If people are steeling themselves for high electricity bills, then why not focus on renewables where the current technology is improving very quickly? When the amazing thorium reactors show up I'll reconsider, but until then... why be willing to pay big for nuclear?
The fact that renewable energy technology is improving is kind of irrelevant — you don't retroactively get all that progress if you purchase now, just like your nuclear reactor won't suddenly be thorium-based once that technology is worked out. You have to choose based on what's actually available. As things stand, AFAIK no renewable power source is more economical than nuclear. Hopefully they will be in the future, but building the current, inferior implementation because one day there will be a better version doesn't make sense. That's like putting a 2-year-old on the Olympic weightlifting team because he seems likely to be very strong one day.
Not sure what you're getting at with the "retroactively" bit. What I mean is renewables are feasible now, and next year they will be appreciably better, and the year after that even more so... this is not a pace of improvement I see in nuclear power, and yet I am supposed to be amazed by its price (cough) and potential (irrelevant since reactors are built to last 50 years; renewable stuff can be upgraded far more easily, in pieces)
Coat the countryside with wind turbines--it's what they've done near the SF area, although you'll note that as far as I can tell no turbines are visible from any point within what is generally considered "the Bay Area"... San Franciscans just NIMBY their power into the back yards of the "less enlightened".
As I understand it, current wind technology requires a lot more land (like, an order of magnitude) and intensive maintenance if you want to get even in the same ballpark of energy output, and that's assuming a location that's good for wind power. You can hardly just drop wind turbines into an existing plant to multiply the energy output like they're planning to do here with nuclear reactors.
Nuclear seems to be our only option for the time being; most renewables require TONS of space to be comparable (not to mention problems with electricity production vs. demand management in the grid - solar and wind energy kind of depends on weather). There's a good book on the topic that has all the relevant calculations: http://www.withouthotair.com/
Increasing the rates paid for electricity actually helps renewables, by making them more competitive. Just like any increase to the gas tax helps electric vehicles compete, any increase to the average price-per-kWh makes alternative energy sources that much closer to economic viability.
I would assume (though I'm not fully up to date) that the so-called "safer" reactor designs such as high-temperature gas cooled, pebble-bed, or thorium reactors are still pretty much research projects. They are likely at least a decade or more away from commercial scale feasibility.
One exception is the Integral Fast Reactor, which was near production-ready when Clinton cancelled the program in 1994. GE-Hitachi has a similar design called the PRISM which has been approved by the NRC for a full-scale demo reactor. GE is trying to sell it to the UK to burn up their plutonium stockpiles.
In the IFR tests at Argonne, researchers cut off the cooling system entirely, and the reactor just quietly shut down, with no damage.
A great new book on the IFR is Plentiful Energy by Till and Chang, two senior scientists at the Argonne project.
1. China is working on a mass-producible pebble bed reactor, the 100 MWe HTR-PM. The first pair of them are under construction, and are scheduled to start commercial operation in 2015.
2. It's possible to run existing pressurized light water reactors on a fuel mix consisting mostly of thorium. This has nothing to do with the capital costs of construction, but if uranium ever gets a lot more expensive, it could be a very useful option.
