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Bill Gates May Build Small Nuclear Reactor
Hugh Pickens writes "TerraPower, an energy start-up backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is in discussions with Toshiba Corp. to develop a small-scale nuclear reactor that would represent a long-term bet to make nuclear power safer and cheaper. Toshiba confirmed it is in preliminary discussions with TerraPower, a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding concern partially funded by Gates. Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori says the two sides are talking about how they could collaborate on nuclear technology, although discussions are still in early stages and that nothing has been decided on investment or development. TerraPower has publicly said its Traveling Wave Reactor could run for decades on depleted uranium without refueling (PDF) or removing spent fuel from the device. The reactor, the company has said, could be safer, cheaper and more socially acceptable than today's reactors. Gates's recent focus on nuclear power has been fueled by an interest in developing new power systems for developing countries where he says that new energy solutions are needed to combat climate change. Terrapower faces a lengthy, multi-year process to get its "traveling wave" reactor concept reviewed by regulators but if TerraPower succeeds in advancing its plans, it could provide an alternative blueprint for the nuclear industry at a time when new reactors may be coming online."
Toshiba confirmed it is in preliminary discussions with TerraPower, a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding concern partially funded by Gates and Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori says the two sides are talking about how they could collaborate on nuclear technology although discussions are still in early stages and that nothing has been decided on investment or development.
Run-on sentence much?
Living With a Nerd
He's building a bomb, I tell you! A bomb! Send in the troops right now to stop him.
I am officially gone from
...finally.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Bill Gates invests in a company. He's not personally building a reactor like some kind of comic book super villain.
The bad part is it'll be like japan where his neighbors all have "An error has been detected with your computer and it has been shutdown for your safety...." burned into their skin.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I have been waiting for years for Bill Gates to start using his money for something in the mad scientist realm we all knew it was coming. . .
If there was ever a more appropriate time for the Bill Gates as Borg graphic, I don't know when that would be. If a nuclear-powered Bill Gates is ever developed, then resistance will be fissile! (sorry, resisting that joke was futile)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Naaa, Bill G. is a closet OpenBSD fan for all his personal use. He would never trust something as slipshod as windows to support anything he is personally involved in.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
The blue glow of death.... Who better than Bill to distribute it?
Botnet + arms race = bad
Pride goeth before the meltdown.
Perhaps he's hoping to get Bing into the Iranian and North Korean search engine markets by threatening them with nukes.
Next he'll shave his head and then try to defeat Superman.
In the movies, whenever a billionaire builds a nuclear reactor, James Bond usually has to save the world from his evil schemes.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
Well, that's what the ALL-CAPS DISCLAIMER texts are for.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Insert MSlam/Reactor safety quip
We need "Mr. Fusion." All this nuclear fission based energy is so last-century. We need to get back to the future and use nuclear fusion technologies.
Business see that the Government is now ready to invest in nuclear power and come up with some long term research project that will probably end up getting funded by said government. Yes, $Bill has thrown in his few coins, but I'm sure none of the investors will do it with out any potential for a return in 5 years. Smart business.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
isnt there some clause in the windows EULA that specificly prohibites using it in nuclear installation?
and damn, the MS-shills are out in force today, not a single post with a BSOD joke above the -1 level...
People, what a bunch of bastards
The world has it's first true supervillain.
So who is our superhero? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Obamaman? Anyone?
Remember: no capes!
Blue screen of HOLY MOTHER OF...
Seriously though, this is a good idea. And these should power water-treatment and desalination plants.
Nobody likes a poor thief.
Will the reactor be running Vista?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Bill gave a speech on this at last years tedtalks.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
Was anyone else sorely disappointed to find that the PDF (Linked in the article), was only a page long? I was hoping for this long and complicated PDF file that I could sit and read for a while :(
Having survived Chernobyl it gives me a great fear if such reactor runs Windows. We will all be glowing in a dark after that blue screen....
He's too busy building the organ while stroking the white cat.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Alright, alright! I'll say "uncle!". You win uncle Bill. I'll go back to using IE. No need to go nuclear on us.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Where is the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag?
