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Should Nuclear and Renewable Energy Supporters Stop Fighting?
Lasrick writes "A debate is happening in the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that started with their publication of 'Nuclear vs. Renewables: Divided They Fall,' an article by Dawn Stover that chides nuclear energy advocates and advocates of renewable energy for bickering over the deck chairs while climate change sinks the ship, and while the fossil fuel industry reaps the rewards of the clean energy camp's refusal to work together. Many of the clean energy folks took umbrage at the description of nuclear power as 'clean energy,' so the Civil Society Institute has responded with a detailed look at exactly why they believe nuclear power will not be needed as the world transitions to clean energy."
A lot of this talk about nuclear power plants or even coal powered power plants being inflexible is nonsense. They are run continuously because this is more energy efficient. However there is nothing stopping you from burning less coal. In France it is common to partially off nuclear power plants during the night:
In France, however, nuclear power plants use load following. French PWRs use "grey" control rods, in order to replace chemical shim, without introducing a large perturbation of the power distribution. These plants have the capability to make power changes between 30% and 100% of rated power, with a slope of 5% of rated power per minute. Their licensing permits them to respond very quickly to the grid requirements.
Not the orignal poster,but IMO...
Thorium salt reactors are still "up-and-coming" techniques. Although there have been a small smattering of experiments over time, the only significant testing of the idea was back in the '60s (the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge Nation Labs). Although most of the technical hurdles appear to be known, I don't think there is doubt that more work needs to be done to make this production worthy. Some of the biggest issues (e.g, metalugical radiation brittling and salt reprocessing efficiency), are hard to do small scale experiments with so the only real course is to build more experimental reactors to help understand this. Experiments like this are really expensive. The FUJI project (one recent attempt considered to be a leading effort) failed to raise $300M required to build their experimental miniFUJI reactor back in 2011.
There are also secondary effects that are unknown. Uranium mining of past decades created some pretty bad ecological damage and it is unclear that Thorium minining would be any better (or be similarly econonmical with lower impact mining techniques). There is also the issue with decommissioning (even with existing Light-water reactors, this is an ongoing cost concern). At Thorium Salt Reactor have greater fuel efficiency...
One of the continuous knocks against Thorium Salt Reactors has also been nuclear proliferation security issues with reprocessing (since the most efficient configuration for Thorium Salt Reactors is a breeder configuration), but although there are some known safeguards available for denaturing to make bomb-capable material difficult to extract, terrorist level dirty-bomb material is always available in large quantities (a different threat model than in the 60's)...