They are up against big fossil fuel tycoons like the Kochs. If we are strictly talking corporate propaganda, the fossil fuel industry has plenty of that.
As much as people portrayed an epic battle between renewables and nuclear the real winner from the move away from nuclear was natural gas fired gas turbines.
The most obnoxious thing about the energy literature is that it frequently reads like a stopped clock. People still compare the cost of nuclear energy to the cost of coal, but it's no accident that the US stopped building coal plants at the same time it stopped building nuclear plants because it stopped both for the same reason... The capital cost of a gas turbine generator (even in a hybrid cycle including a steam turbine) is dramatically smaller than the steam turbines used in coal and nuclear plants.
Since molten salt reactors run a lot hotter than LWRs they could drive
but it's a technology that is not very well developed. If nuclear energy is going to compete with natural gas, however, they need to ditch the steam turbine.
Do the gas turbines use the brayton cycle? As I understand gas turbines are around 64% efficient with various tricks. I recall a LFTR presentation talking about how they could use the Brayton cycle because of... ?high temps I think?.
Is the closed cycle gas turbine also using a superior cycle like the Brayton? Oh it's in the third sentence, CTRL-F failed me.
> As I understand gas turbines are around 64% efficient with various tricks.
These super-high efficiency gas turbines are not 'pure' gas turbines, but so-called combined cycle plants. Basically you first have a 'normal' gas turbine driving a generator (which, by itself, maybe gives you ~45% efficiency), but then you take the host exhaust of that gas turbine and use that to drive a secondary steam cycle driving another generator.
I'm not sure such a thing is doable in a closed Brayton cycle, at least I haven't read anything about anything like that.
An interesting thing with closed cycle Brayton is that instead of air you can use another fluid as the working fluid. Supercritical CO2, for instance, has some nice properties leading to extremely compact machinery. Of course there's an uphill battle in commercializing this technology; if you use air (or nitrogen) you can just adapt one of the many existing gas turbine cores with $zillions of R&D and decades of experience behind them.
It seems to me that companies like GE and Westinghouse have tons of money. Add that to the billions pro-nuclear folks have in SV and you've got quite the war chest to fund effective pro-nuke campaigns.
I'm out of date, lol. Well, GE, even post-breakup, has a huge energy business that would benefit from increasing nuclear production. Assuming they really can make safe, cost-effective power, anyway.
GE is one of the big names in gas turbines, and AFAIK they make wind turbines as well, in addition to nuclear power plants. So whatever the customer wants they can offer. ;)
Those folks might not want to waste that money in a propaganda race against the entire fossil fuel industry and the emerging renewable energy industry. GE and Westinghouse are large and successful companies, but is nuclear a major part of their portfolio such that they would take such a big risk (compared to fossil fuel industry which views clean energy as an existential threat)?
