By Vijay Jayaraj
Nuclear energy offers humanity the safest, most efficient approach to harnessing natural resources for its use. As the densest energy source available, nuclear fuel requires the least amount of material and land for electricity production.
This is sufficient reason to support the technology. Yet, some promote it as a means to address a manufactured climate emergency – worse yet, as a mere stop-gap in a transition to weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels.
Presenting nuclear energy as a so-called solution to climate change damages the credibility of those making the case and detracts from the real benefits of the technology. Suggesting that nuclear is only a bridge to the least dense energy sources – wind and solar – is absurd.
Uranium was discovered in 1789 by Martin Klaproth, a German chemist. However, it was not until the 1930s that scientists understood that its atoms could be split to release energy.
According to the World Nuclear Association, “Uranium has the advantage of being a highly concentrated source of energy which is easily and cheaply transportable. The quantities needed are very much less than for coal or oil. One kilogram of natural uranium will yield about 20,000 times as much energy as the same amount of coal.”
Unlike intermittent solar and wind energy, nuclear power plants can operate virtually continuously to provide a steady source of electricity. In the United States, for example, nuclear plants have an average capacity factor of over 93 percent, compared to around 35 percent for wind power and even less for solar.
It is no wonder that some of the world’s leading economies rely heavily on nuclear. More than 70 percent of all electricity consumed in France comes from nuclear. All the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Navy are nuclear powered, as are about 40 percent of major U.S. naval combatant vessels.
I’ve come across multiple people who advocate for nuclear energy as a solution to a climate crisis. The problem is not with their advocacy of nuclear energy. Rather, their misstep is accepting a popular, but fallacious, theory that carbon dioxide is dangerously overheating the planet – or with their lacking the courage to confront the falsehood.
Fortitude is required in the politicized milieu of the climate debate to state the simple fact that very significant climate change occurred many times well before there were industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.
Periods warmer than today existed 2,000 and 1,000 years ago when Romans grew citrus in northern England and Vikings grew barley on Greenland, respectively. The modern warming phase that began in the 17th century, starting the exit of the Little Ice Age, was well underway at the advent of our era of heavy industrialization.
In addition, the effect of CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels on atmospheric temperature is a highly debated topic.
It may not be a debate acknowledged in the mainstream media or by political elites, but thousands of scientists view assertions that CO2 is driving dangerous warming as gross exaggerations contrary to common sense and scientific integrity. Computer models attempting to predict the warming effect of CO2 almost universally fail.
So, people advocating for nuclear power on the basis of its potential to address a nonexistent climate emergency undermine their arguments for the technology’s actual benefits of safety and efficiency. The last thing we want is a mischaracterization of a wonderful and groundbreaking technology in the name of climate change.
Nuclear energy is awesome, and supporters should make an equally awesome – and factual – case for it.
This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy, April 24, 2023, and can be accessed here.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
Photo attribution: Lucas W Hixson, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Nuclear energy is pretty much emissions and carbon free so to the extent that they are making things warmer (we don’t know exactly ) it will help . Better safe than sorry.
Better with half a baby than none!
An excellent article. For years I’ve been trying to get the Nuclear Institute in the UK to advocate for nuclear in its own right. But they won’t; they advocate nuclear power as a solution to the imagined “climate emergency”. They won’t accept scientific reality.
Two sides to this.
So nuclear for ‘climate’ is bad science but good politics.
I’m happy to accept the politics while still arguing the science.
The problem is that they are trying to climb on the climate band wagon. They harm their scientific/engineering credibility by doing that.
That is a price we may have to accept. They are not climate scientists. They are nuclear engienners. They specialise in ‘how’, not ‘why’…
And so they accept that radioprotection rules, which keep on slowing down the industry.
Yes, very good point. The art of the possible may force us to accept a less bad choice over a ruinous choice.
The best choice objectively is continuing to use fossil fuels while they continue to be the most cost-effective solution. Recognizing that fossil fuels are a finite resource, we should certainly be developing and deploying next-generation nuclear technology. But deploying current-generation nuclear technology under today’s punitive regulatory regime is not cost-effective, albeit safe and reliable.
So it is not the technology but the bureacracy that is impeding progress. Who knew.
