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Thorium is one idea out there now, for certain. I agree that there’s a big infrastructure startup cost, but thorium is so plentiful that the sooner we get started, the sooner we can reduce our energy costs, IMO.

As for the disaster planning: I’m not so much talking of planning for huge million-year volcanos, quakes, etc. I’m talking of just better self-reliance for the plant infrastructure. For example, I have a hunch that it will come out in the analysis of Fukushima that they didn’t have anyone on staff who knew that much about diesels. They didn’t have a plan for what to do if the diesels got flooded, etc. I’ve seen this again and again in high-tech companies that had diesel backups - they had no one on staff (formally) who knew what to do if the engine didn’t start. They simply assumed that “Hey, we paid all this money for a backup genset system, we test it once a year... so we can just assume it is going to work.”

OK, oh-so-very-brilliant-MBA’s in management... what it if doesn’t? What then? Call the local diesel shop at 0300? Um, that’s not a way to achieve the uptime promises you’re making to customers.

That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. I’ve seen no shortage of this short-sighted thinking that “Oh, it will just work,” followed by “and we outsource the maintenance and repair to reduce staffing costs....”

This leads to some rather unexpected (by management) failure modes. For want of a farrier, the horse couldn’t go to town to get help ... that sort of thing.

Thorium is a breeder cycle but the nice thing is that you can use thermal reactors for the breeding. We'd have to adapt the current LWRs to do the Th-U breeding but it probably could be done. Then we'd need to develop the reprocessing infrastructure. Once we had enough 233U we could build plants to use that, but there might be a lag between that and building up a supply of fissile material.

I know in this country it is part of the Equipment Operator training program to be able to run the diesels and also synch the generator to the station safety buses. When offsite power comes back on the generator operator has to know how to synch that to the buses now running from the emergency diesels, and then take the diesels offline. There is a fair amount of automation in the process now but the training still requires operators to know how to use a synchroscope and perform the operations manually if needed. Still a good idea to know how to do it.