You know a new nuclear energy source is serious when the anti nuclear people start going to the trouble of producing hatchet job materials.

1 - Thorium is about 3-4x more common than Uranium on the Earth's crust. But a lot of that Uranium is disolved on Sea Water, which means expensive to obtain. Thorium is available worldwide, both as monazite beach sands and rare earth mines (all fairly easy to mine). Thorium is kind of FREE actually, since it's already extracted in huge scales from the earth for rare earth mining and current has zero actual usage. Thorium is actually a problem for rare earth mining. There is enough Thorium already mined that could power the whole earth for a decade using LFTR reactors.

2 - 100% of the Thorium is Th-232, 0,7% of Uranium is U-235. Thorium reactors can be designed to use at least 90% of the Th-232, with designs that promise over 99% Th-232 utilization. Current, water cooled, solid fuel uranium reactors are limited to using less than 0,7% of mined uranium since they burn most of the U-235 and a little of the U-238 (99,3% of Uranium), with reprocessing like the French, that's doubled. Uranium/Plutonium IFR reactors are able to use 99%+ of mined uranium. Actually an IFR reactor can be started and operated solely on the waste from regular uranium reactors (startup with spent nuclear fuel, topped of with depleted uranium), existing spent nuclear fuel is enough to startup enough reactors to increase USA nuclear electricity share from 20% to 50%, and depleted uranium stockpiles enough to power those reactors for hundreds of years.

Competitive when the sun is shining. With solar production having priority over everything else except for wind.
When you understand the whole regulatory model, you see the math isn't was it seems.
It's profoundly unfair to compare baseload NG with intermittent solar. Its comparing apples to oranges.

Actually the nuclear waste from water cooled/solid fuel reactors is fuel for IFR reactors.
If instead of giving new nuclear a hard time, we embraced IFR reactors, existing spent nuclear fuel + depleted uranium would be enough to power the whole world for over 100 years without mining a single ton of Uranium / Thorium from the ground.
While North America / Western Europe is wasting its time on solar, Russia already has many operational IFR reactors like the BN-600 and BN-800.
My main problem with the BN reactors is I don't trust Mr. Putin. GE has the S-PRISM design. But NRC regulations are so complex and expensive, it's uneconomical to just do it.

What waste, you mean nuclear waste ?
Nuclear remediation procedures have been shown to be 90% of what is really necessary.
If we take current nuclear regulations seriously, we must stop living in Denver-CO, Salt Lake City-UT, or any sky resort above 2000 meters.
Nuclear regulations have been designed without comprehensive data points, using just the nuke detonations in Japan as sole data points.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima have actually proven those nuclear regulations are overblown.
If those regulations were at a necessary level, Chernobyl would have killed a million people. Instead less than 200 people died.
TMI and Fukushima killed zero people, caused zero cancers.
If Linear No Threshold model were right, both TMI and Fukushima would have caused enough cancer cases to be statistically easy to find.
The reality is the problem is only on people's mind.
Please read this:
    http://nuclearradiophobia.blog...

Solar panels alone might look cheaper than nuclear.
When you take the full cost of migrating 100% of existing nuclear+coal electricity production in Germany to solar+wind. Nuclear is a cakewalk.
The math is quite simple.
Germany's peak electricity load is 65GW. Of that 15GW were renewables since the start of energiewende.
So 40GW of new nuclear would migrate 100% of natural gas/coal/old nuclear generation.
That's 31 full size nuclear power plants (1.33GWe each).
Even at ultra high 10 billion euro per full size nuclear power plant that's 310 billion euro. New nuclear is being built at half that cost in China / India / South Korea.
It has been proven that energiewende is a trillion euro plan. Without any assurances it will work. As a matter of fact, the challenges of storing solar/wind intermittent production are known to be impossible to solve. Solar in Germany produces 90% less in the winter than in the summer. Wind might blow more strongly in the night / winter in general, but there are statistical exceptions. All it takes is a few low wind winter days for the grid to collapse using only renewables.
Do the math. The math doesn't add up.
Solar in California / Hawaii / Florida / Texas works much better than Germany (sun shines much more in the winter), but still a 100% renewable model doesn't add up. The current feed in tariff system works very well until the grid is 20% solar or 20% wind. At that point the intermittency issues fuck everything up.
Hawaii is already showing that, and Hawaii is a best case scenario (extremely mild winters insolation wise). Hawaii could go 100% solar with just 6 hours worth of peak electricity demand worth of energy storage. Still the math doesn't add up. Even with Hawaii having one of the highest USA electricity costs along with Alaska.
Stop. Think. Get out of your radical environmentalist bubble.
If you aren't an engineer, physicist or otherwise STEM college graduate it might be beyond your numbers skills to understand what I'm talking about.

