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As China Option Fades, Bill Gates Urges US To Take the Lead in Nuclear Power, For the Good of the Planet (geekwire.com)
In his year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says his to-do list for 2019 includes persuading U.S. leaders to regain America's leading role in nuclear energy research and embrace advanced nuclear technologies such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture. From a report: "The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change," Gates wrote in the wide-ranging letter, released Saturday night. "Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game." Gates acknowledged that tighter U.S. export restrictions, put in place by the Trump administration, have virtually ruled out TerraPower's grand plan to test its traveling-wave nuclear technology in China. "We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely," Gates wrote. He said "we may be able to build it in the United States" if regulations are updated and the investment climate for nuclear power improves.
Then what do you use for shielding?
mired in bureaucracy and political bs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Endless lawsuits are the biggest impediment in the US. Get them under control and we have plenty of cheap power
THere are a number of new intrisically safe (relatively speaking) self contained nuclear vessels. For example the Hyperion reactor. You bury in you backyard and it makes power till the fuel runs down. Then you can did it back up. In the meantime it minds it's own business and the type of nuclear fuel can't run away. Same with the Thorium reactors. Sure you could cut them open and spill the contents but that's actually pretty easy to clean up since unlike chemical spills radioactive materials are easy to find to clean up. Also things like uranium and thorium with long half lives just are not that "hot" to begin with.
The idea is that once you foreclose all possibility of a meltdown or steam explosion then nuclear power can done more safely and with less emissions than any other on-demand power source even when the operators are incompetent.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They just removed several posts completely.
Sad to see SD being coopted by the moneychangers.
Nuclear pipe dreams:
LFTR: We're looking at an investment of about $40 billion and at least a 10 year Manhattan Project style gathering of the greatest physicists in the world to catch up to where the last research team left off in building a molten salt reactor. On top of that, we have to drill through the whole Thorium cycle to prove it out. Theoretically, it is very promising on paper. We'll have to see how well it proves out in reality. It has all the added benefits of being less toxic than the current Uranium cycle, with little to none of its byproducts that can be weaponized, and the end result material after the cycle is complete is only radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years in the Uranium cycle.
Thorium reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is much less nuclear waste— two orders of magnitude less with thorium. It's abundant so it's more accessible. And it's prohibitively difficult to use as a nuclear weapon so it's safe to let developing countries without mature or stable state apparatuses develop these. The reactor designs use a lithium floride container that will melt, draining out the fuel in the even of an over temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Uranium Nitride safety: http://www.ans.org/pubs/magazi...
They can be built small, they do NOT produce weapons-grade uranium as a by-product, and they can’t melt down due to an uncontrolled “chain reaction.”
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
IMHO, R&D for all kinds of new/advanced fission/fusion tech must be supported/continued!!!
Why?
Because, for a really great future, our world does not just need clean energy!!!
There are many great things can be done/accomplished w/ electric power,
but, only if, there is truly astronomical amounts of electricity available!!!
Energy sources like Solar & wind etc would never be enough to realize them!!!
Like what?
For example, there are far superior materials, for all kinds of construction/enginering, like titanium,
but producing them at truly large scales/quantities require astromical amounts of (clean) electric power!
Imagine, if all buildings, roads, infrastructure, vehicles etc were made of titanium,
then, they all would be really light, strong, (unlimited) durable!!!
Imagine, if we had truly astromical amounts of (clean) electric power, we could build a global clean water pipeline network!!!
We could produce clean water, at enough scales/amounts for all kinds of needs, for wherever needed on Earth, by desalinating sea water!!!
Gates's focus on new, un-proven, and frankly more complex fission reactor designs is hopelessly misguided. A much better idea was the Gen III+ approach of standardized units that are improved lower cost versions of proven PWR technology, like the Westinghouse AP1000.
And no, it is not "opposition to nuclear power" holding it back in the U.S.
The primary problem is and has been the high capital cost of the plants. Without regulation guaranteeing sufficient stable returns over a long time to recover the investment it is a difficult pitch, and even then the long pay-back time makes it less desirable than natural gas plants if that is an available option. How to make capitalists and investors want to sink their money into these plants in large enough numbers to be helpful?
And this problem has led to the second - so few plants built that the industry to do it has become moribund, thin and the supply chain brittle.Westinghouse, the developer and backer of the AP1000 plant went bankrupt two years ago.
