"We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception."
Just imagine what we might have by 500 years! I say go for IFR's NOW! They are the ONLY economical way to do carbon-free baseload power without bankrupting the economy.
Well that would depend if it was hand built as an individual project or whipped up on a factory line wouldn't it?
We must deploy today’s GenIII reactors immediately. We cannot wait any longer. These GenIII reactors have passive safety features undreamt of in Chernobyl and Fukishima.
And they have the GenIV feature of being modular. Think about that for a moment. Older nukes were the “Rolls Royce” of the energy world. They were hand-crafted site-constructed expensive beasts! But GenIII reactors can be modularised and put up on the assembly line. Safety systems can be standardised as part of the production line process. It will bring the costs down dramatically, and cuts Rolls Royce costs down to the Hyundai level, while being better than the original.
Now, GenIV reactors are still my favourite as they burn nuclear waste. They breed it up. I’ve said repeatedly that we have about 500 years of fuel sitting around in cooling ponds, just waiting for GenIV reactors to burn it.
But it’s not that simple. We don’t have access to all that energy yet. Even if I waved a magic wand and overnight and we had the thousands of GenIV nukes we need, it would still take a few decades to breed up our nuclear waste to the right purity to run them! That is, although we *already* have 500 years worth of nuclear fuel sitting around in our ‘waste’ cooling ponds, it will take a few decades to get at it all as the fuel only doubles every 7 years.
So build the safe GenIII nukes now, and then we’ll have all the waste we need ready for the GenIV reactors when they finally come off the production line! As a friend over on BNC said,
"Gen III+ reactors (AP1000, ESBWR) are also largely ‘modular’ with parts built in a factory and assembled on site. We can do this now. New designs should be developed, but there is no need to wait. In 10 years China will be building AP1000 (or their higher-power variant the CAP1400) reactors at rates that will astonish the world. They are building the module factories now."
We have the technology right now. We can do this! We should build AP1000 assembly lines to fly them out the doors onto the trucks and freight them straight to site for assembly like so much giant-sized Lego. It’s time to do this, and the faster we start the better we’ll cope with peak oil and climate change.
Energy will be a AND/AND solution. We can't rely on just one source, we need many. Wind power is one of them.
Can you please explain this statement? GenIV nuclear reactors feed off waste and could run the world for 500 years just on the waste we already have today. They are baseload, load following, and live in concrete bunkers that are pretty much bomb-proof, 9/11 proof, and definitely cyclone proof. But wind turbines only have a 33% capacity factor which means they only work a third of the time, the other 2/3rds are down when we don't decide they need to be down (as when a nuke is getting serviced) but when nature stops blowing, and turbines definitely aren't cyclone proof.
Sure we need other energy sources such as liquid fuels for cars, but when it comes to electricity, the world's cheapest electricity will come from GenIV nukes built in a modular format on an assembly line, trucked to site and then clipped together on site like so much super-sized lego. AND there's no need to build "super-grids" to shoot solar electricity from one side of a continent to the other or wind back again, so you save there as well. (Let alone the cost of all the huge seaside salt-water hydro dams required to act as giant batteries for the intermittent wind and solar.) Whichever way you look at it, GenIV nukes ARE the silver bullet. And we have enough uranium and thorium on earth to run the world for hundreds of millions of years.
But I’m here to stop them! I will now reveal to the world the presence of this infamous font of infamy! The M.I.B. are actually the Mason’s in Black. You can learn all about them if you just buy my upcoming book, Why climate change is crap and you must fear the M.I.B. instead for just $29.95.
If you like Why climate change is crap you might also enjoy the sequels,
More about the M.I.B,
What you can do about the M.I.B.,
How to survive the coming M.I.B. take-over,
Another 100 reasons climate change is rubbish and your local CSIRO lab have also been brought out by the M.I.B., and finally,
How the M.I.B. fabricated the laws of physics on a universal scale to trick every spectrometer and science student in every lab across the planet, ever. No really. (This last title is a little long but my publishers say it appeals to a very specific market. One has to pay the bills, and what the heck is wrong with that?)
You’ll probably want to buy the boxed set for only $100. It’s all good science, you can trust me. The fact that I couldn’t get my works published in the peer-reviewed journals only proves how far the M.I.B. have come! Once they have control of our minds, the Rubber Duck underwear laws are soon to follow.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra