Unfortunately, even in the US, we have no plan to install the clean power we need fast enough to save the planet. Even if every country were to agree tomorrow to completely eliminate their coal plant emissions by 2030, how do we think they are actually going to achieve that? There is no White House plan that explains this. There is no DOE plan. There is no plan or strategy. The deadlines will come and go and most countries will profusely apologize for not meeting their goals, just like we have with most of the signers of the Kyoto Protocol today. Apologies are nice, but they will not restore the environment.
Barry Brook offers Steve Kirsch a guest blog spot — excellent:
Steve Kirsch, after discussions with a large number of the principal researchers on Argonne National Laboratory’s IFR project, has prepared his ‘one stop shop’ summary of the Integral Fast Reactor technology (sometimes referred to as the ‘Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor’ [LMFBR] or the ‘Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor’ [ALMR], although in reality, the IFR is [...]
[From The Integral Fast Reactor – Summary for Policy Makers]
In addition, there are valuable contributions in the comments to this post. And do read this comment by Barry Brook, which begins as follows:
I was asked by email about the economics of IFR relative to Gen III reactors. Here is my brief response (there is more in various posts and comments in the BNC archives):
Clearly, as a commercial IFR is yet to be built, this will remain unproven until a demonstration commercial-sized plant is built. This is the current imperative. A key importance of getting the IFR and other Gen IVs fast tracked is that they provide enormous social capital to allow for the necessary expansion of Gen III. If the waste problem and long-term fuel supply issue are not perceived as being ’solved’, then we will struggle to get sufficient support for the sort of large-scale roll out that is require. So ‘proving’ up IFRs, as soon as possible, in one key part of the nuclear synergy, even if the economics of recycle are currently marginal.
Standardisation and modularity are clearly the game-changers for the nuclear power industry.
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