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Bill Gates To Help China Build Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor
First time accepted submitter BabaChazz writes "Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates says he is in discussions with China to jointly develop a new kind of nuclear reactor. During a talk at China's Ministry of Science & Technology Wednesday, the billionaire said: 'The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste.' Gates backs Washington-based TerraPower, which is developing a nuclear reactor that can run on depleted uranium."
Just wait, China !
Bill Gate will give you Blue Screen of Nuclear Death !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...powered by Microsoft Bob.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Too bad he's prohibited from doing something like this in the US. If it weren't for ill-rational fears of nuclear power the R&D would be done in the US.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
China is one of the largest CO2 polluters in the world. Traveling wave reactors are known to be incredibly clean and safe. If you give the Chinese abundant safe and clean energy, this is going to really help the global warming problem.
The reason traveling wave reactors were never used, even though the technology has been know for half a century, is that they produce no waste that is useful to making nuclear weapons. That is only reason why all nuclear power nations wanted the more dangerous reactors that ran on uranium and plutonium fission.
But modernizing the safer, non-weaponizable form of nuclear power is a great way to go.
With the recent nuclear crisis in Japan, perhaps Gates has found another upcoming market to invest in. Nuclear Reactor Vista - Calculating time to transfer power...
Hi. Why not build a Thorium reactor. There is no problem with Thorium, it cannot be made to weapons grade anything. reg quintt
From Microsoft megastar to traveling wave salesman.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Will the power plant's system running Linux?
"I see you're trying to build a bomb...." hahah
'The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste'
the Chinese have a habit of cutting corners, lots of them. will it really be safe? also, their track record of proper waste disposal is poor. it's a good idea as long as there arent any people involved.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How many Bill Gates does it take to make up for the damage done by the Koch brothers?
How is it desirable that lunatics like Bill Gates mess with our education system?
Why should Bill Gates decide whether or not GMO are a good thing for Africa?
I Thought Chine was investing in Thorium nuclear reactors, what happen to that?
I'm skeptical of the whole concept-- we've heard about next gen safe clean nuclear forever -- LONGER than we've been hearing about clean coal or Roswell Aliens.
When a Chinese reactor goes bust do you think the people responsible will LIVE or have a nice life afterwards?? In Japan they no longer have the honor they once had in their leadership so the responsible ones do not kill themselves anymore; but there may be some shame. Its worse in the USA.
China may have troubles with quality control and corruption; but they have no trouble dealing out proper punishment which should deter some of the problems.
Besides if these "safe" nukes are feasible the leaks will be no worse than the drinking water, air, and arsenic apples in China...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
But slashdot looooves nuclear power. Does not compute with groupthink! (hive mind explodes)
"bill gates" and "nuclear reactor" In the same sentence is really not good.
"bill gates", "cheap nuclear reactor", "china", what can possibly go wrong ?
Seriously, in this kind of monster, only 1/10th of the fuel is supposed to be active at any time. Furthermore, they want to use low enriched U, so they need even more.
I would guess, from a 150ton fuel for a typical GWe device, you will here have like 5000 tons of fuel.
As soon as this becomes instable, all the "dead mass" will become reactive(despite the poisons), and you will have a never seen before 5000 ton U bomb. (as opposed to a few kg in a nuke bomb)...
aaaaaaa
He pushes Windows here, but will send American tech over there for a few bucks. I think that he and his family should just move to China.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
China will use it to build and charge batteries that will be sold in Wal-Marts in the US, so this is a win-win, right . . . ? An the "traveling nuclear waves" stay in China . . . ? Isn't a traveling nuclear wave called a tsunami, and caused a disaster in Japan . . . ?
Actually the title sounds like fear mongering (Bill/China/Nukes) or a bad joke:
"So, Bill Gates walks into a bar in China with a traveling nuclear wave reactor, and the bartender says . . .
[Insert Your Ask Slashdot Punchline Here]
Can you surf nuclear waves . . . ? Maybe China wants to take over the surfing travel industry . . . ?!
