No discussion of traveling wave or thorium reactors. There is new tech that uses fuel much more efficiently and produces less waste.

Keep in mind, thorium salt reactors have many disadvantages as well, including short lifespan, requiring an on site chemical plant to constantly maintain proper mixture levels, embrittlement and corrosion of containment vessels and pipes, etc., but the biggest hurdle is regulatory since they are 1) breeder reactors that enrich the fuel (which are nearly impossible to get approval for in today's climate) and 2) need fairly highly enriched fuels to operate, much higher levels than ordinary reactors (also causing major opposition).

None of those are insurmountable obstacles, but they are why we don't have them producing power today.

I would like to see thorium salt reactor put into production..

low waste..there's a hell of a lot of thorium out there-- several times more than uranium. So much that we won't run out of it and can use it for hundreds of years.

I guess I'm lucky enough to live in a country where less than one-fifth of the electricity is generated by coal. So I don't much think of coal vs. nuclear in terms of the cancer risks as such. I'll never be close enough to the fuel of a nuclear reactor. And I'll likely be exposed to more toxicity from traffic than coal plants.

Also, our CANDU reactors can be powered by decommissioned bombs.

"CANDU reactors are unique in that they use natural, unenriched uranium as a fuel; with some modification, they can also use enriched uranium, mixed fuels, and even thorium. Thus, CANDU reactors are ideally suited for using material from decommissioned nuclear weapons as fuel, helping to reduce global arsenals."

https://cna.ca/technology/energy/candu-technology/

There is still spent fuel to be managed, which isn't trivial, but I'm okay with at taking a few bombs out of circulation in the mean time.

Coal is responsible for many orders of magnitude more deaths and radioactive emissions than all nuclear incidents combined. But people don't care about simple things like facts or numbers. Talking about renewables when a significant portion of baseload power is still produced by coal is pointless. Let people have their feel good green tech (made in China, powered by a lot of coal of course ; ), but replace coal with modern nuke.

Denying the place of recent generation nuclear power as a viable strategy of supplying cleaner baseload power is much like denying man made climate change. Fucking moronic.

Thorium salt reactors do produce waste, but it's incredibly safe compared to breeder/lwr reactor byproducts. In fact, you can introduce older reactor waste in to the liquid mix in small amounts and the LFTR will break it down to less harmful components by accelerating decay in the core.

http://lftrnow.com/

"LFTRs can also burn radioactive “waste” we are currently storing, made from the LWR units of today. We could actually reduce our radioactive waste using LFTRs and other Molten-Salt Reactors (MSRs) (more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1fqB6p9pgM)."

So LFTR is a strategy for both power supply and cleaning up existing waste storage. Who'da thunk it??

I don't see nuclear having a renaissance anytime soon...
Solar and Wind are already cheaper, don't emit CO2, and don't produce nuclear waste that has to be transported and stored in exotic containers for thousands of generations.

Thorium salt reactors also produce waste.

Nuclear does make a useful energy source for NASA space probes though.

I used to be anti-nuclear. The basis for this was one part "oh no, meltdowns!" and one part anti-war. The second part of this concern happened when I learned that the material in warheads is refined in nuclear reactors.

As I continued my research I learned that newer reactors can be built that do not enrich weapons-grade material. They can't be used for bombs.

With the new reactor technology, I was left with only the concern around meltdowns. Even with older technology, meltdowns are very rare. Newer technology---like what's mentioned in this video--is even safer..

Now, I'm an old hippie, and I still prefer solar and wind (in my ideal world) but my concern over nuclear was pretty much put to rest with all that I've learned.

As long as the powerplants are designed in such a way that they do not create material that can be weaponized, I'm pretty much okay with it.

I like how at 1:48 you can hear the screaming of the souls of the damned, that power the reactor.

I recall something similar, low power medium heat mini-reactors that could not meltdown, on a tv science show a decade or more ago. They had a few small units (shipping container size) running a few buildings somewhere in Canada on an experimental basis, but I have no idea what came of the project.

To add to what @skinnydaddy1 has said, if you look at a satellite image you can see that only the part of the building covered by the new arch, housing reactor number 4, was destroyed in the 1986 explosion. There isn't any need to cover the intact reactor number 3 which was actually still used for another 14 years after the loss of reactor number 4:

https://goo.gl/maps/GxvACfnvtpM2

The primary goal of the NSC is to prevent the reactor complex from leaking radioactive material into the environment and the secondary goal is to allow a future partial demolition of the old structure.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

My understanding is that the main barrier to achieving fusion sooner is funding. Unlike fission breeder reactors, there are few weapon applications - so military funding from the US doesn't go there.

Fusion power has been 30 years for at least the last 30 years, and probably since the 1960s.

This article has a bit more detail on some of the subjects this video covered, and also the 30 year timeframe:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/03/23/nuclear-fusion-reactor-research/#.WCWhnuF97fA

I'm always curious about the 'free energy' claim.
Even if it's not expensive, it won't be 'free', and if it is so perfect that it's free, what happens to the millions that work in the energy field today? I'm not suggesting that issue is in any way a reason to not go forward, just that it's an issue that must be dealt with in the eventuality that 'free' energy becomes reality.
They should hype it as possible 'cheap, efficient, clean energy', never 'free', imo.

Are there any reactors trying to use both methods....magnetic confinement/compression and laser compression combined? It seems like they could use much less powerful (and less power consuming) compression/heating devices if they used both together.

To be honest I didn't read all of your reply because you said you were done, so I don't think you'll respond further I'll just address the tail-end - the noun-switching thing is really stupid.

If I say our police aren't performing to the standards we require, you don't help the dialogue by switching out the word police for 'blacks', 'jews', or 'hydrogen atoms'. For one, a police force is something we choose to have; we have created the police force for specific reasons. These specific reasons come with minimum requirements, which we need to keep track of to make sure we didn't make the wrong choice. Secondly, we have responsibility for our police force, to make sure they have the training and support to continue to serve their original goals, because nobody gets into police work with the dream of being on the wrong end of a viral video about shooting innocents.

You can't switch out the word police for 'blacks' or 'hydrogen atoms' because that's idiotic. You can switch out the word police for 'nurses,' 'fire fighters,' etc, because those are comparable groups, that we need to monitor, support, and hold accountable.

Nothing of what I say paints every police officer as equally in the wrong. That's like saying it's wrong to sound the alert for occasional nuclear meltdowns, because that ignores all the times we don't have meltdowns. If our reactor works fine 6 days of the week, but has a critical failure once a week, that's a problem, and needs to be addressed, even though the other 6 days are fine.