Bill Gates Is Beginning To Dream the Thorium Dream

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."

Comments

Finally!

[CrimsonAvenger]

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

Re:Finally!

[Valdrax]

What about all the stuff his foundation does about malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV? Or the stuff he's doing for sanitation and disaster relief? Heck, even if you're looking for something closer to home, then what about try to fund a better condom so that people will be faced with less of a choice between pleasure and safety?

I may not like the man and bear a huge grudge for some his more destructive effects on the computer industry, but all of that kind of seems piddling compared to the effect his actions will have on billions of the world's poorest people. I have been forced to grudgingly admire him for quite some time now over his philanthropy and the transparency and effectiveness of his charity compared to some of its "rivals."

Re:Finally!

[almitydave]

Rumor has it the new thorium reactors will put out 640 kW, which oughta be enough for everybody.

Re:Finally!

[cusco]

The group who do the investing of the Foundation's money is entirely separate from those who are doing the actual Foundation work. As with pretty much every fund manager they're going for the largest return on investment, and they're not going to put the money into some feel-good company distributing handmade baskets with a 1.2% return when Monsanto and Shell return 7%. That's their job, to grow the Foundation's funding. It's up to the rest of the staff to figure out what to do with that money.

Re:Finally!

[Kwyj1b0]

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.

Re:Finally!

[nojayuk]

Some of the richest uranium deposits known are in northern Canada, in locations so remote they'd have to fly the yellowcake (uranium oxide in the form of U3O8) out in cargo planes. Today the spot price (25th July 2013) for yellowcake is $40 per lb. which makes it uneconomic to work that ore body given the logistics costs involved. If the price of yellowcake tripled then maybe it would start to be worthwhile opening up those orebodies. That tripling of the raw material price would only increase the price of nuclear-generated electricity by about 1.5 cents per kWh though because the fuel is still ridiculously cheap and a minor part of the total cost of nuclear electricity.

Long time back before WWII, nobody was really interested in uranium, it had little or no industrial uses. After WWII everybody started looking for it but it was thought at that time it was rare hence the early interest in thorium, breeder reactors etc. It turned out that it was actually quite a common substance with lots of easy-to-mine ore bodies in places all over the world. We're still working on the easiest to extract sources of uranium because they're cheap. As they run out we'll dig up more expensive ores, lesser grades requiring more digging and processing and the price will rise.

The wonderful thing is that uranium is so compact a source of energy that we don't need to dig up a lot of ore to keep the lights on, not compared to coal or oil or gas. The US' entire electricity demand could be met by a couple of million tonnes of uranium ore each year, without reprocessing spent fuel -- if that was done (at a price) a few hundred thousand tonnes of ore would suffice. In comparison it would take about 4 billion tonnes of coal each year to do the same job.

The bottom line price for uranium is extraction from seawater -- Japanese experiments suggest that would cost about $300 per kilo of uranium metal although nobody's bothered to build a pilot extraction plant because, guess what, uranium is so cheap right now it's not financially viable to even try. There's enough extractable uranium dissolved in the world's oceans to power the world for millenia if we had to.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

He's doing more for humanity than you are.

Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere

[tlambert]

Those with the money control the future, good or bad.

Yes, I remember now. It was from a book at my local Carnegie Free Library, funded by wealthy philanthropist Andrew Carnegie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library

Or it could have been at Stanford, which was funded by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.

Or to put it another way: focus is no substitute for vision. Government bureaucrats rare have vision.

Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere

[bryonak]

While Carnegie and Standford are admirable individuals, I think you're somewhat in denial here. The vast majority of long term projects happening in the world these days are funded by governments (whether they matter to the actual survival of the human species is another question, as humanity would survive just fine without any privately funded and without most government sponsored endeavours).
But take health care for example: all charities in the whole world combined only achieve a fraction of the medical support solely the US health care system provides for, let alone the European ones.
Private charity makes for very good PR, but simply lacks the mass to come anywhere close to the amount public services require.

As for vision, both individuals in interaction with government (= active involvement with their own society) and those know-it-better separatist privates can have visions equally. Personally I would take Neil deGrasse Tyson's campaigning over Bill Gates' profit oriented private funding, but luckily we can have both!

Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere

[Nadaka]

Uh... no. Not at all.

The entirety of the culture of serfdom was the rape of your own country for the profit of the nobility.

Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere

[Valdrax]

For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.

No, many of the long term projects that get a lot of media attention are funded by wealthy individuals. Taxpayer dollars go to many long-term projects that will benefit humanity as well.

The LHC, Super Kamiokande, and almost all the big physics projects are taxpayer funded. Almost all the big brain mapping initiatives going on today are publicly funded -- particularly through the NIH. Most climate monitoring is done by national governments and universities. Government funding is about the only thing keeping new antibiotics research alive since it's unprofitable.

Personally, I'd rather vote for people to put the money into projects that won't deliver short-term profits in hopes of greater long-term profits than cross my fingers and hope that if we let some people amass enough concentrated money that they'll spend it on something other than their own, narrow interests. For every Carnegie or Gates there are a dozen Koch brothers, Trumps, and second-generation rich twits like Paris Hilton.

only *exact quoted text* is wrong

[DrYak]

The Gates connection is an idiotic myth.

No, the connection is wrong only as far he didn't literally say "ought to be enough for everyone".
That the correct quote:

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

yup, he admit that he had a part in designing the 640k limitation and admits that he though at the beginning that it shouldn't be problematic, but the realised the error later.

Yes it was due to the design of the original PC, which used 640k for RAM and the rest for video & BIOS.

The 8088/8086 processor used in there machine has no such limitation. (Hint: 640k isn't a power of two, so very likely, it isn't a bus limitation. The bus is 20bits, meaning that it can address spaces up to 1MB).
The 640k is purely an arbitrary choice. You have to put the non RAM parts (ROM, Video ram, etc.) somewhere in the address space.

The most prevalent way to do it back then is to put this part in a fixed range at the beginning of the address space, and then put the ram afterward. That's the way it was designed on most home micro computers.

IBM and Microsoft (per Bill Gate's own admission) collaborated in the designing of the PC architecture. Surprisingly, they did NOT follow the prevalent way. They opted to sereve the address space 00000-9FFFF for RAM and A0000-FFFFF for the rest. (That's where the 640k come from: it's the first address with a hex "letter" instead of "number" because that the arbitrary point they choose for the RAM/ROM split).

Had they chosen to go for the most prevalent way, problems would never had arisen, the upper simply being pushed as newer CPUs with wider buses became more widespread.

But, IBM though of the PC as a glorified terminal with which to talk to their big irons. They didn't see much interest in providing much RAM. The important part was their minicomputers and mainframe, and those DID have more provision built-in.
Microsoft on their side, came from a background of 8-bit home micro computers, in which 64k was huge.
As Billy said, 640k could seem to them as being more than anything ever needed. They could write software running inside 64k. The PC could even ship with incredible amount of RAM like 128k. Why would anyone need addresse of more than 640kb.
Also the first PC were equiped with amounts of RAM varying between 16k and 256k - so it was not "640k of RAM, then BIOS" but more like "a few kb of RAM, a huge unused gap in the address space, then BIOS" - given the huge gap, the address split might have looked reasonable... ...except it wasn't. If they were paying a little bit more attention to what was happening around them, they might have thought a little bit better and thought of a design which doesn't put a restriction on memory.

The point of thorium is no plutonium.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, ...

The big point of thorium reactors is that they don't produce plutonium. This made it less attractive during the Cold War, when producing plutonium for building bombs was considered a plus. Thus they were what was developed before opposition to nuclear plants made designing and building new ones uneconomic - at least in the US.

In the current age of avoiding nuclear weapon proliferation, this potentially makes such designs less expensive to build and operate due to lower regulation and less need for defense against interception of spent fuel by budding bomb-makers, to convince the bureaucrats to let things proceed.

Such lower regulation and lower costs might make it possible to proceed with the necessary research, design, and deployment and still hope to make a profit.