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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.
As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea. It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games, like how "China" now always means mainland China, and never Taiwan (although that one's somewhat more understandable, since they have the chunk of territory called China, whereas the Republic of Korea only has half of the Korean peninsula.)
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Let's see:
Japan invaded China and Manchuria, killing 300k in Shanghai alone.
The US tried the darling of the left, sanctions.
Then, while the Japanese were in Washington, in negotiation with the US on resolving the conflict peacefully, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor one Sunday morning. That afternoon, the Japanese ambassador delivered the declaration of war.
Along the way, there was the Bataan Death March (definitely genocide).
On Saipan, the US had translators and loudspeakers trying to convince the Japanese civilians that they would not be harmed. The Japanese military told them the Americans would kill them. They jumped off a cliff into the sea. Can you have genocide within the same racial group.
Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we asked the Japanese to surrender. Sound of crickets as the Japanese, with their custom, killed the peace proposal with silence.
Then the B-29s were sent out, not with bombs, but risking flak, etc., to drop leaflets telling everyone in town to get out or face a new and powerful bomb. They chose to stay, working in the Mitsubishi Torpedo Works, the shipyards and other armaments plants.
After the first bomb, the US waited three days. Still the sound of crickets from the Imperial Palace.
So, your definition of genocide is striking back in force after an unprovoked attack? Interesting definition.
And, once the Japanese surrendered, we spent millions feeding their people. Genocide?
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.
Kind of. SFRs are about 50 years old, even in the USA. We have, err, had, about a half dozen of them. Those crazy soviets put them in subs which they promptly set on fire and sunk. Its old icky tech. No one wants them if they can use a PWR or BWR design instead. The latest spin is to try to market them as something new even though they aren't new. Just like IT, everything old is eventually new again, and sometimes it even works. SFRs are the "cloud computing" of nuclear engineering.
For non-nuke noobs, a SFR is just like any other reactor except:
1) The coolant is sodium instead of water, so its hyper flammable and this scares the hell out of everyone involved, so every plant has had excellent safety and production records, well, except for the ones that caught fire.
2) Ditto above water is neutron activated for "a couple seconds" so other than impurities / leakage into the coolant, the coolant is basically radioactively harmless, however sodium does neutron activate and takes a couple days for enough half lifes to pass before its harmless (radioactively). Note I'm talking about the coolant itself not impurities or leakage into the coolant which is unchanged, more or less. So thats a bit freaky. You can draw PWR/BWR primary loop coolant and by they time it flows thru the "just in case" filters its cool enough to dump directly into the sewers. Sodium takes a bit longer and dumping it into the sewers is not exactly encouraged behavior, although I'm sure its terribly entertaining.
3) Other than being flammable and radioactive, sodium is a near ideal coolant. You won't have corrosion issues like hot high pressure water. Endless stories about 20 year old pumps being pulled out of service and appearing to be brand new. Although there were some "hilarious" near disasters with eutectic alloy formation and that was all figured out 40 years ago.
4) Sodium solidifies into a solid lump at room temp. This is kind of an issue for operational concerns. OK time to boot up the reactor, pull the control rods. Oh wait, they're frozen in place. Well then. And once you fix that and get the reactor cooking, the pumps are jammed so you've got to heat them.
5) Vapor pressure at operating temp is basically nil, at least compared to water. So the reactor vessel is more or less unpressurized (well yeah you blow argon over it instead of room air, but ... its just a argon blanket not 1000 psi steam like PWRs / BWRs) So all this fukushima splitting open stuff is not really relevant. Of course if you did split one in half it would be the end of the freaking world...
6) The "overheat leads to high temp chemical reaction with cladding leads to H2 buildup leads to kaboom" aka fukishima is literally chemically impossible. "unplug" a SFR like happened in Japan and basically nothing happens it just inherently calms itself down and eventually will freeze itself solid. Crazy but true. Isn't nuclear engineering cool that way? PWR and BWR to some extent or another will try to blow themselves up if abandoned so you engineer "fail safe" by making them really tough, but an abandoned SFR just kinda sits there all hot at a constant temperature and does nothing. Its kind of boring that way. Until the local fire department decides to hose it down with fire hoses. Sodium doesn't like water very much. Err actually red hot sodium likes water a lot, its just the nearby humans that dislike the fireball.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger