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.

Comments

But if you take out the Lead

[rossdee]

Then what do you use for shielding?

Re: But if you take out the Lead

[guruevi]

Nuclear reactors provide one of the cheapest sources of energy besides natural hydro plants.

The problem is regulation. If you have to pay people for 5-10 years to do nothing with a new plant and then another 5-10 years to replace the rods when the fuel is only 10% spent, you're artificially inflating the price and even with all that, if you can get a plant built you're still cheaper than solar and wind.

The problem with nuclear is not the technology, a reactor can theoretically run for a decade without needing refueling, the US Navy is building them to last the lifetime of a ship (75 years) without any refueling . A modern reactor can take up the size of a small shed in your backyard (if you have a cooling pool nearby). But we're not building those because someone may steal a rod of "weapons grade" fuel.

Re: But if you take out the Lead

[dfghjk]

"Some want government to solely fund the entirety of healthcare costs."

You post would be more interesting if it didn't include off-topic comments that give away your game. You might also consider including actual content in the analysis.

Furthermore, regarding your off-topic content, the government "solely funding" healthcare costs is grossly misleading. The people solely fund healthcare costs one way or the other, the issue is the most effective way to accomplish it. It would be helpful for you to understand what's to be accomplished and how best to accomplish it, not merely how one piece looks based on your world view.

Re: But if you take out the Lead

[smoot123]

...none of this changes the fact that nuclear is stupidly expensive and uneconomical.

It's expensive because we make it expensive. The whole point of the current research efforts is to show we can make inexpensive and reliable nuclear power plants which are as safe or safer than conventional fossil fuel plants. The safety part isn't that hard since no one has ever died from a nuclear power plant (exceht Chernobyl), which you can't say about any fossil fuel.

The problem is we're so frightened of nuclear power we're unwilling to dispassionately listen to plausible arguments. I'm not saying they're right, just that they ought to get a fair hearing.

Re: But if you take out the Lead

[Solandri]

Even factoring in Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power remains the safest power sources man has ever invented. It's safer than wind and solar (helluva lot safer than hydro, which is responsible for the worst power generator-related accident in history - about 170,000 killed, 2 million left homeless).

The problem with obtaining insurance is not due to nuclear being unsafe. It's due to a quirk of statistics. The more times you throw the dice (the more individual items you insure), the tighter the distribution gets. The bell curve becomes narrower, and you're more likely to get a result close to the predicted average. So it's easier for the insurance company to figure out what to charge (or for the casino to guarantee a profit) if they're insuring tens of thousands or millions of items. If they want to be 99.9% sure their collected premiums exceed their payouts, they only have to charge a few percent more than their expected payout based on the average (middle of the bell curve).

But there are only 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. With a sample that small, the bell curve ends up very broad. If an insurance company trying to insure them wants to be 99.9% sure they've collected enough money, the premium they have to charge ends up being several hundred or thousand times higher than the average expected payout, instead of just a few percent higher.

Re: But if you take out the Lead

[guruevi]

700MW of peak wind only produces 280MW on average, not the same as a continuous 700MW from a reactor. Also, your 700MW wind farm is a pile of rust in as little as 5 years with most farms only lasting 10 years and shreds close to 10,000 birds per year including endangered species of eagles and owls. Meanwhile most reactors are operating 50-70 years, well over their planned 40 years lifespan.

So really, you're comparing $60M + operating cost over 5-10 years (and not counting disposal, which few defunct sites have been disposed of) with a $240M investment over 7 times as long.

Chernobyl is pretty much the worst that could've happened (which was partially due to Russian weapons testing and untrained operators), but only a few decades later, wildlife has fully recovered in the area and some people have continued to live there.

small scale reactors

[goombah99]

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.

Another pipe dream

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hyperion now called Gen4 Energy

[goombah99]

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.”

The Real Obstacles To Be Overcome

[careysub]

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.

Now why would we waste our time with nuclear

[rsilvergun]

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?

Re:Bill Gates is a software guy,

[TeknoHog]

Ah, nuclear reactors with the stability of Windows...