Big lie.
Initial investment to startup a nuclear power plant is high. But once up and running, nuclear is cheaper than coal (fuel, maintenance, operational costs).
Over the 60-80 years a new nuclear power plant is expected to operate the initial high nuclear costs are fully paid off.
That's one of the many distorted facts that is said about nuclear.
Don't waste your time comparing nuclear to solar / wind.
Nuclear is baseload energy.
Solar / Wind are intermittent energy sources, whose costs ignore the grid upgrade costs and other indirect costs required to go even 20% solar electricity for North America.
Hawaii is already showing the results of extreme solar penetration. Germany renewables plan has to sustain is headway at the 25% electricity from renewables mark (including solar+wind+hydro+biomass in the mix). Germany might make it to 30 or 35% in the next few years, but the sun doesn't shine at night, too little sunlight in the winter, wind doesn't blow uniformly every day problem costs way more than nuclear to be solved.
The real solution is proper nuclear education.
The real solution is to reverse the radical environmentalism brainwashing conducted at large scale in many countries.
Its interesting that brainwashing creates a deep hatred for nuclear, but fails to vilify the real bad guy: COAL. COAL kills 200 thousand people yearly worldwide. If all nuclear power plants worldwide would have instead been coal power plants over 2 million people would have died from COAL pollution effects.
COAL is the bad guy. Nuclear is much safer even than natural gas.

People properly educated about nuclear safety are actually pro nuclear. Nuclear IS safe.
If we approached airline safety like nuclear, there would be no airlines, they would all be grounded forever.
Like nuclear, flying with the airlines is the safest form of transportation.
Nuclear is similar, the safest energy source.
I'm a private pilot combined with my in depth computer and physics/engineering general skills allows me to understand how a modern airliner works to a deep level.
I have also dedicated a few hundred hours studying light water / boilling water reactors recently, the types of safety systems (complexity, failure modes) is extremely similar in both cases.
The big difference is its easy to create a nuclear bogeyman, since radiation is invisible, while airline accidents are well publicised.
  This site sums the thought extremely well:
      http://nuclearradiophobia.blog...

The parent post was totally serious.
The largest effect from Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl wasn't actual deaths/cancers, it was radiophobia.
Because we can't see, smell, hear or otherwise feel radiation, and because there is an extremely smart anti nuclear campaign, we all get radiophobia, until we are properly educated about the subject.
Both Three Mile Island and Fukushima killed zero people and caused zero cancer cases.
Chernobyl was easily avoidable with safety practices already in place in North America and Western Europe decades earlier, should those safety practices have been followed by the USSR, Chernobyl would have been another three mile island.
If anything, those three accidents have actually proved radiation safety standards are two orders of magnitude too strict.
If the premisses from those safety standards adopted by the NRC, EPA were true, even three mile island would have caused dozens to hundreds of cancers and many deaths. And Chernobyl would have killed around a million people (so far less than 200 deaths were caused).
The data used to setup those standards have always been incomplete, it used only data from Hiroshima and Nagazaki on one extreme and was extrapolated linearly. The reality is at radiation levels 1% those right after the nuclear detonations cancer incidence drops much more than linearly.
Please educate yourself about radiation and nuclear power safety.
The reality is that nuclear power is the safest electricity source in the world, even safer than solar and wind. Please go lookup actual hard data instead of using your gut feeling (it must be wrong). The data shows otherwise.
The reason nuclear is safe its an extremely dense energy source, nuclear power plants require small operational staff. So actually keeping the highest safety levels is possible. While solar/wind requires more than an order of magnitude more people.

Nuclear is very expensive upfront, but very cheap over the 60 to 80 years a new reactor should last. If a reactor lasts 80 years, its total operational costs will be lower even than coal (by a significant margin).
Only big hydro is cheaper today.
Solar/Wind doesn't count, since studies greatly ignore their dependence/impact of coal/natural gas peaking backup and/or the huge costs of grid upgrades to be able to move tens of GWs between areas where it's windy right now and where the power is needed. Adopting lots of wind power today = lots of CO2 emissions from coal/natural gas peaking backup. Nuclear has no such issues.
Nuclear power stations can be built fairly close to the main markets they are going to serve, while wind must be built where the winds are strong.
Plus a lot of the nuclear costs are a result of overzealous NRC regulatory framework that insists on overblowing nuclear cancer risks.
Three Mile Island and Fukushima have actually proved meltdowns are far less serious than stated by environmentalists.
And a Chernobyl style accident is likely not to ever happen again.

