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Bill Gates To Develop a Revolutionary Nuclear Reactor With Korea
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pledged to develop with Korea a revolutionary nuclear reactor that will leave far less radioactive waste than existing ones. Gates invested US$35 million in a nuclear-power venture company TerraPower in 2010. TerraPower is led by John Gilleland. It was formed from an effort initiated in 2007 by Nathan Myhrvold's company, Intellectual Ventures. The company includes expert staff and individual consultants who have worked for some of the most prestigious nuclear laboratories and engineering companies in the world." You may remember that Gates worked with China to build a reactor late last year.
Microsoft is working together with the North Koreans to kill us all! Give all my moneys to DHS and TSA!
Those north-south thingies are just a waste of electrons, pixels or ink.
I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.
I really appreciate that someone is working on advancing nuclear energy. Oil and gas are fine for now, but eventually we will need reliable non-oil/gas based energy solution. I believe nuclear, once sufficiently mature, could be that alternative.
I mean, we can probably guess which Korea they're referring to here, but last time I checked, they hadn't been reunified yet. I really hope that Bill Gates isn't building a nuclear reactor for North Korea.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
That's all I have to say about that.
North or South?
A lot of people would just sit on their fortunes (Warren Buffet) or piss it away on political bullshit (Koch brothers). I know a lot of the crowd here is anti-Microsoft, but it's nice to see Bill Gates doing something with his hoard and something halfway-geeky to boot!
We know how this guy operates. He'll buy something already developed, and slap his name on it.
Why does anyone need nuclear power? Solar salt thermal plants can do baseload electricity already. There's a proposal to convert Australia to 100% solar thermal/0 carbon emissions in a 10 year time frame and it only costs $400 Billion. That completely eliminates our greenhouse gas issues. http://www.http//beyondzeroemissions.org Nuclear/Oil/Gas really are dead end Technologies. We should be conserving nuclear resources for long-haul space travel instead of burning our only real means off this rock.
intellectual ventures is involved. in a few years we'll be paying a licensing fee as part of our bill
... are microsoft getting into the refinement of uranium/plutonium as a way to avoid patent litigation from Apple/Samsung/Google over the surface?
"We raise your patent for 'a small button on the device front, that allows the user to turn it on', with two 8Kg blocks of plutonium-239, which we shall now hand to your lawyers as one big block, whilst running away very, very, quickly..... ".
Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death? Honestly?
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy - well no, come to think of it, I don't hate them anymore, they're like the nasty grandmother who's gotten old and invalid and you feel vaguely sorry for now - but quite frankly they've gotten good at making stable operating systems.
Old BSOD statements are getting really old and stale now...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I guess Matt Groening had already in the pipeline for the Simpsons something like Homer at work fiddling with the new Metro interface of the control system.
It's gonna be REAL!
The only billionaire evil scientists existed in the works of Stan Lee
Korea = North Korea
I bet they mean south Korea. (small s)
One Korea!
Oh no!
Can you imagine the front page news 10 years from now?
"...and for the news in the international arena, tens of millions of people in South Korea were left without power again due to a reactor Blue Screen Of Death. The Nuclear technicians that operate the reactor confessed to having forgot to reboot the reactor at least once a day to avoid the BSOD"
Week before last. I thought it might be a hardware error, but the laptop runs Linux just fine. Reinstalling Windows and so far its worked flawlessly.
Why not with Iran?
Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death? Honestly?
Years. They seem to have stopped right when I switched to Linux.
... when the first thing that I think of when I see the headline is that's one way to ensure that he spends all of his money before he dies?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
doesn't the windows Eula say not for use in nuke plants?
Or, Yknow he could go to Cambodia and fix the drinking water. That would show humanism in a appreciable way...just spitballing here.
Because North Korea is the best Korea
did you forget to take your meds?
Does it run Linux?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,290910,full.story
By Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon Times Staff Writers
January 7, 2007
Ebocha, Nigeria â" Justice Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb.
An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Justice squirmed in his mother's arms. His face was beaded with sweat caused either by illness or by heat from the flames that illuminate Ebocha day and night. Ebocha means "city of lights."
The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.