The U.S. has had a stream-lined licensing process for a few decades now, and since 2008 seven new units were licensed - all of the AP1000 design. Investors/utilities have dropped out of five of these, and the projects are dead. None of these projects were killed by "opposition", it was due to the projects going over budget and becoming uneconomical, and Westinghouse going bankrupt, not problems an untried new technology is likely to fix.
Only the two Vogtle units are still being built and have gone massively over budget. How far over budget? The original estimate for the two units was $4.4 billion and is now expected to be $25 billion. In large part this is has been due to difficulties in getting the major parts manufactured, and errors in construction, requiring rework, and delaying the schedule. And this is due to the brittleness of the industry supporting it at this point.
An AP1000 is running in China right now (started up in June of this year) and three more are under construction, but these units have also been delayed by years due to supply problems
The nations that have either a) built a mostly nuclear electricity grid (France); b) are actively building many nuclear power plants (China); or c) have a well-proven track record for building plants on-time and budget (South Korea) have one key thing in common. All of the companies doing this are majority government owned. That is to say, they are socialist enterprises.
The capitalistic model of the U.S. for nuclear power has failed. It has not maintained economies of scale, has been shown robustness to overcome "teething" problems, and is unable to "take a bath" on early units to perfect the supply system and overcome the learning curve.
It you want to see nuclear power making a come back in the U.S. the only option, on the evidence, would be creating a government run corporation to build them. If you don't support that, then you don't support nuclear power. And complaining about NIMBYism, or environmentalists, as if they were stopping nuclear power is simply beating a convenient whipping boy. Makes you feel good inside to bash people you don't like, but accomplishes nothing.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Nuclear power is simply the release of energy stored over a very long time. As such it is simply adding heat to the environment. Solar power and wind power simply use heat that would be here anyway. Thus it is far better at preserving the environment than operating a nuke.
The biggest problems with nuclear power come decades down the road. Any "lead" endorsed by the political establishment won't focus much further than two presidential election cycles.
What we should do is do a crash program in nuclear waste management and plant decommissioning; once we lick that problem there's not much serious objection to proceeding with even third gen reactors, to say nothing of fourth gen designs with better inherent safety.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
when we've got Clean, Beautiful Coal?
Jokes aside the reason nuclear is a nonstarter in America is Americans don't trust their government and private institutions to keep it safe. Given the levels of corruption we routinely see that's not unreasonable.
Now, I personally think if we could convince Americans that government regulation works it wouldn't be an issue. But sooner or later somebody comes in with talk of "Job Killing Regulations" and an anti-gov't ad blitz and gets 51% of the voters to put somebody in power that'll gut safety regs for short term profit.
Look at Fukushima. 3 70 year old executives more or less destroyed a city for a quick buck and they _might_ finish out a life of opulence and splendor in prison. Or they might tie it up in court until they die of old age. See the problem?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Article summarized: Geriatric billionaire recommends using exotic unproven technologies to create yet more hypertoxic radioactive waste - 'cuz hey, he's going to be dead in a year anyways, so fuck the risk!
Yes, let's all listen to Bill "I am a moron" Gates. A failed businessman from Micro$oft who coldnt even predict the need for more memory in computers. Sorry, you moron, Trump has it 100% correct (AGAIN!) that coal is the future. We have more than enough to last us centuries and it is cheaper and employs more americans than the chinese crap you traitorus libtards keep pushing.
... such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture.
Not even trying to hide it.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
so that makes him a nuclear engineer and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Given the realities of climate change, air pollution, and poverty it is immoral to oppose nuclear energy. Also assuming renewables can replace fossil fuels is the equivalent to believing in the toothfairy.
Please make laws so that my new startup can sell stuff. Better yet, make my startup's stuff mandatory.
Yours Billg
DoE just signed a contract with UAMP to basically own 2 NuScale reactors out of the 12 that are coming. It will take a bit of time to build these (on-line in 2026), but they will be able to scale up to 1 reactor / month. IOW, by 2028, they can start building out new sites with 10-12 reactors for 600-720 MW sites. While this is less than massive 1+GW reactors that GE-Toshiba or Westinghouse push, these are near impossible to meltdown, can go up quickly, are passive meltdown proofed, and are quite cheap compared to coal, and even AE (if you add in the batteries for short-time on-demand).
The question becomes, will DoE under Perry and CONgress work together to push Nuclear power. One thing that he really should be doing is requiring that at least 2/3 to 3/4 of the energy be capable of on-demand for at least a week, if not a month. We are moving to electricity being the main form of energy (esp by moving our transportation to electric), so, it really needs to be solid. While price figures in, so should national/states security.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Better 'n part time power®© in any case
Until such time as the sun goes out or gets so big that it eats the Earth, the climate is going to keep changing and cannot be made not to change. Just whom does Gates think he's fooling - or is he really that stupid?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"...if regulations are updated..." means if regulations are lowered so we can get away with lower safety standards.
