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."

Comments

Too bad

[wmbetts]

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.

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It can be done cheaply enough in the U.S. RIGHT NOW. The problem is NIMBY and anti-nuclear activist groups have literally made it impossible.

Re:Too bad

[mug funky]

except when someone develops a safer, cleaner method of boiling water that burns through most of the "pollution" (actually viable fuel) created by the last 3 generations of the technology.

just because it's not the best now, doesn't mean it can't (in fact SHOULD) be made better, if only we were allowed to learn from past mistakes, rather than running those mistakes well beyond their designed lifetimes.

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it irrational? Ever heard of Fukushima? Go back and follow the timeline of events. At *every* stage of the disaster experts were reassuring the public that according well accepted nuclear community engineering standards--which the plant adhere too--the next event in the timeline wouldn't happen. It became almost comical after awhile. The news about Fukushima continues to get worse to this day.

No. It's very rational to fear nuclear power, just like it's rational to fear driving on a highway. Coal plants might spew out more radiation, but they're an extremely simple, stable, and well-known quantity. You can probably predict with a high degree of accuracy exactly how many people will die of cancer from a coal plant. But nuclear plants very clearly have many unknown and unpredictable characteristics. Nuclear engineers earned a giant *FAIL* on Fukushima.

I'm still very pro-nuclear. But after Fukushima nuclear engineers really should learn some humility, as well as nuclear fan boys.

Re:Too bad

[Billly Gates]

Except in the US businessmen are cheap and have more interest in cutting costs than following safety rules. Fukashima had the same attitude of costs and could have avoided the meltdown. I would feel better if governments ran them rather than for profit deregulated corporations who have brainwashed the populace that anything else is evil socialism.

Re:Too bad

[rasmusbr]

Ill-rational? Oh dear. Leave science ( and written communication ) to those capable of said tasks.

There is nothing irrational about being against the most dangerous, polluting and expensive method of boiling water ever conceived.

Hear, hear.

Coal* mining and burning has to stop. It's deadly and dirty.

The fastest way of displacing coal at present is to build natural gas plants and wind turbines, so that should be our current industrial focus. Solar will play an increasingly important role as solar technology gets cheaper and more effective.

But none of these come close to nuclear in terms of safety and environmental performance. It's hard to beat the inherent power of E = mc^2. Gas emits CO2. Solar and wind rely on the mining of huge amounts of toxic materials, much of which will have to be deposited in underground storages unless we develop ways of recycling it. (Does that sound familiar?) Nuclear is both cleaner and safer because it relies on mining of small amounts of toxic material.

If we could develop a nuclear reactor that could be produced on production lines in factories and shipped out to the customers in shipping containers nuclear could not only be the cleanest and safest alternative, but also the cheapest.

*You meant coal, right?

Re:Too bad

[Mashiki]

Apparently you've never lived in Japan. If you did, then you'd know the anti-nuke hysteria that goes on when a company tries to build a replacement plant for aging tech.

Re:Too bad

[Anthony Mouse]

You can probably predict with a high degree of accuracy exactly how many people will die of cancer from a coal plant. But nuclear plants very clearly have many unknown and unpredictable characteristics.

You're doing it wrong. First of all, you can get a pretty damn good estimate of the likelihood of a major nuclear incident by dividing the world-wide number of operating hours of all nuclear plants by the number of major incidents. It isn't predictability that's the problem, it's the scope of the damage that occurs when something does go wrong.

But that isn't even a problem either -- it just sounds a lot scarier. People are irrationally afraid of things that are very rare but when they occur are very bad. It's like movie plot terrorist threats: Hardly anybody is killed by terrorists, but we spend trillions of dollars trying to reduce the amount of terrorism with unnecessary wars and security theater.

Do the math. Something which is fifty times as bad but occurs ten thousand times less often is a Good Thing. (I mean honestly, go visit an abandoned coal mine once. Then tell me the damn Superfund sites they leave behind aren't each individually worse than Chernobyl.)

Re:Too bad

[Joce640k]

Thing is... there are SAFE reactor designs.

No, really. The fact that everybody is still using those old 1950s reactors is ludicrous.

Re:Too bad

[sFurbo]

Yes, you are right, coal mining and burning coal should be forbidden. Wait, what were you talking about?

Re:Too bad

[BlueParrot]

I would feel better if governments ran them

You mean like Chernobyl?

The problem is lack of effective regulations and oversight. Making something government owned doesn't stop that. You need the people who inspect the stuff to be independent from those who profit from it. If the government wasn't full of industry lobbyists then private run - government inspected , would probably do the job pretty well.

