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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."
...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?
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.
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
There's still huge potential for fission power. It's just that civilian reactor technology is basically stuck in the 1970s.
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.
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
I'm right on it, just give me oh... say.. 20 years?
anyway, old school 1960s fission isnt all that interessting, these newer reactors which burn spent fuel from the old school reactors, is very very interesting. It reduces the amount of radioactive waste we have to store, and extracts energy in the process. Fusion, is off course the ultimate goal in nuclear technology, but optimising fission to the point where waste is kept to a minimum, and fuel cycles/reactor designs are far more efficient and safe is definitely a good thing
People, what a bunch of bastards
He's too busy building the organ while stroking the white cat.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I still be the greens will oppose this tech under the grounds that it doesn't reduce waste ENOUGH.
It will encourage growth, the very last thing the greens want. Expect to see opposition to it.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
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.
"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
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.
He's building a bomb, I tell you! A bomb! Send in the troops right now to stop him.
Running a pirated copy of windows has suddenly become a lot more dangerous.
I have a working to this problem. During the winter, I heat my house by burning hippies.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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!!
The irony is that burning oil and coal for the last 25 years has probably left the environment much worse off than if everyone had thrown up nuclear reactors in the 80's. Sure, the greens would object to burning coal and oil too, but sometimes you have to compromise and accept the lesser of two evils.
Poppycock. One cannot defeat Googol the Destroyer with mere bombs. This is an attempt by Gatus to deny Googol the Detroyer the power needed to run the antipodal LHC in order to create the bipolar quantum energy conundrum in which Googol will temper the world's data before using it to complete the Rite of a Million Targeted Ads.
When last we saw our heroes, Gatus and Joba continued in the diverse efforts to thwart Googol the Destroyer. But we saw a new hero rising, in the persona of T-Bone Pickings, who aims to control the world's power supply via creation of wind farms under his control, thereby making fossil-fuel energy obsolete and useless to Googol the Destroyer. It appears that Gatus and Pickings have been coordinating their efforts -- while Pickings is being thwarted by legislators who secretly serve the Dark Master, Gatus has come up with a plan to use small nuclear reactors to make fossil fuels obsolete, thereby denying Googol both the power to run the antipodal LHC and the power upon which his Webcrawling Spiders of Doom feed.
It appears that Googol the Destroyer has been partially thwarted in China -- there may be additional heroes there who we could celebrate, should we ever be able to get information out of the Great Firewall. Can Gatus have the same kind of Legislative and Bureacratic success against Googol the Destroyer here in the United States? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, rumors circulate that Joba, contrary to popular belief, has not been ill. Rather, he underwent a series of surgeries to enhance his natural charisma, marketing abilities, and since he was under the knife anyway, a titanium-clad skeleton, actuator-enhanced musculature, and a bone-white monochromatic epidermis. Cyber-Joba is now a real force to be reckoned with -- but will his new powers be enough to thwart Googol the Destroyer?
And lest we forget, the roving Druid Stallmanx has ceased roaming for the time being, and spends his days and nights directing the efforts of his Beard Gnomes in his secret laboratory. Just what is he cooking up? Can he reconcile the anarchist developers with the money-grubbing and low-self-esteem developers that Gatus and Joba have converted to the cause of stopping Googol?
All these questions possibly answered, and more, in next week's episode of Googol the Destroyer!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I don't see why anyone would be surprised by this. He's already a multi-billionaire business tycoon with his own custom-built fortress. Since the job of Batman is already taken, the transition to supervillain is the next logical step.
... 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).
US reactor technology is stuck in the 1970s. France is already implementing new generation reactors and even the oldest they still have in service are more advanced than the newest reactors operating in the US. Anyways, back to the original topic: I think this new reactor design that Bill Gates is endorsing is very promising. Thumbs up.
... 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.
640 MK should be hot enough for anybody.
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
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....
Clearly you know very little about the Chernobyl disaster. If the people responsible for it had been forced to put up with 1,000,000 "Allow or Deny" requests, they would have never managed to disable enough safety devices to make the reactor fail. "Security through annoyance" wins again!
Well Toshiba bought Westinghouse when the US stopped building nuclear power plants. Rather than letting all that know how go to waste and allowing mindless fear to control their energy policy Japan kept building nuclear power plants.
GE also builds reactors for the Navy.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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.
Not to mention that if Chernobyl had been built with any kind of containment structure at all it might not have been as devastating when it did "blue screen". (Think firewall... meter thick reinforced concrete firewall.)
I don't see why anyone would be surprised by this. He's already a multi-billionaire business tycoon with his own custom-built fortress. Since the job of Batman is already taken, the transition to supervillain is the next logical step.
But he's SO far behind Larry Ellison in that area.
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
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.
Well Toshiba bought Westinghouse when the US stopped building nuclear power plants. Rather than letting all that know how go to waste and allowing mindless fear to control their energy policy Japan kept building nuclear power plants.
More importantly, Japan* has the heavy industrial base to handle the enormous steel ingots required to produce single piece containment vessels and they are able to scale that up in just a couple of years. IIRC, Japan Steel Works currently has 80% of the market, with China and Russia covering the last 20%. The USA never had the capacity to do it and AFAIK never planned to try.
You could use a two-piece containment vessel, but it has to be welded together and those welds must be inspected for life... which sucks. That is why I think these alternative reactor designs are going to get funding, because containment vessels are an enormous bottleneck that just isn't going away.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Windows Genuine Advantage has detected that you are running an unregistered version of windows. Your power supply has registered itself as a Travelling Wave Reactor. Your thirty day trial period has now expired, and your Travelling Wave Reactor will begin its self destruct sequence.
Self destruct in
15 minutes...
6 days...
30 seconds...
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."