Compared to breeders, renewables are cheap as dirt too.
Nonsense.
Pie in the sky for now. Renewables are on the ground producing usable energy as we speak.
Also nonsense.
All kilowatt hours aren't equal. To borrow Rod Adams' analogy, think of them like seat hours. Seat hours during a high profile game are worth tremendously more than seat hours during a cold autumn night when there isn't a game on. Seats hours that require you to get up and leave in the middle of the game are essentially worthless.
Most of the energy produced by renewables is useless(but gets counted and subsidized anyway). All power produced by renewables must be backed up in full by spinning reserve and natural gas turbines or hydro power ready to jump at a moments notice.
Since there's no way to disentangle renewables from fossil fuels they're at best a device to make coal and gas fired plants a little bit more efficient.
Confused? Soylent is referring to a liquid-flouride thorium reactor, a next-generation fission power plant design which looks good on paper.
The technology is well understood. Several molten salt reactor prototypes have been built and operated as a result of the desire to have nuclear powered aircraft. ICBMs took over that role and military had their hearts set on fast breeder reactors for their ability to produce very high quality Pu-239 so the programme was cancelled. The molten fluoride salt chemistry for separating actinides and fission products is well developed and understood.
Either he's too lazy to type it out or he was hoping I'd say "LFTR lol wut?" and give him an excuse to play the appeal-to-authority card
Either you're too lazy to read the thread without skipping posts or you'll just take any excuse to be obnoxious.
...and it takes 10 times the energy to mine it and refine it and ship it...
No.
It takes 10 times the energy to mine it and produce yellowcake. It takes exactly as much energy as it always did to transport it back and forth across the world for conversion to hexafluoride, enrichment, fashion it into fuel elements and disposal. All this other stuff is declining slowly in energy consumption, especially enrichment now that remaining gaseous diffusion is quickly being replaced with gas centrifuges.
As you can see, even using 300 ppm and 500 ppm EROI concerns are completely irrelevant:
http://www.environdec.com/reg/021/dokument/EPDforsmark2007.pdf
...and it would take thousands of new reactors to meet the world's power needs...
1000 x 1 GW of light water reactors with industry typical capacity factor of 90% produce as much power as approximately 1 million mounstrous(104 meter turbine diameter) 3.6 MW wind turbines form GE with a 28% capacity factor(good spots get used up first, so that's probably very optimistic).
1 TW of nuclear doesn't require a massive expansion of transmission capacity out to desolate, windy areas in the middle of nowhere. It is actually even worse than that, in aggregate the lines supporting wind power have to be rated for 3.6 TW to meet peak output from these wind farms even if mean output is only 1 TW(unless you're content with throwing a lot of the power produced away, which is what tends to happen in the real world).
1 TW of nuclear doesn't require a "smart grid" to come in and shut your airconditioning off and prevent you from doing your washing for a week or two when the wind isn't blowing to protect the grid. It doesn't show seasonal variations.
1 TW of nuclear won't take Europe deeper into dependency on russian Gazprom.
Most nuclear plants designed for a 40 year lifespan have proven themselves capable of having their license extended to 60 years and it's an open question if they can have their license extended to 80 years. Gen III plants are designed for 60 years of operation and it is expected that they will be able to extend their licence to 80 years.
Wind turbines are expected to last 20-30 years.
Solar PV is laughably expensive and suffers from the very same reliance on good regional climate and natural gas. Remotely promissing thin-film cells require the development of a transparent electrode based on something other than indium tin oxide, which is far to scarce to scale up(possibly metallic carbon nanotubes or graphene, but no one really knows).
Solar thermal has barely evolved since the designs deployed in the late 19th and early 20th century. Development of remotely cost effective solar thermal plants has eluded both the DoE and numerous private enterprises.
... they aren't that much better than renewables to begin with, and they produce nuclear waste, and they can be used to produce nuclear weapons.
You can't run an electric grid on non-hydro renewables. Hydropower is lovely, unfortunately it's unable to meet more than a handful of percent of the worlds energy needs.
Reactors designed for civilian use produce poor quality plutonium for nuclear weapons. Too much Pu-240 and Pu-241 and you have a lot of neutrons flying around from spontaneous fission as well as heat problems. You don't really want to insulate such plutonium with a thick blanket of precisely crafted high explosives and it's unlikely that any country would get the precise timing and tritium boosting required to avoid a fizzle correct on the first try.
You're making the strange assumption that other countries suffering an energy scarcity will give a damn what the US or Europe thinks of them building a reactor. They quite simple won't.
If a country wants a simple nuclear weapon(I.e. air craft deliverable) it's far easier to build centrifuges or simple reactors for the purpose of producing high quality plutonium(e.g. the dual-use magnox reactor, the detailed design of which was and probably still are publically available).
If you can get over that moral hurdle about the long-lived nuclear waste, of course.
It's strange that spent nuclear fuel presents a moral hurdle for you when you don't have a problem with setting civilization up to either completely collapse or continue to burn every last ounce of coal and gas unless you can pull out of your wazoo at the last minute a continent-wide Rube Goldberg machine comprised of V2G, smart grid, HVDC 'webs' criss-crossing the continent and able to deliver electricity from anywhere to anywhere at a moments notice(even more vulnerable to space weather and sabotage than the current grid) and months of electrical storage backing up the entire grid.
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