What I do see is a fair number of people declaring that thorium reactors are the solution to our energy problems.  And making that declaration based on?  Certainly not on a working thorium reactor that is producing electricity at an affordable price.

You recognize that at this point LFTR advantages are simply hypothetical.  Some people seem unable to grasp that fact.

If that were the case, then we would never have bothered with nearly all of the scientific advancements to date. Human flight? There was no working model for that before the 1900s, that didn’t stop enthusiasts from putting together what they could in their spare time and having at it.

The hypothetical, yes hypothetical, costs and advantages of LFTR using thorium as a fuel are interesting enough, in my opinion at least, to warrant deeper consideration and investigation. If anything, they would be an excellent source of power for things like space exploration vehicles and extra planetary locations(bases, living spaces, etc) where wind and solar might not be as viable as on terra firma.

So, while wind, solar, hydro, etc. all have tremendous promise as renewable sources of energy, let’s not dismiss something that has potentially great uses in other areas, let alone all of the other hypothetical benefits.

What you should argue instead is that Thorium allows the use of different kinds of fuel forms that are cheaper. However, that’s not an infinitely defensible position. A molten salt reactor could be run off Uranium as well.

Haven’t we done this already? You can’t power the planet with vapourware.

Are you comparing the price to that of paid off coal without hidden costs, paid off coal with ‘all in’ accounting, or new coal generation with or without all in accounting?

We’ve got two new processes coming on line which will cut the cost and raise the efficiency of solar. That will drive the cost of solar below new nuclear.

Renewables receive less subsidy per kWh than will new nuclear. New nuclear would be given the same sort of PTC as wind plus would get free loan guarantees and free liability insurance.

* Despite the fact that fast breeder development began in 1944, now some 65 year later, of the 438 operational nuclear power reactors worldwide, only one of these, the BN-600 in Russia, is a commercial-size fast reactor and it hardly qualifies as a successful breeder. The Soviet Union/Russia never closed the fuel cycle and has yet to fuel BN-600 with plutonium. http://www.fissilematerials.org/blog/2010/02/history_and_status_of_fas.html

* “…it would take a conventional light-water reactor (LWR) 30 years just to provide the plutonium to start one such breeder reactor, and so far, such systems have not been found to be economically viable. … The new study suggests an alternative: an enriched uranium-initiated breeder reactor in which additional natural or depleted (that is, a remnant of the enrichment process) uranium is added to the reactor core at the same rate nuclear materials are consumed. … however, there are little hard data on whether such a cycle would really be practical and economically competitive. One of the report’s major conclusions is that more research is needed before such decisions can be made.” Note: no mention of thorium as significant fuel. http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/nuclear-fuel-cycle.shtml

* Solar PV cost trend. http://i.imgur.com/GvsxR.png from http://www.americanenergyinnovation.org/full-report/

Let us know when the first LFTR is built then we can compare your claims against reality.

You present a best-case projection. We won’t know for 10-20 years.

But even a 40% reduction from $0.20/kWh to $0.12/kWh won’t make thorium reactors cost competitive. Remember, they need that ‘twelve cents’ 24 hours a day to stay in business. Wind at half the price kills nuclear as there is no way to sell power at prices high enough to break even over the rest of the day.

That the Sun does not shine 24/365 is not an issue. The fact that the Sun does shine, on average, 4-5 hours a day throughout the US and when it does it will produce electricity cheaper than a reactor causes fatal problems for new reactor bids.

You cannot construct a new electricity generation system that must sell at a 24 hour average rate higher than competing sources. If wind takes several hours per day and solar takes another hunk then nuclear would have to raise its selling price for the remaining hours to a point which would make it multiple times its average price. Even if natural gas generation were $0.30/kWh it would snatch the remaining hours away from nuclear.

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We’ve got plenty of existing rooftops, parking lots and low value land such as brown fields and landfills to take care of our solar panels. Worry not.