It's not entirely true that there are no inhabited areas with high natural background levels. In fact much higher than the global average. These include Ramsar in Iran, Guarapari in Brazil, Kerala in India and others. The interesting thing is that epidemiological studies do not find adverse health effects on humans. Which certainly raises questions about the linear no threshold model which holds that there is no safe lower limit.

High Levels of Natural Radiation in Ramsar, Iran

Further to that the US has threatened to use nuclear weapons on many occasions, probably more times that all other nations put together:

Empire and Nuclear Weapons

Indeed the world cannot sit on it's hands waiting fusion. Fission is a highly practical, safe and clean form of electricity generation. And Generation IV reactors make it sustainable and hugely reduce the waste issue. If you haven't seen it, there is a host of informative material and discussion on Barry Brook's blog. Brooke is Director of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide and one of the group including Hansen pushing for development and deployment of Gen III and Gen IV nuclear.

Brave New Climate

Not since 1950 eh? How about the carpet bombing of Cambodia. (A lot) More bombs on a defenseless tiny nation than were dropped by all allied forces in WWII. This vile campaign went under the name of Operation Menu.

The only reason this experience is not being repeated on the same scale is that the US lost the war on Vietnam and strategic and political thinking changed. Not that there has been a sudden outbreak of "humanity" in US foreign policy or military doctrine.

The following link has a table of reactors currently under construction (or with construction about to commence) in China.

Chinese Nuclear Build

It can be seen that the construction schedule is mostly in the range 3 -5 years per plant.

The capital costs of the new Chinese plants seem to be well under $2 billion per GWe capacity (avg ~ 1.5 billion). At this price they are probably cheaper than coal when the much lower fuel costs are taken into account. Notably some of these new plants are Generation III+ Westinghouse AP1000 reactors.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

Yeah, right around the world meteorologists have been hard at it, repainting weather stations just to increase the surface temperature anomaly.

The issue of "well sited" or "poorly sited" stations, urban heat island effect, altitude of stations etc etc etc have been sliced and diced every which way in the published literature and have not been found to have any significant effect on the global temperature trend.

Not to mention the fact that the satellite temperature record shows about the same trend of global warming as do the surface temperature records.

Watts' surface station project has fallen flat on it's face and contributed a bit fat nothing to the understanding of climate.

Don't you be silly. Nearly all the raw temperature station data has been available for years. It's called the Global Historical Climatology Network. Go and look it up.

Anybody wanting to construct their own global or regional temperature records has been able to do so. In fact NASA GISS temperature record is constructed from this freely available dataset.

The fact that after years of whining, the skeptics never did so says one of two things - they are incompetent or for not hard to fathom reasons, unwilling. Far easier and suited their purposes better to defame working scientists.

In fact in the last 6-9 months, several science bloggers have done so, including (at last) one skeptic. And the results all are in close agreement with the published HAdCrut, GISS and NCDC temperature records.

So exactly what data is withheld that actually affect in any meaningful way the core conclusions of climate science?

I don't know what your point is, but for example EBR-II and its derived Integral Fast Reactor can burn uranium and/or plutonium and breed plutonium from fertile uranium. GE Hitachi have a commercial design called the SPRISM.

Your claims about no new breeder reactors of the with a uranium/plutonium fuel cycle since 1968 are just plain wrong.

You are quite wrong. The Russian BN-600 sodium cooled fast breeder has been in operation since 1980. The larger BN-800 is being built in Russia and a joint venture has been established to build two in China.

India plans to bring it's first domestically designed fast breeder reactor on line in 2011. With plans for 4 more by 2020.

There are a number of projects in the US to develop small modular fast reactors - US Dept of Energy SSTAR being one of them.

Breeder reactors (fast uranium or possibly thermal molten salt thorium) will be the future of nuclear electricity generation. Give it a couple decades.

Do you have any regard for the truth, or do you just think sound bites are sufficient?

The truth is that there are a number of predictions that come from climate science that have been confirmed by observation:

1. The surface temperature will increase - it has

2. The heat content of the oceans will increase - it has

3. The poles - especially the nth pole will warm faster than the rest of the planet. The observed warming of the Nth pole is dramatic.

4. The stratosphere will cool as the troposphere warms. It has.

5. Ocean acidity will rise - it has.

A couple of these predictions are more than a century old, having been first made by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. He was the first to arrive at an estimate of sensitivity of climate to increase in atmospheric CO2. An estimate not that different to what is the accepted range today.

Not only have these predictions been confirmed by observation, but no other plausible explanation has been found other than an enhanced greenhouse effect. Despite exhaustive efforts, attribution of climate change principally to solar changes, cosmic rays, astronomical cycles etc etc has been shown to be plainly incompatible with available observation.

"Hot Rock" AKA enhanced geothermal has a great story to tell. Low CO2, baseload power with potentially huge energy reserves. Progress is slow though.

The company that was possibly the closest to delivering a commercial amount of electricity is Geodynamics with their facility in the Copper Basin in central Australia. It is said to be one of the best locations (geologically) in the world. They have had their problems including a well accident. The initial 25MWe pilot plant has been put back to 2015.

At best, it seems there is little chance of seeing even one commercial scale (say 500 MWe) EGS power plant in less than 10 years. Unless there is unexpectedly rapid advances, EGS is not likely to impact CO2 emissions for 20 years or more. And that's too late.

I probably did factor in the fuel cycle costs by over estimating capital cost. Sth Korea has signed a (mostly fixed price) contract to build 5.5 GWe of nuclear power capacity for UAE at a price of around USD $20 billion. This is substantially less than the figures I mentioned and includes "first of a kind" costs. China is currently building 1GWe NPPs at a cost of less than USD 2 billion.

Uranium is a relatively common metal in the earth's crust. Current prices are cheap. It is highly unlikely that more reserves will not be found that are economically exploitable. It can also potentially be extracted from sea water.

But I do agree in principle that there would eventually be a shortage if the world was to be powered with current Gen III reactor designs. They are not efficient in their use of fuel and they generate an unnecessary amount of long lived waste.

Which is why people such as James Hansen are so keen so see the development of Generation IV reactors such as the Integral Fast Reactor or the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. Both of these designs 'burn' close to 100% of the nuclear fuel as compared with ~1% in current PWRs. I did a back of the envelope calculation and found that IFRs could supply the worlds electricity requirements for well over a thousand years on known uranium reserves. And there is several times as much thorium as uranium in the world.

Put simply a golf ball size piece of uranium or thorium would supply an entire life time of energy for a person living in high energy country such as the US. And generate the same mass of much shorter lived waste. There is no other way of generating energy with such a tiny environmental footprint

Google IFR and LFTR. It's a fascinating and very important story.

Is around one hundred Westinghouse AP1000 1GWe modern Generation III+ nuclear power plants (or similar plants from another manufacturer). I reckon you may even be able to negotiate a bit of a discount for an order of that size. As a rough estimate, this would supply the current electricity needs of the UK, Spain and the Netherlands.

The latter would then be able to lower their per kWh CO2 emissions to around what France (which generates about 75% of it's electricity from nuclear) has already achieved. It remains a fact that aside from countries blessed with the right geography and climate for large scale hydro or the geology for geothermal, France's CO2 emissions per kWh are waaaaay below any other country.

Even better, start building the Generation III+ reactors and begin a crash development program for Generation IV reactors which are something like one hundred times more efficient and can 'burn' the waste from current reactors thereby turning a problem into a huge energy asset.