Bill Gates Promises Congress $1 Billion To Build Nuclear Reactors For Fighting Climate Change (sfgate.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: Bill Gates thinks he has a key part of the answer for combating climate change: a return to nuclear power... Gates, who founded TerraPower in 2006, is telling lawmakers that he personally would invest $1 billion and raise $1 billion more in private capital to go along with federal funds for a pilot of his company's never-before-used technology, according to congressional staffers. "Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that's available 24 hours a day," Gates said in his year-end public letter. "The problems with today's reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation."

Gates's latest push comes at an important turn in climate politics. Nuclear power has united both unpopular industry executives and a growing number of people -- including some prominent Democrats -- alarmed about climate change. But many nuclear experts say that Gates's company is pursuing a flawed technology and that any new nuclear design is likely to come at a prohibitive economic cost and take decades to perfect, market and construct in any significant numbers... Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said TerraPower is one of many companies that is raising the public's hopes for advanced nuclear reactor designs even though they're still on the drawing boards and will remain unable to combat climate change for many years.
Jonah Goldman, of Gates Ventures, stressed to The Post that Gates was not advocating for TerraPower alone, according to GeekWire.

"Gates thinks the U.S. has 'the best minds, the best lab systems and entrepreneurs willing to take risk,' Goldman told the newspaper. 'But what we don't have is a commitment on Congress' part.'"

Comments

What nuvlear needs from congress

[Crashmarik]

1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. Note I don't say long term because what we call waste will be very very valuable, it's all transmuted isotopes most of which don't occur in nature.

2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.

3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.

Spending money on new designs or upgrading and standardizing current design, would be great as well. Imagine if we had a national standard design that could be quickly deployed and licensed without endless approvals needed.

For once though I feel sorry for Mr. Gates, he is going to find just how much joy dealing with the idiocy environmentalism and the off grid hippies have injected into our society.

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[ShanghaiBill]

1 To get a temporary waste repository in place.

We already have adequate temporary storage: The cooling ponds at the nuclear plants.

Just leaving the rods in the cooling ponds for the next 30 years is a good solution. As time goes by, they become less radioactive and easier to handle. Meanwhile we are developing robotics that will make processing the spent fuel way easier and cheaper in the future than it is now.

Also, it is very likely that over the next few decades we will find alternative uses for many of the isotopes in the fuel rods, so we will no longer consider them "waste" at all.

There are plenty of reasons to wait, and no good reason to be in a rush.

Re:Geothermal

[Chas]

But geothermal is extremely location-specific.

You have places where you go down a thousand feet or so and you're good. You have a suitable hot spot.
But there are other places where you can drill all you like, you're NOT going to get a usable geothermal well in anything like a rational budget.

Re:Geothermal

[ShanghaiBill]

You have places where you go down a thousand feet or so and you're good. You have a suitable hot spot.

Solution: You build your geothermal plants in these locations, and then you run HVDC to the areas without suitable locations.

Per mile, moving electricity by HVDC is cheaper than moving coal by train, and we do plenty of that.

Re:Geothermal

[Anonymous Coward]

IPCC estimates that the maximum total possible geothermal power worldwide is in a range from 35 GW to 2 TW.

Even if we take the highest possible estimate, in 2014, the total installed electricity generating capacity worldwide was nearly 6.142 TW (million MW) which only includes generation connected to local electricity grids.

So IOW, even if we had ALL THE GEOTHERMAL GENERATION POSSIBLE, we'd still only be able to replace a third of our power generation.

They're still safer even with mistakes

[Solandri]

Nuclear is the safest power source man has ever invented. Even with the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, it has killed fewer people per TWh generated than any other power source.

What's going on is that people are really bad at appraising big but rare risks. Their mind focuses on the magnitude of the risk, exaggerating the larger risks. Simultaneously, their mind glosses over the lower frequency of the risk. Consequently, big, rare events like nuclear disasters get overemphasized in people's minds, while small, common events like maintenance workers falling from wind turbines get overlooked.

It's the same reason plane crashes are splashed over all the TV news, while car crashes rare make the news, even though going to a destination by car is 1-2 orders of magnitude more dangerous than going by plane. The magnitude of the carnage from a plane crash is greater and overwhelms our minds, while the much lower frequency of plane crashes is overlooked. Or on the flip side, it's why people spend money on lottery tickets even though on average they'll lose money. The magnitude of the payoff if you win overwhelms our mind, to where we completely ignore the infinitesimal odds of winning.

Re:They're still safer even with mistakes

[phantomfive]

Nuclear is the safest power source man has ever invented [nextbigfuture.com]. Even with the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, it has killed fewer people per TWh generated than any other power source.

Note the margin of error in that link is rather large for solar, so solar could be safer.

Re:They're still safer even with mistakes

[steveha]

Another problem is that many people think that nuclear materials are magically dangerous.

There are nuclear materials that radiate energy fiercely, and would kill you in seconds if you stood next to them.

There are nuclear materials that will still be around 30 thousand years from now.

But there are not actually any nuclear materials with both of the above properties at once. The ones that are super dangerous also have a short half-life, so they decay away to nothing in a relatively short time. The ones that take forever to go away are quite mild.

But some people who don't understand the above point are worried that nuclear materials are super-deadly things out of nightmare.

