pirie as a nuke site. Almost all the rest of the SA coastline is better than the a*crack of the gulfs.