Vermont Yankee apologist John McClaughry is taking a new tack in his latest blogpost, that showed up as an editorial in the Messenger and willI no doubt make the rounds of local papers in the coming weeks.

Since overwhelming evidence is mounting against the wisdom of continuing operation of VY, Mr. McClaughry is stumping for an alternative nuclear model, the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, which he presumably sees slipping seamlessly into the void created when Entergy throws in the towel.  

(Which might be sooner than you think, given the failure rate of VY systems.  This incident occurred twice in the last month, suggesting that they have no idea what is causing the problem.)

Reaching back to the very inception of nuclear power, McClaughry blames Admiral Hyman Rickover for getting the whole thing wrong in the first place; and presumably, for every false step, from Three Mile Island to Fukushima, that’s happened since.

It seems that Admiral Rickover was in too damn much of a hurry to power his fleet, pushing through adoption of an inferior model for nuclear generation that evolved into what is now the industry standard…and which, up until now at least, Mr. McClaughry seemed to think could go on forever.

Why else would he so energetically lobby to have VY’s license extended another twenty years?

But no; his affections have shifted to the LFTR , which he now insists truly is the answer; and he does make an enticing case:

Without going too far into technical details, the LFTR would almost certainly produce electricity cheaper than coal, because of lower capital and fuel costs; use a fuel that is in almost inexhaustible supply, both in the U.S. and elsewhere; operate continuously, in baseload or peaking mode, for up to 30 years; be factory-built and deployed in compact 100-megawatt modules close to the end use of the power; contribute nothing to air or water pollution and need no water for operation; safely consume long-lived transuranic waste products from current nuclear fission reactors; produce high-temperature process heat that can make hydrogen fuel for vehicles; and be walkaway safe.

…except that this rosy estimation, which conveniently avoids “going into too much technical detail” is just so much shinola since no working prototype actually exists with which to test it!

And it’s never that simple.

First of all, in discussions of the cost efficiency of LFTR I see no mention of dropping Price-Anderson, which currently gives nuclear power generation the distinct edge over other alternatives by zeroing out the tremendous economic disadvantage nuclear would have in terms of liability if the industry was required to carry all-risk insurance against the potential cost of a worst case scenario.

I also see no mention of a lessening in the generous government subsidies for plant start-ups that nuclear has always enjoyed as the favored alternative to coal.

And that is just the skin of the poison apple.

LFTR technology still carries with it the twin issues of threats from terrorist activity, and what to do with the deadly byproducts.  While those byproducts might arguably be somewhat less in volume and shorter in half-life; they still hold deadly potential for a very, very long time; and we have never even begun to deal with the nuclear waste we already have on hand.

Because of the manner in which LFTR’s smaller modules would be deployed to many, many more local situations, the risk from terrorist strikes and interceptions would be exponentially greater than what we now have. One of the key issues associated with LFTR technology is its potential to significantly grow proliferation.

But all of this is a little beside the point of the real reason why Mr. McClaughry’s arguments fail.  They fail because, in Mr. McClaughry’s universe, private hands with corporate bottom lines still hold all the nuclear energy cards; and that inevitably means that they will be mismanaged to the advantage of shareholders and ultimately to the disadvantage and risk of the public good.  

If power generation must be held in private hands, we have no business authorizing ANY form of nuclear generation.

Blaming Admiral Rickover misses one important point.  Except for two disaserous losses in the 1960’s, there is no evidence that the US navy has ever had a nuclear accident on any of its extensive nuclear fleet.

Unlike civilian power generation, which is always trying to squeeze more profit out of any operation, the navy’s nuclear-powered craft function under the strictest discipline and the highest standards or care, with little thought to the “bottom line.”

Unfortunately for Mr. McClaughry and others who are determined to find a golden goose in nuclear, those are the only circumstances under which the tremendous destructive power of nuclear energy can be safely harnessed.

And very much to that point is Fairewinds Associates’ latest video release, which unveils a new timeline tool for documenting the “incident” life of reactors in order to more accurately predict the point at which catastrophic failure is likely to occur.  This tool is meant to be a defensive citizen resource, but could be used even by the utilitites, were they willing to concede that ultimate failure can and will inevitably occur if reactors are not withdrawn from service when certain characteristic incident patterns begin to play-out.

The example used in the video is San Onofre; which, had it not been for the tireless efforts of Friends of the Earth and Fairewinds to bring greater scrutiny to the failing plant, might still be in operation and headed for certain disaster: