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.

Comments

Nuclear Power is unnecessary.

[DMJC]

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.

Traveling Wave Reactor

[trout007]

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.