Regards.

The current ‘subsidy’ exists for the first 6 (I think) GWs of power to be produced…or the first 4 plants. It maybe 8 GWs. This amounts to 1.8 cents a KW name plate capacity. It runs out after this first $8 billion USD goes away.

The loan guarantee program, of which only $18 billion is guaranteed right now, is not actually a ‘my-pocket-into-your-pocket’ subsidy but just that, a guarantee to investors that if the plant goes belly up, they won’t lose their investment. It does make financing MUCH cheaper, which is good for the rate payer.

No nuclear proliferation.

I can’t speak for other countries, but there aren’t any large subsidies for nuclear power in the United States. There is supposed to be a loan guarantee program, but the DOE hasn’t actually granted one, the last time I looked. Loan guarantees don’t cost the government anything, unless the utility company defaults anyway. Since that isn’t likely if the utility actually gets an operating license from the government, that is probably why most companies are applying for the loan guarantee in the first place. No company wants to be stuck with the next Shoreham.

The government actually imposes hundreds of millions of dollars of costs on nuclear power, that other forms of power don’t have have to pay. That is what it costs to get an operating license from the NRC. That doesn’t include the interest charges that are piling while the NRC spends years processing the application.

thanks for that!!

Here in the US West there seems to be quite a bit of enthusism for wind backed up by natural gas units.

1. It may well be too late and we can’t do a damn thing about it.

2. It would be wrong to conduct a planet wide experiment as we have been doing for over 100 years to see if we can pump CO2 into the atmosphere for as long as possible and as much as possible to see what would happen. That’s just plain dumb. I’m against dumb, so let’s find other energy solutions.

3. ERGO: we need to rapidly roll out all forms of nuclear energy as fast as possible to alleviate above points 1 and 2.

David

In an ‘ideal future’, meaning one where no fossil fuel is burned for generation, NG would be used for all manner of chemical feedstock, fertilizers, etc.

David

So while breeder reactors might be technically possible, are they always economical?

“It is known as one of the biggest government spending boondoggles in Germany. SNR-300 was to output 327 megawatts. The project ended up costing about 7 billion Deutsche Mark (about 3.5 billion euros or over 4 billion USD). Klaus Traube, then director of the executing company Interatom, is today one of the most prominent German opponents of the usage of nuclear power.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

EIA also listed the CO2 produced from coal generated electricity as 1,979.71 million metric megatons which is 2,182 million short tons or 2.164 million pounds per GWh. So the 3 million pound number is 38% too high.

BTW, I’ll take a mild C with a side of Thorium.

You can often see the (pretty weak) “but it’s not natural” argument applied to just about any form of science, technology or medicine that the human race has developed to our advantage.

Firstly, there are huge stockpiles of depleted uranium in the world, and used LWR fuel. Even if we stop mining all uranium, and didn’t use IFRs, and only used LFTRs, we should still burn up all that already existing mined uranium, and yes, any reactor will transmute U-238 into Pu-239 in situ and fission the plutonium.

Saying “we should ban plutonium” kind of reminds me of the time Greenpeace launched that worldwide campaign to ban all chlorine.

Suggesting the banning all transuranic actinides because Pu is a transuranic actinide would be like Greenpeace calling for a ban on all halogens because Cl is a halogen.

Should we still use Np-237 as a precursor to Pu-238 production, Am-241 in smoke detectors and neutron sources, Pu-238 in spacecraft, Cf-252 in neutron sources, etc?

Plutonium isn’t “unnatural”. Pu, Cf, Am etc are ‘cooked’ inside stars and supernovae – those nucleosynthesis processes don’t just stop suddenly at number 92 – but since none of these elements has any nuclide with a really long half-life (billions of years, like K-40 or U-238 for example) they have all decayed away from the Earth before our time.

As far as “unnatural” elements are concerned, what about technetium, astatine, polonium, promethium and actinium? (and francium too, but nobody seems to be able to find a good use for that, it’s just too unstable.) They don’t occur in any significant amount on Earth naturally, but can be made artificially. They’re pretty interesting and useful materials too.

Then there’s the whole other can of worms to open up regarding the “unnatural” nuclides of “natural” elements.

To be honest, and I’m sorry to put this bluntly, but it just sounds to me like you’re suffering from a little bit of “plutonium phobia”, which is usually bought on by concern about nuclear weapons, and the mystical, magical, supernaturally dangerous mythos that surrounds this very interesting element.

It’s just a metal. It’s not black magic.

To paraphrase Glen Seaborg, you don’t stop nuclear weapons proliferation by restricting nuclear science and technology of any kind – certainly not by restricting parts of the periodic table.
You can only stop nuclear weapons proliferation by creating a world where people don’t feel like they need to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.

Here’s another couple of alternative solutions to airconditioning.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10262597-54.html
http://www.energyboom.com/geothermal/first-time-geothermal-power-air-conditioning-australia

I am no refrigeration expert but it is not a difficult technology. I have a camping fridge 30 years old which has hardly ever been turned off and still going strong. I know absorption chilling is not an efficient process but if it can harvest otherwise wasted heat then it should be further developed and used in conjunction with solar power to cool vehicles and buildings.