In Ebocha, where Justice lives, Dr. Elekwachi Okey, a local physician, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. No definitive studies have documented the health effects, but many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer.
"We're all smokers here," Okey said, "but not with cigarettes."
The oil plants in the region surrounding Ebocha find it cheaper to burn nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas each day and contribute to global warming than to sell it. They deny the flaring causes sickness. Under pressure from activists, however, Nigeria's high court set a deadline to end flaring by May 2007. The gases would be injected back underground, or trucked and piped out for sale. But authorities expect the flares to burn for years beyond the deadline.
The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France â" the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.
Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.
Oil workers, for example, and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation's efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, which is ideal for mosquitoes that spread malaria, one of the diseases the foundation is fighting.
Investigators for Dr. Nonyenim Solomon Enyidah, health commissioner for Rivers State, where Ebocha is located, cite an oil spill clogging rivers as a cause of cholera, another scourge the foundation is battling. The rivers, Enyidah said, "became breeding grounds for all kinds of waterborne diseases."
The bright, sooty gas flares â" which contain toxic byproducts such as benzene, mercury and chromium â" lower immunity, Enyidah said, and make children such as Justice Eta more susceptible to polio and measles â" the diseases that the Gates Foundation has helped to inoculate him against.
Investing for profit
AT the end of 2005, the Gat
Korea? Really? Wtf on this grand earth would he pick Korea for?
It's a really cool idea if you can get it to work. It breeds fuel right before it burns it. So you can load the thing once and have it run for 50 years without refueling. It's nice because you don't have to have move large amounts of enriched uranium or plutonium around.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Last week. They are rarer these days with Win 7, but they still happen. It was a company issued laptop so I didn't mess with the settings if that was your next question.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Okay, so why hasn't he been arrested on terrorism charges yet?
Offering to build a nuclear reactor and, of all places, in Korea? I thought there were export laws about things like that?
Not to mention, he's obviously well-funded, has planted malware on every computer in the world (and thus indirectly funds all piracy and peer-to-peer networks).
Seriously? We're chasing after some pillock in an embassy when Bill Gates is building private nuclear reactors in war-torn countries?
Have a (serious) look at the LENR move.
Old nuclear systems will become illegals in a few year.
Is this related to Bill Gates' plan to re-invent the toilet?
http://www.e-catworld.com/
Thorium nuclear plants doesn't exist for now (and will probably never exist).
Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death?
Last week, whilst watching a DVD with VLC. It was also the first one in the ~3 years I've been using Windows 7.
They can use robot guards, presumably running Windows, to guard the site
This is a ploy to launder money. Kim Jong Il never died; he just went into hibernation. They will build a temple around his resting body to tap into the now great field of power and love for his people that emanates forth from his nipples. The robustness of the structure is a precaution in the event he awakens in a poor mood.
Indeed; I've had people point out 'Japan's running just fine having shut down ALL their nuclear plants!'. Just recently I read an article* that pointed out that the cost of the oil and natural gas to replace their nuclear plants pushed Japan into a trade deficit for the first time in decades. Now, it didn't have a mention of cost, and the global downturn probably plays a factor, but I found an estimate of $100M/day, 4.5M barrels of oil. Since Oil is pretty price-inflexible, that 4.5M barrels of oil is coming out of the rest of the world - raising the price of our gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products.
LNG imports: increased 18% in volume, 52% in value, to $67B. Cost to the Japanese: $23B USD equivalent.
Not the most impartial site, but it quotes $55B in additional fossil fuel imports. It actually says the shutdowns were a bigger cause than all the damage from the Earthquake & Tsunami.
For those worried about global warming - Green energy isn't ramping up to replace the nuclear power lost anytime soon, and it's led to a substantial increase in Japan's CO2 emissions. Right now Japanese consumers oppose turning the plants back on; but last I heard they're also not seeing an increase in their electric bill yet.
Finally, to DMJC - How well do you think SST Plants will do during an Alaskan Winter? Beware the 'one true power' fallacy. My goal is 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% other(hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, etc...)
*Dead tree publication, Stars & Stripes, Aug 13,2012, 'Fukushima disaster studies call for regulatory reform'.
I don't read AC A human right
...of course... !!
ROFL
No "What could possibly go wrong" tag?
