The dominant type of new nuclear power plant, light-water reactors (LWRs), proved unfinanceable in the robust 2005–08 capital market, despite new U.S. subsidies approaching or exceeding their total construction cost. New LWRs are now so costly and slow that they save 2–20x less carbon, 20–40x slower, than micropower and efficient end-use.1 As this becomes evident, other kinds of reactors are being proposed instead—novel designs claimed to solve LWRs’ problems of economics, proliferation, and waste.2 Even climate-protection pioneer Jim Hansen says these “Gen IV” reactors merit rapid R&D.3 But on closer examination, the two kinds most often promoted—Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and thorium reactors4—reveal no economic, environmental, or security rationale, and the thesis is unsound for any nuclear reactor.

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In short, the notion that different or smaller reactors plus wholly new fuel cycles (and, usually, new competitive conditions and political systems) could overcome nuclear energy’s inherent problems is not just decades too late, but fundamentally a fantasy. Fantasies are all right, but people should pay for their own. Investors in and advocates of small-reactor innovations will be disappointed. But in due course, the aging advocates of the half-century-old reactor concepts that never made it to market will retire and die, their credulous young devotees will relearn painful lessons lately forgotten, and the whole nuclear business will complete its slow death of an incurable attack of market forces. Meanwhile, the rest of us shouldn’t be distracted from getting on with the winning investments that make sense, make money, and really do solve the energy, climate, and proliferation problems, led by business for profit.

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