Politics in the later 20th/21st Century is about delivering what your WEF Headmaster has tasked you to do, using any form of mendacity, surrendering any moral or ethical standpoint and screwing over the gullible who vote for “you” because the Medjia think “you” are “great”….art of the possible – NFW.
Politics has an effect on people’s mind: Trump enabled a new, active conservative party that tries to do something, unlike the old “let’s suppress fed agencies” party that was only good at telling what they might do.
I have asked this simple question many times here at WUWT.
If the use of fossil fuel is going to lead to runaway warming ( there is no proof that it will) why don’t those pushing climate change not advocate for nuclear power?
The simple fact that they don’t want the population of the world to prosper . The simple fact is that this is not about the climate.
Climate is being used as a weapon to push the world towards a green socialist fairy tale land .
The high chiefs of climate change have stated that cheap affordable energy for the people is like giving a teenager a machine gun.
Of course there are many people that are convinced, and that shows that the constant propaganda from our news media has worked and they are convincing many “useful idiots” to work for the “cause “.
Nuclear is going to be a hard sell but people will change their minds when they are freezing in the winters and they are only able to buy basic food items .
Affordable energy is essential and populations might wake up when their economy tanks.
Just a note ,I was brought up on a mountain farm without electricity and snow was a regular feature in the winter .
Any of the trolls here like to try that ,no insulation , cut your own wood for heating ,cooking and hot water .
Energy lifts people and countries out of poverty but the many green and anti nuclear groups want to push us back there.
If you are anticarbon and antinuclear, then you are pro-blackout.
“Nuclear is going to be a hard sell but people will change their minds when they are freezing in the winters and they are only able to buy basic food items .”
Do not be misled by the insanity which is Germany or Austria. Long ago their Green parties and environmental groups were heavily infiltrated by the KGB and turned in a heavily antinuclear direction. This success was one of the reasons why Yuri Andropov became the Soviet successor to Leonid Brezhnev. Nuclear has far more support among most nations which are NOT Western Europe.
Instead they accept a political reality.
You cannot blame them for that.
I am certain the “almost” is unnecessary.
Any model that attempts to connect any direct influence of CO2 on earth’s energy balance is bound to fail because the proposition is so far-fetched it is beyond stupid.
I thought the Russian climate model was pretty close to right.
Of course I don’t know what the model models. It may not even have a CO2 input.
The Russian model gives the best correlation with the global temperature trend but it has huge errors for places like the western equatorial Pacific that is already near the 30C ocean surface temperature limit. The model cools the present by around 3C to get a future warming trend without breaching the 30C limit.
Is still has warming trends where there is none – achieved by cooling the past below the measured value.
I think you have gone too far.
Everything affects climate.
The first question is ‘but by how much?’ CO2? Not significantly.
The second point is that climate is a fully chaotic system with overall negative feed back and several attractors, which means a vegan farting in Brighton could plunge us into a new Ice Age.Or rather the end of this interstadial.
The latter point makes all of so called climate science mostly meaningless and invalidates the whole climate change political movemnent. In short we havent a clue what the climate will do in the next 100 years, and are wasting money to prevent something we cant prevent and probably isn’t even happening anyway, instead of gearing up to meet it..
The 17th century was 1601-1700 which included the deepest depths of the Little Ice Age in the 1690s and turn of the 18th century.
Looks like the author makes the common error of confusing the ordinal with the cardinal. The 17th century is not the same as the 1700s.
Also, in my view, there is nothing wrong with suggesting the use of a technology that is safe and cost-effective (at minimum relative to the disastrous alternatives proposed by climate loons).
I see it as akin to suggesting that exercise and proper diet is a good way to ward off the evil spirits that you believe are trying to possess your soul, making you depressed and lethargic. The fact that you’re misdiagnosing the true root causes does not diminish the value of the solution. I don’t need to disabuse you of your theology in order to counsel you on your health.
Mike Jonas has the right take on this. I would just modify it slightly in that the continued use of fossil fuels is the true optimal solution from a viewpoint of cost effectiveness.
Maybe the elimination of punitive regulations that currently cripple nuclear power might tip the scales back to nuclear, but that is an unproven hypothesis. Right now, nuclear is a massively better choice if the only option offered as an alternative is bird shredders and slaver panels.
Double-vision, common among those who wear the climate change blinders.
They like to use the propaganda phrase “pre-industrial” to describe the halcyon perfect climate of the Little Ice Age. We are supposed to imagine the smokestacks of the Dickensian dystopia spreading the evil gas over the whole world in the 1800s.
Not mentioning that the early industrial operations were mostly water-powered, and that they existed only in a relatively tiny part of the world. By the available inaccurate proxy measurements, they affected the CO2 ratio hardly at all.
By their own calculations, CO2 only began its rapid modern rise in the 1950s. There are 200 years missing between the smokestacks of Birmingham and the actual onslaught of CO2. Warming was happening that cannot be blamed on SUVs or Big Oil. This makes the true believers slightly nuts, as anyone would who is forced to hold two conflicting beliefs simultaneously.
“We have always been at war with Eastasia!” “We have to get rid of the medieval warm period!” “War is peace, ignorance is strength.” The “advent of heavy industrialization” causing warming in the early 1800s is another example.
Art history is real history but it can be warped and ill-used just as verbal history is. Recent research on the art of J.M. Turner and Claude Monet and their impressionistic style supposedly indicates that the atmosphere of the early Industrial Revolution was already heavily polluted. Incontrovertible evidence.
Turner is known for his use of light in his paintings, especially in Venice. Some of my photos of Venice look very ‘Turneresque’ (not my fault fer shure) in the white and haziness, so the the pollution levels there would be about the same as in Turner’s time, i.e., not very.
You can see the same “pollution” in his ‘Snow Storm: Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps‘ (somewhat prior to the Industrial Revolution) and in ‘The Slave Ship‘ far out to sea. In areas where you might have actual pollution, ‘Rain, Steam and Speed‘ and ‘The Fighting Temeraire‘ look about the same as the first two.
The researchers’ imagined “pollution” is merely the individual style of those two artists.
I wonder about those researchers- are they art historians and artists or “climate” scientists? I suspect art historians may not agree with this theory- just a wild guess.
The LIA had warmer and cold periods. According to NASA there were three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, all of which were separated by intervals of slight warming
The coldest winter in the CET was in 1684, an Ice Fair Winter, followed a couple of years later by one of the warmest of the LIA
Ice skaters in a Netherlands/Low Countries winter being an iconic image….
Yes, the 1930s also had some of the coldest as well as some of the hottest periods. Maybe it’s the meridional flow theory in action.
“Access to endless cheap energy is like giving an idiot child (nee politician) a machine gun.”
Maybe Ehrlich was onto something, as opposed to just being on something?
Nuclear is without doubt, the greatest energy source available to mankind. It is a great disappointment that since the first fully on line nuclear power plant was built and operational, back in the 1950s we have been overwhelmed by coordinated politically motivated shouters telling us to stop it.
Literally blowing up our reliable coal fired power plants rather than simply replacing the coal firing part with nuclear heat producing steam is a crime. The infrastructure that existed the turbine halls, the grid lines and power control systems already in place but now junked, is the biggest folly of the 21st century. Sadly I fear those incredible errors of judgement, will not be the last or the greatest errors visited upon humanity as this century unfolds.
Of course we are ignoring the elephant in the room. Nuclear reactors using uranium were popular in the cold war era because the byproducts of fission could be used to make nuclear weapons.
As plentiful as uranium is, thorium is far more available. But no weapons-grade byproducts. So no large-scale research projects except for the very early proof-of-concept ones in the 50s.
The problems of energy are so easily solved that one suspects the powers-that-be of deliberately avoiding real solutions. If you eradicate poverty, hunger and war, where would the Marxists find converts?
In a decent society that works, the bomb-throwers are jailed. Not revered.
In my experience, Bruce, as often as not Marxists come from pampered overindulged over- (mis-) educated classes.
Poverty, hunger? Go visit your nearest Walmart and let me know how many emaciated poverty-stricken waifs you find there (relative to the 250-pounders with 100-pound children in tow).
It’s not Marxists that are the meaningful threat, it’s the corrupt crony fascists like the Biden and Clinton Crime Families who manipulate government power to their benefit. It’s the soulless Uni-party.
Perpetual war is of course the classic approach to crony profiteering, but every government program is a profit opportunity for the crony fascists.
That’s why real problems are not addressed effectively. The problem must not be solved, that would destroy their business model. The goal is to have as many people as possible utterly dependent on big government. Forever more and more government employees and government contractors.