If one of Bill Gates' projects leads to clean and plentiful energy and saves the world from global warming, it still won't make up for IE6.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Intellectual Ventures, eh? If you believe all those article in Techdirt (here,
here and
here), it is not so much a patent-holding concern as a patent-scam concern. Maybe Gates is getting ready to milk the nuclear power industry in the same way it is milking the IT and communications industries. If that is so, Gates just might save us from the perils of nuclear power, as the industry would be too busy defending itself in court to build any new plants.
Selling many small nuclear reactors and fuel to "emerging market countries"? Hopefully there is some review process for who can buy these and a tracking process to guarantee the materials stay with the original purchasers. Is Yemen an "emerging market country"?
Notwithstanding Mr. Gates ownership of TerraPower... It makes sense for Toshiba to work with them given (a) Their ownership of the Westinghouse legacy (b) Their experience building large nuclear power reactors (c) Their experience designing small, self contained, fail-safe nuclear reactors in the 100kW to 10MW size range.
as a world threat! LOL
Dear Hillary: Please return to your sandbox with
Kim Jong iL.
Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout
"Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian Cat away from being the villain in a James Bond". Building a personal nuclear reactor certainly keeps him on track. It would be better if he built it in a volcano with a bust of his head chiseled into the living rock, but you can't have everything.
The Blue Screen of Death will now cause the green cloud of radioactive fallout! Gate's is simply looking to create a rainbow of diversity for the ways that he can cause pain and destruction. Though... I'm not sure leaping from electronic to biological desolation? Might their be some anti-trust issues here (again)? Billy when oh when will you learn?
"640 volts ought to be enough for anybody. . . "
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Scorpio!
He'll sting you with his dreams of power and wealth.
Beware of Scorpio!
His twisted twin obsessions are his plot to rule the world
And his employees' health.
He'll welcome you into his lair,
Like the nobleman welcomes his guest.
With free dental care and a stock plan that helps you invest!
But beware of his generous pensions,
Plus three weeks paid vacation each year,
And on Fridays the lunchroom serves hot dogs and burgers and beer!
He loves German beer!
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
Probably has a more complicated activation process than a real reactor too.
I, for one, am glad to see the words "nuclear power" and "combat climate change" in the same sentence (which is not also another Slashdot comment).
Hopefully, something does come out of this in the end.
Stall-Man (Richard Stallman, not Larry Craig)
Microsoft as a nuclear power, I bet Iran is jelous
I just have this horrible vision of the technicians upgrading the control system and having to reboot the system. Homer Simpson as the celebrity sales rep? "It's pronounced nuke-you-lar"
linquendum tondere
Do we have to start calling him Mr Burns, and will he have an assistant named Smithers?
FLR
To be fair - this is a hard day for the poor average slashbot. Should he praise nukular power or damn Bill Gates to hell? Decisions, decisions...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's plugged in!
It's gonna say, hey I think I got a new device.
It's gonna load the appropriate driver.
You now expect this nuke react.. Wooww!!
I don't know about you, but I don't want to be anywhere a nuclear reactor that Bill Gates had any part in designing. It's bad enough that computers running software he had a hand in creating have orders of magnitude more problems than software from any other source. Put Bill Gates into the nuclear reactor business, and... well, I shudder to think of the sheer magnitude of the potential for disaster there.
is that nearly all of the core tech that is used in plants today was developed in America. Likewise, even this one was mostly developed here back in the 60's. Terrapower is simply an update of an old oak ridge idea. Yet, this work will go Toshiba, rather than General Atomics, B&W, or other American companies. Gates, have GA develop it. Or B&W who has been developing reactors since the 60's (they do all of the reactors for the Navy).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I just hope this thing never bluescreens
Why? Does the article say he's going to put Windows ME on it?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Will the Start button be designed for both Startup and Shutdown of the reactor?
Will the paperclip show up on Computer screens stating, "I'm detecting a meltdown, would you like some help?"
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
What can possibly go wrong??
Just remember, 640 Watts is Enough For Anyone!
Google invests in Solar and Gates in Nuclear.
I prefer Google's approach.
http://www.google.org/rec.html
... that I had read YEARS ago about the South Africans having worked on and/or perfected what IIRC was called a pebble bed reactor which was also small and intended to not need refueling with casing design for easy storage after ending functional life...
and yes, there it is near the bottom of the article...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
the Adam's Atomic Engine variant...
