The Thorium reactor is a red herring
My major concern is not that breeders using the Thorium cycle may not be a way forward for the future, but that not one single operator is proposing them now. If we really need nuclear power, then the only option now and possibly for many decades is the uranium fuel cycle.
But this is the crunch. Do we need nuclear? Compared with fossil fuels, and coal in particular, nuclear is low carbon, but over the full life cycle of generation, from mining, concentrating fuel, and transporting to to plant and later in the cycle, managing and disposing of waste and decommissioning after use, nuclear is far more carbon intensive than any renewable resource, even large dam hydro and six times more carbon intensive than onshore wind. Germany is producing more carbon now, as it develops its renewables and has to use gas in the meantime, but the way that nuclear operates means that it does not happily coexist with renewables, especially as nuclear is so heavily subsidised. In the future Germany will benefit hugely from developing and deploying sustainable, less polluting sources of energy in the future.
Those who are as old as I am will laugh at the statement that the cost of nuclear is "next to nothing". We all heard the calls in the sixties that nuclear will produce elecricity "too cheap to meter". Now we have a ??100 billion bill for clearing up this toixic legacy (see Nuclear Decommissioning Authority budget for details). Nuclear is not the future, it is our very expensive past.