This topic always attracts lots of emotion, with very little substance . . . oh, and I guess I'm an offender, too . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Hopefully Bill doesn't cut too many corners and stays out of the flood zones. Maybe he can find a good sized city in western China with lots of desert around.
China mine a lot of their own coal and are planning to get more from Mongolia. Most of the Australian coal goes to Japan:
http://www.australiancoal.com.au/the-australian-coal-industry_coal-exports_coal-export-details.aspx
Also there are plans to expand a Uranium mine in Australia to make it the largest in the world.
I read somewhere sometime ago China was researching a nuclear reactor design called Pebble Bed, made to be cheap, reliable and safe. Do someone with more knowledge in that field knows if it is a continuation of this program or a completely new design? Thank you.
Tomorrow is another day...
Only an idiot would buy an ugg. They are now cheap chinese garbage.
Is the reactor going to use Windows? Is that a good idea? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The ultimate question for all reactors is what they leave behind.
They can't help leaving behind fission products (that's where they get their energy from), which isn't too much of a problem, as it takes only about 300 years for them to decay to levels of radiotoxicity of natural uranium in equilibrium with its decay products.They will leave behind some Uranium, but this can still be used in other reactors.
The problem is mainly residual Plutonium, Americium and other elements, with half-lives of several thousand or tens of thousands of years, which require hundreds of thousands of years to decay to such levels. (Because of the very damaging high energy alpha decay, rather than lower energy and much less damaging beta and gamma decays.)
On the one hand non-fissle transuranic elements capture neutrons and interfere with the chain reaction, on the other hand capturing neutrons either splits them or eventually transmutes them into fissle elements. This turns them into fission products, which we can handle with reasonable confidence. The question now is: does the travelling wave in the travelling wave reactor provide enough neutrons to transmute and split the transuranic elements it breeds, such that the reactor as a whole reaches a stable equilibrium before the end of its operating time? Conventional reactors don't, because the chain reaction is stopped for lack of neutrons long before a stable equilibrium is achieved. Most breeder reactors do, but it depends a lot on how tight the neutron economy of the particular reactor is. And afaik (correct me if you know better or have access to specifications), the neutron economy of the travelling wave reactor is rather tight and might well be possible, that the wave leaves ever more transuranics in its wake as it moves, without ever reaching an equilibrium over the whole of the reactor.
Why is reaching a stable equilibrium before the end of operation enough? In this case you can add some additional transuranics at the start of operation and still reach the same equilibrium at the end of operation. If the amount you can add at the start (and still reach equilibrium) is larger than the amount left at the end of operation, you effectively reduced the total amount. Given that, you effectively solved the long-term problem of transuranic waste, by limiting its amount and eventually burning it.
The question is, can the travelling wave reactor do that or not? (There are other options ex post, but it is always best to not let the problem exist in the first place rather than dealing with it later.)
Firstly, Billy G. is not very smart.
Secondly, the very notion that intelligence brings insight is ludicrous.
Thirdly, the idea that smart people should rule stupid people is elitism at it's purest.
And finally, there's very little difference between the chauvinism you just expressed and the racism of the KKK. Indeed, the notion that "I have the right to decide over your life because your so stupid" is something so awful -- even the ultra-conservative Koch brothers would be appalled.
Wait till you see the meltdown!
In the new design, the reactions all take place near the reactor's center instead of starting at one end and moving to the other. To start, uranium 235 fuel rods are arranged in the center of the reactor. Surrounding these rods are ones made up of uranium 238. As the nuclear reactions proceed, the uranium 238 rods closest to the core are the first to be converted into plutonium, which is then used up in fission reactions that produce yet more plutonium in nearby fuel rods. As the innermost fuel rods are used up, they're taken out of the center using a remote-controlled mechanical device and moved to the periphery of the reactor. The remaining uranium 238 rods—including those that were close enough to the center that some of the uranium has been converted to plutonium—are then shuffled toward the center to take the place of the spent fuel.
