>better nuclear designs

Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors. On the other hand there are plenty of people suggesting that we not build new reactors. We aren't seeing an attack on old reactor designs, we're seeing an attack on the "other option" you listed.

>Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors.

the real political and economical power is with the current nuclear industry which doesn't have other designs. Any permit to build if given in the next 10 years would result in a new old nuclear plant. Like any powerful established industry they protect their position with heavy regulations and wouldn't let any innovative outsiders in.

There are plenty of other designs, most of which get built as test plants, work nicely then never get built again due to political pressure to stick to "safe" designs.

Yeah, but they are lobbying to we allow industry to build new plants without a fundamental and transparent rethinking of the safety issues, and with various proposed schemes to limit or eliminate corporate liability. (Is that really the best way to ensure safe designs and operation procedures?)

The reactor designs are newer, but we also need newer designs for management and disaster prevention/response. Even with the crappy obsolete Fukishima reactors, we would have come through this event fine had there been a (much) bigger investment in those non-technological areas when the plant was built and over the decades since then.

Um, the root cause of the problems at Fukushima had nothing to do with the design of the reactors. The root cause was that their backup diesel generators, which were to supply power to the reactor control and safety systems in the event of a shutdown, along with their switchgear, were sited behind a seawall that got overcome by the tsunami. If the backup generators had been sited properly, this whole fiasco would never have gotten started; the reactors would have shut down safely, end of story. I'm actually amazed that the reactors have held up as well as they have in the face of having no cooling water over a significant part of the fuel rods for this long.

> develop nuclear fusion [ as its development has been practically stopped for the fear of proliferation ]

Wait ... what? Are you saying that nuclear fusion (and not fission) poses some kind of proliferation risk? Proliferation of what, exactly? Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets? Hydrogen? Deuterium?? Tritium??? Helium????

Or are there some reasons to worry that the neutron flux from the reaction would be used to activate or otherwise enrich something dangerous that I don't know about?

>Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets?

this 2, laser driven inertial confinement and tokamak, don't pose a significant proliferation risk even/when they are successful. Unfortunately this 2 is also least promising as the decades of experiments have clearly shown. As a result, there is no rush of investments into them.

The proliferation risk is creation of relatively compact, say, in the first generation, up to transport container size fusion device. Creation and maintenance of such a weapon wouldn't be possible to control as there is no radiation, no uranium mining/buying, no massive enrichment facilities, no breeder reactors,... nothing to control. Basically a nightmare for modern international politics.

At the end of 199x the government analysis shown that the fusion wouldn't be cheaper than 4c/kwt of coal power and it would pose the significant proliferation risks if developed and miniaturized into the deliverable device. Thus we have such a dismal investment and progress. Do you pay attention to Sandia?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841

I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb. Quite the opposite: one needs to keep the reaction under control, so keeping it small makes things easier. I suppose, in theory, it's possible, but I doubt it.

If you have a citation for where Sandia says there are proliferation risks, I would be interested.

it isn't a yield (like shock/heat wave, etc...) that is the primary purpose of neutron weapons. The neutron flux is what they are created for. Just for example - the neutron weapons deployed in Europe several decades ago were of very low yield, as low as it is possible with fissile-fusion weapon - their purpose was to stop Soviet Union tanks as intense neutron flux passes easily through the armor, yet is absorbed nicely by humans as we're 80% water.

>I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb.

No need to. The only thing what matters is the amount of neutrons generated. High intensity flux during 10-30sec. instead of super-high during 0.001ms explosion would do the same damage if the total amount of neutrons generated is the same.

I mentioned Sandia because what they do (more precisely what they did 10 years ago) was the most effective and promising way to get effective fusion - for energy generation as well as to weaponize it without fission part, and i think it is illustrative to look at them to see how progress has stalled (more precisely it was redirected from advancing of the engineering of the fusion into more plasma research) when it became that clear.

So you're saying it would be used to make a neutron bomb? Interesting.

I do understand that practical fusion requires neutron flux, but I didn't think we had achieved any significant amount of fusion capable of producing such a flux.

fusion development hasn't been stopped, especially not for fear of proliferation.

Do you have any information about this subject that I do not?

Also, the major problem with putting solar power plants in deserts is that you lose most of your power trying to get it somewhere useful. Expect this to change when we have commercially viable room temperature (ish) superconductors.

Another problem with desert solar power plants is political - Europe for instance would become dependant on the middle east and africa for power, which after the past couple decades of oil politics doesn't look like a very attractive option.

Of course nuclear isn't much better in this regard - while we do have uranium deposits, we don't have any uranium mines, and hence rely on imports for nuclear fuel.

On the other hand, you can always use thorium deposits, use nuclear waste from other nations as fuel, pull uranium from seawater, etc.

>fusion development hasn't been stopped, especially not for fear of proliferation.

>Do you have any information about this subject that I do not?

do you have any information about fusion development being really seriously continued? It isn't proliferation risk alone that affects the development. It is also about projected cost of the produced energy. Any such facilities would be extremely expensive, typical nuclear plant expensive, and it doesn't look like it will have energy density higher than current nuclear plants as both are limited by the same factors, like cooling system engineering that transfers the energy from core to turbines. Thus the price of fusion energy may theoretically be cheaper than the price of fission energy only by the cost of uranium itself. Permits, regulatory approval process, etc... will not be cheaper. Such cost projections, together with the proliferation risk are the reasons that there is no meaningful development of fusion today.

With high voltage directed current lines, losses are around 3%/1000km. That's not so much.

Interesting, do you have any links as to how they work/how they are constructed/etc?

Because while it is a false dichotomy, people's reaction to both are real and extremely unbalanced. We're used to coal, so people don't fear it as much as we should. We hear "nuclear" and get cold war propaganda popping up in our heads.