What if bill gates or his wife ran for potus against Trump 2020? who wouldn't vote for him?
Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
281–290 of 353 posts
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#282isnt his approach to use the nuclear waste of fission in a new reactor?
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, coal is even worse than nuclear. So let's have neither but renewables instead :). Compared to europe, the USA is a big country and it is also further in the south which means more sun for solar collectors.
Hang on, are you absolutely sure that renewables are less damaging than nuclear? The footprint for nuclear is tiny, it might be competitive. Fukashima was a level 7 nuclear distaster, so that is as bad as it gets. The actual damage done is objectivly not that bad compared to a lot of things we have accepted in the past with only increased safety regulation (like dam failures). 2 lvl 7 accidents in 35 years; and desig…
The mortality per TWh has nuclear winning by a long shot.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#284Three serious problems with nuclear, globally: - too slow. Break ground now and you'll be producing energy by 2030. - political instability. Hands up who supports the switch of Iran and Saudi Arabia to nuclear? It would reduce a lot of carbon emissions. Let's not overlook Ukraine either: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurenuclear-plants-i... - budget instability: Wylfa has stopped https://www.independent.co.…
I support Iran’s right to have nuclear power as well as nuclear isotopes for medical use.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#285Fission produces toxic waste. Thats just the fact. It takes thousands of years to become safe to handle. The idea that "we'll just bury it in the desert" is the same kind of short-term thinking that got us into our current ecological predicament.
Also, it works now.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm one of those fission sceptics. The main problems I have with fission isn't technological issues, it's human issues. E.g. in Fukushima, people were forced to move back into their homes, without giving them an option to get compensated instead. Furthermore, engineers pointed out that there were issues with the way Fukushima was built but their concerns were discarded. Human issue again. Fission plants should be bui…
What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal). Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.
As an engineer I do feel that just because a risk is diffuse, doesn't make it better. I.e. if coal kills more people, it's objectively worse.
But I'm not sure if you can say that definitively. Peoples feeling of the "badness" of an outcome matters. And you also have to consider that dying a bit earlier might not be as bad as some of the immediate consequences a nuclear disaster can have to people of all ages.
I'd be all for building more nuclear, but I feel like it's just unrealistic to expect a sudden revival of nuclear. I think it's likely more productive to focus more R&D and investment on solar/wind and storage.
Solar/wind+storage also has some really nice benefits like being more decentralised and does not depend on a steady source of fuel. This has big benefits for developing nations as they don't need to build out big centralised grids.
Accelerating solar/wind+storage could have a bigger impact on the developing areas in e.g. Africa, as if their choice is between coal and nuclear, they may be more likely to go for coal as it's just much simpler for a nation that's not as advanced.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents Every row in the table has a citation at end.
The table is extremely misleading by not estimating risks for the next 100,000 years.
Well, the WHO estimates of total casualties of Chernobyl were consistently and significantly downgraded every decade after the disaster as more data of the actual effects came in, so it seems like we are currently vastly overestimating the risk.
It now happens to be that the indirect, psychosocial effects of the evacuation and economic losses due to the plant closure caused way more total health problems than the radiation. We now see similar trends at Fukushima.
And no, that doesn't mean that radiation isn't dangerous, people definitely died from radiation in Chernobyl (not in Fukushima), particularly the personnel and rescue workers.
However, the danger of low-level radiation seems to be vastly overstated. The Linear Non-Threshold Model (LNT)[1] for radiation damage seems to simply be wrong, which is not surprising as it was never based on data in the first place.
That of course also affects how we should think about nuclear waste, as the idea that we have to isolate it 100% from contact with the biosphere is predicated on the LNT.
And as someone pointed out, if we actually crash back down to a Bronze-Age society, nuclear waste will be the smallest of our problems, whereas if we remain an advanced industrial society, we will be able to deal with it, better each year.
However, the bigger point about nuclear waste is that there is just so incredibly little of it. With BFR, we can probably start chugging the worst bits of it into the sun if we don't want to re-process.
In fact coal plants actually produce more radiation:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Cont...
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#288As much as I'd love to see us as a civilization control the atom, I'm not seeing the financial case for why we should be focusing on nuclear right now.
NuScale said their tech was targeting $90/MWh, and trying to get a first plant running by 2023[1]. That's a non-starter for most modern utility RFPs even today.
Xcel Energy is seeing bids as low as $18/MWh for wind, $29/MWh for solar, and $36/MWh for solar+storage[2]. So maybe nuclear can fit into the realm of the 10% of edge cases where renewables+storage aren't effective, but I'm not seeing any financial scenario where nuclear comes close to providing the middle 80% of generation capacity. It's just too damn expensive.
Unless Bill Gates is proposing we can cut nuclear prices by 80%, I'm worried this is a huge distraction from us deploying renewables + storage + flexible load, which is currently extremely cheap and getting cheaper.
[1]: https://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/small-modular-reac...
[2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/record-low-sola...
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. Whenever I see someone compare nuclear deaths to solar deaths (lot of solar death are falling off a roof), I slap my forehead when they suggest full speed ahead with nuclear (despite it being too expensive, uninsurable without government backing, and no waste disposal plans) instead of...making it harder to fall off of roofs when installing rooftop solar.
By refusing to support an alternative solution, you are supporting the status quo. It is easy to bring up problem after problem with alternatives. It is not easy to show why the status quo is somehow better, because it is not. A death is a death. Someone dieing because they fell off a roof is equally as bad as dieing due to radiation.
I would disagree. Thousands of that can only be done by humans are by many measures better than a single dangerous plant that produces the same economic output in a more concentrated fashion.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#290Fission produces toxic waste. Thats just the fact. It takes thousands of years to become safe to handle. The idea that "we'll just bury it in the desert" is the same kind of short-term thinking that got us into our current ecological predicament.
So does burning coal, and that shit gets everywhere. Nuclear waste is well contained and can be secured for hundreds of years easily: https://www.npr.org/2011/02/02/133399514/into-eternity-nucle...
Not that secure. just watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU