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Bill Gates Is Beginning To Dream the Thorium Dream

Posted by Unknown on from the bill-just-wants-a-vat-of-molten-salt dept.

Daniel_Stuckey writes "TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered the most attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But Terrapower just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too."

8 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wow, I finally have a reason to like/admire Bill Gates....

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    1. Re:Finally! by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Don't forget the widespread parasite infection rate due to his work on cheap sanitation infrastructure. The last "generation" of excessively wealthy philanthropists did wonderful things, like build universities, parks, and feed the homeless. This "generation" seems intent on fixing the world, which, while neocolonialist, is really promising in the amount of progress.

    2. Re:Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You know what? No, it isn't enough. His decisions to put other companies out of business and to eliminate competition took millions if not billions of dollars out of our economy and hurt countless other possible investments and real people. If he hadn't made evil decisions, we might have solved things decades ago that he has just recently began helping fight.

      Opportunity costs always exist but when you take them away from other people in what are bluntly evil ways, you can never ever actually make up for it.

      But this, this particular scientific focus, this is important and exciting to people who have long since realized that many problems are going to outlast all the attempts to fix them.

      You can never make up for something evil in your past until you can travel back in time. The best you can do is try to do some good now. I'm glad he has decided to try to do some good now. I'm glad he is putting his money into something I personally care about. So pardon those of us who actually feel a little excited for a change.

    3. Re:Finally! by Kwyj1b0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      For example, in Africa, The Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron.

      The Gates Foundation also has investments in 69 of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical. It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and The Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.

      Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of transgressions including forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.

      In the mean time, Bill Gates' net worth has increased by $20 Billion since 2007.

      Ideally, that shouldn't happen. However, if you look at the worlds most profitable companies, I would assume you would find most of the 69 companies in that list. If Gates puts back a significant portion of the gains back into philanthropic work, it would be a net gain.

      Shell and Exxon do not need Gates money. I doubt Gates is on their board of directors. His organization must have bought the shares on the open market as an investment. They should be using the proceeds of that for further philanthropic works. In a way, his organization might end up using the profits of Exxon to undo the damage of Exxon.

      I know the idealistic notion is to say "we don't need blood-money to achieve our goals". And Bill Gates certainly has enough of money to throw at problems. But I'd rather he grow his money and spend the profits on philanthropy than not give to important causes at all.

    4. Re:Finally! by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The molten-salt reactor built in the US back in the 60s had a maximum output of 7MW thermal -- it never generated any electricity, the heat was dumped to air. A modern GenIII uranium reactor like those coming on-stream in China and elsewhere produces about 4500MW thermal /1600MW of electricity 24 hours a day, and with downtime for refuelling, inspection and maintenance as needed they are expected to operate for sixty years at least -- a century of operation is not impossible given the extreme overengineering that goes into the core components involved.

      It's a bit like saying someone who built a model aircraft engine that ran for a few hours means they can design a reliable efficient cost-effective truck engine based on the same principles. Good luck with that.

      As for the proposed Indian thorium reactors they are basically standard PWRs and heavy-water BWRs fuelled with a mixture of thorium, medium-enriched uranium and plutonium derived from conventional low-enriched uranium nuclear reactors of the sort in operation around the world today. Thorium (Th-232) isn't a good nuclear fuel by itself, it needs to be bred into fissile U-233 with neutrons from U-235 and Pu-239/240 before its energy can be extracted. India want to go this route because they're not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore limited in their access to the world's nuclear materials markets and they don't have good native sources of uranium ore. If it were otherwise they probably wouldn't bother.

    5. Re:Finally! by Arrepiadd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Gates Foundation has always been primarily a wealth investing and patent acquiring entity. I seriously doubt they are here for the benefit of humanity

      Yes, the Gates Foundation should just use all its money this year and close shop by next year. That will do much better for humanity!

      Guess what, wealth investing has to be a big part of any decent foundation's work. The Nobel Foundation has been around for 113 years and the way they did that was by investing the money they got in the first place. Otherwise it would have ran out a long time ago.

  2. Re:Norwegians are already on it by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Good grief, what an utterly crap article! So many things they got wrong... Lessee, the thorium experiment involves eight (8) pellets of mixed-oxide thorium/plutonium fuel in a single fuel rod loaded into a low-powered heavy-water research reactor fuelled mostly with enriched uranium (the reactor is designed to accept other fuel elements like the thorium MOX rod for testing purposes which is why the test is being carried out in Norway). Thorium needs a neutron flux to breed Th232 up into fissile U233 and produce energy hence the mixed-oxide formulation of the pellets mentioned. Assuming the MOX pellets get commoditised they'll need an ongoing future supply of Pu to continue making them and that can come only from either reprocessing fuel rods from regular uranium reactors of the type running today or breeder reactors also burning uranium although the track record of breeders hasn't been too good up till now, lots of engineering problems with molten sodium leaking and consequential fires. Note that the travelling-wave reactor design mentioned in the original article is basically a breeder using guess what? as a coolant. Oops.

  3. Google "Moonshot" video about thorium reactors by schweini · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's a fascinating video on the "Solve For X" site that follows this Thorium advocate around. It's very convincing!

    https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/thorium-an-energy-solution-thorium-remix-2011