Currently there is no known material that could be used to encase the fuel rods in -- they need to survive radiation exposure for decades without expanding.
The ONLY reason for building the current reactors was to build neclear weapons. Of course it's not going to be safe! Even when they were first build engineers made other designs that would be far safer, but they couldn't get hold of Uranium 232 or what ever it is you need to purify to make a nuke.
It's a real shame that people are not more educated as this could be part of the answer to the energy (and pollution) issues that are facing humanity. There are designs that DONT need active cooling, so in the event of failure would not explode, spreading the radioactive crap everywhere.
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Makes sense. That's where the word "ugly" comes from, after all... "looks like an ugg"...
The travelling wave reactor concept appears to be basically a sodium cooled reactor that has a lot of extra U-238 , allowing it to go very long without refuelling as the enriched portion of the core "travels" along the U-238 ( this image explains the concept: http://evworld.com/press/IV_twr_concept.jpg ).
I have to say I am sceptical. The main economic issue with sodium cooled fast breeders is that they are very capital intensive due to the challenges of handling flammable sodium. Thus trading even more capital investment ( in the form of a larger core ) for less frequent refuelling seems like a bad idea. Furthermore, any design that is to see widespread deployment should make use of economics of scale. Fuel fabrication, reprocessing and so on can be centralised, with a few facilities potentially serving many reactors, or even multiple nations. It thus makes little sense to move capital costs towards the power plant and reactor, away from facilities that can be centralised. This is why I doubt all the talk about "Integral" facilities or on-line reprocessing ( as suggested for molten salt reactors ).
It's not very hard to build a breeder with a 2-3 year core lifetime anyway, and you probably don't want to run it much longer than that without shutting it down for servicing, repairs, inspection and so on.
Don't get me wrong. It's a cool idea technologically. I just don't think it will be economically competitive with other Gen-IV designs. The focus for breeders today should be on reducing capital up-front investment, improved safety and reliability. No utility is going to invest billions up-front in an experimental design that is unlikely to be economically competitive with other alternatives.
I start: 640 mSv ought to be enough for anybody.
Deleted uranium is one of the biggest lies of the modern age. It is purified U-248 and as this design shows, it can be made into plutonium. And while this smaller design may not generate as much waste as the big boys, it still does and they may be mass produced and eventually spread that waste everywhere. And with a little modification, you have a plutonium maker, just you need for your nuclear weapons.
of actual decommissioned nuclear power plants. If such a list exists, it would be microscopic in comparison to the list of aging plants given a rubber stamp extension on life just so the owners never have to foot the bill or more accurately not until they bailout with their golden parachutes. This may be more of a US problem, given that corporations are firmly in control of government.
I keep imagining that Bill really just wants more H1B visas and has conflated a couple of his negotiating points...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Why Bill?
Gates isn't a nuclear engineer, nor does his company have related expertise. China has plenty of money of its own, they don't need him to put up funds.
Bill Gates invests in more nuclear power. Google invests in solar power plants.
One thing that is quickly forgotten is the human cost of developing power sources. The industrial revolution was powered by steam. But a lot of people died before safety and control strategies were developed that tamed that beast. Nuclear is no different -- and the more the screams of NYMBYs and the greed of lawyers/insurance companies work to hold back development the longer it will take before the potential of nuclear power is realized. After all, one thing that held back development of the automobile was a perception of how dangerous gasoline was. And Edison waged a fear campaign about the dangers of alternating current (a good thing he lost). And there is the loss of perspective on the amount of radiation we receive on an ongoing basis -- and the role of radiation in the development of disease (along with everything else). To say nothing of the amount of fallout dumped on the US northeast during the 1950's and 60's due to open air testing. At least nuclear is not adding appreciably to the greenhouse gases. And wind still blows when it blows -- it was just revealed that in Ontario 86% of the wind energy is dumped because it is generated when the power is not needed. And looking at the safety record -- more people are killed each year mining coal than in the entire history of peaceful nuclear power. But the hysterical press tends to ignore that -- it is an inconvenient truth. But we should not forget that Fukashima was an old design that was known to be flawed many years ago. It would be interesting to know how much of a role the fear of change played in keeping it that way.