Take for example, the problem of homelessness. It is mostly a mental health and substance abuse problem. The costs to society of not effectively treating these problems are huge. But instead of doing so, we get legions of government bureaucrats and businesses addicted to government funding, not actually helping anyone but just cycling addicts and disturbed people through wholly-ineffective programs repetitively.
Their metrics are not cure rates, recidivism, or any other measure of a successful outcome. They measure their success by how many treatment events they have performed.
Well said. THAT is why the whole of the deep state is doing everything they can to stop a second TRUMP! presidency.
TRUMP! learned much in his first term. Primarily he learned he cannot trust congress to write the bills. He WILL finish the boarder wall.
He will end the increase in the spending limit by law or veto.
When the dollars in exceed the expenses out, as chief executive HE will decide what gets paid for and what does not. With a stroke of his pen, he can end all funding for CRT, ESG, etc., every liberal full employment program funded by the US federal government.
Regan, one of our greatest presidents, failed to use that power, the power to curtail borrowing. His greatest failure.
TRUMP! will not make that mistake again.
I’m not so sanguine. He still thinks Operation Warpspeed was awesome!
“Breaking news: US Military are withdrawing from foreign bases to deploy to the southern US border, to conduct anti drug cartel operations. Emergency powers statute empowers the Military to employ summary justice including public firing squads of all people importing drugs, seek and eliminate operations for all drug cartel members, using drone technology on any drug cartel member regardless of location as well as any location identified with the cultivation, harvesting and production of illegal narcotic substances – including cross border operations without prior notification. Financial sanctions to be imposed on any and all connected persons and corporate entities with any connection to drug cartel members.” Dont think it will happen…but it should.
Marxism is a useful tool for oligarchs and autocrats. Even though it preaches the opposite, its results are favourable for both.
THE NEW LEFT ARE THE PEOPLE THEY WARNED YOU ABOUT
Civilian fission reactors for generation of electricity are not suitable for producing bomb grade uranium. Fission byproducts are not ingredients for military weapons.
BUT if electrical generation heat source fission reactors used highly enriched fuel, as do US military ship reactors, they would only need to be refueled 1/5th or 1/10th as often as with the current fuel enrichment levels. The new US Ford class Aircraft Carriers are 25 years MINIMUM before refueling.
The reactors would have a much higher on line time, 95% or more. More efficient in every way. And with SMR, the refueling would be done in a factory. The reactor cores removed and taken to the factory for refueling in a controlled environment. With interchangeability, one core can be removed and immediatly replaced with a fully fueled core and put back on line. The majority of down time would be the cooling of the core to a level allowing for removal.
The efficiencies of scale in the manufacturing process for SMR will inevitably reduce costs unlike the cost of wind and solar generation sources.
Military reactors are designed to be driven like a sports car: rapid and frequent changes in power levels. Very different from civilian reactors. + Operators who are trained for it.
I’m a fan of SMRs. I own stock in Nuscale (stock symbol SMR).
Civilian fission reactors for generation of electricity are VERY suitable for producing bomb grade PLUTONIUM. Fission byproducts are ingredients for military weapons.
And you van make bombs out of Thorium by products if you have to.
But nuclear weapons are not a way to win wars.
Ukraine demonstrates that.
I never read it or even especially took much notice but from ‘some time back’ a guy wrote a book about nuclear power – the socio-political cost implications.
i.e. How NIMBYs, safety & waste concerns, cronies, lawyers, planners etc all put up roadblocks and the book was an attempt to quantify those things.
The conclusion was that ‘the regulation’ surrounding nuclear made it five times more expensive than it ought to be:
Something that brings on A Really Splitting Headache in me is that somehow ## Hinckley got permitted but everybody was horrified at the 9pence per kWh cost of its electricity = about 2 or 3 times the price that wholesale electricity was at the time.
(UK wholesale at BMReports is around that figure as I write)
## Hinckley is an flat-out and larger-than-life admission of Green Energy Fail
Hinckley is being built so as to enable a Black Start.
Now, it’s being admitted that it won’t have the grunt – hence another nuke being built at the other side of the country in Suffolk. The geography gives it away.
iow: ‘they’ know that renewable energy is going to crash the UK grid and, off its own bat, will not be able to restart it.
Yet still they bludgeon on….