Anyone know if Korea is looking to require Open Source in some part of the government? If not, everybody should make the threat when it comes time to upgrade windows...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Of course the reactor will run windows. Just like the aircraft carrier that ran aground. A GPF will cause a melt down, and then we will call it the 'Redmond Syndrome'
Hopefully they will power Microsoft with it. :)
Ridiculous.
Their first proposed reactor, which they showed off on their web site for over a year, violated all the basic rules of reactor flux, geometry, and physics.
You can't get nuclea material to burn down, like a cigarette, due to basic geometry and entropy. A totally wacko concept that no real nuclear engineer would entertain, not for a minute.
Their new design is just a teensy bit less wacko.
Mr. Gates gave a rather insightful and intelligent discussion of this problem at a recent Ted Talks. He makes a pretty solid point that some kind of nuclear power is our only way out of the carbon-destroying-the-earth problem.
In this case a BSOD is really a BSOD!
Credit where credit is due.
Yes it does use hydro. But try to site a new dam for a hydroelectric power plant.
I find it hypocritical for the environmental movement to cite hydro-electric as an example of successful renewable energy in support of non hydro renewables when they've historically fought any new dams tooth and nail.
is doing so much good in the world while our fine leaders frolic in filth and foolish dumbfuckery... the hell is the world coming too ? Is nothing sacred ? Oh wait, metro,.... balance restored.
Maybe with nuclear reactors it will be a green screen of death.
that Bill Gates is giving Kim Jong Eun a nuclear reactor!
Sadly the same logic applies to laws passed by the US Congress.
Whenever I read "People's" and "Bill of Rights" in a law I always look for how many rights they are going to trample.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I believe since WinXP (at least ON WinXP) Microsoft by default sets the OS so it doesn't show a BSOD -- it just reboots spontaneously. I don't run Windows anymore, but once I re-enabled the BSOD I used to get them on a damn near daily basis with XP. On the few times I've booted to Win7 on my new laptop (Damn Adobe products...), I'd say I've gotten one mysterious reboot out of around 10 hours spent running the OS.
Not to mention all the times I hit to boot Win7, walk away for a minute, and come back to see the Linux login prompt. Damn thing can't even get to the login prompt without spontaneously rebooting! And that's not a rare event, that's AT LEAST three quarters of the times I try to boot Windows!
Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death? Honestly?
Good question.
My honest answer: more than a decade ago.
Honest explaination: it's more than a decade I don't run windows anymore on my personal computers (at work is another issue: I get payed for using it, but it's not my choice neither my responsibility).
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
some woo-woo woo-wooing on the wwwoo-wwwooo wwweb...
so should I be investing in palladium or nickle this time?
Speaking from experience with huge number of machines running all kinds of OS here: most spontaneous reboots are due to bad non-ECC DRAM. It doesn't matter what OS the machine runs. With bad (cheap consumer-grade) DRAM, it's only a matter of time until some important kernel data structure gets corrupted, and then it's "undefined behavior land." With ECC-RAM, stuff like Win7, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris are pretty stable (excluding buggy third party drivers, of course).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Never had a single crash on Linux on this laptop. Hell my old WinXP machine that I used to use for gaming was crashing at least once a week when I left it on Windows, but never saw a single crash that I can recall on Linux.
My first assumption on any kind of frequent crash is almost always hardware failure. And I used to build my own PCs from the cheapest parts I could find ($20 video cards, the half price RAM that gets shipped from Taiwan...) so I have plenty of experience with bad RAM. But when a Linux system won't crash under heavy load, and a Windows system will crash while idle, and they're on the exact same hard drive and the exact same system, hardware failure seems a bit less likely...
I think the Bill Gates time after Microsoft is looking to be much more interesting than what he did with Windows. The philanthropist and world developer side of him deserves a big credit.
The guy who runs 4chan is called "moot"
but that's a mute point.
Great. Assuming fuel is abundant, available in politically stable regimes, and the overall endeavor is energy positive. Coupled with better batteries, this could actually be useful. If I were Gates, I've be focusing on batteries next.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Does you IT make images and apply them to each new laptop as it comes in? Perhaps assuming that each laptop of identical product number is made of identical components? I've seen this crop up at least once, where different Wi-Fi cards were used in the same make and model of laptop, causing problems when the default image was laid over top.
