Open Thread 6

I doubt that energy policy in Australia will differ that much if either Abbott or Gillard form a government. The fact that the Greens will control the Senate next year means that in practice they will get a lot of what they want. Perhaps their $23 carbon tax will be watered down to $10 with giveaways.

I’d expect a trickle of wind and solar projects to keep bubbling along with great fanfare. Meanwhile mid sized plants fired by coal seam gas will be built and the media will point out that’s where all the new electricity is really coming from. Bureaucrats will announce Australia’s sheep don’t fart as much as first thought therefore emissions are down. In other words the next three years will be marked by the same dithering and delusion as the last three.

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This has been briefly mentioned in another thread on this forum. How about micropower Nuclear powered plants for personal use. Rod Adams and galloping camel tell us they have been available to power space probes and the like for years. So technically they are available right here and now, I don’t know about safety or lack thereof as far as the nuclear fuel goes, but imagine if one could buy , off the shelf so to speak, an electricity and hot water producing system that works 24/7 independent of wind or sunshine availability. Those people not paranoid about nuclear power could install it and society would gain experience with it and mitigate co2 pollution. Analogous to the situation in some European countries, where as an electricity consumer you have the option of buying “nuclear electricity”. I doubt very much if the greens would allow the regulatory framework to set this up.
But we can dream can we not ??

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Where do the federal independents stand on nuclear energy?

Windsor is absolutely against it. Katter seems to be a renewables fan. Don’t know about the others.

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Uncle Pete,

I would like to build on your thought.

I’ve been thinking about the problems of getting nuclear started in Australia. One part of the problem is politics, public awareness and fear of all things nuclear. Another part is the technical aspects, such as with our transmissions system, and a third is the financing of nuclear power plants. This post is about the technical aspect as it relates to the best size of the plants for getting us started.

I’ll continue my approach of ‘book-ending’ the problem by looking at the extremes first.

Let’s start at one extreme of the size range, the large end. I’ve been thinking about the problem of trying to build the really big reactors in Australia. They are too big for our transmission grid. The new Gen III units being built in Europe are 1600MW. Some boiling water reactors are even larger. Korea has standardised on its 1350MW APR1400. Most other designs are over 1000MW,

However, Australian generating units are generally less than half the size of these new Gen III power plants. Most of the newer NSW coal units are 660MW, Victoria about 500MW and the other states use smaller units (mostly). Our transmission system is set up for these sizes, so to insert 1000MW or larger units into our grid will mean we need to spend a lot on the transmissions system as well.

There is another problem with larger units. Australia’s relatively small economy would not be able to gear up to manufacture as large a share of the components as we could if the components were smaller. To elaborate: if we were to standardise on say the AP1000, more of the components would have to be built overseas than if we were to standardise on smaller nuclear power plants. The CANDU6, at about 650MW net, was designed and built in Canada but is now being built in many countries and in all cases with increasing local share.

Going a step further, if we were to start with very small reactors, just to get started, I envisage the possibility of Australia building a manufacturing plant under licence to, for example, Toshiba or whoever’s technology we decide to go with. The manufacturing plant would expand over time to manufacture more and more of the components as the roll out and replacement of our fossil fuel generating plants progresses.

Ziggy Switkowski recently said that it may be easier to get started with some small plants to help to change the public perception. He wasn’t specific about types, but I can envisage the possiblilty of getting started with plants in the range of 100 to 300 MWe [Ref 1], instead of trying to go straight to 1000MW or more. These plants are expected to be commercially available in the near future, and one of them is claimed, by the manufacturer, to cost arounf $4,000/kW in 2009 $ [ref 2].

Uncle Pete, you’ve mentioned the extreme small end of the market. I don’t really think that is a viable option. It suffers from the same problem as distributed power supplies like solar panels on roofs. Here is why.

In a house or small factory, the load changes from zero to full power. Let’s start at the limit where there is no grid and everying has their own power supply. Every site would need a generator that could provide full power but swing between zero and full power. The cost of such a unit would be very high per unit of energy supplied.

If we allow a grid as well then there is a balance between the peak power the grid must be able to provide and the peak power the local plant must be able to provide. If we work all the options through, we find that by far the cheapest option is to have poles and wires to deliver the power for from reasonably centralised, moderately large power stations.

We need to remember that about 75% of our power is demanded all the time. It is cheaper to have power statiosn that provide that power all the time and onthers that can ramp up and down to delieve the extra power needed at peak, than to try to fit every establishment with a power supply that can delieve the full range of power demanded at that site. My gut feeling is that the cost of a fully distributed system would be in the order of 100 times thew cost of centralised power stations with power delivered by poles and wires. Combinations of distributed systems and centralised systems will cost less than fully distributed systems, but more than the centralised systems.

