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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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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Ah, nuclear reactors with the stability of Windows...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Regulations exist for a reason.
Gross corporatist propaganda to limit liability for negligence, incompetence and criminal actions.
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.
Wrong. It was stored when the supernova exploded pretty much instantaneously. Its just been stored for a very long time. And Solar and wind require batteries big enough to be seen from orbit. When you back solar and wind, you are also backing natural gas and pretty much embracing climate change. If you believe otherwise, you simply haven't done the math or understand how power is used. Both CA and German CO2 releases have gone up during the same period when wind and solar were being deployed in great number and electricity prices rose in those places over the same period. And this is only accelerating as we double down on these policies. Hopefully you realize how much damage your solar and wind policies are doing before its too late for all of us. If not, guess who will be blamed first?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."