^ ^ I'd love to read his thoughts too, LB. He's looked at the websites and sees nothing that he feels is really new. Wants a little more time to mull and study. He's seen technology for mini-reactors that he liked, but said these things are not going to make a big impact on our future needs for power generation.

 

I would love to expound on his thoughts on your question. (You know how I love to expound.) But my brother is a cipher. Plus he lives in New England so...

 

So, he talks in code and you lost the key.

 

this is one of the small modular type reactors that +1 likes: mpower

 

One major issue with nuke based power has always been the trade between near term benefit versus long term waste storage cost.

Looking at the terra power option which utilizes U[sup]235[/sup] and U[sup]238[sub] [/sub][/sup]to create Pu[sup]239

[/sup]So you might get 25 years, 50 years absolute tops, out of the reactor before metal fatigue renders the plant inoperable. (radiation induced metal fatigue)

and yet from the NRC
If you had to front load the expenditure of decommissioning and waste storage ( if that was even possible) the discussion ends pretty quickly.

I seem to recall that our friend Legal Bill was very concerned about the wind power installation off of the cape and who would pay to tear down the wind mills at the end of their useful life.
That consideration would be chump change versus waste storage for literally thousands of generations.
Putting it differently the first half life of Polonium is longer than modern man has existed as any form of culture, almost five times longer than any form of written record for all of humanity.

Of course the other major issue factor in any discussion is safety. Chernobyl and Fukushima have left vast areas uninhabitable.
One could easily argue that both failures were attributable to hubris.
In the case of Chernobyl, a guy pushing the limits of the reactor to test capabilities.
And Fukushima simply failed to recognize the potential violence that lay beneath the waves.
An attributing factor with complex system failures is as they transition from new design to legacy design.
The smart guys who "got it" and knew the design intimately are slowly replaced with support engineers.
Support or maintenance engineers can tend to be your B students. While not Homer Simpson, their job is to not screw it up.
Sometimes though Homer does gets hired.

 

Here is another link, this one to the Max Planck Institute, which has a non-Tokamak fusion reactor up. The future of nuclear is fusion. There will be no TMIs, no Chernobyl and no Fukushima. It is safe when it is operating and does not leave unsafe crap to be dealt with.

 

I wondered when someone would open the discussion to the disposal of waste and the decommissioning of old equipment and I'm glad you did. It takes years and tons of time at the drawing board and the risk of mistakes to take down existing outdated equipment. The waste has to be handled carefully and the storage of that waste consumes and makes poisonous lots of sq footage of our planet. It is true that they operate efficiently for a long time and the new ones use less fuel,but still there is maintenance involved and the risk of accidental human error is one that has to be considered. It is still not known how many humans were inadvertently exposed to not only radioactivity but the chemical byproduct during the cold war years of frantic nuclear manufacturing, etc. I suspect there are more Homers out there than we want to know. We entered a realm about which we STILL know little. We have no real knowledge of what is really safe and what is not. Already there are many areas all across the world that have contamination from the byproduct of nuclear activity and it will probably be generations before we see all the effects to humans, animals, plants and the environment as a whole. Meeting power needs for us all is really a difficult task. When you get into wind and solar power, we're still using petroleum products that come with their own issues. I'd love to have a solution.

 

No one is listening . Fusion, it's only byproduct.....helium, more balloons, more parades, more blimps. But seriously, fission is dangerous during and after we make it, we need a clean solution, and that is fusion. Tap, fusion; tap, fusion; tap, fusion (think Penny, Penny, Penny).

Fission is a 100+ year old technology, it leaves a footprint as bad or worse than fossil fuels.

Rant over.

 

Fusion "could" be the answer one you get by the tough but annoying little details of physics and managing to get a positive yield.

Wait!! it's 2015 aren't we supposed to have Mr fusion by now?

 

Emailed your link to +1 early this a.m. I'm awaiting his reaction (I'm sure you noticed the little pun )