Nuclear power generation, as it is practiced today, is: inefficient, dirty, dangerous and water-dependent. It does not have to be that way.
A few weeks back there was a diary by The Anomaly that seemed intriguing but I did not quite get it (there are technical details there which I will not repeat here, so go take a look). Then a few days ago I came across the same subject in a TEDx talk by a guy who used to be a rocket scientist and has taken up the cause of Thorium based nuclear power in the form of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR.) The few minutes of the talk were interesting, to say the least, so I sought out more. I admit that I was hooked.
Pretty much everything wrong about nuclear energy today, and there is plenty, can be traced back to the sixties. Pressurized water (heavy or light) reactors extract less than 2% (to be generous) of the energy in the nuclear fuel. High pressure and temperature mean that when something goes wrong (and it will), it goes wrong very badly. They need high volumes of water for cooling which limits their locations and makes them vulnerable. High inefficiency means that there is plenty of nasty radioactive waste. It also means that we will run out of nuclear fuel at some point.
LFTRs operate at normal pressures and extremely high efficiencies, in the high 90s. They generate and recycle the fuel, which is so abundant that we could operate civilization for millennia and not run out. Almost all the fuel is consumed, so there is very little in the way of waste. And they don't need water as the turbines run on gas exchange rather than steam. They are highly scalable and, this is important, throttleable. In the initial design the idea was to use them in aircraft. This will probably not be feasible due to weight and safety constraints but spacecraft do NOT share those constraints.
With LFTRs the safety features are passive and depend on the laws of physics. The hotter the reactor gets, the slower the reaction. If pumping fails, the salts simply melt through a plug and flow down into a container.
LFTRs realize the original dream of nuclear power as approaching electricity "too cheap to meter." When you have that, all sorts of things become possible, such as synthesizing liquid fuels and producing hydrogen, desalinating water on scales (to address an issue on the rec list) beyond the industrial, even capturing CO2 and pumping it back into all those empty spaces underground left by the oil industry. And then there is the application I alluded to above, space travel. Just this week, the Economist had a leader saying farewell to the space age, that we will be condemned to forever faff around in near Earth orbit. (I disagree but they make some good points).
A LFTR powered spaceship with an ion drive can be assembled in orbit, with no danger that a launch failure will rain radioactives on the people below, and then we're really cooking with gas. With that much power, Mars and the asteroids are weeks and months away instead of years and decades. A suitable medium sized asteroid contains trillions of dollars worth of metals and minerals. LFTR ships can bring that wealth to us and undercut mining on Earth.
Not to mention of course, that LFTR power would eliminate the need to cut the tops off of mountains for coal, to frack the rock for natural gas, to tear up Canada's tar sands for oil and leave the fracking Saudi's begging for spare change.
Thorium, the element in question, is naturally associated with the rare earths you might have heard about recently. What you might not know is that when an American miner goes after those precious rare earths, the thorium he digs up as well is then classified as radioactive waste, to be disposed of expensively. This is one of the reasons we don't have an indigenous supply of rare earths, which are highly important to renewable energy technologies, and why China has a strangle-hold on them.
This is not a new idea. Most of the work was done back in the sixties and a primitive demonstration reactor was built but the industry and the establishment were going in different directions. Most people involved realized that such incredibly low efficiencies were unsustainable but they preferred Fast Breeder Reactors and the status quo precisely because they needed nuclear material for the Cold War's massive nuclear arsenals and because that was what they had invested in. (From The Anomaly's diary and Sorensen's videos).
By the way, as noted in The Anomaly's diary, China is proceeding with this kind of reactor. Good luck to them, they need the energy but then, so do we.
8:17 PM PT: If you have the time watch a full length video: http://www.youtube.com/...