We are now approaching the time when solar and wind will have to start pulling it's weight in electricity supply. Apparently it is virtually free but my bills go up every six months? When electricity goes up gas is increased as well. That is for industry too which means, or not, jobs.
Lets close some more coal plants. Keep paying billions in solar and wind subsidies. Lets go with hydro which converts electricity when we do not need it to less electricity when we do need it. No one is telling us the true cost but when the brown stuff hits the oscillating blades watch out!
I predict when the great and the good are given the true bill which we will not be able to afford we will look to a new age Sir John Monash who devised the SEC in Victoria in the 1930's to counteract the high cost and unreliability of Victoria's electricity supply. He will suggest lots of small scale nuclear plants like submarines reactors but until then the clowns are running our particular circus.

I have very thoroughly researched the topic! And don't find links that may well have been created in Putin's St Petersberg? Very convincing countervailing arguments against thorium!

The only holdup on the rollout of a successful mass-produced operational model? Are, I believe, recalcitrant redundant politicians and the very narrow but extremely powerful vested interests they serve? That would be economically decimated by the widespread acceptance and rollout of MSR thorium.

And I won't mention an army of Adani solicitors and a threat to wage cyberwar on anti-coal activists/nuclear power advocates.

If the inventor and patent holder of the first operational nuclear reactor, Alvin Weinberg, believed and stated, that we should change course and back thorium over uranium.

Then who are we to argue?

Get on U tube and on to thorium in ten minutes, Then the complete Kirk Sorensen address. Then explain if you still can? Why we won't/shouldn't have MSR thorium and its child, bismuth 213, anytime soon.

Preferably in a cancer ward and looking into the eyes of a kid with death sentence brain cancer! Hopefully, one of yours!
Alan B.

Small modular reactors of the light water type (eg NuScale) should be commercialised before 2030. By that time more coal plants will have closed, gas will be unaffordable and we'll know if energy storage for wind and solar will be anywhere near enough. These SMRs could use the transmission lines and cooling ponds at Liddell and Hazelwood. (Have Hazelwood's barramundi died of cold yet?)

Get our uranium enriched overseas as there is glut of facilities. Store the spent fuel in the outback along with hospital radiological waste. When 4th gen nuclear is commercialised in the West (see e.g. Russia's Beloyarsk 4) use that waste to get higher burnup. Maybe Alan B's thorium could be used as well. Either that or wait for squeaky clean electricity. The latter is when the lights to go out regularly and electric cars fail to get enough charge for the next day.

Tas. If you had a truck with a hundred-gallon gas tank and the engine could only fire on the first one gallon? People would rightly claim, you were #@&%! in the head?

Even modular light water reactors, burn less of their fuel than 1% and created from stuff that is as rare as platinum, produce 99% as highly toxic waste.

Yes, MSR thorium can be successfully tasked with burning nuclear waste (unspent fuel) until around another 98% of the available energy is released and the remaining waste has had its half-life reduced to 300 years.

And earn annual billions supplying the waste disposal service, as well as providing virtually costless electricity!

Given the plants and associated infrastructure, could all be paid by the income generated by using these things, some of them, as nuclear waste burners! And weapons-grade plutonium, If the world ever comes to its senses?

If you want miracle cancer cure, however, bismuth 213, with a half-life of just 45 minutes, then there are just two sources.

#1/ From radium bombarded with particles in a particle accelerator. However, consumes enormous energy and financial resources to make millionaire only medicine!

#2/ from MSR thorium, which produces it as a virtually free waste product of a thorium sourced U233 reaction. Ditto xenon 233, the only xenon used as the gas in ontological radioisotope medicine, for brain and or lung scans.

Finally, MSR thorium costs a fraction of conventional nuclear power and given its unpressurised status, far-far safer!
Alan B.

The author's sweet little essay forgets the Opportunity Costs of nuclear disasters.

The opportunity cost of the Fukushima reactor disaster is so far estimated at US$187 Billion or AU$266 Billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Compensation

How many Japanese lives could be saved or prolonged if that Japanese Government Cost of 266 Billion Dollars were injected into Japan's Health Budget?

eg. spent on Health Care, more Doctors? Nurses? Medication? Hospital Upgrades? New and more Ambulances?

Plantagent,

Please read the links in my earlier comment. If you do, you should learn a great deal.

You have been grossly misled about the true health impact of nuclear power reactor accidents. We have to compare the impacts of all energy sources using the same units -- i.e. deaths per TWh, or work days lost per TWh, or serious health consequences per TWh. Authoritative agencies have been doing just that for over 40 years. The safety ranking of the electricity generator technologies has been fairly stable throughout that time. Nuclear has been the found to be the safest in most authoritative studies throughout that time.

You misunderstand the cause of the huge cost estimate you quoted. It is the cost of the impact as a result of the populations irrational fear of nuclear power.