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

[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]

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

[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: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.

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.

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.

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?

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.