Kiisu

Six Reasons for Cloudy Skies on the Solar Energy Industry

It has been nearly 40 years since I studied the topic, so I expect my recollection of the subject will be a bit dated.

However, if I recall correctly, there are alternative engineering solutions to current commercial reactor technology... breeder reactors being one that comes immediately to mind (a properly designed breeder can produce more "fuel" than it "burns"; it is "old" technology; and breeders can be designed to use the more plentiful Thorium instead of Uranium).

And as I recall, some radioactive waste is "waste" for political, not-technical, reasons. With proper reprocessing, that waste can be reused in properly designed plants.

And to throw a bit more gasoline on the fire, I've thought US commercial reactor design to be a bit backward in an engineering-economic sense... instead of building and debugging a series of one-off designs, I've thought the better approach would be to create a small set of standardized power plant designs. As lessons are learned, the standardized design set would be updated. Once debugged, major system components could be mass-produced... thereby reducing the plant unit-cost.

Just a few bits of trivia to sidetrack an interesting discussion.

--Kiisu