Re:Too bad

[angel'o'sphere]

If you want to educate people with "facts" you should get your facts right:

1. it was a 30 year old plant 1 month away from being decommissioned;

The site had 6 reactors, only the three oldest ones where planned to be decommissioned. Also switching the reactors of would not have helped the stored fuel there ... so I don't get your point.

2. it was hit by an unprecedented earthquake that damaged the walls of the plant -- immediately after which the plant was shut down (the fuel rods removed);

The earth quake was 450km away! So the plant was certainly not hit by a magnitude 9 "shake".

3. it was then hit by an unprecedented tsunami and is close to the sea -- this knocked out the diesel power generators and flooded the plant.

Neither the tsunami nor the quake was unprecedented. Japan was hit by similar and even worth tsunamis in history often enough.

It was an extremely unlucky sequence of events -- the reactor was designed to withstand something like a magnitude 7 earthquake (and was hit with a magnitude 9 one), and survive a 7 ft tsunami (but was hit by a 10 ft one).

You know the difference between yards/meters and ft? The tsunami wave was over 14m high. Not 10 ft wich is roughly 3 yards or 3 meters.

Yes, there are now better and safer reactor designs, but they were not available 30 years ago.

How hard can it be to have some mobile power generators available and palce them at the plant in case of emergency? That has nothing to do with "reactor design". Putting the diesel engines in a water tight envirnoment is not that hard either. Or simply making a damm like wall around the plant which is high enough ...

Actually, this is good news.

[Ramin_HAL9001]

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.

Re:Actually, this is good news.

[alendit]

While I agree with everything else, I am not sure, why everyone has always to mention absolute numbers to China's CO2 production. China ist also the most populous county in the world. And the its CO2 emission per capita for 2008 is on par with Sweden or Israel and less than third of the US one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita).

Unless one argues that the Chinese people are less valuable than the US citizens (you can't even tell them from one another!), I don't see, how one can critisise China without being a hypocrite. That goes not only to the US, Germany, France and half of the developed world in worse in that regard.

Of course, if China was to provide an equal living standard to every citizen, the situation would be entirely different. And you can surely use some metric like CO2-emission/GDP, where China would look quite terrible and make a valid argument about their efficiency. But right now, China as a whole is more CO2-free than most of the developed countries.

Re:Actually, this is good news.

[bluemonq]

It's because all the expertise was in enriched uranium reactors, and the same reason why American companies used slightly enriched uranium plants for it: it's cheaper to improve on a current process than to throw it out and start from scratch. Sure, there's diminishing returns, but why bother with something new when in the current situation where the public is afraid of anything nuclear? But when you're in a country where public opinion is less of a problem and you have a large budget surplus, you're freer to mess around.

I'm not sure what analogy there is in GP's comment.

Re:Actually, this is good news.

[mug funky]

wasn't criticism. was a statement that lots of CO2 comes from China, and reducing that is a good thing.

reducing it anywhere is a good thing. it's not a race or culture statement, just a numbers game.

Re:Older than "clean coal" or Roswell Aliens

[unkiereamus]

In Japan they no longer have the honor they once had in their leadership so the responsible ones do not kill themselves anymore

I call bullshit.

Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that suicide is the honorable response to a fuck-up?

The fuck it is. The honorable response to a fuck-up is devoting your life to cleaning it up, until either you fix it or you die of natural causes.

Suicide is a coward's way out, it passes the problem to the next guy and somehow through the power of death magically absolves you of your sin.

Re:Older than "clean coal" or Roswell Aliens

[dave420]

Suicide is not a coward's way out. Yes, it passes the buck, but what needs to happen in someone's head which allows them to go against every instinct every living thing has had for billions of years - survival - has to be pretty god-damned tough to go through.

Don't judge until you try it yourself.

Re:Blue Screen of Nuclear Death ?

[Joce640k]

Joking aside, If Bill can manage to kickstart this it might be the greatest thing anybody ever did for humanity. Future generations will look back on this as The Turning Point.

(assuming that it works anywhere near as well as it works on paper)

Re:Blue Screen of Nuclear Death ?

[Vectormatic]

Adding "Microsoft" to already crazy picture doesn't improve things either.

This is Bill Gates as a private person backing a company which does new nuclear stuff, dragging microsoft into this makes no sense at all.

Re:Blue Screen of Nuclear Death ?

[AmigaMMC]

That's because Bill Gates DID great things for humanity. He has given over a billion dollars to humanitarian causes including organizations to help children with HIV/AIDS. Sorry guys, I'm out of the hate game. The days when I thought Bill Gates was evil are long gone.