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They are probably talking about the site and it's logistics & grid connectivity.

Try look at this: https://www.gen-4.org/gif/uplo...

They are projecting the R&D to take place for another 20 to 30 years, and by then, when the technology is ready, the Chinese plan to retrofit the coal fire power plants (which are themselves almost reaching retirement / decommissioning) with modular designs of molten salt / pebble bed nuclear power plants

Let's examine your citations:

https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms.

So you have an industry PR site.

A site by organizations who actually operate 4th gen test reactors. A site that the U.S. Department of Energy links to for more information, http://www.energy.gov/ne/artic....

http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...

a shitty Wordpress blog written by climate change skeptics

Interesting, google found that page and I went with it since it seemed to say nothing beyond quoting General Atomic's specs on their reactor. If you follow the link they provide to General Atomics they do indeed state that the waste of previous gen reactors is used as fuel and that the waste of the 4th gen reactors is indeed short lived and only needs hundreds of years of storage. Unfortunately they do so with terrible hover over animated graphics, http://www.ga.com/energy-multi..., so I stuck to the summary since it was plain text that could be cut and pasted. BTW, General Atomics are the people who have been building reactors for decades. So these climate deniers clearly got the science correct on this reactor. When the truth happens to be on the side of liars, liars can indeed tell the truth, which seems to be the case here. Again, this page does nothing more than quote General Atomics. Apologies for not offering the General Atomics link directly and going with this summary. I assumed readers could manage clicking on the General Atomics link themselves, did you have some difficulty doing so? Or were you only interesting in the messenger and not the message (the science)?

http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...

a motivational speaker

And the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.

The reality is that salesmen have made a lot of bold claims for gen 4 reactors, but so far they are unproven and somewhat dubious.

That's a strange characterization of organizations that the US Department of Energy refers people to for more information on 4th gen reactors, organizations who operate 4th gen test reactors and companies who will actually build 4th gen reactors and have been reactors for decades.

The word "claimed" was an appeasement to the nuclear deniers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page.

Or was it an appeasement to nuclear lovers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page? The whole point is that without reliable, unbiased citations it's all just your opinion.

Let's examine your citations:

https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms...
http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...
http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...

So you have an industry PR site, a shitty Wordpress blog written by climate change sceptics and the dubiously named "Science Council" that is run by a motivational speaker.

The reality is that salesmen have made a lot of bold claims for gen 4 reactors, but so far they are unproven and somewhat dubious.

>"the claimed benefits"

Wow, you call that a citation? I'm willing to believe that safe/efficient nuclear tech is possible, but Wikipedia is NOT an authoritative source. Got anything better? Maybe a quote from an unbiased nuclear engineer? Respected NGO? Anything?

The word "claimed" was an appeasement to the nuclear deniers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page. Don't read too much into it.

The citation above was just the first thing googled and reflects a consensus among qualified scientists and engineers. I did some more googling for you ...

Click on the links for the various reactor types: https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms...

"First the EM2 core will be started using 12% enriched uranium and used fuel or depleted uranium (DU). After the initial U235 amount has been consumed in the “starter-part” of the core, enough fissionable material will have been created to switch over to a second part of the core where the nuclear reactions will continue and be fed nuclear waste.."
http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...

"The scientific method requires that we keep an open mind and change our conclusions when new evidence indicates that we should. Climate change is the new evidence affecting the nuclear debate -- we need low-carbon energy. Current (2nd generation) nuclear reactors are not as fail-safe as possible and they burn less than one percent of the energy in uranium ore. Next (3rd) generation reactors are safer, shutting down automatically in case of anomalies, and are ready to go, but they still leave 99 percent of the energy in long-lived waste piles. 4th generation reactors, tested but not commercially available, can extract all of the energy in the nuclear fuel and burn nuclear waste. We urgently need R&D to make the combination of 3rd and 4th generation reactors available with comprehensive international controls.
James E. Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. He has held this position since 1981. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University."
http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...

Careful with your NGOs. Some are nuclear deniers that are as purely political and scientifically unfounded as the climate deniers. The climate deniers and nuclear deniers differ only in their political allegiance, they abuse of and rejection of science are quite similar.

the interests that control the USG are against the development of thorium-cycle reactors. And the USG will kill people to see to it that thorium-cycle reactors aren't available on a commercial scale anytime soon.

Which is why the U.S. is active in the international Generation IV reactor research effort, that includes thorium powered designs?
http://www.gen-4.org/
http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm

the interests that control the USG are against the development of thorium-cycle reactors. And the USG will kill people to see to it that thorium-cycle reactors aren't available on a commercial scale anytime soon.

Which is why the U.S. is active in the international Generation IV reactor research effort, that includes thorium powered designs?
http://www.gen-4.org/
http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm

Often, discussions about nuclear energy tend to run rampant with misinformation and hyperbole. I offer the following points for clarity, context, and thought.