"...the investment climate for nuclear power improves..." means if the government promises us a high-enough profit no matter what it costs us to get something up-and-running.
If it truly was about saving the world, they would build it in the US on their own dime and meet all safety standards, even if they don't make a shit-ton of profit. If that wasn't feasible, and it truly was about saving the world, Gates would flip Trump the bird and go to China anyway.
Do the thorium salt one?
Regulations exist for a reason.
Gross corporatist propaganda to limit liability for negligence, incompetence and criminal actions.
"concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture"
So that is why this big liberal is now pro nuke power.
oh yes. LFTR nuclear reactors. That's the one where everything is a liquid flouride salt. You go and run a distillation column in order to separate out the fission products, while the reactor is operating. I figured that an absolutely gigantic LFTR complex, which produces tens of gigawatts of power, could make sense economically. It would be like having an oil refinery, with all the engineers, and scientists, running it. A lot of PhDs in one place.
50 gigawatts. 200 Mev per Uranium atom fission. about 2.6 * 10 ^ -3 moles Uranium fissioned per second. 0.6 grams of fission products.
Can someone also look into using up spent fuel? Either through re-processing or sticking it into a different type (?) of reactor that can use it.
One of the large objections to nuclear is often about the "waste". But there's a lot of unused material in there and it seems a shame to simply bury it.
The big radioactive elements on a human timescale are strontium 90, and cesium 137. They each have a half life of about 30 years. After about 300 years, their radioactivity is down by a factor of 1,000. Next is Americium-241, which emits alpha particles, and has a half life of ~400 years.
So, after guarding the spent fuel for several hundred years. I'd then consider it not so dangerous, and dump it in some out of the way place, like Antarctica, and not worry to much about leaks.
The death of nuclear in Europe benefits
1.) Big Gas
2.) Big Oil
3.) Big war (from 2.))
4.) Big Bomb owners (they are jealous to protect their monopoly)
German "GREEN" party are actually Maoists who have been coopted by CIA and US corporations to act on their behalf.
Millions killed FOR OIL.
You just denounced one of the Core Beliefs of German-Maoist economics !
How dare you! You must be a Nazi, no less.
That's why more and more stuff is built in China. Because they operate all on solar panels and unicorn farts.
Certainly not on an army of super-dirty coal plants.
Just for storing a week of German electricty, we would need a ring of concrete, 2kms diameter and 100m height in the sea. Just for the leccy, not for heating and transportation and neither steel production.
Now calculate how thick this wall would need to be and now many million tons of CO2 would be generated while making the concrete.
Solar panels+Windmills don't work, and Germany proved it at the price of 30 cent/kWh.
Just shows how heavily stupid german commies are. The worst from of commies, German commies.
At a time the french were not yet morally and financially broken/Mohammedized, they built dozens of reactors and can now (still) heat their homes using leccy. They would then also blow a hole into the CIA operatives ("Greepeace") who tried to sabotage french interests.
But alas, France is now run by a former Rothschild bankster, who caves in in the face of slight pressure from yellow vests.
That is why Germany has now the most expensive (30cent/kwH) leccy in Europe and probably the world. And CO2 production has basically not changed. It was a "Gaswende" that helped to burn more CH4.
Your funny cells and windmills produce when you don't need it and don't produce when you need. You would need crazy enormous water storage pools in the sea to just store the leccy for a few days. And these pools would use millions of tons of concrete and millions of tons of steel.
So: you Maoists are good at propaganda, but not at math or rationality.
Nuclear power is much more predictable in its production rate, because most downtime is scheduled (ie. can be planned years ahead) and there are almost no seasonal reasons for non-production.
Compare that to solar, which produces almost nothing in winter and way too much in summer. Same for windmills.
Solar and windmills don't work, look at Germany. Our Maoists were stupid enough to try out. Or more precisely, gullible Germans fell for Maoist propaganda.
France used a proven pressurized light water reactor. The UK used supercritical carbon dioxide nuclear reactors, and they are expensive to build. The UK is able to offset this by extending the life of the reactors, and running them at lower power.
That is why Germany has no batteries which can store for just a week.
What we need would be storage for several months, actually. Look up "tatsächliche Produktion Solar" and then play with the dates. Especially summer vs winter.
