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

[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

[arpad1]

Nope. Not only is geothermal location-specific but it's also quite diffuse.

The Geysers, the geothermal plant that's been operated by Calpines - mostly - and first came on line in 1960. The whole system, which is distributed across 30 square miles and consists of 22 power plants only produces about 955 MW. Having your production facilities spread across a wide area adds a not-insignificant component of cost.

That's a fair amount less than any single base load coal, natural gas or nuclear plant and they can be sited pretty much anywhere obviating the need for HVDC power lines.

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

[TeknoHog]

When I was young I heard proposals like this and the main argument against it was transmission line losses over very long distances.

Using DC means it's not a transmission line. Then you don't have issues with inductive losses. There's still resistance, though, but that part is compensated for by the high voltage (or more importantly, low current).

Has the technology improved to the point that this has become a lesser problem?

The problem in the past was efficient DC/AC conversion, or converting between different voltages of DC. Semiconductors have been used for HVDC since the 1970s and the hardware keeps improving. I'm not sure if there have been any specific improvements lately, though.

Re:Geothermal

[Applehu Akbar]

Geothermal would also meet this criteria.

Geothermal can be thought of as renewable nuclear, and is a good choice for places that have hot spots within a reasonable distance of the surface. I saw it in action in Iceland, on the bleak slopes of Mt. Hengill.

When you drill a thermal well, you can't just drill one. The boreholes keep clogging up with time, like old water pipes, and you have to keep drilling new ones. Your location has to be a place where it is economical to keep drilling more holes.

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

[Applehu Akbar]

Carbon use for mining and transportation applies to all power technologies, and is a self-liquidating argument because it applies to the level of carbon power generation already in the economy. As ICE are replaced by electric motors everywhere and the generating sources for these motors are less carbon intensive, the role of carbon in mining and manufacturing steadily decreases. This will apply in the same way if every generating source was photovoltaic.

Re:Geothermal

[Enigma2175]

Using DC means it's not a transmission line.

"This article is about the radio-frequency transmission line. For the power transmission line, see electric power transmission."

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.

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 ...

Re:Geothermal

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Both PV and the high induction motors used in those windmills require rare earths among other materials

An obligatory fact check: Neither PV nor induction generators require ANY rare earths whatsoever. Seriously, school yourself.

and don't recoup their cost within the lifetime before failure(30 years).

This is also provably wrong, by means of example, since otherwise their operators would be asking for much higher feed-in tariffs than they do nowadays.

Re:Rich people wanting a government handout

[ShanghaiBill]

There is already existing nuclear technology that is relatively cheap per kWh generated.

This is true in theory. In practice, there are always massive cost overruns.

Feel free to list all the excuses, and the reasons the overruns won't happen next time.

Can nuclear plants be managed without mistakes?

[Futurepower(R)]

It seems to me that human management is not reliable enough to assure that there won't be disastrous consequences with nuclear plants.

And... Is Bill Gates working to make more money? We could all send him a dollar.

Re:Can nuclear plants be managed without mistakes?

[elrous0]

How many coal miners are killed each year compared to the number of people kill by nuclear accidents?

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[Crashmarik]

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

Well I have it on good authority from a congresswoman that we only have 12 years to save the world. I may have heard something similar before though.

Re:Cheap energy

[NFN_NLN]

Asteroids you say! Let me tell you about asteroids.... blah blah blah blah blah blah... asteroids... blah blah blah blah.

Re: Rich people wanting a government handout

[Mark of the North]

No. It isn't him or the greens. Large projects are strongly associated with mismanagement and corruption. That is the major reason that there are cost overruns.

Solar and wind do not have these issues, at least not nearly to the same degree. They aren't nearly as risky an investment, which is why growth has been so strong.

A PV Watt does not equal a nuclear Watt

[Solandri]

You're comparing nameplate capacity - how much each technology can produce in the best case. That's not how much they produce in practical use. To be an apples-to-apples comparison, you have to compare actual power generated.

Nuclear plants have an average capacity factor of of 0.90. That is, after you take into account downtime due to maintenance, refueling, testing, etc, a 1 GW plant will over a year produce an average of 900 MW.

PV solar has an average capacity factor of 0.145 in the U.S. for fixed installations. That is, after you account for night, weather, movement of the sun, dirt accumulating on the panels, maintenance, etc, 1000 Watts of PV panels will over a year produce an average of 145 Watts.

So

• A 1 GW nuclear plant costing $1 billion yields a cost of ($1 billion) / (0.9 * 1 GW) = $1.11 per Watt generated.
• A 100 Watt PV panel costing $100 yields a cost of ($100) / (0.145 * 100 W) = $6.70 per Watt generated

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:A PV Watt does not equal a nuclear Watt

[Chas]

It's not nonsense.

