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

My God

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is working together with the North Koreans to kill us all! Give all my moneys to DHS and TSA!

Re:My God

[Samantha Wright]

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.)

Re:My God

[Strawser]

It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games

To resolve this problem I suggest that we start calling South Korea for The Democratic Republic of Korea.

As opposed to North Korea's official name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Yeah, that'll surely clear things up.

Re:My God

[Aqualung812]

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)

Re:My God

[Samantha Wright]

I believe you mean peninsula, not continent; the continent is Asia and the plate is Amuria. The more you know...

As it so happens, though, Koreans invariably refer to their native country as the true and default Korea. That's probably how this story got messed up in the first place.

Re:My God

[operagost]

The Japanese raping Filipinos to death, bayoneting pregnant Chinese, and burning entire towns because one person gave them crap comes a really close second.

Re:My God

[Anonymous Coward]

Splitter!

Re:My God

[MightyYar]

Once you get into total war, there is no moral high ground. Just be glad your side won and move on.

Re:My God

[jbburks]

Genocide? Interesting viewpoint.

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?

Re:My God

[lister king of smeg]

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.

Re:My God

[shutdown -p now]

NK doesn't even pretend to be communist these days. Apparently it wasn't such a good descriptor because none of the Kims invented the word, and so people could think that someone else was smarter than them or something; while in reality, of course, all revolutionary political thought that leads the great Korean people to their superior destiny only originates with the Kims. So now it's all about Juche and songun. They've even dropped all mentions of "communism" from their constitution in 2009.

And why not in the US?

[hsmith]

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.

Re:And why not in the US?

[d3ac0n]

RTFA dude (yes, I know, this is /. where nobody RTFAs) The reactor is designed to produce significantly LESS waste than existing designs. the problem is that getting permits for experimental reactors in the US is even harder than getting one for a known reactor design. We have hobbled ourselves in the Nuclear power area, indeed in ALL power areas due to our extreme fear of all things nuclear. (Despite living on a radioactive mostly molten ball with a thin hard crust orbiting around a giant fusion reaction in space as we get bombarded with interstellar radiation.)

Re:And why not in the US?

[timeOday]

Also, the Obama administration attempted to block further Uranium mining

Citation needed. I just googled it and all I found was that uranium mining would not be allowed on Federal lands in Arizona, i.e. the Grand Canyon. This is a far cry from the universal ban you claimed or implied.

Re:And why not in the US?

[vlm]

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

MS sniping aside...

[sinij]

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.

Care to specify which one?

[Yosho]

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.

Bill Gates is a Rock Star.

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

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.

Re:Nuclear Power is unnecessary.

[QuantumRiff]

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.

Re:Thorium

[ByOhTek]

So we can grow sweet potato like produce that will turn us into aggressive, violent, homophobic, psychopathic "protectors" one we grow past breeding age?

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.

Re:Cost is a factor

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Actual communism

[coyote_oww]

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.

Re:Actual communism

[jpmorgan]

That's how communism fails in small groups, but do you really think the Soviet Union's economy collapsed because they were all lazy?

No, the real reason why communism fails in large scale is because it doesn't have a good decision making mechanism. A successful economy is an efficient economy: efficiency frees up resources to be used for other purposes. The capitalist system is one in which major decisions are made on a financial and monetary basis, i.e., the value and costs of any action can be quantified.

In any sort of command economy, there are political considerations; there are many examples of the Soviet Union making desperately bad economic decisions for political reasons. But there is a greater problem: under communism, optimal decision making is an intractable problem. The economic decision problem grows exponentially with population size.

But what about capitalism? Under capitalism the decision about whether, for example, to shut down a factory for upgrades and maintenance is economic, not political. But more importantly, financial markets operate as a clever information summarization mechanism which reduce the decision problem from exponential to polynomial.

No, communism doesn't fail because people are lazy. Communism fails because running an advanced society is - like most human endeavours - a lot harder than it looks. The devil is in the details, and oh boy are there a lot of details when you're trying to satisfy the needs of a hundred million people. A small fact that most political philosphers overlook.

Traveling wave reactor criticism

[Prune]

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