You’re correct Peta. The crony fascists will tolerate just enough overpriced nuclear power as necessary to avoid a catastrophic failure of their gravy train.
But from the POV of EDF and notably financial doom mongers, Hinkley Point C is being built at great cost and EDF might lose too much.
That or EDF just doesn’t have the stamina to build anything now.
In any case, both parties of the contract are unhappy.
Its what happens when you combine TAS politicians who are doing a Blair – compiling a Contacts” file for use after the electorate has wised up to how thick they are – to what is now described as the blob….I know nothing about nuclear power/energy supply etc – zilch, and I rely on others to educate me ( tough job) – but the stuff I do know about, when it is the subject of a “here today, gone tomorrow” politico spouting tripe, am I forgiven for making the connection with other “stuff” about which the same (class of) politico talks blx?
The scottish hydro is enough for a black start. You don’t start the whole grid at once
Hinkley and sizewell are happening because France is not the UK and France is in the EU.
What was true before is even better now. The main “problem” was retreatment with some waste products having extremely long half-lives. The new 4Gen technologies allow a much better use of the combustible material where the waste produced has short half-lives (<60J) and higher temperatures which increase efficiency. The only problem remains the inherent fear that the greens have put in the minds of the general population. As far as fossil fuels is concerned: oil is a precious resource for chemistry and burning it up is maybe on a long term not the best thing to do.
We need Elon to complete the commercial development of the 4Gen or 5Gen technologies. He is going to need abundant electricity if he wants to continue selling electric cars. Or maybe because he is concerned about humanities fate.
Nuclear is not a solution to the manufactured climate crisis because it’s really not about the climate or greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change and carbon emissions are facades.
There are multiple agendas in play. Many environmentalists have an irrational hatred of fossil fuels. Rent-seeking climate mongers and other leeches hope to line their pockets. Politicians and bureaucrats hope to gain more power and control. Ending capitalism and implementing global governance is the agenda behind some of the most strident activists.
The acceptance of nuclear is growing as energy becomes more expensive and less reliable
The builing of reactors will put the green nutters on the spot and display there true agenda as not climate but the destruction of capitalism and western society
This will break the spell they have on the public and the politicians
I hope all who view your post “get” the irony of your handle…..care to indicate who should be going through the “green channel”?
From the article: “Periods warmer than today existed 2,000 and 1,000 years ago when Romans grew citrus in northern England and Vikings grew barley on Greenland, respectively.”
Also, it was as warm or warmer in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today.
India Tmax chart:
Regarding nuclear — does it matter if we rollout new nuclear plants for the wrong reasons? There is no climate crisis, but if fighting climate changes gets us more nuclear power, is that a bad thing? Or would that ultimately blowback on us?
If rollout of new nuclear plants is done for the wrong reasons, it will be used to subsidize fraud empowering and enriching scammers, rather than benefitting all population. It will allow scammers to perpetuate their schemes. Is it a good thing? Is it a battle lost or half battle lost? And if you really care about environment, please remember that the low cost nuclear energy will be used to subsidize the damage “green” energy is doing to it. Chopping birds, killing whales, destroying landscapes and habitats, etc.
I don’t see the logic of that.
The only people who benefit from nuclear power are the public at large, which is why none is being built.
The coke snorting elites simply DGAF.
Thorium liquid salts cooled reactors will produce cheap safe electric power for all.
Yeah, that and cold fusion.
Is this not the technology which was developed in the US then torpedoed by…?Clinton?
No, it was torpedoed by Nixon.
Regards
Climate Heretic
Any nuclear technology will produce cheap safe electrical power.
We are not arguing over welsh dry steam coal versus anthracite here.
Fixating on one nuclear reaction is pointless . We know how to build uranium and plutonium reactors. Let/s just build some
Huh, another article by the shill for ‘big Uranium’
okay, sarc off
yes, it is amazing how well globalist, and others (if you take the time to notice) use this whole scam and other similar scams to cause the ruin of millions of lives and consolidate their power.
I applaud the theme of this post by Vijay Jayaraj. But . . .
For nuclear power to gain acceptance with investors – – the governments and non-government groups will need to repudiate the “green” agenda. As an individual (or company director) it is suicidal to allocate funds for a project that can be shut down at any time, even after it is built and operating.