Here is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Its funny to watch them rage about the climate change denialists to just turn around and ignore the science/electrical engineering on nuclear and the electric grid.

You run out of arguments and resort to name calling.
Bottom line... My arguments don' t matter. What matters is disproving through videos like Pandora' s Promise and rational environmentalist videos like Cool It.
I'm yet to find any article that is able to disprove them. All articles against those two videos also resort to name calling.
Another very careful video disproving one of your beloved radical environmentalists, Helen Caldicott. I refrain to call her Doctor, since she' s just a pediatrician instead of a PhD.

Depends... If you're ok with having even more coal/natural gas being burned in low efficiency peaking powerplants to make up for moments when solar and wind are falling short than perhaps. But if you want Germany to stop burning brown coal and stop needing Putin's Gas, then you need several times the pumped hydro Germany has even if it tapped 100% of what it can.

But per the usual, you anti nuclear environmentalists don't discuss the inconvenient facts to your side. Only your pipe dream scenarios that ignore all the downsides.

Like I said and I will say again, what matters isn't Germany renewables penetration alone, instead what matters is the total renewables penetration of Germany+the countries it has large electric interconnects total average, since Germany is frequently dumping massive overproduction (which otherwise would need several times more pumped hydro than it has) onto its neighbors, and then it can import baseload nuclear/pumped hydro from France when it falls short. When you average that you will see a far smaller number than the under 25% renewables penetration in Germany alone.

Like most rational environmentalists out there, I'm pro math, while you ignore it blatantly. Start doing the inconvenient math and you will see that nuclear is an essential component to solve climate change. Not my words per see, but rather the words of many renowned climate scientists PhDs, like Dr James Hansen, please google "james hansen need nuclear", watch Pandora's Promise, Cool It, and start differentiating the radical anti nuclear environmentalists whose math doesn't add up and the ones that actually do the complete math and want to solve climate change instead of chasing a pipe dream.

Solar is not peaking. Peaking produces when the grid needs it, a somewhat match between consumption and demand is NOT peaking. If you were an electrical engineer you'd know that by heart. I have talked about this with actual electrical engineers with actual grid generation and transmission experience. You are wrong.

I would however concede that solar + wind + a 2 hr electricity production buffer could actually act as a peaking source but it would still need fossil fuel backups.
A stand alone grid operating even 50% on solar + wind with efficient fossil fuel production (baseload plants with 60% efficiency) might not even be doable with a 6hr storage capacity.
But show me a single isolated electrical grid that did this in a Hawaii / Puerto Rico or larger scale. It just haven't been done yet anywhere in the world.
Like I say again, and again, if this solution were economical, it would have already been done in Hawaii, since it's fossil power plant is low efficiency even compared to state of the art peaking power plants.

Stop dreaming, Germany's is doing what it's doing because of its coal production lobby. There are strong economical interests desperate to maintain Germany burning lots of coal.

It's been said that upgrading the USA grid to handle a predominance of solar+wind would cost 10 trillion USD just in grid upgrades (you still need to add all the solar panels and wind turbines). I'm not sure the number is this high.

Nuclear power isn't evil. Nuclear weapons *might be*. I actually believe the massive nuke stockpile of NATO prevented WWIII and WWIV already. The only thing that prevents a dictatorship like USSR and now Russia/China from going to war is the certainty it will end up with massive population and economic losses. Another inconvenient truth anti nuclear environmentalists are unable to face.

Remember Eistein's quote: "I don't know what weapons WWIII will be fought with, but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones".

So when its all said and done, nuclear power and nuclear weapons might be an essential force for peace and economic prosperity.

Keep installing your solar panels. Still waiting for Hawaii to go 100% solar+wind+hydro+biomass+geothermal !

