Trump's Tech Battle With China Roils Bill Gates Nuclear Venture (wsj.com)

Add Bill Gates to the list of executives whose businesses have been ensnared by the Trump administration's battle with China over technology and trade. From a report: The tech tycoon and philanthropist said in an essay posted late last week that a nuclear-energy project in China by a company he co-founded called TerraPower LLC is now unlikely to proceed because of recent changes in U.S. policy toward China [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. That leaves TerraPower, which had been working on the China project for more than three years, scrambling for a new partner and uncertain where it might be able to run a pilot of the nuclear reactor it has been developing, according to company officials.

Mr. Gates, TerraPower's chairman, helped start and fund the Bellevue, Wash., company, which incorporated in 2008, in a long-term bid to make nuclear reactors smaller, less expensive and safer than current nuclear energy sources. The company has been developing something called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses depleted uranium as fuel, something that TerraPower says can improve safety and reduce costs. Regulatory restrictions and limited federal funding made building the facility in the U.S. difficult and led TerraPower to look for partners abroad, Chief Executive Chris Levesque said in an interview.

Comments

Re:Try Canada

[fermion]

Canada builds pipelines across the US, all the way to Gulf of Mexico, because it does not want the problems of refining oil.

Canada has not begun new reactors since around 1980 though many have been approved. As shown worldwide, the economics make little sense so there is no private funding interest. Only country with very limited energy resources, like France Belgium and Sweden have much of their supply by nuclear energy.

Trump is the head of a shithole party, but sometimes it seems like people just use him as an excuse.

Re:good

[angel'o'sphere]

Nuclear's is north of 90%. So our 5% deployed nuclear generates 9% of our energy, but 18% of deployed renewables generates 5% of the power. Either way the real problem is the batteries needed to handle renewable deployments of more than about 20% energy generation. Without those batteries, its nuclear or natural gas.
And from what would you charge the batteries?

Obviously as long as your renewable contribution to the grid is below base load, "batteries" only make sense in "strange market situations" as in mid day time, all power plants are close to the maximum, pumped storages are full, suddenly you have excess unpredicted wind power (that actually never happens) then you had use for a battery.

Sure, as Elons project in Australia shows: batteries can be used efficiently in a grid. However that project is not because of renewables ... they store excess conventional power in the batteries.

Then again, in Germany e.g., the push is towards self sustaining houses, with enough solar power and a battery. So on a small scale, independent from looking at the big scale of a grid, batteries already make sense. However for accompanying a wind farm, batteries only very rarely make sense. At the moment. But when renewable contribution to the grid reaches 50% (or what ever your base load is) it makes more and more sense.