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

Geothermal

[ShanghaiBill]

"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,"

Geothermal would also meet this criteria.

Re:Geothermal

[pslytely psycho]

As I don't really know much about this subject I feel compelled to ask..
When I was young I heard proposals like this and the main argument against it was transmission line losses over very long distances. Has the technology improved to the point that this has become a lesser problem?

Re:Geothermal

[Applehu Akbar]

The place to build new nuclear plants is where older plants have already been sited, if there is available land and up to the capacity of each local heat sink. One problem with today's plants is that their operating temperature is rather low, because they use water as a coolant and it has to be kept under pressure. The low operating temperature means that some plants that use rivers as a heat sink have to be turned off in summer when natural temperature of the river is too warm for an efficient Carnot differential with the reactor temperature.

Some of the new designs use molten salt as a coolant. allowing much higher operating temperatures. Such reactors could be sited at older locations and not require any heat sink capacity already being used by the older plants. An ideal location might be Phoenix, AZ, where existing reactors use dry desert air as a heat sink, with some help from municipal sewage. New MSRs could use air only, and there is space at the complex for enough reactors to power California.

Re: Geothermal

[Anonymous Coward]

Market forces will not invest the money in baseload capacity nuclear until it is too late. We need to smoothly transition off the petroleum energy base or it is game over.

Dollars Per Watt

[mentil]

If $1billion built a 1gigawatt plant (pretty sure it's not usually that rosy), that'd be $1/watt. Didn't photovoltaic pass the $1/watt threshold a few years ago? Solar panels are scaleable and mass-produced, whereas nuclear requires years of building before you get the first watt of power. Might photovoltaic + energy storage be cheaper than nuclear?

Jerry Pournelle

[Orgasmatron]

Back in the mid 2000s, Jerry Pournelle was saying that we should have spent the Iraq War money on nuclear power instead. The first year cost something like $100 billion. We could have spent the first 20 billion (or whatever) of that developing a better nuclear power plant and refining the design to the point where subsequent plants would cost $1 billion each.

The financial hit to Saddam's oil revenue would have done about the same damage to him as the war did, and we' have somewhere between 50 and 80 brand new, state of the art, top of the line nuclear plants generating cheap power until 2050.

Personally, I prefer government small and would rather private industry tackle a project like this. But since we seem to be committed to tossing a few trillion dollars into the bonfire every year with no end in sight, why not push for something like this and at least have a chance to get something useful out of the deal?

Re:A PV Watt does not equal a nuclear Watt

[AmiMoJo]

$1bn/GW is ridiculously optimistic.

Hinkley Point C in the UK is looking at costing around £34 billion. On top of that you have around £50 billion in bill payer subsidies (the rate for electricity generated is guaranteed for many decades) and the usual taxpayer subsidies like free insurance that are impossible to value.

Hinkley C will provide 3.2GW, so ignoring the unlimited free insurance let's say £26.25 billion per GW, which is about $35 billion.

That pushes the nuclear cost up to $38.8 per watt. These are not theoretical costs, these are what have been agreed and are being built in the UK right now.

I note that you also chose to compare with a domestic PV panel rather than a commercial one, or better yet wind.

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[sfcat]

After all, a lot of this waste won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. Can't just leave it in the pool until then.

And that's a big reason we want to make newer reactor designs. The old LWRs using the U-Pu fuel cycle makes some wastes that have a very long cooling period. The newer Th-U fuel cycle designs make waste that only takes 300 years to cool. And we already have at least 300 years worth of Thorium mined due to all the rare earth mines around the globe.

Most of what is holding back these new designs is ignorance. They are complex but have really interesting qualities and the fact that we won't license the world to develop these technologies is almost criminal.

The LFTR design for instance is being worked on in at least 3 places (US, China, and India). We created the technology (in the 60's) but we can't even get the licenses to commercialize it. A technology that makes enough power (and syn fuel) for the entire globe, can't meltdown, is a sealed solution, doesn't require mining, makes CO2 free power, and produces a grand total of 6 railroad boxcars worth of waste a year if it was used to provide 100% of the world's electricity and fuel needs.

It took 7 years for the engineers to get a license to just do the fluorination work necessary as part of the development of the LFTR. Even worse, as we refuse to do anything with nuclear we let older less safe plants stay online longer than we need to. So all this environmental obstructionism actual makes use less safe and helps the fossil fuel industry. Ignorance is truly our greatest enemy.