Has emerging market nation agreed to purchase >250,000 Windows licenses?
... the upshot: don't hold your breath. It turns out that achieving (or surpassing) energy break-even, as difficult as it is, is actually the least of your problems. Among the others: such reactors use deuterium/tritium fusion processes, and while deuterium is relatively plentiful on earth, tritium (with a half-life of around 5 days) is not. The reactor would need to breed its own tritium, and would need to do so with nearly 100% efficiency (in other words, virtually all the deuterium supplied to the breeding process would have to be converted to tritium for later fusion). If efficiency falls even slightly too low, the reactor runs out of fuel. We don't have a clue how to produce tritium with that kind of efficiency.
Also, a fusion reactor would cost huge amounts of money to build, which means that it needs to run as close to 24/7 as possible to recoup the investment. We likewise don't have a clue how to keep feeding fuel into the system and removing the waste products - the laser fusion systems require fuel pellets to be fed into the system at a pretty high rate... and the machinery that does this needs to do it while being exposed to several tiny fusion explosions per second. The tokamak based systems need to pump in D/T at pretty steady rates, and remove He... while the fusion reaction is still going on. These are very, very difficult engineering problems, and work on them has scarcely begun.
Finally, no one really knows how to extract energy from the reactor in useful form - in a fission reactor, fissioning atoms heat up the bulk material of the reactor, and heat is carried away by some fluid, which then turns a turbine. In a fusion reactor, your energy is produced mainly in the form of neutrons (don't remember if these are slow, fast, or what)... and you get this energy out of the system... how? Again, work on this question has barely begun.
This is not to say that fusion would NEVER work as a means of energy generation... but it does mean that we're not close. For the foreseeable future, nuclear energy is going to continue to mean fission (for better or worse).
On a more serious note why are these douchebags even allowed to moderate based on their OS preference?
If moderating based on OS preference is ever stopped on Slashdot, will the last person to go please turn off the lights on the way out? Thanks!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
... is that it's "proliferation-resistant". These reactors use depleted uranium as fuel, and the waste products are such that you can't make nuclear weapons out of them. I suppose there's still a worry about the production of "dirty bombs", but my feeling is that that's more of a concern in theory than reality. From what I've read, it's kind of hard to make a dirty bomb that actually contaminates a wide area.
I have read a story about a month ago about radioactive thorium which has a lot of advantages over uranium.
P.S. can those small scale reactors produce plutonium?
if he has any kind of input like he's had with developing Windows, we're all in trouble.
Why is it that this story reminds me of when Intel handed out a classroom full of ClassMate PCs and made a huge photo op of it? You know the one, where later on the world+dog learned Intel had to fly in a huge diesel generator to park outside the classroom because the batteries on the Windows based ClassMate PCs wouldn't last the whole day and mains power was spotty.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7115712.stm
I see Microsoft having a tough time becoming energy efficient and capable of running on cheap portable devices. Bill Gates knows this so he wants to drop down his reactor pods outside of classrooms around the world so they can run Windows and not pollute like the diesel generators Intel used.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The fact that you can run this reactor from depleted uranium should give pause to those who think it's okay for the U.S military to be using DU weapons in combat.
Harmful aftereffects of DU do exist contrary to what the Pentagon says. It poisons the land and poisons the people. It's a slow burning WMD and it's use should be declared the war crime that it is.
Here is what happened in Fallujah:
Birth defects rise reported by Fallujah doctors
Docs Blame U.S. Weapons for Fallujah Birth Defects
Darth Montgomery Burns will be final!
This is great news for Iraq. They probably already have all the fuel they need. All they need to do is rake the sand for U.S.-fired armor-piercing rounds.
How many gigawatts does it produce? My DeLorean is in need of a backup just in case I jump somewhere without suitable biofuels.
So we can trust Bill Gates with nuclear technology, but not Iran?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...but now it seems I have only a few decades to wait. Will these devices reach the required 1.21 gigawatts?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Naaa, Bill G. is a closet OpenBSD fan for all his personal use. He would never trust something as slipshod as windows to support anything he is personally involved in.
It has been a while but last time I read a Windows licensing agreement it actually contained a clause prohibiting its use in nuclear reactor control. Your joke is really not that far from reality.
