While I wait for Paul Wayper’s patches, I thought I’d take issue with his “vaguely researched opinion piece” on Nuclear power, and offer my own even less researched thoughts (I don’t even have footnotes!).

I am most definitely not “taking a stance”, the issues are far too complex and varied to do so. I will just throw a few more facts and/or speculations into the mix …

This is why I maintain my stance that we need to move toward nuclear power.

…

Designs like the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor and others are completely fault-tolerant – if you switch all the pumps off and pull out all the control rods, the reactor sits there doing nothing more dangerous than producing heat. They’ve tested this, and it works. No radiation leaks, no steam explosions, and when the fuel is expended it’s already in a safe container for either storage or processing.

First, nothing is “completely fault-tolerant”, that’s like “totally secure”.

Actually it turns out the Pebble Bed research reactor they built in Germany was shut down, after an accident that released radioactive fuel into the environment. Nice!

Pebble Bed reactors rely on the physical integrity of the pebbles to contain the Nuclear fuel. Manufacturing the pebbles is still something of a challenge, current estimates are that 1 in 10,000 pebbles has a defect. Not bad. Except that with ~350,000 of them in the reactor at any one time that’s still 35 reasons to make me skittish.

Pebble Bed reactors are predicted to be cheaper to build than older style reactors. Note I said “predicted”, they’re still working on building the first commercial one. Note also, that by cheap they mean in the $100 – $200 million USD range. Not astronomical, but that sort of money would buy you a lot of solar panels too.

Although the waste from Pebble Bed reactors is already somewhat contained, in the possibly defective possibly corroded pebbles, the problem is volume. It’s estimated a Pebble Bed reactor will generate 13 times as much waste by volume, I guess they’ll have to make the broom cupboard at Lucas Heights a little bigger.

Now, we’re all free market zealots these days right? OK. So if nuclear power really is safe, then surely I can buy insurance for my new nucler power plant on the free market .. right? Ruh roh. Which makes nuclear power less safe than a drunk 17 year old in a hotted up WRX, case closed.