I hope this makes sense.

[Ref 1] http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/advanced.html
[Ref 2] http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/product-purch.html

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Yes, and radiothermal generators are like reactors that cannot be turned off, even if you smash them to tiny pieces. If the intact generator was doing 100 thermal kilowatts, so now are the pieces. This mean they cannot have reactors’ safety during failure.

Given the difficulty the US had in securing a ,couple of kilos of P-238 for an historic space mission, I doubt we’re in much immediate danger of having hundreds of 100KW RTGs rolled out for general use.

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Australia’s current crop of hi tech manufacturers seem to be mainly looking to defence contracts with only side jobs for private industry. Example
At the Australian Submarine Co’s engineering arm (ASC-E), fabrication of four giant autoclaves for Murrin Murrin is well under way. These vessels, weighing 600 tonnes, will be the largest titanium-lined autoclaves in the world. Total contract cost is more than $A40m.

In another workshop, huge caps are welded and prepared for fitting to the autoclaves. The titanium skin will withstand a solution of nickel and cobalt ore and sulphuric acid heated under pressure to a temperature of 250° Celsius.

OK that’s not a single piece forging but it suggests there is some local knowledge of containment vessels. Surely that knowledge can be used and extended. I question the wisdom of some defence contracts such as building more diesel submarines because the last lot were duds. According to tonight’s 60 Minutes the enemy is China so perhaps it would be easier just to surrender.

The point is that there will be many well paid jobs with increased local sourcing of nuclear supply contracts. It would provide careers for young people whose current prospects may be limited to growing spuds in a community garden.

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GC, thanks for that info. I agree completely.

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Regarding the discussion of RTGs, given how concerned the US is about Pu-238 availability for spacecraft, and developing new Pu-238 production capability, I think there should be a renewed interest in the use of small fission reactors on spacecraft, since their fuel is much more available than Pu-238 is.

Some small fission reactors (as distinct from RTGs) have been deployed on spacecraft… for example SNAP-10A, as well as some Russian ones.

There are also modern small reactor designs such as Toshiba 4S… which are quite a bit smaller than typical submarine reactors.

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Thanks for educating me guys. Ok, here is another potential saving in construction cost of a nuke plant.
Instead of building a containment vessel that can withstand a 747 crashing into it, why not have a battery of Patriot missiles installed on site, and let it be known that anyone flying any aircraft within , say 2.5 Km ,will be toast :)

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I presume the S-PRISM would suit Australia well. :) But in all seriousness, what’s stopping a large generator like a AP1000 coming online? iirc, the current coal ones are a few thousand MW, but split by smaller generators. What’s the difference?

Thanks.

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Uncle pete, on 5 September 2010 at 8.51 — Toshiba has a 10 MWe mini-NPP for sale. Largeer ones include Hyperion @ 20 MWe and Nuscale @ 45 MWe. Nuscale makes a big point out of the fact that several of their modules can be run at the same site to create a bigger generator.

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So , in a nutshell, if the legislation was in place for NPP to be allowed to build, then we would have those power plants. The only thing stopping deployment is the political will. ( I suppose the NIMBY principle). And I imagine the coalmining unions here in Australia are not exactly jumping to get on the fission bandwagon :)

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So what do people think about that KiteGen thing? If the carousel turns out to be viable then it looks like it could be a contender. My gut is telling me however that the future energy needs of mankind are not going to be met by a rotating wheel with kites attached.

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Any thoughts on thin-film solar?

Thanks.

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Further to my previous comment, even though they are touting availability times of up to 75% for Kitegen, that still won’t necessarily get you away from the need for full backup. Unlike a coal, natgas or nuclear plant, the outages are weather-dependent, therefore inherently unpredictable. Also, it may take some time to overcome the issues surrounding keeping large aerodynamic structures airborne for industrially significant periods of time.

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Several authors have drawn attention to the benefits that a publicly owned generator has over private ones. The former Electricity Commission of NSW build a dozen 660MW units in about 20 years in the 1970’s and 80’s. The commissioning rate reached better than 2 per year with Bayswater 1-4 before it was wound down at the end of this expansion program. This was extremely successful, so successful that the available generating capacity exceeded the demand, thus enabling the government of the day to completely close its design offices and divide the remaining organisation into three generating corporations and one HV transmission organisation.

Manpower was scaled back from about 12,000 to lose to 4,000 total.