I don't know, there was something about Gates that always struck me as boring.
He is one of the few people in the world who have access to enormous resources and yet, he just does not do anything with it that I would qualify as fun.
Springer has his cars or maybe he used to, Woz flew airplanes, right? The Virgin guy, this dude Branson, he sounds like a kind of fella who knows how to have fun with the money he made. Airplanes, submarines, space craft! Now that's the kind of stuff I am talking about.
Gates is doing his charity of-course, but common, give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and .... there goes your fishing monopoly. What I mean is, he should be doing something fun with his money before he crocks. What's the point of having all that dough and do nothing exciting with it? Well, maybe he is excited with the charity works, again, I don't know. If I had crazy money, I would definitely build the biggest robots or biggest guns ever or biggest freaking submarine or a Enterprise at Moon's orbit. Something that would be hard and fun to do.
Common, Gates, do something that would show us that money can really cause great amounts of fun. Build a freaking nuclear reactor and attach it to a shark's head or something!
You can't handle the truth.
isnt there some clause in the windows EULA that specificly prohibites using it in nuclear installation?
and damn, the MS-shills are out in force today, not a single post with a BSOD joke above the -1 level...
Note on Java Support. The OS Components may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage. Sun Microsystems, Inc. has contractually obligated Microsoft to make this disclaimer.
http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/ieplatform/ie/license.txt
It appears you're trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown...
on my display, the parent has a negative mod total.
I am surprised this is possible.
I wonder if the mod history on the comment show multiple negative mods on a zero mod comment.
It appears there are people with mod points who read zero mod stuff and do negative mods on them.
I sure hope Toshiba's personnel have read up on Bill Gate's history of "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.".
If he runs true to his historical pattern, it means bad things down the road for these 'partners' (future victims).
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Eh, let me know when he can build one in miniature - IN A CAVE!
But..but..does it run Linux?
then were all in trouble, got iodine?
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I can't wait to see what happens when the reactor downloads the latest security updates at 3am, reboots itself, and doesn't come back up because of a bad patch!
Like when Toshiba allegedly announced a safe, small 'neighborhood reactor'?
Or was it actually true? A, a href="http://thinktech.honadvblogs.com/2009/12/15/the-new-high-tech-toshiba-micro-reactor/>Hard to say...
It's either a breakthrough, or just another story. At least TerraPower seems to be real, even if they also want to try Thorium.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm all for nuclear power but... we just need to be sure. ok?
Like when Toshiba allegedly announced a safe, small 'neighborhood reactor'?
Or was it actually true? Hard to say...
It's either a breakthrough, or just another story. At least TerraPower seems to be real, even if they also want to try Thorium.
There, the second swing connects... Missed the preview button the first time.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
With my luck the new 'Windows Control Room API 1.1' will be written in C# in such a way that it will be completely incompatible with my third party FusionReactor.so.6 that I have been happy with for so long. I bet the EU won't be happy about this either, that is unless M$ adds yet another selection to the Win9,10,11 'power control thermal isolation unit' installation menu. At least that way we can all have a 'level playing field' without going completely nuclear over this anti-standards compliance business tactic. We simply can not afford to have another ISO 'Embrace, Extend, and *Extinguish*' episode like the last one. </sarcasm>
Slashdot is incredibly harsh when it comes to Bill Gates, but he has probably done more to improve the world than all of us combined.
The answer is yes, and Rocky Mountain Institute and Chief Scientist Amory Lovins were featured in a New York Times blog in response to last years Presidential Debate. Energy efficiency, a solution at the core of RMIs work, was discussed as a viable and economically profitable resolution to both energy and economy issues. New York Times writer Kate Galbraith points out that RMI and Amory Lovins have consistently advocated the benefits of a soft-path approach to energy, with efficiency at its core. You can read the article here.
When it comes to nuclear power specifically, every dollar invested in new US nuclear electricity will save approximately 2-11 times less carbon, and will do so roughly 20-40 times slower, than investing in the same dollar in energy efficiency and micropower (cogeneration plus renewables minus big hydro dams). Buying new nuclear capacity instead of efficiency causes more carbon to be released than spending the same money on new coal plants!