There is no uninhabiltable land even for decades in Fukushima. None at all.
Go read up on baseload/peaking electricity sources. Peaking produces when the grid needs, not when the sun is shining, big difference. Again you show utter lack of understanding how the electrical grid works.
If its so easy to prevent solar related deaths, just make it happen...
The sun doesn't shine at night, you are assuming huge scale availability of pumped hydro which just isn't available.
Plus you are ignoring the fact that solar is next to useless even in the winter in Germany. Germany produces less than 20% solar electricity in the winter vs the summer.
Using fast nuclear reactors there is enough mined uranium + spent nuclear fuel (that becomes new fuel for IFR reactors) for many decades years to supply 100% of the earths electricity, plus fast reactors fission mainly the common uranium (U-238) instead of the rare uranium (U-235).
LFTR (salt cooled/thorium powered reactors) can power 100% of the world's energy (including providing synthetic fuels, providing warming energy, ...) including projected growth for the next few decades with just 10 thousand tons of Thorium / year. There are DOZENs of mines worldwide, each capable to providing that much throrium for at least a century, or adding it all together enough Thorium to power the earth for thousands of years. Plus by extracting uranium from seawater there's another ten thousand year supply of Uranium.
Russia just brought online a new sodium cooled fast reactor, a BN-800, they have a few BN-600 running for 40 years around Russia and the former USSR states.

Nuclear can power the earth's electricity today, solar needs radical energy storage scientific breakthroughs to power the whole earth. Again, not a problem of having enough solar panels, but an energy storage problem since the sun doesn't shine at night, and provides very little photons in the winter at high lattitudes.

I'm not a pro nuclear zealot, since I'm not against solar+wind. I'm just against those that claim solar+wind are the perfect solution, and that it's enough to solve climate change. I actually tell people to put solar panels at their homes here in Brazil, since we are at a low enough lattitude the sun provides at least half the photons in the winter vs the summer, plus we are still at negligible solar penetration and we have 70GW worth of large hydro dams that can help with the load following without need for pumped hydro. What you call huge scale pumped hydro is still peanuts compared to what will be required to turn off all of Germany's nuclear power plants. I'll make another prediction, Germany just won't turn off the remaining nukes, it just won't be possible.

Go study up on nuclear power, grid generation, grid transmission characteristics. Nuclear isn't perfect, but it's the only solution that can power the world today. Solar+wind can only be a fairly small part of the solution today. Remember that Germany uses the rest of Europe to load follow it's ups and downs of solar+wind production, so what matters is the overall penetration of solar+wind Europe wide, and that percentage is tiny !

One more study that ignores the reality that the electric grid needs electricity when customers need it, not when the wind is blowing.
Plus those studies ignore the extra cost of building humongous upgrades to transmission lines to be able to move tens of GWs when the wind is blowing strong in one area to the areas where the wind is weak (which happens pretty much all the time).
Being pro solar+wind today is being pro coal and natural gas. Coal kills 200,000 people/year worldwide, 13,000 people/year in the USA alone.
Only nuclear can provide greenhouse gas free baseload electricity to the grid anywhere in the world.
Without nuclear there is NO solution to climate change.

Fukushima greatest impact was deaths caused by an irrational evacuation + all anti nuclear idiots putting BS on people's heads.
Should the evacuation have been optional, there would be 90% less deaths.
Zero radiation deaths + zero cancer rate measurements.
Chernobyl was the only really serious nuclear accident and it killed less than 100 people and even the worst case 5000 cancer deaths are increasingly looking like an exaggeration, perhaps less than a thousand people will die prematurely from cancer.
Chernobyl type accidents should never EVER happen again. It was easily preventable with nuclear safety practices from 25 years earlier !

Compare that to coal that kills 200 thousand / year worldwide, 13 thousand / year in USA alone.
Natural gas total deaths are far more than nuclear per TWh produced.
Solar+wind means lots of natural gas or coal peaking power plants, plus solar rooftop joins together the two highest risk professions performed in large scale (roofing and electrician). The low density nature of solar and wind will mean that in the long run far more people will die from solar+wind install/maintenance than nuclear, but you are probably ok with that, since its not you at risk, but instead a low level labor guys on minimum wage.
When you add together all deaths from solar+wind+natural gas, nuclear looks like a cake walk if you look at it honestly without a negative bias.

Solar+wind+hydro+biomass+geothermal can't run the worlds electrical grid without another 30 to 50 years of scientific advancement.
If solar+wind were so great, Hawaii would be running 100% on solar+wind right now with its ultra expensive low efficient electricity oil based generators. And many other islands would have done it too. Instead only the little islands with ultra expensive diesel generated electricity can afford to go solar.

The problem isn't having enough panels. Its also not having cheaper/higher efficiency panels. Its a humongous energy storage problem.

The Germany plan is just confirming what was predicted a decade ago, the math just doesn't add up. It's not a glass half empty problem, it's a glass that is half full and can't be topped off for decades.

That's the big problem with you fundamentalists. Be it religion based, technology based, politically based, you just refuse to see what is out of tune with your fundamentalist view of things.