So, not just any state-owned corporation will have the necessary clout to embark on a nuclear program, rolling out one new unit per year reliably. In particular, the international suppliers of units in the 700MW range might not be attracted any more or less to the existing Australian generating corporations than to privately owned generators.

I contend without evidence to back me at this stage, that it boils down to perception of risk.

Perhaps the best way for Australia to manage risks is to apportion them where they best can be managed. E.g.

Radiation leakage
Radiation – material storage
Radiation – operational error
Commercial – construction
Commercial – market
Planning and approval
and so on.

I suggest that planning and approval risks could be resolved in advance by the state acquiring the land and obtaining pre-approval based on an indicative design.

Most or even all of the other risks could be managed privately, perhaps with a form of underwriting by the government.

In conclusion, my initial position is that appropriate government owned integrated power industry players no longer exist in this country and are unlikely to be rebuilt, but that an intelligent government may be able to sort out amny of the perceived risks which attach to a major infrastructure investment such as re-engineering our power industry, through private corporations.

This may change when I have fully digested the various links which Peter and Barry have provided for us all.

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A few thoughts…

Existing coal fired power stations all have:
1. Land zoned for power generation.
2. Workforces locally which can build, operate and maintain power stations.
3. Wet cooling water systems eg lakes, salt water frontages and/or cooling towers.
4. If desired, land for dry cooling towers. Think: 5Gl/year for a 1000MW dry cooling station, Vs 20Gl/year for cooling towers, but with an energy penalty of at least 5%.
5. In most cases, quite a large physical separation from neighbours – reducing slightly NIMBY.
6. These sites offer a trade off – do away with the coal and fly ash dusts and the sulfurous, nitrous and carbon-laden stack gases and replace them with a cleaner and safer operation.
7. High voltage, high capacity connection points which are the switchyards of the existing power stations.
8. No new land to purchase.
9. No new neighbours to placate.
10. No new dams for cooling water.
11. No increase in water requirements from the rivers.
12. No new highway or rail diversions around greenfield sites.
13. No new towns and construction camps to build.
14. No new transmission easements.
15. No new transmission towers and lines (some conductor upgrades and switchyard mods).

Many of our existing coal fired power stations fit this description. In fact, we used to have scattered around our cities a crop of former power stations.

For example, Newcastle – Zaara Street Power Station. Lake Macquarie – Wangi Wangi Power Station.
Sydney – Bunnerong, Pyrmont, White Bay and Balmain Power Stations.
Illawarra region – Tallawarra Power Station.
All of these sites have now been lost, along with the employment and industry which they supported.
They have mostly been sold off to high rise building entrepreneurs.

The selling point: Recycle our existing coal fired power station sites as cleaner, safer, reliable, long term energy and employment generators to serve our communities and to provide employment for our children and their children.

In summary: Before the governments sell off their remaining power generation assets, pre-approve and promote the development of nuclear power stations on existing sites, preferably by 30-year BOOT contracts, which should be enough for the proponents and the financiers to recoup their investment. BOOT means build, Own, Operate and Transfer. After the 30-year point, the asset and workforce are transferred back to the community, which receives the benefit of virtually free energy and reclaims the asset value. This plan also provides for end-of-life site rehabilitation by the State, thus placing the perceived long term risk involved with site rehab in public hands, rather than asking potential financiers to price into their plans something which is 30+ years away and wrapped in much more emotional nonsence now than will be the case in 30 years.

NSW could start with 2000MW at Liddell (Hunter Valley), a further 3000MW instead of the proposed coal or gas Bayswater 2 (Hunter Valley) and another 3000MW at Wallerawang near Lithgow). Victoria could start with Hazelwood or just about any of their brown coal burners, but with the additional problem that Kennett sold these stations years back. South Australia has a few choice sites, some of which are still in public hands. Quite possibly, further capacity could be located close to pumped storage in the Snowy, to maximise the utility of this resource.

So, what is our national target? How about a dozen 700MW units and a further dozen 350MW units? That program would draw huge international interest amongst suppliers. The first couple of units would iron out any bugs to suit local constraints, for example, training Australian subcontract suppliers and manufacturers to achieve the standards and skills necessary.

From there, it would be easy.

All we need is the political will to use cheap nuclear instead of not-so-cheap but still nasty coal. Once on a roll, 20GW or more would very easily become an achievable target over, say, 25 years.

Nothing else can come close to achieving that amount of CO2-e reduction in that time and at that cost.

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Ewen Laver,

Just for the record, in terms of refuting the case for nuclear power, it seems (from my meeting yesterday at Greens HQ) that the first objection for contemporary Greens is the cost argument.