These conclusions and the empirical evidence supporting them are summarized in Forget Nuclear, and fully documented in The Nuclear Illusion, available for download here, which is to be published in early 2009 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences journal Ambio.
Hopefully our vision will help put these widely publicized issues into perspective and move us all toward a better understanding that takes us beyond politically divisive issues to collective and viable solutions.
San Francisco Photographers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_extinguish
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
It seems interesting to me that Bill would firstly invest in the poor africans health and nothing more, Warren Buffet would add a cool 40 billion to that, in spite of the fact that every business man knows that you don't hold all your eggs in one basket. Do they really care about the poor africans if all they're interested is just health? Why no food? Bush wanted food on the children. Bush is better then Bill. Or are they just money grubbing addicts who want a piece of the pharmaceutical industry? Now this, energy and pharmaceuticals. Bill goes after the biggest 2 money makers out there and it doesn't take a scientist to realize that a man capable of walking over graves for a nickle would not care about people. ;)
Bill if you're reading this:
You can take it with you in the grave provided that you have big enough pockets. Just look up pharaohs. And if you're worried that no one would show up just promise you leave them something
Take cover!
I can't help but notice all the comments about Gates and the cuts over shadowed the main focus of the article being this Traveling Wave Reactor.
A run over to Wikipedia gave me some reason to doubt this amazing power system. Mostly being that it was theorized in 1958, but to date unlike many other reactor types, no one has built a prototype even.
So the question then comes, does anyone know of newer information or why a prototype hasn't been built for testing? It may not put out as much power as a LWR, but it seems it would have exceptional commercial value considering the kind of fuel it uses.
Just curious.
D.S.
I sure gives "Blue Screen of Death" a whole new dimension.
If he'd really want to help the world, he'd make it open source and he would GPL it, but we know him already.
Bill Gates is Mr. Burns 2.0! Excellent...
I belive that the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was warm, fluffy and safe compared to the possibility of Bill Gates making a nuclear reactor.
In ad-speak, this means "might run for up to 20 years... or it might not."
Does anyone actually understand the PDF? It sounds too much like a perpetual motion scam to me.
What about Thorium reactors? Why does no one ever discuss Thorium reactors as solutions to nuclear energy?
He's only going to use it to power his interstellar starship anyway.
I sure gives "Blue Screen of Death" a whole new dimension.
Sure does...the Blue Mushroom Cloud of Death (yes, I know the joke's been made umpteen times downthread) is 3D compared to ol' BSOD's 2D.
This in turn gives more sinister implications to the term "Cloud Computing".
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Now that's a fun thought.....
As I read it, the fuel is intended to be depleted uranium. So *THAT* problem won't occur. Doesn't say anything about other problems.
When I read it over, it looked pretty good. The only reason for being skeptical was that Bill Gates was involved...but that's enough.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Wouldn't you have one if you could afford it?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
What could go wrong?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
...this design uses chairs thrown into the core to control the nuclear fire. ;-)
Maybe that's part of his grand scheme. Slashdotteroids deride BG for the crappy security of his OS making it susceptible to botnets. Maybe he's trying to build the botnet that will rule them all. Of course Skynet^W bobnet will need a ready source of power, hence the nucular reactor.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
ahead in schedule april fools joke?
In soviet Russia, nuke designs you
Let's hope he doesn't put Steve Ballmer in charge of running it.
This is the correct link to the video mentioned above.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/21/166237&tid=134&tid=126&tid=14
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
So...
It'll run Windows 7?
Thank Ghu it won't be running Vista.
Bill Gates isn't exactly known for creating reliable products. Shouldn't he kinda stay away from something like nuclear power?
Image a nuclear power station that only crashed and burned twice last month. Ouch.
That's why windows update runs on akamai linux servers. Does hotmail still run on freebsd?
... to power his home by the lake?
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
the control system isn't being run by Windows, we'll all be OK...
Safety = Microsoft software in control of radioactive material.
If Windows is going to power a nuclear reactor it will be the end of humanity. I say dump the nuclear idea and run a power station on the manure talked at Redmond - that should be enough to power China at the very least.
I looked at that article, saw 4,508 days... and read it as 4.508 days. My mistake.
Check out Bill Gates' TED TALK to learn more... http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
No, just in iTunes. Jobs is going to be pissed about this...
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.