Candu reactors fueled by thorium are essentially thermal breeder reactors, although their doubling time is much longer than fast reactors. They do have huge thorium resources. Their program promises to be the most fuel efficient nuclear program in the world assuming that no one builds fast fission reactors of any type.
There is no technical reason that the United States could not build CANDU reactors. I am disappointed that none of the 8 or 9 reactors now proposed in the United States are CANDU's. We also have considerable thorium reserves. Of course we are very close to Canada, which is almost exclusively CANDU in its reactor technology.
I have done some calculations from these two web sites giving capacity and generation figures from various types of energy in the United States.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.htmlhttp://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.htmlWe see that the capacity loading for the three major types of electrical generation are nuclear (#1, 85.2% capacity loading), coal (#2 67.3% capacity loading) and gas (#3 35.1% capacity loading.)
In terms of generation, coal is the largest contributor, producing 7.12 exajoules of electricity, nuclear, the second largest, producing 2.84 exajoules of electricity, and gas producing 2.55 exajoules of electricity. (I have converted from million kilowatt-hours to exajoules.)
My own feeling is that nuclear should immediately replace coal, just as it did in France. Note that coal and nuclear are closely matched in capacity loading (although nuclear is superior for economic reasons connected with capital cost) suggesting that both are base load capacity. The number of additional reactors to completely eliminate coal burning in the United States is about 180-200, assuming large reactors of the Gen III type now proposed constitute the majority of these reactors. This would not have been a particularly daunting task for the previous generation that built 120 reactors in about 20 years in the United States. However, compared with the previous generation we are technically, morally and financially weaker, so it is difficult to say whether this can be done now. As 9 new reactors have had COL filings in 2005, we will see very shortly how well we can accomplish this task and what public attitudes are. My own impression after 20 years of discussing this topic is that public attitudes are increasingly positive toward nuclear energy. If we fail with these 9 reactors, in my opinion, we will certainly slip deeper into third world status.
The low capacity loading of gas plants reflects the fact that they are primarily used for peak loading. They are superior to renewable resources in capacity, but if - and I am skeptical on this point - renewables can be made to work, they would best be suited to replace gas capacity.
I have examined the viability of the much hyped renewables industry and its capacity in another thread currently running. There is no need to repeat my comments in detail here, so I refer to that thread.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=37086&mesg_id=37086The use of nuclear power to replace transportation demand is somewhat speculative so I will not comment too much on them, except to say that I believe it would take about 750 reactors to accomplish this. Because the proposed types of nuclear reactors would perform at better than 60% efficiency, much higher than any known thermal capacity, coupling thermochemical hydrogen production with an electricity side product, the actual work produced per exajoule would probably keep US energy demand from rising too far above 100 exajoules.
Note that I truncated my last post in this thread. I was adding some comments in edit mode, got called away and fell asleep. I had a huge workload yesterday and had to travel quite some distance by train through NYC by train.