Thank you for that report. I find that really good news. Is see that as enormous progress. Because, if cost and financing is the top item on the agenda, many people will be on the same page (not all of course), so it can be dealt with. I really hope the focus stays on cost and financing being the top issue to be dealt with.

Thanks again.

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Interestingly, given that it was a meeting mainly for new members, two or three I spoke to were actually open to the idea of nuclear power.

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I revert at the start of a new solar cycle to the topic of the effect of a CME, coronal mass ejection, on NPPs. The now-departed blogger DV downplayed all concerns in this area, nothing new there.

So it is interesting to read the long anonymous piece at http://www.survivalblog.com/ on the impact of a CME or EMP attack on US NPPs today. It is written by somebody called “BZ” who says he is a nuclear engineer of 30 years experience. So he passes the BNC nerd test. He writes that his fellow engineers advised him to keep his mouth shut about CME/EMP.

Now as regards BZ, there is an admitted current habit of US nationals and their admirers in the US satellite states of UK, Aust. etc. to turn the victims ie N. Korea and Iran, into perpetrators, ie aggressors against the USA. Hence the preoccupation with EMP, electromagnetic pulse attack against CONUS, as the fans of the US military on BNC would say.

Having said which, BZ’s article is worth reading, because he focusses not on core meltdown upon power loss but on what then happens to the spent fuel storage pool.

A weakness of the article is that he does not compare and contrast CME with EMP: the former happens every 500 years on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event as shown by icecore proxies, the latter is a Bush-Bama fantasy.

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Ewen, do you think the Green’s focus on costs is really because that is their chief concern around nuclear power? Or are the old attitudes still there, but cost is perceived to be the argument with the most traction? Is the opposition on the basis of cost a tactical shift rather than an attitudinal shift?

Not trying to be cynical, just interested in the dynamic here. I’d love for cost to be the focus of the discussion, thats an easy win for us.

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The CANDUs look really attractive for Australia. They don’t need a large pressure vessel, so we’re not stuck with a supply bottleneck on a critical large component, and there would be more opportunity for local component fabrication.

And the fuel flexibility would be great for us. They can burn natural uranium, and spent LWR fuel. For a country with a lot of uranium, a mix of some AP1000s and some CANDUs could give a high utilization fuel cycle without separation and enrichment, just fuel refabrication.

I think an interesting question would be to look at what combination of CANDUs and LWRs would be the most effective for Australia.

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@Finrod, on Kitegen

I’m looking everywhere, and there’s lots of claims about its ‘availability factor’ but I cant find anything on its Capacity Factor. Or does it produce near ‘peak’ power 60-70% of the time? Now that would be something…

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Oh, that work was funded by the US DOE. Someone’s taxes at work, not mine thank god.

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@Eclipse,

Yeah, come to think of it, when I was in the anti-crowd, it was just assumed that Nuke waste would be dangerous forever. Your poster is excellent BTW! Did you make it? I’m in need of some advice on a poster I’m trying to make.

@John M,

Those pictures are amazing! Please tell me that’s a joke though…

The issue of future generations digging up nuclear waste is perhaps overblown. There have been many societal ‘collapses’ over the past few thousands years, but we still have records of what our ancestors did. Any future generation capable of digging down that far would have at least some record of what went on today, and know to take caution, and recognise the signs. Hell it might deter future generations for digging for more oil!

Even if they have no knowledge of Nuclear waste, and they dig some up, so what? They would have to dig up a shitload for it to be of any serious threat. And dragging up heavy spent fuel from a deep mine isn’t easy.

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Kitegen has been postet in this thread already…
How about 24/7 sunpower.
About 3billion for 2.5GW. Cost projection just as stable as gen4 or 3+ nuclear ;)

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Peter asked:

Does that mean that the first objection for contemporary Greens is the cost argument is an opinion of the newish members rather than reflecting the opinion of the higher levels of the organisation?

Note: The words italicised were my construction of the remarks of John Kaye, Greens MLC, rather than his words. The question arose because a new member asked for an explanation of the party’s attitude to medical isotope production at Lucas Heights, and this then led to a more general question about why some countries continued with nuclear power. He spoke of there being two types of countries: those that already had plants and regretted it, and those that had committed, seen costs blow out and wished they hadn’t. He then spoke of the unlimited and open-ended costs asociated with waste storage.

The position was not challenged or supplemented on the panel, which included retiring MLC Sylvia Hale, her replacement, David Shoebridge, or Senator (elect) Lee Rhiannon.

John Morgan asked:

[…] are the old attitudes still there, but cost is perceived to be the argument with the most traction? Is the opposition on the basis of cost a tactical shift rather than an attitudinal shift?

