Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
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
Nuclear power is not only necessary, it is unavoidable, although it may be possible to avoid it in some places, for some time.
Microsoft is working together with the North Koreans to kill us all! Give all my moneys to DHS and TSA!
South Korea.
South - good.
North - US says they I bad, I really don't know for sure though.
Show me a single Solar Salt Thermal plant running in production. Or even one that is almost in production, running anywhere near the power capacities of even these 'little' nuclear power plants. (let alone the Gigawatts of some of the big boys)
BTW, your "only 400 billion" is a bit crazy.. The US has around 100 Reactors producing about 1/3 of our nations power. At an average replacement cost of about $2billion (each) last I heard. So for that same money, you could move 2/3 of the US to nuclear.. and the land mass used to generate it would be significantly smaller.
There is no single solution, and I wish people would stop claiming there is.. Moving all of any country to any single power source is plain foolishness.. its going to take a mix of wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, wave power, etc to properly diversify and meet the power needs.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
When your country name has "democratic" in it, you can usually count on that not actually being the case:
-Democratic Republic of the Congo (non-functioning government)
-Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Communist)
-People's Democratic Republic of Laos (Communist)
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Once you get into total war, there is no moral high ground. Just be glad your side won and move on.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But is a general rule good enough when the subject includes a nuclear reactor AND Bill Gates?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Democracy is a political system. Communism is a financial system
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
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.
No genocide is when you try to systematically kill of a whole racial ethnic, or religious/political group. What happened in WWII against the people of japan was not genocide. We were at war and during war some civilians will died. that is the nature, unfortunately, of war. The US never tried to kill japans entire populous. We fought them until they surrendered. (If we had not the would have gone right back on the offensive.) Then we rebuilt their country. Had we been engaging in genocide we would not have stopped killing them. If you want to know what genocide is look at the other side of the war what happened in the Philippians and Manchuria. Or look over in Europe where the Germans most definitely pursued genocide killing any and all jews, roma, poles, gays, masons, J.W.'s, soviets, and serbs.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The point about Japan is that people were saying we would go back to the stone age without nuclear, but that didn't happen. In fact there has been a bit of a boost due to people buying new energy efficient appliances to help reduce power consumption. Remember that threat of rolling blackouts this summer? It was removed because people met the challenges, all without reverting to an agrarian society or even reducing their quality of life in any measurable way.
I remember that even months after most Japanese reactors were offline there was a story on /. about more European countries deciding to go nuclear free. Some comment about them going back to the stone age was modded +5 informative. Well, that guy and everyone who modded him up has been proven wrong. I'm not saying it hasn't had an affect on Japan, a big affect, but it wasn't the cataclysmic disaster many predicted.
Now, given a decade or two to slowly reduce dependency and move to non-nuclear sources like other countries are I'd argue that not only will there be little or no pain, there will be huge gains as well. Japan in particular is blessed with more than enough renewable energy for the entire country, it just needs to be tapped and the nuclear industry is very powerful.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.