I don't think bill gates will like being tied to the next chernobyl or Fukushima.
Now both disasters could of been not as bad with they would put more in to safety and makeing so that the backup's where not so easy to take out.
Breeders are inherently less safe than even Fukushima-type reactors. They're not inherently subcritical in the case of a pressure drop, and liquid sodium as a coolant is dangerous. TWRs are just a theoretical concept that has been discarded in Europe and America because it seems even riskier.
But I don't think this is really about building a TWR. It's about finding an excuse to ship nuclear waste to China. I wonder how long the Chinese are going to take it. Nobody likes living in the hazardous waste dumpster of the world.
Ask the US Navy how the 2-3 low pressure reactors are working out on all subs and most ships [ships carry boats].
Low Pressure reactors are all over the EU and Canada, have be for 30-40 years.
Only the US is such an Industrial Idiot [tm] as to have expensive welders, pipes, inspectors, take 20 years to build a High Pressure reactor.
Example: 3 Mile Island [and all others] Fukashima and others.
The problem is the small school bus size reactor CAN NOT be installed in the US due to regulations [money hungry congress-critters and corps]
My town of 12,000 and now power hungry industry and do with 1 or 2 of these.
If this works as planned, Nevadans will be kicking themselves for the next century over their protests over Yucca Mountain. They were almost in the position of having tons of FREE nuclear fuel sitting in nice caves, ready to be hauled up for cheap power. Whoops!
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
Why not, we all see how well MS and Gates did with windoze security and reliability.
We do things the American way when we don't really realize why.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a factory still churning out bullets for weapons our military (snicker) doesn't even use
Here's Bill Gates' TED presentation on this project from almost 2 years ago:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
Even if half of this design works out as advertised, i think this would be awesome! Pity that the 'western world' wasn't interested in investing in it and trying it out....
And why is it not as good as plutonium or depleted uranium?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
the best way to bug people who don't care about what happens after they die
and just want to live to the extreme in this life-span is to waste their time left and right.
The way the Travelling Wave was explained to me on Terrapower's site the reaction is designed to carry on for up to 60 years while relying on liquid sodium cooling.. what happens if the cooling system stops working before the reaction finishes all the fuel? Is there a way to stop the reaction? (Would they need to do something physical like cut the fuel pellet just ahead of the reaction and then physically separate the sections?) Would the fuel likely escape containment if the cooling system failed?)
I've made my choice in the OS wars. Ubuntu. I've made my choice in the energy wars. Renewable Energy. If Gates can't get an operating system correct why should we trust him to develop a technology with even greater stakes attached. This is the biggest issue I have with the 1% making the decisions which form the world in which we live - Their decision making process is purely profit driven. The Earth is not a corporation.
Nuc Power advocates maintained, for years, that a melt-through was a physical impossibility. Well.. Interesting I just discovered the following dispersion model, which someone had linked to Berkeley’s discussion page. It uses TEPCO emission data to model possible dispersion patterns for Neptunium and Plutonium emitted from Fukushima:
http://www.datapoke.org/blog/89/study-modeling-fukushima-npp-p-239-and-np-239-atmospheric-dispersion/
http://datapoke.org/partmom/a=114
It's very difficult to see a black swan coming with your blinders up - and even more difficult when your money is on-the-line.
Why not do an innovative development like that in the US or a "more allied" country?
It seems to me too big of a present considering they are not so nice to us...
No I didn't say that. Also, you completely missed the point: Billy G. should be allowed to these things because he is SO smart? Billy should dictated the teachers how to teach -- because he's so smart/insightful? Then why not have the scientist tell us dumb people how to school the kids in the first place? Heck, why not letting scientist run the world?
