Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push • Hacker News Board

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#21

Post by krastanov » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #6

vertline3 wrote: post #2

Wow! I hope his fusion push works out. I think he was working with that tokamak design from MIT last I checked. The design used a magnetic tape that was a new breakthrough, there is a youtube video explaining the details.

This seems to be about fission not fusion. Spending billions on fission research seems wasteful when you could leverage that into wind solar projects whose profits could then be reinvested into even more clean energy. Add in leverage and say 2 billion in research could represent 10-20+ billion worth of clean energy investments before the fruits of this research could come online. And even then you would need to spend…

Seems silly you were downvoted without being responded to. But I do believe you are misinterpreting/misstating facts. If you take into account externalities, fission is cleaner and kills fewer people than other renewables (and both are much better than fossil fuel). This is true even after including the grossly incompetent (but thankfully rare) disasters in the history of nuclear energy. There are a couple of research paper references that always pop up in conversations like this about deaths per MWhour for each type.

Even storage of waste is a solved problem: bury it in dry old mines in seismically dead locations, or start moving to the known novel reactor types.

Politically, the issue is much different though...

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#22

Post by vowelless » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #6

vertline3 wrote: post #2

Wow! I hope his fusion push works out. I think he was working with that tokamak design from MIT last I checked. The design used a magnetic tape that was a new breakthrough, there is a youtube video explaining the details.

This seems to be about fission not fusion. Spending billions on fission research seems wasteful when you could leverage that into wind solar projects whose profits could then be reinvested into even more clean energy. Add in leverage and say 2 billion in research could represent 10-20+ billion worth of clean energy investments before the fruits of this research could come online. And even then you would need to spend…

Seriously, if I see another push for wind (!) on here, I might just loose it. It’s like saying let’s use sail boats in the era of supersonic travel.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#23

Post by cazum » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #19

dsign wrote: post #10

Pushing for green energy and good deeds with the current administration makes me fear for the health of Bill Gates... is he running out of time and considering desperate options? ... now that I think about it, we all are running out of time ... :-( ...

Nuclear energy is spurned by many (most?) self-styled environmentalists. That alone could win it favor in this administration. If Republicans could be persuaded to "own" it and Democrats could be persuaded to go along with it, we might just wind up doing something good for the planet. That's probably optimistic, but there's a lot more hope in that idea than in fighting a pitched battle about solar panels, China, and…

This is the most cynical, but probably the most pragmatic perspective.

I'm not a fan of Gates, but if this is his gameplan, I'm all in.

If we can ditch coal and fossils for nuclear, we'll have a new set of problems, but nothing as dire as "12 years before we all cook to death".

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#24

Post by esmi » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

aiyodev wrote: post #13

Gates is worth ~$100B. The US federal budget is ~$4.1T per year. This is like asking someone with a 4 Gbps connection to transfer some files and offering to burn a single mini CD to help them.

A billion here a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#25

Post by wcoenen » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

aiyodev wrote: post #13

Gates is worth ~$100B. The US federal budget is ~$4.1T per year. This is like asking someone with a 4 Gbps connection to transfer some files and offering to burn a single mini CD to help them.

The budget of the office of nuclear energy is about $1B [1]. So if Gates spends an extra billion over say, the next 10 years, that's still a 10% budget boost. Not jaw dropping but still significant.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/our-budget

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#26

Post by jkravitz61 » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #19

dsign wrote: post #10

Pushing for green energy and good deeds with the current administration makes me fear for the health of Bill Gates... is he running out of time and considering desperate options? ... now that I think about it, we all are running out of time ... :-( ...

Nuclear energy is spurned by many (most?) self-styled environmentalists. That alone could win it favor in this administration. If Republicans could be persuaded to "own" it and Democrats could be persuaded to go along with it, we might just wind up doing something good for the planet. That's probably optimistic, but there's a lot more hope in that idea than in fighting a pitched battle about solar panels, China, and…

Nuclear has such a terrible reputation, and rightfully,people will always have legitimate complaints about it. We can never fully guarantee that a plant is free from the potential of catastrophe, not to mention we still don’t have a great solution to nuclear waste other than bury it in a mountain. It’s definitely a lot better than slowly suffocating ourselves by injecting hydrocarbons into the air, but we really need a revolution not evolution in energy.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#27

Post by microcolonel » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

dsign wrote: post #10

Pushing for green energy and good deeds with the current administration makes me fear for the health of Bill Gates... is he running out of time and considering desperate options? ... now that I think about it, we all are running out of time ... :-( ...

The more effective way to get what you ultimately want is to offer everyone the opportunity to achieve it.

Imagine if, instead of making their case to the administration, the advocates of the FIRST STEP Act felt it was sufficient to criticize the administration, and then give up entirely.

I see no reason why, with the right pitch, the Trump administration would be especially resistant to an effort like this. It's not as though they oppose certain "green" policies because they're "too green"; they oppose them because they are costly for, and unpopular with, their base.

Real people are not your caricatures of them.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#28

Post by markdown » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

hristov wrote: post #12

Bad idea. We have plenty of much cheaper sources of green energy. And lets face it nuclear is far from green. Offshore wind energy is so successful that it is now negatively affecting solar as well as nuclear and fossil fuels. Furthermore, the greatest current innovation vis-a-vis energy is energy saving which is much cheaper than building new reactors. I should add that there is such an energy glut in the world nowa…

> Well gee that is great for you but what does the taxpayer get out of it.

Green energy anywhere and anytime you need it, not just when the sun shines and the wind blows.

The one major problem with nuclear energy is that mining uranium has thus far been an environmental disaster.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#29

Post by m0zg » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

dsign wrote: post #10

Pushing for green energy and good deeds with the current administration makes me fear for the health of Bill Gates... is he running out of time and considering desperate options? ... now that I think about it, we all are running out of time ... :-( ...

What a strange thing to say. Gates has been spending $2B/yr for the past two decades ($28B in total so far) on what I consider to be exemplary philanthropic efforts. Thanks to him millions of people are alive today who would otherwise die of infectious diseases. And he does what he does irrespective of the administration, because he knows it needs to be done, and it's not like he can spend $100B anyway.

If anything, it may be easier to pass legislation favoring nuclear under Trump: Trump likes to deregulate, he doesn't care about anti-nuclear "activists", and he understands the role of cheap energy in the economy really well.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#30

Post by noobermin » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-mile island and chernobyl, but the fact remains the public is skeptical regarding fission for good reason: history has not been kind to the kind of disasters fission reactors have wrought.

If you want to convince the public you're going to do it right this time without creating mini fallout zones, you have to do a good damn job of that instead of just wagging your finger at people and calling them dumb. They aren't dumb, they just know rightly that engineers can't foresee the everything in the future and are understandably skeptical.