No, all of it is crazy expensive and will only drive energy-intensive businesses to China and will drive up CH4 consumption. Putin opens champagne about the stupid Germans.
...they will play a bit of the German-Maoist solar-cell/windmill crap and otherwise
* build more dirty coal plants to fuel their economic steamroller
* build dozens of new nuclear plants
Production will move to China and the Maoists will be happy. Europe will continue its trajectory into the economic crapper. Sometimes I think that was the original agenda of German Maoists.
Who told you to lick the lead when you visit a nuke plant ?
Who told you to eat the red-colored wheat seed when you visited a farmer ?
Who stole your brain ?
The THTR was and IS still cutting-edge technology and exactly because of this it had some teething problems.
Most importantly, we have a huge number of Occupation Collaborateurs here (mostly turned Maoists) who act against any advanced German technology for the benefit of Big Oil, Big War and Big Bomb Owners.
Big Oil does not like serious competition.
Big War like Big Oil wars.
Big Bomb Owners want to keep their monopoly on destructive power.
We would have had nuclear power 50000 years ago, but no way to pump off the leak and send it through filters to capture the radioactive metals ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91yVhrSZ5jQ
Let's see, when he published his book The Road Ahead in 1994, he barely mentioned the Internet.
And pretty much every "innovation" from Microsoft under his leadership was stolen or purchased from someone else.
Not to mention the great technologies that they crushed out of existence (e.g., the Go corporation's PenPoint OS.
Well for American nukes, probably. Solar and wind are much much faster.
If Gates says it's good, it's probably bad.
Go well
How about all the reactors that have to be shut down because their cooling water is too hot? Or run out?
Pretty sure Japan didn't plan years in advance to shut down all their nukes when the 'planned Tsunami' took out a few, for maintenance...
...and solar.
Uh, no. If an electrician falls off a nuclear cooling tower while servicing beacons to warn approaching aircraft, that's an industrial accident, it's not a failure of nuclear power. If that same electrician falls off a wind turbine while servicing a beacon to alert approaching aircraft, that's an industrial accident, not a failure of wind power.
When a wind farm creates a deadly tornado, or a solar farm creates an Archimedes ray and burns a town to the ground, then we can talk about the number of deaths compared to nuclear power. But not before then. Whereas we have two nuclear plant meltdowns on our hands which were failures of nuclear power. Womp womp.
Laughable statement. Wind and solar farms don't need to have immediate evacuation plans for every human in a 20 mile radius because there's not risk of meltdown.
And if you add a zero to that number to replace all coal as well as bypass wind and solar, you'd be looking at a Chernobyl or Fukushima every couple of years, instead of every few decades.
Because this siphon is going to appear out of nowhere? It's not going to require constant observation and maintenance by future generations? Costs that wont apply to wind and solar, because they don't use radioactive fuel.
At least in Germany, the sum insured is much too small. Something like 2.5 billion Euros mandatory sum insured, and anything beyond that is up to the operator.
If we consider Chernobyl and Fukushima, an appropriate sum insured would be at least 200 billion. The last estimate I read about the total damage from Fukushima was around 190 billion, and I think insurance should cover the sums that "typically" happen in a worst-case scenario. We had two of those so far, so they are not impossible.
Now a group of major insurance companies might be able to collectively pay that sort of payout and offer insurance. But the premiums would probably make nuclear power quite unattractive.
C - the footgun of programming languages
If wind power needs 1000x more service calls than solar, wouldn't you say solar is safer than wind?
If nuclear needed people to walk a tightrope across a windy chasm full of razor blades, wouldn't you say that nuclear was dangerous?
I bet the US wishes Hillary didn't sell that 20% of prime US uranium to the the Russians.
Of course, because he's Bill Gates and obscenely rich, his opinion is far more valid than that of a pauper like you or me
If a person falls off a nuclear cooling tower and dies, it is a death related to nuclear power. Only looking at catastrophic incidents, like meltdowns is very narrow minded, and not how USA government regulations and thus industry approaches safety. Injury rates are not calculated based only on catastrophic incidents. I am a Process Safety engineer at a natural gas plant. My job is managing the low probability (but) high consequence possible events. In the 45 years this gas plant has been around, it has never had an explosion or any other catastrophic incident. This doesn't mean that the injuries that have occurred aren't counted against the gas plant. Even the truck driver who fell on his back, because he was running, because he heard a loud noise, counts against us. We also have an evacuation plan for our neighbors.
