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

DMSR

[sfcat]

Some explanation...depleted Uranium (U-238) is the more common form of Uranium found in nature. It has a very small amount of U-235 which is the fissile stuff (enriched Uranium is almost all U-235 and very little U-238). The way this reactor works is that it breeds the U-238 into Pu-239 and that's what fissions. It also uses water as a coolant which is a bad idea we need to retire. A coolant that increases the intensity of the chain reaction is a really, really bad idea. The explanation for why this design is pushed is that the U-238 isn't useful for a bomb (and we have a lot of it) and the waste that comes out is very long lived which is something the anti-proliferation folks like (I think this is a stupid way to do anti-proliferation). However, this design produces more waste than some more modern designs and in my opinion isn't really suitable for civilian power.

The breeding of U-238 is exactly what you do when you make a modern bomb and PUREX (how you separate out the Pu-239 from the Uranium) isn't exactly a secret process as it was developed 70 years ago. It seems safer to just use 50% enriched Uranium (which still require enrichment) and make less waste or ever better use a Th-U fuel cycle as no Pu-239 is produced in that fuel cycle. Anti-proliferation folks often come from foreign policy or military backgrounds and often don't have the science background to understand all the subtleties of nuclear power. So they choose the "more power" approach and often force civilian operations to run in a far more nasty and waste producing way in an effort to ensure nobody ever reprocesses the waste to make a bomb. This is classic risk telescoping as the pollution from the waste is far more likely to endanger lives than this fantasy that couldn't even happen in a movie because the audience wouldn't buy it.

Re:Before and After

[Iconoclysm]

Honestly, I'm worried more about China now that we've already built them up and now we're severing ties. It's incredibly stupid to do...not as stupid as your assumption that anyone has changed any opinion they had before Trump came along, but still very dumb.

Re:good

[sfcat]

They were less than 10% in 2016, I don't think we've more than tripled our generation in California. And yes, I live in California. For the US, it's closer to 5%, not 18%.

The GP and you are confusing two different numbers. The GP is talking about total deployment. You are taking about how much power was actually produced. Which illustrates a great point. A 200MW wind farm doesn't equal a 200MW reactor. Solar and wind load factors are in the single digit percents. 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.