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

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?

[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

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.)

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: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

[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?