Solar voltaic need to be replaced every 25 years or so and batteries every 10 or sooner. while Recyling is possible, it requires so much energy that it's cheaper to buy new and just bury the above in landfill.

Even then the production of solar voltaic come with mountains of highly toxic waste, that have polluted our oceans to the point where wild fish come with enough toxic mercury to harm the cognitive ability of all. With a resulting lowering of the general IQ! Maverick?

MSR thorium has a useful life of as much as 100 years with the reactor vessel etc., being recycled as smelted metal, the graphite reuseable with some processing and the 5% final nuclear waste product being eminently suitable as long-life space batteries that burn up with reentry or add to the fuel of the sun.

The cheapest solar voltaic can do is a profit free 5 cents PKWH, add the usual profit and that's 15 cents PKWH And that is with huge broad scale acres of ground covered with panels! Adding battery backup at least triples that cost and makes manufacture, processing or value adding of anything here impossible on simple economic grounds! I mean, we had to subsidizes car manufacture here when coal-fired power was available at 3 cents PKWH!

At 45 cents PKWH we'd be back to lighting our homes with candles! And nobody would be able to cool or heat their homes or even run the fridge or electric cooker!

Only the most ignorant simpletons would back battery backed solar voltaic. Except as home owned systems that don't come with energy suppliers profit margins! And nowhere does that solve the endemic pollution of our oceans and wild fish stocks!

Even then any commercial Enterprise/venture would need something far less expensive and that cannot be fossil fueled! End of story! Only carbon -free nuclear fits that bill and that needs to be MSR thorium given the probs uranium comes with, the least of which is the 90+% nuclear waste product!
Alan B.

had a good old laugh

"TAI is supposedly overseen by trained economists, lawyers and journalists"

All three groups are now thought of as bigger Liars than used car sales people and Insurance floggers.

Sorry Alan B.

THORIUM Reactors suck Alan B.

You, over simplify in repeating a Thorium reactor's possible advantages. Your idea of dotting little Thorium Reactors all over Australia forgets intentional terrorist intervention that could come by way of blackmail and an inside job, towards a DIRTY BOMB. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb

Each of your little reactors would need intensive and expensive armed security protection.

I won't go into further specifics except to say
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Disadvantages

Some experts note possible specific disadvantages of thorium nuclear power include:

- Breeding in a thermal neutron spectrum is slow and requires extensive reprocessing. The feasibility of reprocessing is still unverifed.[33]

- Significant and expensive testing, analysis and licensing work is first required, requiring business and government support. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists suggested that it would "require too great an investment and provide no clear payoff", and that "from the utilities' point of view, the only legitimate driver capable of motivating pursuit of thorium is economics".

- Fabrication and reprocessing is higher cost than using traditional solid fuel rods.

- Thorium, when irradiated for use in reactors, makes uranium-232, which emits gamma rays. This irradiation process may be altered slightly by removing protactinium-233. The decay of the protactinium-233 would then create uranium-233 in lieu of uranium-232 for use in nuclear weapons.

= Making Thorium into a dual purpose potential Nuclear Weapons fuel.