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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.
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 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!
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.