A word about the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The Nuclear Energy Institute {NEI} is an industry PR group that uses the word "institute" in their name for a reason related to convincing the public of their credibilty. Their mission is to increase public acceptance of nuclear energy so that their 280 members make a profit.

Now every business has a right to belong to a group like this that represents their interest to the public but in the case of the nuclear industry they exploit a weakness that most trade groups have worn out -they try to cloak their sales activities in the aura of scientific credibility associated with physics.

If you trust the NEI you should also trust the American Petroleum Institute during the Deepwater spill.

Groups like this operate on the same level of ethical commitment to the public good as any other corporate public relations operation.

NEI: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Nuclear_Energy_Institute
"NEI's objective is to ensure the formation of policies that promote the beneficial uses of nuclear energies and technologies in the United States and around the world"
"the propaganda wing and trade group for the American nuclear industry (which) spends millions of dollars annually to engineer public opinion"

AEEG: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alliance_for_Energy_and_Economic_Growth
"According to the DeSmogBlog, "AEEG's voice mail directs you call Rob Dubrow at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) for questions regarding billing."

CASEnergy: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Clean_and_Safe_Energy_Coalition
"On its website, the PR firm Hill & Knowlton boasted that the group is "a national grassroots organization that advocates the benefits of nuclear energy. The CASEnergy Coalition is a Hill & Knowlton campaign run out of the Washington, DC office."

Yup - NEI hired H&K, famous for their sleazy PR tactics,
which included selling the first Gulf War with "Nurse Nayirah" who wasn't a real nurse,
she was the daughter of the Saudi ambassador and falsely testified before Congress:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_babies-from-incubators_hoax_and_war_in_the_Persian_Gulf
"In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah."
"Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."
"Hill & Knowlton and Congressman Lantos had failed to reveal that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the US, who sat listening in the hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to reveal that H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony."
"Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK) was a front group established by the Hill & Knowlton PR firm to promote the 1991 U.S. war in the Persian Gulf (Operation Desert Storm)."
"Hill & Knowlton, then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it."

More on H&K: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hill_%26_Knowlton

They are for what they can sell today. Between development time and the approval process Gen4 is going to take 30-35 years just to get to the end of design approval with the NRC.

That is the point genius. Each of your pet "well if would only blah blah blah then nuclear can be a success" is a flight of fantasy, nothing more nothing less.

In the meantime it allows you to recruit the gullible, which is your objective.

...the way profit is made. It's coops sharing electricity as opposed to large conglomerates making fuel assemblies.

I would like to know more about this.

The nuclear reactors themselves are extremely expensive and won't get paid off unless they make it to the end of their lifecycle. So what the nuclear power industry does is get big government loans to build the things, and the rate payers pay those loans back off over time. Since they need very difficult to assemble fuel assemblies, the money in the industry is made by making those assemblies.

Basically they sucker people in to having a nice clean nuclear reactor and once it's built it requires a few companies to keep it running, it's a monopoly.

LFTR by contrast runs on thorium fuel, requires only a small amount of highly refined fuel (and once thorium reactors are running they make more of it, so you can have a thorium reactor that runs and creates the U233 to sustain the reaction).

The fuel cost for a current nuclear reactor is in the tens of millions.

The fuel costs for a LFTR or IFR (using depleted uranium) is in the thousands.

Explains it better than I could:

.

ETA: This is the conclusion of an independent analyst who is fully qualified to evaluate the technical merits of nuclear energy systems...

"Contrary to the claims made or implied by thorium proponents, however, thorium doesn’t solve the proliferation, waste, safety, or cost problems of nuclear power, and it still faces major technical hurdles for commercialization.

...Not an Economic Solution

Thorium may be abundant and possess certain technical advantages, but it does not mean that it is economical. Compared to uranium, thorium fuel cycle is likely to be even more costly. In a once-through mode, it will need both uranium enrichment (or plutonium separation) and thorium target rod production. In a breeder configuration, it will need reprocessing, which is costly. In addition, as noted, inhalation of thorium-232 produces a higher dose than the same amount of uranium-238 (either by radioactivity or by weight).

Reprocessed thorium creates even more risks due to the highly radioactive U-232 created in the reactor. This makes worker protection more difficult and expensive for a given level of annual dose. Finally, the use of thorium also creates waste at the front end of the fuel cycle. The radioactivity associated with these is expected to be considerably less than that associated with a comparable amount of uranium milling. However, mine wastes will pose long-term hazards, as in the case of uranium mining. There are also often hazardous non-radioactive metals in both thorium and uranium mill tailings.
"

Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power
By Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd

If 30 years is what it takes, it's what it takes. At least it's an ETA, which fusion doesn't have yet.

.

Many industry members are Nuclear Engineers and industry experts. I think if you want to know the technicalities of what is happening at the Nuclear Plant they are a very good source of information. Nuclear plant workers and engineers in my area are using their website to follow what is happening to the plants in Japan along with other sources of information.

as well as people who act according to their experts' output
like the epa, which rendered the wtc disaster area safe by decree

or not. If you want to know the technical details of how and what the operators are doing to cool the reactors the NEI and other industry groups are a good source of information. I'm not say you have base your opinions on the safety of nuclear energy on the information coming out of these industry groups.

The primary specialty of the employees doesn't speak at all to the ethical standard under which those individuals perform their function.

The PRIMARY FUNCTION of the engineers and "industry experts" is to promote the financial well being of the people paying their salaries.

Of ALL sources of information that is available to the public, the monetary motive embodied in PR operations makes them the least reliable.

Other sources that are more likely to provide accurate information because of the ethical structure of the organizations involved are are, in descending order of validity:

Academic peer review
Academic white paper
Government and NGOs
Industry

It isn't complicated, if you want lies, go to the people who are going to lose money telling you the truth.