Pete your ability to try and silence debate before anybody who knows anything whatsoever about safe, clean cheap nuclear power ( NOT YOU) has a chance to illuminate the facts, is legendary!.

I get you do not want to see an industry developed on already tried and proven technology, given how much that might hurt your rooftop solar panel installation business?

And when you can't win a factual debate, sadly, my old mate, you are reduced to going the verbal and abusive bullying, play the man tactics, which I who actually does give a rat's for my fellow Aussies, just didn't earn!

The fastest a nuclear reactor has been built and commissioned is actually six short months and proven by the factual evidence as opposed to your activist's BS writ large! Yes I know, it was an SMR and based on a tried and tested proven design and all I am advocating here genius! Not you preferred and stated forty years BS!

If your solar panel installation business takes a hit a few years down the track? You can always switch to installing the magnetic induction pads under electric vehicles that allows them to be recharged on the go on future graphene highways? And given the continual rollout of new models? Never ever run out of business!

If you want a civil factual debate I'm your man, old mate! TBC.
Alan B.

Poor old Pete probably means problematic.

Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates; Disruption and Global Benefits Forgone

Abstract

This paper presents evidence of the disruption of a transition from fossil fuels to nuclear power, and finds the benefits forgone as a consequence are substantial. Learning rates are presented for nuclear power in seven countries, comprising 58% of all power reactors ever built globally. Learning rates and deployment rates changed in the late-1960s and 1970s from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rapidly rising costs and stalled deployment. Historical nuclear global capacity, electricity generation and overnight construction costs are compared with the counterfactual that pre-disruption learning and deployment rates had continued to 2015. Had the early rates continued, nuclear power could now be around 10% of its current cost. The additional nuclear power could have substituted for 69,000–186,000 TWh of coal and gas generation, thereby avoiding up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions. In 2015 alone, nuclear power could have replaced up to 100% of coal-generated and 76% of gas-generated electricity, thereby avoiding up to 540,000 deaths and 11 Gt CO2. Rapid progress was achieved in the past and could be again, with appropriate policies. Research is needed to identify impediments to progress, and policy is needed to remove them.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169

The fossil fuel industry, big nuclear, big pharma, green activists and rooftop solar installers are variously terrified we might choose to pick up where Alvin Weinberg, a chemical engineer, the inventor and patent holder of the first operational reactor went!

As he head honcho of the world's first operational molten salt thorium fuel reactor, which was operated between the 50s and the 70s, at Oak Ridge Tenessee, proved.

They, those variously opposed tried to destroy his (rescued at 11 minutes to midnight) notes and bury the only commercial quantity of U233, a principle source of, miracle cancer cure, bismuth 213, in the world!

This is how much financial terror is generated in the hearts of all those industries which could be enormously hurt or decimated by the rollout of already tried, tested without accident or incident and proven, walk away safe, MSR thorium.

Years and years later after the forced and premature shutdown, some "nuclear experts" did find some corrosion" Well it incorporated chemical engineering and as always there is the possibility of corrosion years after, when the reductants are suddenly removed/stopped.

That they tried, unsuccessfully to hide the facts and bury the U233 tells us they are terrified of the truth, don't want anyone to pick up and run with what was developed at Ok Ridge and forced to shut down on the eve of electrical generation, after which it couldn't have been!

We lost our car industry because the builders couldn't afford a power bill the exceded the wages bill, and thousands of Aussies have been routinely sacrificed After this coal-fired altar, as curable cancer has been allowed to take folk who would have had remission with tried and tested, conventional western medicine, bismuth 213, and in greater annual numbers than double the annual road toll. And in day clinics minus the usual nausea, loss of hair etc/etc! TBC.
Alan B.

Taswegian,
Looking at the example of SA, we can see that those escalating costs of yours are largely a myth.

Your perception of hypocrisy is also based on a misunderstanding: you think it's about the amount of infrastructure we have. In reality it's more about whether it is constructed (and financed) in an efficient way.

The AEMC has not done its job well, meaning there are far more restrictions and higher charges than should be necessary. But there are no technical problems that can not be easily overcome.

Nuclear energy has a great future globally, but in the Australian context it's unlikely to be competitive with renewables.

Dearest Alan B.

E.C. Uribe with a PhD in chemistry from conducting research with the Heavy Element Nuclear and Radiochemistry Group at the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory advised in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 6, 2018, http://thebulletin.org/2018/08/thorium-power-has-a-protactinium-problem/#

"THORIUM POWER HAS A [NUCLEAR WEAPON PROLIFERATION] PROTACTINIUM PROBLEM"

"In 1980, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) observed that protactinium, a chemical element generated in thorium reactors, could be separated and allowed to decay to isotopically pure uranium 233—suitable material for making nuclear weapons. The IAEA report, titled “Advanced Fuel Cycle and Reactor Concepts,” concluded that the proliferation resistance of thorium fuel cycles “would be equivalent to” the uranium/plutonium fuel cycles of conventional civilian nuclear reactors, assuming both included spent fuel reprocessing to isolate fissile material.

Decades later, the story changed. “Th[orium]-based fuels and fuel cycles have intrinsic proliferation resistance,” according to the IAEA in 2005. Mainstream media have repeated this view ever since, often without caveat. Several scholars have recognized the inherent proliferation risk of protactinium separations in the thorium fuel cycle, but the perception that thorium reactors cannot be used to make weapons persists. While technology has advanced, the fundamental radiochemistry that governs nuclear fuel reprocessing remains unchanged. Thus, this shift in perspective is puzzling and reflects a failure to recognize the importance of protactinium radiochemistry in thorium fuel cycles.

...uranium 233 has a lower critical mass, which means that less material can be used to build a weapon. And compared with weapons-grade plutonium 239, uranium 233 has a much lower spontaneous fission rate, enabling simpler weapons that are more easily constructed...

...There is little to be gained by calling thorium fuel cycles intrinsically proliferation-resistant. The best way to realize nuclear power from thorium fuel cycles is to acknowledge their unique proliferation vulnerabilities, and to adequately safeguard them against theft and misuse."

_________________________

@ttbn

Yes Thorium and trying to flog funky new small reactors is foolishly problematic indeed.

Pete