It certainly is disappointing to see other pro-nukes attacking a viable nuclear enterprise, especially when by doing so they are helping to perpetuate the myth of proliferation risks associated with spent fuel.

I guess this is inevitable whenever people fight for money: loyalty to a general cause, in this case nuclear power, is subordinated to the financial interest of individual companies or R&D organizations (or divisions/branches/sectors within government departments).

The question of the viability of current recycling á la France was touched on in a brief back-and-forth between me and Bob Alvarez in the Comments of Page van der Linden’s post on Alvarez’s Hanford report:

http://vanderlinden.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/7/pu-waste-hanford

How many times have you read about their amazing energy efficiency exercise of reducing fuel enrichment electricity consumption from 2700 MWe to just 50 MWe, thus freeing up nearly three nuclear power plants worth of capacity with just a $2 billion investment?

I also wanted to mention that it is not just “anti-nukes” that like to spread misinformation about the cost and “proliferation hazard” of the aqueous recycling processes. I subscribe to an email list of Integral Fast Reactor junkies. They are constantly using negative arguments about aqueous recycling to try to justify huge federal government investments in developing their baby. Of course, they claim that it is much cheaper, more reliable, and produces material that is far less likely to be attractive to a terrorist bent on using reactor grade plutonium. (See Atomic Insights for some recent articles on just how unlikely such a terrorist project would be in the first place.)

Unfortunately, they want the government to spend about a billion dollars per year for five to ten years to prove just how cheap their technology will be - once it actually works on an industrial scale.

I am certainly not opposed to technological improvements, but I hate it when proponents of neat ideas “go negative” to try to capture taxpayer money for a project to prove that their new idea is better than the one that already works.

While the current government jumped out of the gate proclaiming its support for nuclear energy, subsequent proclamations—“billion dollar sinkhole” and “every year they come to us with another tale of woe” being two—cannot have signaled to prospective customers that this is a pony worth betting on. So I agree, the government has undercut its own crown corporatioon.

As for global warming: I can almost forgive the government for not touting nuclear as a solution to that. After all, the biggest mouths on the issue in this country are Greenpeace, the Pembina Institute (yet another ragtag bunch of anti-nuclear “environmentalists” puffing themselves up with the “institute” moniker), and the David Suzuki Foundation, which is run by an avowed anti-nuke. Then again, anybody who can’t muster a rebuttal of these groups’ comic-book pseudo science needs new strategists.

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2010/07/canadas-rocky-road-with-nuclear-energy.html

Again, very disappointing that a lot of mainstream reporters don’t also ask questions like this. I guess that after getting scooped by the National Enquirer on the Edwards story they’re trying to get revenge by out-Enquiring the Enquirer.

What most of these anti-nukes don’t understand is that safety is an integral part of the design of the whole system. For most safety-related systems, it would take a major engineering effort to design it out. Why spend EXTRA money to make something LESS safe?

And a further point. The ACR is demonstrably further ahead in its design in the applicable country—Canada—than either the Atmea or Kerena (see http://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/licenseesapplicants/powerplants/newapplicants/vendorpreproject/status.cfm). All the Areva LoI does is confirm NB is looking to buy a new reactor in the 1000 MW range.

There is really no risk for NB to talk with Areva. Areva should be aware that NB’s real interlocutor is the Canadian federal government.

I cannot see how an energy source that provides more than half Ontario’s power in any average year is unreliable. Your bicycle analogy doesn’t even come close to being applicable. If your bicycle were capable of shipping tons of freight, and in fact moved most of the province’s freight, then okay. But your bicycle is more comparable to wind/solar. Nuclear is comparable to your car and public transit—it does most of the heavy lifting, day in and day out, year in year out.

And yes, wind with its average CF of 30 percent might be higher than some coal units’ CF, but you know what the difference is. When you need coal-fired power, you power up the generators. When you need wind, you cross your fingers and hope it blows when you need the power. The coal units with the lower CF were simply deployed less by the IESO; it wasn’t like the IESO needed them and they weren’t there.

However it shakes out, there’s no way that you can rhetorically change the physical picture. Wind provides small scale unreliable power, nuclear provides large scale baseload. Wind’s inherent unreliability is why it was dropped in the 1800s as a global shipping fuel, after having been the incumbent fuel for thousands of years.