Agreed. They can just import more coal from Australia.

Nuclear power is quite unsubsidised and is made expensive by heavy-handed regulation. The small "subsidies" there are should be seen as small mitigation activities designed to soften the blow of regulation. Also, nuclear power is made relatively expensive by allowing fossil fuels to escape their external costs.

I disagree. On the contrary, they must, as there is always a trade-off between costs and safety. You need to set a correct level, and frankly, today, the safety for new nuclear is cranked up irrationally high. The result is not only that resources are wasted in the field of nuclear energy, when the marginal safety costs are way higher than marginal accident avoidance gains. It is also the case that coal can keep its dominance, creating the cancer equivalent to few Chernobyl accidents a year as well as creating an existential threat to mankind in the form of AGW.

In amounts that does no harm.

Why is it intolerable? I find Fukushima perfectly tolerable. Compared to other energy related damage, Fukushima was extremely mild. For instance, hydro dams fail and the death toll can be in the hundreds of thousands, coal combustion causes millions of cancer deaths and AGW, while natural gas cause major explosions and AGW. Sure, there is wind and solar, but added costs and the inability to provide stable or load-following power would (in the event of our reliance on them for most of our energy needs) cause much more harm than the occasional nuclear meltdown.

Do you not think we all benefit from energy? What would our society be like without energy? Your socialist ideology seems to obstruct your ability to think rationally about this.

A chemistry professor sitting on a rock in the sun for long enough will mostly decompose into simpler structures. Life does, in different ways, create complexity, such as complex molecules, seasonal growth patterns and greater diversity in colour. A planet teeming with life should display a number of differing signatures from a comparable barren planet regardless of whether that life resembles ours not. You just need to look for complexity!

Sorry, but you should read up before posting nonsense. Thorium is found in very rich deposits. Literally there are beaches with all-black sand, 20-30% thorium oxide contents. Thorium prices would go down if demand increased. The price is "high" right now because of a lack of economies of scale.

But thorium is found in very rich deposits. You can scoop up monazite sand with 20% thorium content on some Indian beaches. A front loader could get fuel for a million car life times in every scoop. The world's current thorium reserves is 2.6e12 grams, which should suffice for 325 billion car life times. But those reserves is just what's known today and extractable at $80/kg. But one kg of thorium has the energy of some 15,000 barrels of oil, so I guess we would be prepared to pay more than $80.

As I said, fission produces short-lived isotopes in proportion to the energy delivered. If you want to generate a lot of energy, you are going to generate a lot of fission products. If these fission products aren't somehow continuously extracted and distributed (diluted), they will be present in amounts that need cooling. Perhaps the LFTR design can handle this, but I don't really care. To me, passive cooling is good enough. If it isn't for you, then by all means add to the protest choir that leaves the field open for coal.

Regarding "organized slavery for profit", I don't think we are going to reach a consensus. Your sweeping moral outrage seems to make you blind for the progress that has been made, and thus you are unable to be constructive or promote constructive policies.

I said we would get very far beyond 20%. With mad subsidies, we can get a bit farther by overbuilding (resulting in stranded wind), DSM, wider grids and so on, but it will be increasingly costly. Also, at such penetrations, wind will kill its own spot price, i.e. the electricity price will approach zero or become negative on windy days. We can already see the tendency that countries such as Spain, Portugal, Germany and so on stacks up with Denmark at between 15%-20% wind, as their build-outs starts losing pace.

If you run a solar thermal plant at 100% of capacity during the dimmest days of winter, your turbine is severely under-dimensioned and the plant will not be able to utilize all the collected heat during summer.

Forget about solar thermal during Europe's winter. It won't be able to produce at a reasonable cost. Btw, in Sweden where I live, the north of the country actually doesn't have any sun at all during part of the winter, and the sun doesn't set during part of the summer.

Ok, so you don't have extended periods of cloudy weather or winters with little sun? Great, good for you, then go for it. I'm content that you threw out wind. Hope you realize that solar thermal isn't practical for much of the world, though.

Lot of hills? Ok then, no problem then? *sigh*

I started off by saying we could have 80% wind if wind where generating baseload power. You said that this limitation was a misconception and that storage was no problem. When I challenge this, you back off, but quite aggressively, saying I'm dumb for suggesting only wind. So, please come again: Why are my maths way off?

What would you have beside wind? The problem is, renewables' supporters always say there needs to be a mix, which means they don't have any one viable, scaleable alternative. Instead, they try to confuse the issue by talking about mixes and make big lists of impractical tech. Which is stupid.

I didn't say you said you should demolish all nuclear plants immediately, so the straw man is yours. Also, nuclear is only 18% of UK electricity. You're mainly a fossil thermal economy.

No, Germany won't be in darkness, as nuclear is only 23% of its generation. It will keep a similar amount of lignite and increase its use of Russian natural gas. And it will have exhausted its grid's potential to swallow intermittent sources, so it can't go further and decommission the lignite, unless it use even more Russian gas. Germany has simply made a choice to prefer lignite and Russian gas before nuclear. It won't make them dark. It'll just bring the world a bit closer to disastrous climate change.

Yes it is. Small old nuclear reactors gets retired. New ones are built. (Just not in the US.)

WNA nuclear reactor database lists 131 retired nuclear reactors with an average capacity of 316 MW and an average start year of 1969. It also lists 435 operating reactors with an average capacity of 842 MW and an average start year of 1985. The reactors shut down this side of the year 2000 is 12 british reactors from the 60-ies and earlier, one French and one German reactor from the early 70-ies, famously the Fukushima reactors and their Hamaoka brothers from the 70-ies, and a number of eastern bloc reactors of which some are newer but of inferior Soviet design.

Sorry, but you are being nonsensical. Breeders such as Superphoenix produce about as much fission products as any other reactor of similar size. It needs to fission just about the same amount of heavy isotopes to get just about the same thermal output. The difference is that the breeder utilizes close to 100% of the mined uranium/thorium, whereas the current once-through designs use about 1% and leave the rest as waste. The reason Superpheonix was difficult was not because it produced more radioactive fission products, because it didn't. It was because it was first-of-a-kind and used sodium as coolant. Sure, reprocessing equipment and chemicals gets contaminated and that means a bit more of that kind of waste, but that is also of a more benign type that does not need storage forever. You do get rid of mining and of spent-fuel waste that requires deep geological repositories.

I assume you would also accept to have electricy 30-50% of the time, and that the electricity you do get comes at a hefty price premium?