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Now, how do you manage to build 100 SMRs rather than 10 white elephants?
Maybe China will do.

In a shipyard. Or in factories. China is also working on molten salt reactors (plural). They are inherently safe and very compact. Conventional reactors use a tenth of the materials that go into wind and solar, and advanced reactors may improve that figure another order of magnitude. Meanwhile, the birthplace of MSR technology (the US), remains content with natural gas, and welcomes the impending collapse of civilization.

I have heard from a nuclear engineer that a nuclear power plant takes no more materials or engineering than nuclear power.

This was probably meant to be "no more materials than a coal plant", and if you set nuclear and coal plants side by side, it is blindingly obvious. See pages 48-52 for such a comparison of coal with advanced nuclear.

Never mind that conventional nuclear already uses a tiny fraction of the resources of renewables, so the comparison with advanced nuclear is even more stark.

You cannot "generate" energy. Not one time, not four times.

Okay, Pedantic Avenger... how about using the utopian word 'liberate'... as if the anthropomorphically infused energy was kicking and screaming to get out? You could even have it breathe a sigh of relief and grin and bow to everyone like a genie.

In addition to pursuing the promise of liberating 4 times the energy that could theoretically but not practically be produced in today's water cooled solid fuel fission reactors... how about finding a way to increase fuel burn efficiency from their abysmal ~0.5-0.7% to something in, say, the high 90%s? Like one hundred times better?

Of course I'm talking about fuel dissolved in molten salts. Uranium burners like ThorCon now with a concerted effort to achieve the dream laid out (and prototyped) by Alvin Weinberg in the '60s, Thorium breeders that actively process salts to remove long-lasting products... to achieve a ~300 year walk-away-safe waste profile. Literally the best idea, ever! And if we do it before China does, we may even jump out in front again and save ourselves from financial ruin. Another plus.

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"DID SOMEONE SAY THORIUM?" TIME ONCE AGAIN FOR CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI... Updated again! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!

My June 2017 letter to Energy Secretary Perry was focused on the vulnerability of US natural gas. It is a great pain to state the obvious, but necessary because utility wind and solar has made faux-environmentalists into useful idiot 'crypto-advocates' of gas grid generation. We are on the cusp where a coordinated attack on the gas distribution network in a few places would trigger cascading grid failure, as distant gas plants operating directly from the pipelines drop offline and stay offline for days or weeks. This sentiment has since taken shape as the Trump Administration proposes ways to protect utilities able to stockpile 90 days of fuel, and encourage them to do so. It comes down to a simple question: Can you supply a compelling reason why the United States electric grid should fail completely within hours of a relatively simple attack?

This letter of mine has been in Donald Trump's possession since May 2, 2016 . If you read it you may discover why I considered Trump the only candidate worthy of such a message. In his pronouncement to pursue energy self-sufficiency in general and consider nuclear an essential part of the mix, there is hope. The others offer nothing but more years of bad road and an obscenely stupid fixation on base load irredeemables (wind and solar). Trump is literally the only one with the courage to stand up to the tripe.

In 2013 I reached out to Senator Inhofe to propose an energy path for Oklahoma and the country.

Also in 2013 I reached out directly to Halliburton Corporate with a very specific idea that just might have laid groundwork for their secure long-term future. At the time their stock was climbing towards $70 and they probably thought they didn't have a care in the world. Not so good now. Not a glimmer from this one either. I had high hopes for it.

Mentioned in these letters is Faulkner's 2005 paper on Electric (HVDC) pipelines, and the two hour Thorium Remix 2011 video presentation (time index below).