The above point is not original with me; I saw it on Slashdot years ago, and don't remember who posted it or else I would give credit.

Re:They're still safer even with mistakes

[AmiMoJo]

What's going on is that people are really bad at appraising big but rare risks.

Indeed, they tend to focus on very specific metrics like "deaths per TWh" and ignore the stuff that makes their favourite technology uneconomical.

In nuclear's case the problem is that even relatively small scale accidents like Fukushima cause hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. Fukushima was the first time it had happened on that scale in a democratic capitalist society, and what were previously theoretical costs suddenly became real and investors fled. Even with the government picking up most of the tab and a country with relatively low awards in civil legal cases, investors aren't going to risk their assets being made both worthless and nationalized, and governments are now reluctant to provide the usual free insurance they offered in the past.

Fukushima could have been a lot worse. You can keep telling us that honestly, this time nuclear really is safe, the last dozen times it was just unknown unknowns and we really have made it meltdown-proof now, but the people holding the purse strings are not buying it.

Re:A PV Watt does not equal a nuclear Watt

[Solandri]

I'll assume you really understand that what you wrote is nonsense. An output of 1 GW is 1 GW, no matter what the source was.

Let's take the example of night since that's the easiest to grasp. If you have a PV solar installation on your house which churns out 10 kW during the day, during the night it will yield 0 kW. Averaged over 24 hours, the average power production is then only 5 kW.

If you factor in similar reductions in actual production due to clouds, angle of the sun being sub-optimal, dust build-up on the panels, degradation due to age, the panels being taken offline for maintenance, etc., over a year a typical 10 kW PV solar installation will produce as much power as a 1.45 kW PV solar installation with the sun always shining and directly overhead.

In other words, the Wattage rating of these power installations is not their actual average production. It's the maximum they can generate under optimal conditions. Nuclear plants operate at those optimal conditions most of the time, so over a year they produce about 90% of their rated max Wattage. PV solar panels rarely operates at those optimal conditions (basically only during noon in summer on cloudless days), and on average they only product about 14.5% of their rated max Wattage.

It's the same reason you can take a laptop with only 5 hours of battery life, and use it for 8 hours. The power consumption when in use remains the same, but if you suspend it when you're not using it, its power consumption drops to near zero during that time. And thus its average power consumption drops enough to allow the battery to get it through the 8 hour day.

I'll become a big fan of nuclear energy when the radioactive waste from nuclear plants is completely removed from the earth. Of course, "the best minds in the US" (and elsewhere) have been working on this for many decades, and no solution has been found.

The nuclear waste problem is political, not technological. What we call nuclear "waste" actually still has about 90%-93% of the energy from the original uranium still in it. That's why it stays dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years. It's possible to run the waste through a breeder reactor, which uses it for fuel to generate power (called reprocessing). The "waste" from a breeder reactor is usable as fuel in a regular reactor. If you run the waste through this cycle, you can extract about 90% of the energy in the uranium. And the remaining 10% means the final waste will only be dangerously radioactive for a few hundred years.

So why don't we reprocess? It turns out one of the byproducts from a breeder reactor is weapons-grade plutonium. So there's enormous political pressure not to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. President Carter banned reprocessing the spent fuel from commercial reactors in the U.S. in the 1970s. Which is why we're stuck with "waste" which will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

However, consider that more and more countries are developing nuclear weapons. At some point in the future, so many countries will be nuclear-armed that it will be pointless trying to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. At that point, all the "nuclear waste" we buried or are holding in spent fuel tanks at nuclear plants suddenly becomes precious fuel containing 10x more energy that we extracted from the original uranium fuel.

Re:Cheap energy

[LynnwoodRooster]

As long as that storage is hydrogen - which is the lowest cost mass-storage means, and can also be quickly and easily used for transportation needs, too...

Re:A few billions are peanuts ...

[Chas]

No. An MSR is actually fairly simple. The expensive part is all the regulatory BS, plus the endless lawsuits.

Re:Geothermal

[Anonymous Coward]

If its a LFTR and I get a cut of the revenue, I'll put one in my literal back yard.

You idiots still think we are on Generation I heavy water reactors because you have made the regulations so tight that we never even got to have a generation III one. These are radically more advanced, produce very little waste, which comes in the form of medically useful isotopes, use 99% of their fuel, and are passively safe. You can throw the switch to shut one off at any time and there will never be a problem. The liquid fuel just drains into an underground tank.

Re:Geothermal

[angel'o'sphere]

There never was a problem. There are losses, most grids have a loss of 5% - 7%.
However no one talks about the transmission losses of an oil or gas pipeline (they are much higher).

In AC grids transmission lines compensate for losses by scaling up the voltage. E.g. about 130kV in Germany and over one million volts in 3rd world countries like Kasachstan.

AC lines have the problem that they loose power by radiation and induction to surrounding metal structures. E.g. if the wires hang low you can hold up a flurescence light and it glows by the power loss of a high voltage line.

The modern bust word is HVDC - high voltage direct current, as opposed to AC ... the losses to radiation don't exist and if you put the voltage in the 10 million volt range, the losses due to DC versus AC (as in Ohm and resistance) are acceptable.

But to say it bluntly: with a 7% loss you only need to produce 7% more energy. The current grid you are using at the moment already does that. But for some absurd reason it is a problem for renewables ...