Of course, the other possibility is just bad hardware, typically RAM, but it could probably be anything.
The point is, if you saw a blue screen, something is wrong and it's probably something that is diagnosable and fixable.
. . . once you understand the question.
Let's call the North the Revolutionary Republic of Korea.
The South would be the Technological Republic of Korea.
So after all the US companies rejected the idea as unworkable science fiction, and then the Japanese did, and then the Chinese did, Korea is the next sucker up to bat.
Good luck with that.
There are working communes around in North America. The ones I know of are small (1000 or so), and religiously conservative, high trust groups. Transparency is high, leadership is a calling (and more work than non-leadership, with few/no perks).
Personally, I think the size is a key issue, because the small size (and transparency) enable trust. Lack of trust is the big fail in communism. If your going to all share alike, you have to have some confidence that everyone else is contributing their best efforts, or your going to slack off yourself. Someone sees you slacking, and slacks (a little more?) themselves - its a downward spiral. The only way to combat the race to the bottom is to reform or boot the slackers. The key piece here is that slackers can't hide.
Unfortunately it has not happened since. Bugs that can't be reproduced are extremely hard to fix.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well, "Dude"...I did in fact RTFA, initially hoping to see something about thorium or pebble-bed reactors. To my surprise, they're flogging is a "sodium-cooled fast reactor". That's something we've heard about before, except this time they conveniently left out the words "liquid" (before "sodium") and "breeder" (after "fast"). In our current world political climate, following Fukushima and with all the hand-wringing about terrorists and "suitcase nukes", no technology that makes plutonium is gonna fly.
Can you rule out hardware failure or bugs in third party binary blob drivers though? Because those things will kill any OS, and if anything Windows is now one of the more resilient ones due to running many drivers outside the kernel.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
http://www.e-catworld.com/
Not to mention NASA, Duncan, Hagelstein from MIT, many MANY more acknowledge cold fusion is real.
Not to mention possibility of room-temperature thermionics.
Get with the times Bill. You're not helping society by pawning off this kind of tech when something much better is literally right around the corner.
Having been closely involved in building a nuclear power station myself, I can tell you that US$35 million will go almost no-where. Yet Gates will get his name on it for that as if he built it single handed?
When in primary school, all us kids sponsored some community building by paying 25 pence each to write our name on a brick. I bet my brick was cemented up behind the urinals.
Check out this section of a video where Kirk Sorensen, a nuclear and NASA scientist, criticizes TWRs (the class of designs TerraPower is planning to build): http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=P9M__yYbsZ4#t=01h00m25s
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I cannot rule anything as it happened once and has not repeated.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Agreed. Although you sound a bit up-tight, it is a fact that he is giving away money which is in part dishonestly obtained by shady and downright illegal practices, MS being a convicted monopolist. So it is partly other people's money he is being free with.
Refund a chunk of that money to MS customers and let them decide for themselves if they want to give it to Gate's charities or power stations.
From the Article:
Gates invested US$35 million in a nuclear-power venture company TerraPower in 2010. TerraPower is led by John Gilleland. It was formed from an effort initiated in 2007 by Nathan Myhrvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures .
and
Gates met with the head of the Korean Nuclear Society, Chang Soon-heung, in Seattle on Thursday and agreed to cooperate in the development of a sodium-cooled fast reactor,
It looks like he is working on a nuclear patent portfolio!
Actually, South Korea is "Republic of Korea", not the "Democratic Republic of Korea"
DPRK is, of course, the North.
I had to double (and triple) check that when sending money to the south, because I'm fairly sure that sending it Northwards would have resulted in
a) It never coming back to me
b) Me ending up on some sort of watch list
Luckily a smartphone and a google search ensured I had the *correct* Korea, though I'm a bit annoyed that the bank doesn't have it noted somewhere.
Just call it a Quantum Computer that Makes Energy as it produces Truly Random Numbers!
Maybe you should read up on fast reactors - a fast reactor is not necessarily also a breeder; a light water reactor breeds plutonium whether you want it to or not.