Agreed ( as far as an avid non scientist can ); imho, the house of cards that is ESG might be the key; pushback is evident, especially from those enlightened folks realising that Pension Funds’ trustees are having to look extremely closely at their personal (fiduciary) liability and the less than great returns from ESG investments vs non ESG …..a big big issue. Litigation Lawyers will be laughing all the way to their digital crypto currency online files…..
How on this earth can a global index based ESG ETFs contain entities such as Pfizer given the massive historic fines for commercial crimes and high misdemeanours?…..I don’t know either.
The way out of that is for the power station operators to insist on a contract that will outlast the present governments that will exact punitive compenstaion from a future government if they do.
In the end that is what kept German reactors going when Merkel wanted to shut them down and switch to Russian gas.
Well done Vijay, tell it like it is. My suggestion for those who would promote nuclear to combat global warming would be to advocate nuclear over wind and solar just because it is better. We are going to have to spend money on future energy production, it might as well be on something that actually works rather than something that makes some people feel good.
More time/energy/work needs to be done on aneutronic nuclear fusion, imo. Breakthroughs on commercial level reactors may be imminent.
I don’t buy into the CO2 mythos, but using the adherent’s to this religion’s anti-CO2 point of view would seem to imply that the mining and processing of Uranium ore creates a lot of demonic CO2.
We have a choice between nuclear power and a new Dark Age.Fossil fuel is coming to its end. These are facts irrespective of climate nonsense.
However if the vast majority of millennial snoflakes believe in ‘climate change’, then it saves time trying to detoxify the brain washing if yiu just say ‘nuclear power is green’.
I’d rather have the right solution for the wrong reasons, than no solution at all.
“Fossil fuel is coming to its end”....How long do you give oil, gas and coal? It has been coming to an end since it started.
Germany’s shutdown of nuclear is a pro-Russian move. Which is good. They won’t be able to do without Russian fossil fuels, even if they have to buy them from India.
The coming nuclear renaissance isn’t needed to solve the non-existing climate crisis, it’s to solve the political necessity of giving low information voters an alternative to mineral intensive, low-density economy destroying inefficient wind and solar These voters will forever insist that the government “do something” to save the planet from plant food (CO2).,
You just can’t blame Areva for trying to dance to the music being played.
I blame former CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique) (think French DOE) for not going to the media frontlines when the French Academy of Medicine published
“Irradiation médicale, déchets, désinformation : un avis de l’Académie nationale de médecine”explaining that
The evidence is just overwhelming. In medicine it rarely is that strong. Low doses are not that dangerous, they can’t be, we would see it.
But CEA doesn’t care.
Nuclear energy is the answer to all the energy needs of civilization, however its not PWR, LWR or even modular reactors. The energy needs of the world lies with Molten Salt Reactors (MSR)
As if western civilization did not have enough energy problems as it is. Along comes China with this:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-molten-salt-reactor-cleared-for-start-up
In addition you have Indonesia tagging along with this:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/01/174503.html
The above are two examples, other countries are pursuing research into MSR. So what’s the future in the energy sector? It goes something like this
a) Fossil fuels will eventually run out say, 100, 150 or even 500 years.
b) ITER and Tokamak type fusion reactors are failed technology, the following are reasons why:
i) How do you get the fuel in?
ii) How do you get the waste out?
iii) How do you get the energy out?
iv) How do you do i, ii & iii while the fusion reactor is still running?
c) Nuclear PWR have many cons, ie; cost, fuel efficiency and nuclear waste
d) The only answer to the above PWR problems are, Molten Salt Reactors (MSR).
i) They are inherently safe, no water needed and low pressure
ii) Fuel efficiency is 3% for PWR as compared with virtually 100% for MSR
iii) Abundance of fuel is 3 (Thorium) times greater than Uranium
iv) Enough fuel to last 1000s of years. If Thorium breeder reactors then 100s of 1,000 years
v) Nuclear waste is minimal, 300 years as compared with 10,000+ years
vi) Can provide society with all the fossil fuels needed /sarc
It will take time and it will happen for MSR to come into being and they present to society or humanity a paradigm shift in the use of energy. Just like the industrial revolution went from wood to coal. Society will suffer pains as it transitions to the new energy source.
Regards
Climate Heretic
I remember the claim:
Well my paraphrase may be a mix of reality and my own POV but still…