That wind and solar don't have the possibility for catastrophic events, and so don't need insurance against that, really doesn't tell us anything about why insurance on nuclear is so difficult to get. You like wind and solar, I get it, but your argument is laughable.
If the USA did safety like Japan or the USSR, building 10x more plants would increase the incident rate by 10x. But the USA doesn't do safety like them, and has a much better track record. And if an incident like 3 mile island happened 10x as often, I would be ok with that, even if it was at the nuclear power plant 35 miles from my sister's house. Oh and just like solar and wind have become more economical with time, so has nuclear become safer with time. Newer plants would be much safer than the Gen I and II plants, Chernobyl and Fukushima, that you cite.
But nuclear isn't economical, like wind and solar, which is why it doesn't get large scale implementation. While not popular, I'm all for whatever is cheapest (counting all costs), and am fairly confident that is what will happen.
>If that same electrician falls off a wind turbine while servicing a beacon to alert approaching aircraft, that's an industrial accident, not a failure of wind power.
The rate at which you have deaths from falling from tall things is directly related to the number of tall things you have and the frequency you need people to climb said tall things. If I invented a magic power source that produced several GWs of power continuously for free, but the plant was composed of 1,000,000 towers that needed to be climbed monthly for maintenance, you'd expect some workers to fall sometimes in servicing the plant. If the "towers" could instead be buried in the ground so maintained is done on the surface, you'll have fewer maintenance deaths. The danger is a result of the design.
The fact that wind turbines are dangerous to work on is fundamental: You're climbing a tall object and doing work on smooth surfaces. Nuclear produces fewer deaths than wind and that's a fact. Don't try to remove deaths from the pool just because they make wind look bad. They do so because wind is more dangerous. Don't try to lie about it.
>Wind and solar farms don't need to have immediate evacuation plans for every human in a 20 mile radius
This is a completely unnecessary precaution brought on by irrational fear. Evacuation of people from around Fukushima produced many deaths from the stress and speed at which it was conducted. Nobody died from the plant itself. If people sheltered in place then nobody would have died total.
>Chernobyl or Fukushima every couple of years
No you wouldn't. Chernobyl was a known dangerous design. Known extremely dangerous. Like the soviets cared. When the plant blew, they cycled dirt farmers through it for cleanup work with no training. Lots of people died, but that was only because the soviets put almost no value on human life. Fukushima is a boondoggle for sure, a financial and PR disaster. But it was well contained and killed nobody directly. Besides, the design was also _known unsafe_. People knew the seawall was too short. People knew putting generators in a basement was a terrible idea. If some company built thousands of turbines along a coast with poorly reinforced base, and a tsunami knocked them all over and killed a dozen people, you'd be saying "but it wasn't the fault of wind in general, those turbines were built to fail!". I'd agree. It's possible to build safe nuclear (See: The 99% of reactors which have never had a problem) and it's possible to build safe wind. Extremely unsafe examples of both could be discounted as long as you aren't repeating mistakes of the past in future designs. Please remember that nuclear is still relatively new and experimental, while wind power has been in use for thousands of years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
post full of lies, strange it's AC not WindBourne...
Did you even look at the link WindBourne before you claimed it was spot on?
Clearly none of you idiots even read the link provided.
Every country should stay away from nuclear power since it is clear the Americans are willing to cause nuclear "accidents".
then you are serious about nuclear power.
Contraciting yourself:
So, more tall things to make people fall will result in more deaths, but exponentially more nuclear power plants wont result in more meltdowns. Riiiiight.
It's a fact you're conflating industrial accidents with the danger posed by the powersource itself, which is nuke fanboy bullshit. Again: wind and solar farms don't have immediate evacuation plans for everyone in a 20 mile radius because they pose no danger to the surrounding populace.
Not according to nuke fanboy math its not, no moreso than uranium mining accidents are.
In the same breath you note that wind and solar don't have no possibility for extreme disasters and then wonder why nuclear insurance is "hard to get"? Laughable indeed.
You mean cut corners to save money? But of coooourse they do. Hell, here's an article back from the Reagan Administration on how safety is given second priority. Fukushima was a once in a thousand years disaster - if you think all US plants could survive the same, you're wearing some mighty big clown shoes.
If you had 2x the amount of solar thats needed, upping that to 3 or 4 times wouldnt make the battery requirements bigger but smaller. Much like your smaller brain.
That supply would also help diversify it, and make it less likely it would all drop at the same time. Making the battery requirements also smaller.
Neither of you like to read the links you post.
It's obvious when they completely contradict what you claim they say...