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund is investing in the TAP molten salt reactor. This is one of many promising designs that seek to address the concerns about nuclear and allow it to displace fossil fuels through superior economics. Additionally, the republican platform supports leveling the energy market, solving the Thorium Problem, and enabling development of advanced nuclear:

We support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower. A federal judge has struck down the BLM’s rule on hydraulic fracturing and we support upholding this decision. We respect the states’ proven ability to regulate the use of hydraulic fracturing, methane emissions, and horizontal drilling, and we will end the Administration’s disregard of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act with respect to the long-term storage of nuclear waste. We encourage the cost-effective development of renewable energy sources — wind, solar, biomass, biofuel, geothermal, and tidal energy — by private capital. The United States is overwhelmingly dependent on China and other nations for rare earth and other hardrock minerals. These minerals are critical to advanced technology, renewable energy, and defense manufacturing. We support expediting the permitting process for mineral production on public lands. We support lifting restrictions to allow responsible development of nuclear energy, including research into alternative processes like thorium nuclear energy.

I was actually just reading on how this can be done.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/d...

You can just replace coal with nuclear. We can do it at an assembly line with a pace of one GW power plant per week, or there about. We can build them in a shipyard as 100 ton building blocks. Barge the blocks to the construction site and start stacking up the blocks. If the US DOE gets up off of their thumbs we should have a prototype in five years and a functional assembly line less than five years after that.

While this won't get us off of fossil fuels in ten years it puts us on a path to do so in perhaps 100 years.

Here is what James Hansen has to say about it. Even that is probably not enough though; a fee on CO2 may have some effect in the developed world, but the rest can not afford it, and will not accept such limitations. Even the terrible consequences looming are nothing next to the abject poverty that billions are subjected to daily. As bad as burning coal is, inexpensive fossil fuels still offer a desperately needed improvement in their lives, and it is not right to deny that to anyone in such circumstances. (It is also better than burning wood, as many "environmentalists" would have us do.)

The only practical way forward that results in rapid decarbonization, is to offer the developing countries a cheaper option, before the countless gigawatts of planned coal fired capacity are actually built. We know that nuclear can rapidly displace coal, as it has done so in the past in a number of countries. China is ramping up conventional nuclear, and developing advanced reactors. Newer mass produced LFTR or Thorcon reactors will make nuclear energy even cheaper and safer yet. See also Thorium: energy cheaper than coal for details.

These summits which result in plans too cowardly to even mention the words carbon dioxide or nuclear are perverse. Until nuclear is at least acknowledged and proposals are on the table for encouraging development and deployment of advanced reactors, they are a total waste of time.

The win-win scenario is vastly increased investment into nuclear electric generation. Nuclear is already the safest form of baseline power generation, and is 100% carbon free. Next-gen technologies offer the possibility of less than 5 per KWH electricity, and no possibility of meltdowns. The world needs plentiful, non-stop power going forward. The ONLY carbon-free way of achieving that is nuclear power, and this can be done with no sacrifice, and no penalty to the poor via increased energy prices.

You could be right. My preferred option would be to let the markets pick the winners and losers. The key is to apply a revenue neutral carbon tax that ensures that any fees collected are spent in reducing income tax and sales tax. That way we are taxing behaviours that we want to discourage, and lowering taxes on things we ought to be encouraging.

The problem is that such a scheme is still regressive, at least here in the US. The poor pay no income tax, and there is usually no sales tax on food and other necessities. A carbon tax would raise the cost of energy, and if applied to gasoline and diesel, would increase the cost of goods pretty much across the board. Also, plenty of poor people would be hurt by higher gasoline prices.

If there were fewer artificial barriers to nuclear (including somehow educating the public regarding the actual instead of perceived risks) it would quickly become one of the least expensive options - cheaper than coal or gas.

One of the more practical approaches to next-gen, molten salt nuclear is being developed at ThorCon.

Shouldn't matter. Even non-nuclear plants tend to have a "physical" layer of security beneath the computer. If, for example, a reactor vessel becomes overly full, it triggers a switch which directly closes all the feed valves

Yup. They have extra layers of safety in power plants you won't find in microcontroller-controlled mechanical devices designed for the consumer.

Then look at one of the more modern fast breeder or molten salt reactor concepts such as ThorCon, which claim to incorporate more inherent safety, and I think the fact that there are millions cars driving around with humans behind the wheel, some of them carrying large quantities of hazardous or explosive materials, some of them drunk, some of them insane or asleep, is a scary as hell, compared to the more benign idea, that a machine-learning system would be controlling some industrial processes....