You're trying to compare maximum output of 2 facilities rated for 1GW.

But a nuclear plant basically outputs at maximum capacity for 90% of the year.

A 1GW solar plant only has maximum output for a fraction of a day, for a fraction of all the days of the year.

So, over the course of a year, a 1GW-rated nuclear plant will output far more power than a 1GW-rated solar plant.

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.

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:They're still safer even with mistakes

[serviscope_minor]

You can keep telling us that honestly, this time nuclear really is safe,

It is: you hear about every single incident at great lengths. When was the last time you heard about a PV installer die from a fall off a roof?

Nuclear basically only has big, rare accidents. It also puts land out of action so you keep on hearing about it forever. Other forms have smaller but much more numerous accidents, so you never hear about them.

Humans are bad, really really bad at large, rare events versus small common ones. Hell, 1.25 million people die per year on the roads worldwide and it barely gets a mention. We're still hearing about Chernobyl (maybe 4000 indirect deaths and 270,000 displaced) 30 years later.

Even looking at people displaced not killed, roads are like 5 Chernobyls each year every year regular as clockwork but it barely gets a mention. That is how bad people are with risks.

we really have made it meltdown-proof now,

No one should ever claim anything is perfectly safe, but we certainly ought to be much better at building them now than 40 years ago. The thing is people are so against building new ones that they'd rather keep the old ones running way past their service life than build a newer one.

but the people holding the purse strings are not buying it.

They are also beholden to public opinion no matter how misplaced it is. Now, a lot of things about renewables are a lot more convinient even if more people have to die to deliver it. Fundamentally it can be done with short term planning.

But renewables are only a complete solution in conutries with enough resources. For somewhere like the UK the population density is just too high. Any solution will be partly renewable, and the rest will be either carbon based or nuclear.

Re:They're still safer even with mistakes

[serviscope_minor]

Yes, you just summed up there why nuclear is unacceptable. It only has big accidents which put land out of action, among other effects.

Yes, and it doesn't matter how infrequent they are. Apparently putting land out of action is much worse than killing people. Coal is a slaughterhoue compared to nuclear and it pust land out of action, and yet the main thing people worry about is carbon.

The reason nuclear is unacceptable is people are terribly bad at understanding risks and proababilities.

Unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that Fukushima is still leaking into the sea.

Without some sort of threshold, that's a meaningless concern. It could be no worse than smeone throwing a bannana a day into the sea. But that's exactly what I mean: with nuclear people switch off to the usual risk/reward tradeoffs and simply say that anything is unacceptably bad.

Speaking of, people got all hot and bothered about detecting the radation in seawater off the US coast. What they didn't realise is that it says more about the phenomenal sensitivity of the instruments than it did about danger. The radioactivit was a few atomic disintegrations per second per cubic meter of seawater, vastly vastly smaller than the background radation.

What? It takes way more resources to build and maintain a nuke plant, counting fueling, but not even counting decommissioning (which literally always costs more and takes longer than estimated.)

Who said anything about cost? No matter how much we pay, the land area of the UK is not going to increase. There are not enough renewable energy resources to cover our energy consumption.

If we max out solar, wind and tidal we won't manage.

Re:If that were true, he'd be building the things

[cheesybagel]

Think of this as a rich man's version of ITER. The state pays for it, then MAYBE you will get a usable generator in two generations. Except he gets to keep the patents to himself while the state pays for most of the bill.

This is the rich man's version of the stone soup folk story.

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[angel'o'sphere]

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.
Strange that we did not discover any use during the previous 70 decades, or is it 80 already?

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:What nuvlear needs from congress

[LynnwoodRooster]

Strange that we did not discover any use during the previous 70 decades, or is it 80 already?

Damn, I had no CLUE that we had nukes back in the middle ages!

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:Take it all

[JaredOfEuropa]

Why’d you have to bring race into it? Or would we somehow be better off it Gates was a dumb old black guy?

it uses Uranium fuel with molten sodium coolant

[PinkyGigglebrain]

In case anyone was wondering.

Had to skim almost the whole article to find out this simple little bit of info.

Gates wants to build a Uranium based "traveling wave" style reactor using molten sodium for cooling. The technology is problematic, hasn't ever been tested on large scale. Requires metal alloys that are still being developed and still uses a rare, expensive and inherently dangerous fuel.Some experts say the tech is potentially decades away from being viable.

Disclaimer: I am an advocate of LFTR (Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor) based energy generation. The tech still needs work but its closer to reality than what Gates wants.

5 minute intro to LFTRs" if your curious.