Why? Because it would end up very very badly. Let me tell you a little story. The story of James Lovelock. His little book "Revenge of Gaia II" recently spooked the brains of the British elites. However, there was something off with that book and they didn't notice, the finest journalist, the finest academics, the finest British elites -- totally clueless. James Lovelock is a Nazi. Every error that made the Nazi, the Nazis it's in this book (and they all missed it...).
But what was the question again? Ah, the government is too corrupt. That's why everything is going down the tubes. It's the government's fault. Jerry Brown is SO corrupt and SO dump. Also, Fox News is supposed to dictate Washington's agenda etc etc.
Where does the gridlock in Washington come from? Why is the USA in a downward spiral? There are answers to this. But they're not here on Slashdot[1] and neither inside the New York Times[2] -- they are on YouTube ^_^.
[1] You guys don't know much about politics.
[2] The New York Times is everything Fox News is supposed to be.
Google is investing in a number of tech. That includes Solar power, but also wind, geo-thermal, and they continue to look at nuke.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Quit trying to give China the moral high ground!
Who cares if there are safe reactors? Not most governments. Hell, most WANT the unsafe, ancient, dangerous designs. Thorium Salt, etc? Hell no! Most governments want the by-products for their weapons programs. This is the reason many of the better designs were shelved in the US over the past 30 or so years. Building bombs gets a HECK of a lot harder without nasty fissionables
Come one people the arguments are cool but Bill is only the Face and the money Bill have the power to make big things happen to bring the correct people to the table and the money to backup a technology changing system like this one and many others Bill has worked in many developments in medical applications Like new MRI and including making Satellites for NASA
Nearly every industrial process has has something toxic involved. The above poster could have just as easily used margerine and the nickel catylst used to make that as their strawman.
There are far worse things used to make the fuel that goes into your vehicle (eg. HF) than arsenic and phosphorus but we just accept it as part of life and deal with the dangerous materials appropriately. The nuclear fanboys stuck in the 1970s like to pretend that everything they blindly cheer for but do not understand is "clean" and that no progress is necessary. Of course that is insane, dishonest, an insult to everyone's intelligence and counterproductive.
Keep endorsing it big business soon you will live under it.
You will have no choice that is how it works.
To check out an amazing 5-minute intro to Liquid Thorium Reactors search for Thorium Remix or go to thoriumremix.com
ALL nuclear reactors DO have a proliferation risk in them. The main driver of the proliferation risk is they create and spread knowledge about how to safely and effectively work with highly radioactive materials. Some designs are worse than others in that the materials and of processing equipment can be directly re-purposed for weapons. With that said, the main reasons nuclear is dead in the US is, #1 Given its history, who is dumb enough to trust a multi-billion dollar investment to the regulatory whims of the NRC? Answer: No one with a billion dollars. #2, There are too many people who earn a living scaring people about nuclear power. Ralph Nader essentially retired on it. NIMBY is just a tactic they use.
I hope solar and wind eventually pay-off because Hydro and Nuke are dead in the U.S.
ALL nuclear reactors DO have a proliferation risk in them. The main driver of the proliferation risk is they create and spread knowledge about how to safely and effectively work with highly radioactive materials. Some designs are worse than others in that the materials and of processing equipment can be directly re-purposed for weapons. With that said, the main reasons nuclear is dead in the US is, #1 Given its history, who is dumb enough to trust a multi-billion dollar investment to the regulatory whims of the NRC? Answer: No one with a billion dollars. #2, There are too many people who earn a living scaring people about nuclear power. Ralph Nader essentially retired on it. NIMBY is just a tactic they use.
I hope solar and wind eventually pay-off because Hydro and Nuke are dead in the U.S.
'The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste'
Well, at least China is good at doing one of those already. The other 2, not so much...
Obviously he cozies up to the Chinese - birds of a feather steal together.
Chinese stole almost all technology inventions from the West
Gates stole almost all ideas sold by Microsoft
Together they can go into the future ripping off other people's ideas and live happily ever after.