Also, the plutonium IFRs make is _less_ useful for weapons:
"... plutonium-bearing material taken from anywhere in the IFR cycle was so ornery, because of inherent heat, radioactivity and spontaneous neutrons, that making a bomb with it without chemical separation of the plutonium would be essentially impossible - far, far harder than using today's reactor-grade plutonium."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
running in all its glory in a nuclear facility.
Kim Jong-il: "Ahhahahahahahahahahahahahohheeheeha ah ooh hee ha ha. And I thought my jokes were bad."
Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death? Honestly?
Honestly, it's been a while since it's now a Black Screen of Death, Honestly!
That's alright. Bill is actually a clever guy. He knows not to use Windows for anything serious.
May we live long and die out
I've written ADC/DAC drivers for DOS on a 486 to do realtime control system stuff. As long as you don't have any TSRs running DOS works great for realtime stuff exactly because it's non-preemptible. This means that as long as you only need to do one thing, it's very predictable.
Ironically, the stuff I did was eventually used on a research tokamak fusion reactor.
That's Windows Update, which frequently reboots before the desktop shows in order to replace system components. Because it knows nothing of setting the default OS entry in Grub, you reboot into Linux if it's your default.
You can change the menu to default to whatever was booted last with the savedefault command.
This could be due to the way Win7 and Linux use memory internally. Bad bits in uncritical parts of the kernel memory could very well remain harmless, but one bad bit in a critical data structure could wreak havoc.
I'm not defending Win7 by any means, but I know quite a lot about systems programming and how kernels work. I've done some simulations in virtual machines, randomly flipping bits in various parts of kernel memory, and the OSes may or may not crash.
Having said that, I think that most (but not all!) crashes on Windows are due to flaky drivers, when it's not bad memory or bad PSU.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Yea, I have Linux as my default and prefer Linux as my default because 99.9% of the time that's what I want it to boot into. It's just obnoxious that it takes two or three reboots sometimes to install an update on Windows (Shut it down, on boot it reboots again, then sometimes it will still have things to install and pop up a window saying it's going to reboot AGAIN and there's not a damn thing you can do about it), when I can update my entire system on Linux with at worst one.
Check your hardware. I had a dual boot Mandriva/XP box a few years ago, and Windows got really flaky. Linux quit when the power supply finally went all the way down... it had been bad for quite a while. Linux is incredibly tolerant of hardware faults, Windows not tolerant at all.
Last year I had a kubuntu/Win 7 notebook with the undesirable trait of hanging under certain circumstances in both OSes (a hardware design fault). I'd have to pull the battery to get it shut down, Windows finally died, kubuntu plugged right along.
Free Martian Whores!
The North needs this tech more then the South. The South is full of infidels!
...the nuclear reactor is built with Microsoft's Windows Activation Technologies...and the reactor fails it's "activation check"?
Does the reactor shutdown within 180 days, or does it go "super critical" and then blow up in 180 days?
Inquiring minds want to know.
You can opt out of our new program of experimental nuclear reactor near you home. To opt out of our program buy license for going nuclear-free form Intellectual Ventures.
Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death? Honestly?
About two weeks ago. It was centered around a bug in the handoff between the onboard Intel and Nvidia graphics cards, the drivers didn't handle the handoff between IGP and external (to the processor, not to the laptop) graphics correctly. Not Microsoft's fault, but then again, probably 50-75% of BSoDs back in "the day" were caused by bad drivers or hardware.
A settings tweak resolved the problem. That said, obviously the BSoD is still alive and well. FWIW, I've kernel panic'd linux and OSX at least as often as I've killed Windows 7 in the past few years of use too. They all seem about equally stable in a desktop environment. Servers, however are a different game. I don't think I've crashed a configured Linux server I manage in... years.
Just another ignorant American.
Given the experience we have had with Microsoft Windows, which is still after all this time, plagued with vulnerabilities and other troubles, can we really trust Bill to be involved with the development of a nuclear device? Will it really be using Windows 8 for it's operating system? Armageddon is closer than I thought in a world with Bill Gates involved in nuclear politics.
Gives the term Blue Screen of Death new meaning ,-)
Big Blue Screen of Death?
North Korea is about the closest regime to 1984.