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[stooo]

1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. >> does not work. it

2. Get the NRC out of the way ... >> Yeah, le's reduce the safety checks. What a great idea. Fukushima anyone ?

3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built >> will not happen. They are more expensive than renewables.

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:article summarized

[Chas]

Wrong.

Nobody's asking to build any Gen2/Gen3 reactors.

They're looking to build safe-by-default Gen4+ designs.

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch was one of the earlier nuclear weapons, famously used to thwart the Rabbit of Caerbannog.

Re: What nuclear needs from congress

[reboot246]

Three branches of Congress?!? Did you pay attention in school? This is one of the major problems in our country today. Public education has failed to accomplish its mission. We now have several generations that are totally ignorant of how the federal government is organized and how it works. What's really scary is that those people VOTE!!

A very short primer:
There are THREE branches of our federal government - Executive (the President), Legislative (Congress), and Judicial (the Supreme Court). Congress has TWO houses or chambers, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[Registered Coward v2]

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

Not a good idea. While the nuclear industry has done a good job, post TMI, of self regulating to focus on safety the NRC still has an important role to play. They need to ensure all regulations are met and prevent the “it’s just a minor deviation from rules / design / etc. so it’s OK” mentality. The regulations may appear onerous but many are written as the result of past mistakes.

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

That has been done. The combined operating license lets you build and operate the plan and not have to wait to operate while construction issues are litigated.

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.

The NRC has approved several standardized designs that can be built without all the licensing and approvals needed for a nonstandard design. Unfortunately the industry can’t seem to actually build a standard design and not make on the fly changes that requires licensing approval, thus delaying construction and raising costs. In theory, a consortium of utilities could all build the same standardized design reducing construction and operating costs through economies of scale. Many current sites were approved for more plants than were actually built so sites that can be used without all the site approvals exist as well. The kicker is cheap gas. You can get 10 year contracts for gas and build a gas plant a lot faster and cheaper than a nuke. Given that, there is no reason to look to building a fleet of nukes, as was the idea when the advanced reactors were designed.

Re:Cheap energy

[Mashiki]

When nuclear is used, the baseload for the design(s) is to hold around 60-70% of all the generation for a specific area. Gen II reactors have a cleanup cost that's high, Gen I are astronomical. The reason those old reactors keep being used is because environuts keep protesting the replacement of aging nuclear plants. See the glorious fuckup that led to in Japan for instance, since replacing PWR designs with Gen III were and are still stuck in the courts. You can see similar circumstances in the US, and you can see the same in Canada for example with the Chalk Lake medical reactor, which was supposed to be shutdown over a decade ago. Court cases tying up the replacement, leading to massive overruns, then nimbys and more environmental bullshit. Now Darlington Nuclear(Toronto) is supplying most of those isotopes and other countries which have nuclear reactors have had to pick up the slack. Europe for example relies now mostly on French reactors for their medical isotopes.

Chalk Lake if you're wondering supplied most of the world's medical isotopes(between 70-80%), for everything from targeted radiation treatments, to short-lived radioactive used for MRI's and CT scans.

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.

Re:What nuvlear needs from congress

[sfcat]

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.

No, no, and no. And your beliefs about "regulation" are at least 30 years out of date, to the extent that they ever resembled reality at all.

Bullshit. Not a single MSR design or even a new design other than the AP-X line has been licensed in the US in almost a half century. Multiple lawsuits happen at every chance in the process of building a nuclear plant. If regulators don't want something to work, they will kill it. The nuclear regulation is the exact opposite of what the Republicans do with the EPA. If you put people in charge that don't want it to work, it won't.

Read about those AP-1000 plants in detail. The regulators had no desire to see the project complete successfully. They had to grade the site twice because regulators didn't like how the backfill was being placed. The fabricators fucked up royally as well but changes in regulation that happened while the plant was being build made the process much more complex and resulted in a worse overall quality of the construction due to changes in design during the building process. Changes in design that were entirely political and designed to kill the plant (like the requirement to withstand a commercial airliner, then it was a fighter jet, then a fighter jet with a full payload).

Anyone doing an research with radioactive materials will spend a good chunk of their day dealing with paperwork. Like half of their time. Often delays to get approval for necessary research, often this research is into safety systems, will take multiple years.

This isn't an area that's treated in the same way as other power sources and the level of regulation should be high, but more paperwork doesn't equal more safety. More and better safety systems equal more safety and we can't even do that work. The level of obstructionism is high enough that it clearly creates more risk than it avoids due to making us continue to use older and less safe methods. There is always a risk in doing nothing, that's where the logic of regulation falls apart. Especially in the area of scientific and commercialization research.