Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched
The real trouble with the light water reactor is not the nuclear part but the steam turbine it is attached to.<p>Unfortunately people have a way of driving while looking in the rear view mirror and much of the discussion around nuclear energy revolves around issues of the 1970s.<p>In the 1970s coal burning power plants were the cost king of power plants.  There was some concern about making them cleaner,  but by the 1980s gas turbine power plants with 10 times the power density (e.g. 1&#x2F;10 the capital cost)  were becoming widespread and people quit building coal plants.<p>(A big literature got left behind about how to drive a gas turbine from coal,  on paper it would be lower capital cost than a conventional coal plant,  but the technology never got developed at full scale.)<p>Even if the heat was free it would be hard for a steam turbine based power plant to compete with gas turbines.<p>Now it should be possible to build a nuclear power plant based on the brayton cycle using helium or carbon dioxide or some similar gas as a working fluid.  You then need to use helium or sodium or lead as a coolant because the pressure would be too high with water.<p>Fast reactors are the best developed option,  followed by the prismatic HTGR,  then the thorium reactors.  Pebble-bed HTGR looked pretty good until an expose came out that a German pebble bed reactor had a difficult time...  Turns out pebbles that slide past each other just fine in air will get stuck on each other and crack in helium.<p>When Bill Gates and others go around saying we have to get over the safety issue they are continuing the stigma.  Nuclear power is not going to get out of it&#x27;s funk unless it has a cost story that looks good when everything goes right -- which is not the case with the LWR.