It's not as if research on nuclear power has stopped. It's gone on and resulted in many safer designs, more compact designs, etc. It's just that we haven't built any power plants yet using those new designs.
The analogy with cars (yay!) is if we knew how to build a modern car that got 40 mpg, with air bags, crumple zones, and the rest of the safety suite that modern cars have, but the only cars on the road were the ones using 70's technology.
Fortunately, some new plants are finally being built with many advances. At least in this country. At one time a couple years ago, the number planned was in the teens, but that may have changed between then and now. Most of them were in the south.
This is exactly word-to-word what the industry says. I once believed in it too, as it seems to make sense superficially. However, certain events started a slow process where I started to think deeper, based on easy-to-verify, undisputed technical facts, on which I want to base my technological opinions on.
What I understand now, is;
(1) It indeed IS possible to build much much safer nuclear power than in the 60's and 70's, but
(2) it is so expensive that no one wants to build those. More specifically,
(3) Combining better safety and more compact design is simply impossible due to physical facts (residual heat curve, passive cooling requirements to give some headroom in accident situations, controllability). For example, the safety faults in GE Mk I design are
mostly due to small size that was a selling point then. OTOH, better passive safety inevitably means large size, and the containment price goes up.
(4) The new, "safe" designs have already been found to have inherent safety problems (for example, AP 1000 chimney effect containment flaw), or they are getting badly out-of-schedule AND
much higher cost than planned (EPR). This gets us back to point (2).
(5) The fact nuclear is even remotely economically viable is based on practically
complete ignorance of the waste problem.
(3), (4) and (5) lead to the situation where building safe plants and even trying to solve the waste problem is even more expensive than building and maintaining those wind turbines....! The solution has just been very simple; let's ignore the problems and go on, taking the (relatively small, but existent) risk and counting on some future nuclear technology that can reuse the waste.
Given all this, nuclear power is more like a "fun" technological demonstration, or a risky business. If made cheap enough to be viable, it is a conscious risk. If the risk is not to be taken (or if the risk is REALLY minimized, this is by using technological facts, not just PR words), then it would be so costly that the same amount of money is much better used in alternative technologies. The simple fact is that the energy from sunlight is just
enormous, and compared to that potential, a very low amount of money has been used on R&D.
The drive for nuclear has always been very political, not based on what would be wise for the world and human kind.
Don't worry, I can assure you that it was not easy for me to have to admit that those green "do-gooders" were absolutely right. They were just ahead of their time. Now it's all becoming reality, or actually, it has already happened to the point that the change is coming.
All the proposed "new" technologies I have seen references to have been completely unviable, or inherently very dangerous, but "marketed" by bloggers etc. who have not taken any look on the underlying technological facts more than very superficially. For example, I have seen argumentation like: "using sodium-cooled reactors is very safe, because there is no water, because the nuclear plants need cooling because the water gets hot, and if there is no water, it does not need cooling." This was in fact from a major Finnish media. But if you have been awake in the chemistry lessons, you know about sodium... If you have followed any news regarding nuclear, you know what happened at Monju reactor in Japan in the 90's with sodium. And, lastly, if you have been awake at the physics lessons, you probably know that in order to create 1000 MW of energy, you will be generating around 2000 MW of waste heat, regardless of whether there is water or sodium. This kind of practical approach is necessary.
IF some of those breeder/thorium dreams happen to become reality in the form of safe, reliable, environment-friendly and economical design as hyped, that will of course change the direction of my comments. However, it is a harsh error to decide anything else based on that hope alone. Enormous amounts of money have been used on those projects for 50 or more years, with no single practical result yet. The date "when they will work" have been postponed for decades. If it happens, it will be a completely new discussion from a completely new viewpoint then. What doesn't exist now, cannot "just be built".
Hope it didn't get too off-topic. On topic: if I understood it correctly, this news line was just a typical made-up sensational scoop. Sub-critical neutron source is NOT a nuclear reactor at all! About every big hospital have those, most universities have, and any large company doing R&D on chemical/physical fields have those. Of course they are still a security risk but at a completely different level than nuclear reactors.
You had a lobotomy where? :confused: