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.

Current rollout of renewables is clearly not sufficient because carbon emissions continue to rise at the top end of IPCC projections. And new coal fired facilities are still being built (and not just in China).

The problems with wind and solar are that they are not base load. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine they don't produce power. Certainly if sufficient energy storage could be provided in the grid, things would be different, but it would be ruinously expensive to do so with current technology. There is no way that currently solar and wind could completely replace current baseload facilities - not even a little bit close. Not even with "smart grids" - it is not a trivial problem. Which is not to say that they have don't have a place - anything that helps get us off coal does.

I was referring to enhanced or engineered geothermal - EGS - (AKA hot rock geothermal) which theoretically has huge potential. It involves deep bores (4km +) into hot granite below sedimentary rock, injecting water, fracturing the granite and circulating superheated fluid to the surface to drive conventional steam turbines. The potential is vastly greater than the limited resources of existing geothermal, with some prospect of eventually providing a significant portion of baseload power worldwide.

To my knowledge the closest to getting EGS commercially operating is Geodynamics at their facility in the Cooper basin in Australia which was supposed to have 25MW pilot in 2013. After an accident in 2009, followed by massive flooding of central Australia their 1MW demo has been put back two years to 2012. It's going to be a while yet.

As to whether nuclear appeals to state planners or businesses, even if that assertion is true (which it may or may not be) who cares? What we want is the best decision.

We absolutely MUST replace coal fired electricity generation with low CO2 methods. Coal is the worst CO2 emitter.

I very much doubt that current renewable technologies are sufficient. The only stuff that is immediately deployable is wind and solar. Wind certainly can't provide baseload power. Solar is still problematic though solar thermal is promising. Wave power is still really experimental. Enhanced geothermal is very promising but there is still no commercial size power station.

If it comes to raising the planet's temperature by 5C or nuclear power, I'd have to say nuclear is the clear choice.

There are newer options in nuclear power generation that could be much superior to most of the current stuff in efficiency, safety, far lower production of high level waste and cost. These are the so called forth generation reactors.

One such is the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) which

1. Uses far less nuclear fuel - maybe 100 times less.

2. Can use existing nuclear waste, depleted uranium or plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons as fuel. It can in fact help with existing waste problem.

3. There is enough existing fuel to last a long time. Uranium mining not needed.

4. Waste processing possible on site, vastly reducing security and safety risks of transporting large quantities of dangerous materials.

5. Produces much less high level waste than current designs. Perhaps 1%. And the waste mostly has a shorter half life.

6. "Softer" failure modes => better safety.

7. Maybe possible to prefabricate in factories => cheaper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

When all is said and done, I think that the carbon pollution problem will only be solved by inexpensive clean electricity. Some hard choices will have to be made.

Under the cloak of "realism" your response is nothing other than ideological - a blind acceptance and defense of current economic organization.

When it comes to realism, I'm afraid that Greenpeace et al have it right, at least in broad principle even if the details are occasionally a bit rough.

The reality is that we are reaching planetary limits, in climate change, destruction of biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle and the phosphorus cycle with problems with fresh water availability and ocean acidification waiting in the wings. Today there are something like 25 - 30% fewer wild creatures living on the planet than in 1970. The planet could not support it's 6 billion humans consuming resources at the same rate as US or Australia (to name the worst culprits).

It the true realists that recognize this situation. Proposed actions to mitigate the problems might not always be perfect but business as usual is just crazy.

From: ernst.kattweizel@redcar.ac.uk Sent: 29th October 2009 To: The Knights Carbonic

Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the Master called “the ordering of men’s affairs by a transcendent world state, ordained by God and answerable to no man”, which we now know as Communist World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment.

The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s initial thesis - that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere - had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master’s rivals. Within 35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to “demonstrate” the Master’s thesis. Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major objections were sustained.

More resistence was encountered (and swiftly despatched) when we sought to install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master’s second grand law - that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law.

Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available, and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.

The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even though we have ensured that eight of the ten warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001(10). From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.

Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic Circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world’s glaciers.

Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.

The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The capture of George W. Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly-capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been accepted: world government will be established under the guise of controlling manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus?

Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.

Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.

Tosh.

There are a wide range of opinions on what measures would be effective to mitigate global warming. For example there is heated debate on the necessity and/or desirability of nuclear power. Nobody is labeling nuclear proponents as "deniers".

James Hansen, one of the best known climate scientists in the world, condemns cap and trade and likens it to indulgences granted by the medieval Catholic Church. He advocates "fee and dividend". Nobody is calling him a denier.

It you want to be part of the debate about mitigation measures then please do so - everybody is welcome - but could we dispense with the false accusations of victimization.

And you wonder why people get sick of hearing nonsense like "mystery models with hidden data"? Because it is fundamentally a lie repeated by people like yourself either willfully or through being too lazy to actually look and see what is publicly available. I recommend that you start at the handy page of links provided by the climate scientists who run the RealClimate site. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

On that page you will find links to NCDC raw station data which is used to compile the NCDC and NASA GISS global surface temperature reconstructions. You will also find links to the Global Paleo Climatology Network, maintained by NOAA, containing vasts amounts of proxy data such as tree rings ice cores etc. You will also find links to freely available climate model code. And lots more besides. Try visiting the NASA GISS site where just about everything they do is downloadable - data, papers, models, code - the lot.

This single page of links provides any thinking person who posseses the requisite skills, with sufficient information to begin their own evaluation of climate science. Or you could start by reading some of the published research.

People will stop saying "you are full of it" when you stop constructing straw men and telling porkies.

I do believe this has been going on for a long time now. It's called publishing in peer reviewed journals. Thousands of times.

It seems that the published science is so compelling that every national science academy, scientific society and professional body of international standing that has expressed a public position has asserted the reality of AGW.

If this reasoned published evidence is good enough for the leading bodies of world science, then I'd say you need some very cogent arguments to dispute it. Hand waving doesn't cut it.

You are to brutally honest, full of it.

You want some falsifiable predictions from mainstream climate science. Try these:

1. The global temperature will increase - predicted by Hansen's model from early eighties. There is an observed increase in temperature.

2. Arctic and antarctic to warm faster than rest of the planet - predicted by all models. Observed.

3. Troposphere to warm and stratosphere to cool - predicted by all models. Observed.

4. Increasing signature of CO2 in long wave spectrum form top of atmosphere. Observed by satellite spectrographically.

5. Increasing acidification of the oceans. Observed.

and plenty more where those came from. Please cut the crap about climate science not being falsifiable. Try looking at the evidence, the science and the facts for a change.

It seems some "skeptics" have (finally) got off their arses and made an honest attempt to make their own global temperature reconstruction using the NCDC dataset. Which is a great improvement over the morons who think filling in form letters for vexatious FOI requests has something to do with science.

And what a surprise! They find that their record pretty much agrees with the CRU compiled record. If anything it shows a little more warming.

It is discussed here http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/global-land-temps-cru-style/