Since some of these designs would actually be buried, and terrorists would need a week or so to dig them out, characterizing them with them simple then concerns, presumably about safety, as simply 'bad' seems simplistic.
Presumably dams are also 'bad' as if they are breached they cause considerable loss of life.
More seriously how Chu has the cheek to call this going for a leadership position is stunning - China alone plans 28 new rectors in operation by 2020, build time 50 months, cost £2.1 billion each - a fraction of fadish 'renewables' - and are also building a pebble bed reactor to go online in 2013 which has all the characteristics for small reactors he is talking about here - just years ahead of starting to build anything in the US.

This is good news, he's right that any serious effort to reduce AGW must include nuclear power, I'm also for renewables but the cost of storage will make it difficult for them to excede 30% of the mix any time soon. Hope he's talking about Thorium as well, a much more plentiful fuel.

al vin:
We disagree on the costs of renewables.
Here is a recent analysis for the UK, based on Government data, so it is pretty authoritative - I am familiar with a fair amount of the BERR data which confirms it:
http://www.pbworld.co.uk/index.php?doc=7&aid=126

The contribution of renewables hydro apart is actually fairly minor, and where wind is used extensively as in Germany and Denmark electricity costs are very high but large additional taxpayer subsidies are still needed.
Just as import, the intermittency of wind and solar mean that a lot of natural gas has to be burnt to make up, and as it is used for topping up that is not done very efficiently.
Carbon emissions per capita in Germany and Denmark are some of the highest in Europe, and those of nuclear France the lowest.
On another level, it is simply not reasonable to think that a minor source like wind, or, God forbid, solar, can be ramped quickly enough to save us, or overcome the many technical issues.
Nuclear is a proven technology, which is provenly capable of generating the vast majority of the electricity in a industrial society, and what is more the potential gains in efficiency are of a different order to dispersed, intermittent, material intensive wind and solar.

Both wind and solar, which are the only 'renewable' technologies mature enough to discuss at all sensibly in this sort of context, are much better in the US than in Europe.
Solar might be OK for peak electricity in hot areas, but it's present input is tiny, and I mean really tiny.
Wind if OK until you reach perhaps 5% of the grid in any given area, and then grid balancing becomes more and more difficult, costs escalate and the CO2 savings drop off.
At high levels of penetration CO2 savings actually become negative, as it displaces energy sources which genuinely emit very little CO2, nuclear and hydro, whilst needing very large amounts of gas to back up.
The numbers just do not make sense, and the pity is that unrealistic prospectuses are delaying genuine action.
The Chinese are building their 28 reactors for $2.1bn GW.
There is no reason other than unreasonable gold-plating and poor regulation that they could not be built in the West for, say, $4.2bn GW
That is way, way cheaper than any renewables, and you don't have to make up for intermittency or burn huge amounts of fossil fuels, as the 'renewables' tie you into.

Once they figure out how to render the waste harmless, I am interested. While they are at it, make sure they are truly insured and not self under insured.

The first of the new Finnish design major plant that "is set to revolutionise European nuclear has found that the pre positioned holes in the concrete dome were misplaced so that they need blocking in and repositioning.

Indonesia builds on a geological fault lilne , Sydneys 6Y.O. replacement 'Experimental'reactor at Lucas heights has benn in ' operation for 10% of time since comisioning, last I heard down for 18 months.
The operating licence included a waste disp[osal - reprocessing contract with the Argentine, from where the plants design originated.

Since that licence was granted, Argetina has undergone a military coup, virtual bankrupsey (pre GFC) and is now rattling sabers with britain again over the faulklands.

It's a bit like one can't get out ones own front door with so much deception spin lies and sheer self serving couldn,t care less doctoring from the nuclear industry stacked against it.

For all the same reasons as we who (have bothered even) to read Stan 'goracle's' posts about dozens of ready and waiting ,energy solving, planned and 'shovel ready' plants in the US, we now have the official version in plain daylight "first in 30 years to get approval and yes some demand for more.

But no new "start" strategic arms reduction treaty, concerns over proliferation and increasing no signatory nuclear weapons states, and the US even under Obama approving money for new Nuclear weapons research.

Now you all know that is true, so just how dumb and powerless is the citisenry that is expectted to accept this situation.

The answer to that question plumbs the depths of my comprehension.

Now I concede to mortal failings and admit to not being any oracle, but am unable to even agree to a debate or discussion when the basis of information is patently lies, with false and misleading or sheer defiance of common sense as basis as the second and third and fourth most likely basis.

In other word 'Illuminate (enlighten) me but don't start by spouting lies.

If you don't like lies take Greenpeace and the WWF off your reading list.
In a recent report the WWF and Allianz put Germany in as the top country in Europe for low carbon emissions.
Eventually, after much digging, a small footnote gave the information that they 'adjusted' the emissions from nuclear power in France, to show the electricity from nuclear power 'as though' it were from natural gas!
So they thus created 'virtual carbon emissions', justifying this attempt to hoodwink and misinform the public by saying that they did not much fancy nuclear power.
'Greens' in articles routinely, and indeed almost invariably, treat installed peak watt power as average output, so often that either they are terminally stupid or deliberately seeking to deceive.
There is much made of the cost over-runs in Finland on the first of a kind in a nuclear plant, but the many that come in on time and to cost are ignored, as are the huge cost over-runs on the German off-shore wind project, coming in at the incredible price of $19million MW - and you still don't get reliable power.
This is aside the practice of routinely exaggerating risks by several orders of magnitude, whilst ignoring those from approved 'green' sources, in spite of the fact that they all involve continued vast burn of fossil fuels.
The 'greens' through their opposition to nuclear power have also put in a large contribution to global warming, with unknown consequences due to the continued unabated burn of coal, as their 'cunning plans' for energy production are in fact pure fantasy.
So if you want deliberate lies, deception, and attempts to mislead the public, look no further than the so-called 'greens', who invariably go for the most environmentally damaging and financially suicidal fad.

Arnold,
One of the technologies I like is home fuel cells - lots of other people are doing those as well as Bloom, who are something of hype merchants.
So if those were used, then the gas would be burnt much more efficiently than using it to back up wind.
The efficiency works out so that you can save as much or more by concentrating on improving it, and forget the wind towers.
It is not that I am against all renewables. What I am against is exaggerating what they can do and going for vast feed in tariffs.
I want high altitude wind, which is much more reliable, to be researched more, for instance.
It saves around 95% of the materials of building towers.
The numbers work out at the moment though that if you want to reduce CO2 and get off fossil fuels, you go nuclear.
It really is that simple.
Fortunately the risks and costs of so doing have been grossly exaggerated by the greens, to the delight of the coal industry which is not just some theoretical risk, but a proven killer by the tens of thousands.
Residential solar thermal is a bargain though!

Arnold,
The attraction of nuclear is threefold:
We can do it now, at reasonable cost if we do it right.
The fuel is for practical purposes unlimited with only modest advances in technology - the traveling wave reactor, or the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, for instance.
They can be made very safe.
The design of the LWR the commonest type in use today was, just like wind towers as opposed to high altitude wind, too early and probably not the best design for civil use.

Nothing is ever absolutely safe, and the 'precautionary principle' is pure rhetoric, not a risk management strategy.
However the risks need be no greater than any other large chemical or energy producing installation.

You can't run renewables without burning natural gas, and the benzene emitted in it's production, sometimes near residential areas, is very nasty stuff indeed.
So if you are talking in the real world, risk management and assessment is always needed, and adequate control.
In the West, other than in mining, there has never been a death directly attributable to the nuclear industry.
By co-incidence, the confirmed death toll from Chernobyl, 69, is exactly the same as from wind turbines - blades fracturing etc.
Of course, Greenpeace 'calculates' vast numbers of future deaths, which it continually repositions so that they are always 20 years in the future.
What they don't tell you is that the death toll from mining and using the rare earths in wind turbines if calculated on the same basis would also be huge.

Nuclear plants in most areas of the world are indeed normally built to cost and on time.
As I linked to the report earlier, the cost of off-shore wind, which is the only British alternative capable of anything like the scale, is at least 2-3 times that of nuclear power, and costs have escalated faster for that then nuclear - around 70% in the last few years, versus 40% for nuclear, if memory serves.

The potential for cost reduction, and in particular fuel efficiency increase, is enormously greater for nuclear as we only use such a tiny fraction at the moment.
Here are some links to the option I favor, which could burn the waste from current reactors and would only need around 15,000 tons of thorium a year to provide the world with present power output:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2009/12/wired-thorium-article-available-online.html

We need power too urgently though, and coal, which is what will actually be used instead if we don't build nuclear, is too polluting, emits too much CO2, kills too many people, and is too ultimately limited to make that the best alternative, so we should also get on and build what we can now.

War is often the result of resource shortages, and that would kill a lot more people than any imagined dangers from nuclear power.
We are not going to limit the spread of nuclear weapons by forgoing it for Civil purposes ourselves.
Any nation that has wanted nuclear power has pretty well got them, with the possible exception of Iraq, and stopping that shows what it takes, hardly practical to control all the present non-nuclear nations that way.