Oh I don’t doubt that at leadership level the need to be unambiguous in opposing nuclear power is clear. For the Greens to abandon this position would be potentially very divisive and even if there were elements who might be inclined to take a more pragmatic approach, it’s not clear how they could do this plausibly. What I read into this is that the leadership is no longer convinced that citing Chernobyl cuts the kind of ice it once did. Significantly, in his qualification, Kaye said even if you could somehow promise there’d be no more Chernobyls (or words to that effect). Many of the new members would have been children when Chernobyl occurred and would have cut their teeth worrying about climate change.

Interestingly, Kaye, at one point in his life, apparently was an energy trader and leveraged that experience to put the baseload fallacy position to answer the intermittency objection put to him. “We were the ones” he said “who helped push the whole move to on demand energy”.

Re: thorium, in private discussion, he tried to claim that thorium plants required significantly more energy to start up than did uranium. I suspect this was based on a misunderstanding of the roles of fissile and fertile materiels in the nuclear fuel cycle. One person challenged him, but I thought it better to get a feel for the people in the room than become engaged in debate at that point so I kept circulating.

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kitegen is a dynamic system. The kite is controlled. It works at full capacity in almost any winds.
If there is to much wind it is powered down.
You would understand if you kitesurf.
Unlike a parachute it is not only dragging along but working like a profile. Maybe you can compare it with a sailboat.
In the carousel configuration you would just launch more kites in low winds.
High altitute winds are almost always “on”.
Jet streams even more so…but you would have to reach higher to tap into jet streams.

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From the Spiegel article –

‘As long as old, highly profitable nuclear power plants are still online, they will hinder the development of renewable energy,’ Gabriel said.

Morons. That sentence makes no sense, and exposes the true objectives of the person who said it.

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Stafanie

High altitute winds are almost always “on”.
Jet streams even more so…but you would have to reach higher to tap into jet streams.

During the Second World War England and Germany floated balloons above their cities; they were tethered to the ground with thin steel wires . The purpose was to bring down bombers flying in to bomb the cities.

My question is who should pay the insurance costs for aircraft that accidentally get caught in one of the kites you are advocating?. Should the insurance cost be attributed to the air transport industry (thus raising our airfares) or to the wind kites (thus raising the cost of electricity)?

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EclipseNow,

I am not talking about tactics. I am talking abojt the cost? What is the cost. Ams I totally disagree with you that it would be a small risk. I think it is not a risk, it is an issue (in project management terms when a risk has a probability of occurrnce near 100% it i8s an issue). So this is an issue, not a risk.

Do the calculations ansd work out hom many of thse things would have to be strung from the sky to provide our electricity needs and what spacing would they be. How many aircrafet would they bring down per year? What is the cost? Who pays?

If you think aircraft never stray off course, I don’t know where you’ve been?

I notice you back on the evacuating Sydney emotive stuff. I thought we’d put that to bed ages ago. Is it sny wonder I get frustrated?

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Saw the wanker-mobile from “Friends of the Earth” (I think it’s owned by FoE, but I’m not 100% sure) driving around Melbourne this afternoon, scaring people with their fake trailer-load of “radioactive waste”.

(The same one as depicted here: http://indymedia.org.au/2010/07/30/melbourne-launch-of-nuclear-freeways-2010-30-july )

(Of course, they have absolutely no idea about the legislation, permitting, licensing, international regulations, package and container design, shielding, containment and similar controls that go into the regulation of the actual realistic transport of any radioactive material.)

I wonder where they’re going? I can’t think of any public forums concerning nuclear technology in the near future in Melbourne that they would take their travelling circus to picket at.

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I don`t see a reason why the powersat system should not be doable.

NoFlightZones are all around Europe…there are more prohibited zones than flightpathes.
The kites can be reeled in under a minute.
Every KitegenStem will be equiped with radar.
Residual risk is insurance issue.

Maybe the windindustry could give kitegen a kickstart.
But I guess the Italians are not selling the technology yet. They are trying to develope the product alone.

But there are other people working on high altitute power. Makanipower (Google), the kitelab at TU Delft and some students in Swizerland.

Retrofitting shipps with Skysails can also save significant amounts of fuel/CO2.

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@EclipseNow,

I believe Charles Barton has written some stuff on that article over on his blog:

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2009/11/dr-michael-dittmar-on-future-of-nuclear.html

I suspect a major critique has not been written because of the incredible length of it!

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On the latest one…

IFR FaD 6 – fast reactors are easy to control

Keeping up with the posts on BNC is becoming a full time occupation!

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A good many highly qualified engineers and scientists have attacked the perspective of the CoR over the years. Peter is in quite good company in this.

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