Love reading your columns Andrew.

One solution may be the ALMR. A good article on this was in the Dec. 2005 Scientific American, titled Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste. Talk about burying the lede! The title should have had "ALMR" in it, since that was the most important thing.

ALMR stands for Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor. It will be difficult to build, but the theory has been worked out. Instead of using water to 'moderate' fuel rods, which slows neutrons way down so they can split U235, this would use liquid Sodium as a moderator. For some reason, Sodium doesn't slow down neutrons. So the neutrons would be 'fast', and in fact the ALMR is also called a 'Fast Neutron Reactor'.

The advantage of using fast neutrons is that they split U238, which is over 99% of all uranium. Right now what we do is to 'enrich' natural uranium to get the ordinary 0.71% of U235 to about 5%. What's left over is 'depleted' uranium, and this is being used as ammo in Iraq. Useless junk.

Burning U238 would mean that 99% of the fuel could be used, instead of a small fraction. Not only that, but the ALMR has the potential of reducing nuclear waste by a factor of 100. Until fusion comes along, these babies are the way to go. China and India are working on versions, but not the US.

Read the article. Very very interesting indeed.

I think a closer review of history will show that utilities abandoned nuclear power in the 1980s because people like Amory Lovins were able to convince them that it was simply too expensive. Natural gas and coal are a lot cheaper.

Today I bet if you run the numbers, you'll find wind generation is actually cheaper than nuclear power plants.

You mean fusion. Regular old hot fusion. Cold fusion is magic. Fusion is real. In the really long term, say, 100 years from now as an upper limit, fusion will be an excellent energy source. Cold fusion will never be a fuel source, any more than, say, prayer.

Fusion is becoming a widely understood process with lots of engineering limitations that still need to be resolved. I think a serious worldwide commitment to fusion research would result in usable power plants around 2040, but that's a guess.

Cold fusion is either a hoax or an extremely rare random event. It would be like planning on using spontaneous human combustion as a fuel source.