I haven't kept up with the technology. Lots of progress in materials has been made over the years, and lots of new prototype designs have been worked on for the last 30 year or so. The problem is that many of the real-world problems don't show up until you try to build a full-scale power reactor.

My main point is - there's no silver bullet. If thorium-based or breeder reactors were as great as the Wired story implies, they would have been built. There's not some grand conspiracy by the bomb-makers that suppressed them, but rather real technical, budgetary and arms-control - http://en.wikipedia....r_Breeder_Reactor issues.

Cheers,
Scott.

Superphenix was shut down in 1997. http://en.wikipedia....%C3%A9nix#Closure

Power production was halted in December 1996 for maintenance. However, following a court case led by opponents of the reactor, on February 28, 1997 the Conseil d'État (Supreme State Administrative Court) ruled that a 1994 decree, authorizing the restart of Superphénix, was invalid. In June 1997, one of the first actions of Lionel Jospin on becoming Prime Minister was to announce the closure of the plant "because of its excessive costs". Jospin's government included Green ministers; pro-nuclear critics have argued that Jospin's decision was motivated by political motives (i.e., to please his Green political allies) rather than rational considerations. However, the reactor did not produce electricity most of the time in its last ten years because of malfunctions[4] (in fact it was consuming substantial power to maintain sodium above melting temperature).

Superphénix was the last fast breeder reactor operating in Europe for electricity production. According to a 1996 report by the French Accounting Office (Cour des Comptes), the total expenditure on the reactor to date was estimated at 60 billion francs (9.1 billion euro).[4]

Yes, people can and have built them in the past - including in the US. To date, they have seemed to be very expensive experiments and uneconomical. Superphenix seems to have been an expensive space heater....

Cheers,
Scott.

It's hard to predict technological breakthroughs. ;-)

I count ~15 thorium-fueled reactors here - http://en.wikipedia....m-fueled_reactors - the largest being 330MW-electric. In my looking around, it seems that 500-1000MW-electric plants fired by coal are common, so that even a 330 MWe plant was a small one.

(Note that some of those plants were designed to produce plutonium, and they use different reactor designs. Their main commonality is the use of thorium. Only the MSRE at Oak Ridge seemed to use the technology that's the subject of the Wired article.)

Thorium technology has been tried many times, in many countries.

Given that people have worked on thorium fission reactors since at least the 1960s, and only a few small ones are in operation now, it doesn't seem like an approach that will quickly yield major dividends. By all means, continue to do research. We should have our eggs in as many baskets as possible. But don't ask me to support billions or tens of billions for another US nuclear demonstration power plant before you can show me that the problems in the earlier plants have been solved - e.g. see http://en.wikipedia....enerating_Station - over the long term.

Ultimately the technology has to be affordable over its life-cycle.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.

But these experimental reactors are even more expensive. E.g. the Superthingy in France cost over $9B Euros.

I wasn't counting the waste processing issues in my thought experiment - I was thinking more about the life of the plant itself.

The economics of nuclear is a complicated topic that depends on a whole mess of assumptions - http://en.wikipedia....her_power_sources But when many/most of these experimental reactors are shut down after only a few years, and often produce little if any electric power due to engineering issues, then I think a reasonable person can conclude that they're too experimental right now (or in the near future).

You may be right that they would be farther along if the AEC and NRC and so forth spent more money on development. We'll never know. But since we know a lot more about the problems with nuclear power now than we did in the 1950s and 1960s, since the federal government isn't dumping vast amounts of money into nuclear R&D any more, and since the public is not sold on the need and benefit/risk equation for nuclear, it's a tougher row to hoe now than it was then.

It would be different if we could say, "Look, we spent $100B on nuclear power research in the 1950s-1970s, we learned all the issues and have this great, safe, cheap, reliable power technology that just needs some tweaking before it's ready to go. We're 95% of the way there!" But it doesn't work that way. We learned a lot about stuff that doesn't work. There are still complex issues that need to be solved and it's going to cost a lot of money to get to the point where we have reliable power reactors based on a new fuel technology.

Cheers,
Scott.

You seem to have more confidence in management than me, though. ;-)

Seriously, as I said above, breeders may ultimately be necessary. I don't think that we're (the USA is) anywhere close to ramping up production of new nuclear power plants, though. We haven't done enough of the engineering necessary to make it cost-effective or to know if it can be made cost-effective these days.

Maybe the EPR will be great, maybe not. http://en.wikipedia....essurized_Reactor

Cheers,
Scott.