1) Just to be clear: There are NO 80 year old reactors. If Chicago-Pile 1 was still operating, it would turn 70 this year. The oldest currently operating nuclear reactor is the Oyster Creek facility. This reactor came online December 23rd 1969 making it 42 years old curerntly. This is according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_Creek_Nuclear_Generating_Station

2) All NRC regulated reactors have maintenance performed on the systems every outage, to the point that much of the facility is newer than the day it turned on. This is due to maintenance and repair activity, as well as upgrades to improve efficiency. The article calls this "midlife refurbishment". The industry does this because it is easier and less costly than a new reactor. The thought process of the industry is that it is easier to tear down and rebuild under the existing license than it is to get approval for a new license. If the industry could feasibly replace a reactor vessel, I would bet they would.

3) ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section 3 is a good code. Creep, Fatigue, Corrosion, and many other issues are addressed in this code that the non-nuclear codes for B&PV only tough upon exotic need, and then refer the engineer to the section 3 code. I encourage you to read it.

4) Some reactor operators send material samples to the Advanced Test Reactor at the INL for accelerated radiation age testing. This information is sought by the reactor operators to gain a better understanding for themselves about their own equipment.

5) Reactors are designed for a much longer life than 40 years, but the NRC set the 40 year license to force a mid-life review. Reactors get far better treatment than any car or plane that most people have ever have ridden in. In this context, a 40 year old reactor properly maintained is very possibly not a safety concern.

6) The Davis-Besse RPV head mentioned by the article was a case of criminal conduct in the eyes of some people, and is not considered normal operating behavior by people I have met from the industry. Whatever the facts are, the indictment can be found here. http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/documents/indictment.pdf

7) Reactors designed to operated under the NRC have a "defense in depth" safety approach. The reactor and facilities are given a design basis accident that is a conservative forecasting of potential accident scenarios.

8) The NRC has a glossary available to you http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary.html note the term "meltdown" is not there. Many people associated with the nuclear field feel that it is a poor term that does not adequately describe a problem's behavior or severity. This is borne out of the use of the term for several reactor failures that all had different designs, behaviors, and severity of failure.

9) New reactor designs offer some stimulating improvements. The Generation 4 reactor effort can be found at http://www.gen-4.org/ currently the US is operating Gen 2 reactors.

but there are also plenty of arguments against. The biggest of these are:
- waste
- safety
- containment in case the 'safety' bit fails Not a nuclear engineer, physicist, etc.. but I've looked into them for an energy project. I can try to find sources if you'd like or wikipedia has outside links to some of them in the Gen IV article. Google also had some interesting papers on it. http://nuclear.energy.gov/genIV/neGenIV1.html was an excellent starting point. There's also an international nuclear research program: http://www.gen-4.org/

Waste would not be a problem if we would be allowed to reprocess the waste from our current reactors. However, that is a legislative issue. Additionally, a large portion of the next generation (Gen IV) reactors are supposed to run on the waste of their predecessors and produce far less waste than before.

Many of these "new" (Loosely used, some are enhancements of old designs with improved tech. Others are new since the tech now exists to make them feasible) reactors will have significantly improved safety controls over their predecessors; many of these are passive such that the reactor will stop itself instead of having a guy do it. A lot of these designs are also closed cycle so a large portion of the containment problems would be alleviated.

Glancing through your posts, it's pretty clear that you're a solar/wind guy but you did acknowledge that nuclear was a need to solve the problems as a stopgap. My opinion is that we need nuclear as a replacement for coal plants given that both are pretty much continuous output. Wind and solar have their places but we can't always count on their consistency. Hell, solar won't be able to provide all our energy needs due to the maximum energy that hits the Earth at a given location. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be considered.

Energy is ultimately going to be provided by a suite of sources: wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, solar, etc. They all have their places and none of them can be ignored. All need R&D to work on ways to improve safety, manufacturing, efficiency, and the like to make them more feasible and attractive to industry.

However, I see the energy problem as a two-pronged problem: supply and demand. Everyone continues to focus on the supply side so heavily while demand generally goes overlooked. I think a large portion of the problem stems from the fact that reducing demand is seen as a move to decrease "quality of life" even though it doesn't have to. I really think there needs to be technology (or legislative) goals to reduce power consumption of appliances throughout the house and office: air conditioning, fridge, stove, computer, printer, networking equipment, etc... By reducing demand and making our supply more environmentally friendly, I think we can make a pretty big difference in emissions and air quality, future energy supply security and growth (plug-in electrics), job security for many, environmental damage (coal mining), etc...

We are really only borrowing this planet from our children and grand children after all. I see it more as our children and grandchildren inherit all the problems we weren't bothered to solve in our lifetimes. Similar premise though.