Dave,
Mining, wether for minerals, coal or any is probably the most dangerous industry in any country but the actual will vary greatly depending on which country.
the nuclear industry is no different in that regard, except that the products are highly dangerous depending on the type and particle size and also the area of the body contaminated. So skin contact with physical particle 'fallout' or only the radiation or emmission, and the specific element concerned and hence the depth of penetrating rays varies immensly.

When as is well understood the timeframe from exposure to effect can be several decades and the show up as genetic amage or mutation, in a way similar to asbestos, or long term toxic chemical exposure, I could not agree with the statement that " no one has ever attributed a death directly to the nuclear industry.
The deaths are mostly seen as long term life shortening and debilitating cancers etc.

It is not credible to say that the "69 " deaths from Chernobyl incident is all there is to it. That is to say on this side of an arbitary line we have deaths but on that side there is no effect.
The deaths occouring within the first year or two are no more the end of the story than to say only the deaths within the first few years of asbestos exposure are counted.
Asbestosis being assosiated with very specific symptoms, is realatively easy to link, radiative induced cancers are much less straitforwarrdto diagnose and the 'govt ' and official industry studies and data are not vigooroously studied.
To my knowledge the best science in this regard comes from 'outsider' testing, analysis etc that is focused on proving the link, rather than the officials that would like to prove the safety of.These more vigorous stanalysis are however not well funded or numerous. They are however daming.

Re the cost of mining and resource extraction, it is not negligable or even small. Large amounts of energy are needed in the fuel cycle.
S.Australia's Proposed open pit mine will in fact double the energy / carbon footprint for that state.

Last year over atwo week period, terrible dust storms swept topsoil from precisely the area of mine tailings and atomic test " Remediated areas. These storms choiked both Melbourne and Sydney and I can tell you that there were four days were people were told to stay indoors and close windows avoid excercise IIn my area, 400 klm's noth of Sydney or well over 1,000 klm's from the dust source.
As I said the source area included low depth and surface dumps holding a large percentage of Australian nuclear waste.

Whereas the "sixty nine" deaths from wind generation machine accidents I'll bet refer to ' qualified' persons taking known risks in a hazardous but localised zone. I.E. technicians not the general public.

You state
"We need power too urgently though, and coal, which is what will actually be used instead if we don't build nuclear, is too polluting, emits too much CO2, kills too many people, and is too ultimately limited to make that the best alternative,"

Urgently for what? more neon advertising, higher high rise and phallic tower blocks? overseas air travel and generally everything that opens and shuts? to be discarded when a new fad comes along.You may equally be referring to economic development but regardless it is not correct in my opinion to suggest that we will all suffer as is implied if we don't have access to large amounts of power (at any cost).

I do agree with the second part of your estimation of the costs associated with coal use though.
My only comment there is that the official line we are asked to accept is that Carbon capture and sequestration will ' make it all right'. Again that is a leap of faith too far for the less gullible.

What worked for a while IE energy from coal is known more widely for what it is and not responsible behaviour. Most of us in the industrialized world are accustomed and reliant on it though and we should be big enough to see it's ugly side and at least acknowledge the damage even if we feel powerless to put it right .

I should say I do hold An office in the Nuclear disarmament movement but not as spokesperson or speaker so I express my personal opinion only and disclose in the interests of proper accounting.

You don't need to mine anything to have all the uranium you want. There is 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in ocean water. Two years ago, Japanese teams extracted it at a cost of only a few times the actual world price of uranium. That's why we still mine for it, because mining is cheaper. Though, even if mining was forebidden and we would extract it from seawater the incraesed price of the uranium would only negligible increase the electricity price.
Next generation nuclear plants will during the next centurybe burning the waste we already have.

Whew! i'm exhausted just trying to read DaveMart and Arnold's debate. (btw, thanks for keeping it civil, guys).
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It just goes to show how much of a "hot button" topic nuclear power is. And why is that? one word: chernobyl.
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Chernobyl showed how dangerous nuclear power can be. Chernobyl was a terrible disaster (and will continue to be for a long time).
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However, we cannot let fear paralyze us. Nuclear power can be safe and less harmful to the environment than coal.
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OTOH, the nuke industry must develop smaller, cheaper plants that come online quickly. AND, have a plan for waste.
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When they do that (which is only reasonable) the public will accept them. Until then the opposition will continue.

DaveK, "it is STILL a fossil fuel". i don't follow.