Bill Gates' nuclear venture plans reactor to complement solar, wind power boom

> Rickover's quote on new reactors vs existing ones is apt to every development in this field.

Indeed, it's easy to get carried away by the promises of new exiting tech on the horizon.

Then again, we're never going to innovate if we expect everything new to immediately prove superior economics.

> Sodium cooling is temperamental with the US navy abandoning it due to leak problems, and France having mixed experiences. The coolent catching fire whenever it leaks is not so fun.

Indeed, sodium has downsides. As well as upsides, which is why most fast reactor designs to date have used it as coolant.

> Fast spectrum with metallic fuel and pyroprocessing was demonstrated in the IFR but is messier than you might naively expect, with leaks of xenon that need control.

Well, isn't that true for all reprocessing? When you crush or otherwise process the spent fuel, the radioactive noble gases will escape.

> The HEU for startup is also problematic but maybe derated plutonium could be used.

HEU for civilian applications is non-viable, I think. Modern fast reactor designs are designed to work with HALEU, before (potentially) switching to a U-Pu closed cycle. One can of course quibble where to draw the line between HEU and HALEU. The current 20% is certainly a conservative choice. But it's also a quite minor hill to die on.

> As I like to say in this kind of threads, lets ban the act of burning fossil fuels for power.

That's most likely too drastic, leading to a massive immediate economic crash. That being said, what could be done is to start a massive society-wide decarbonization program (think WWII style industrial mobilization), which would start with a few years of building up industrial capacity, followed by a ban on building any new fossil infrastructure or equipment. See e.g.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-...

If we are to take climate change seriously, it's too late to waffle around the margins with carbon taxes etc. and expect that the free market will take care of it all.

This article is 9 years old. No nuclear plant would have been build in that time, no significant development in this technology happened but the development of renewable energy sources and batteries has progressed rapidly. We've witnessed Elon Musk's battery farm, ideas like floatovoltaics, Building-integrated photovoltaics, stuff around hydrogen storage, etc. There are also grids like in Europe where even when there is no sun shining and no wind blowing (never happens), there is always a dam in the Alps or Scandinavia.

If you have to depend on gas for the next decade and abolish coal for that, it's still a huge win and progress with an outcome that looks much brighter than this of building a single new nuclear plant or even drowning even more money into research of something that may or may not become realistic in many decades (like fusion).

@the market: if we've learned something in the recent decades than it is that "the market" can't do shit without rules and regulations. Literally. They'll mess up everything they get into their hands and bring out the worse of it.

PS. you are aware that there are already uses for Methane and that there is even P2G generation going on where you gather CO2 from the atmosphere to generate Methane which is than burned afterwards to generate energy.

Neither hydro, wind nor solar are actually toxic by nature, even though they have their own environmental impact, at least they can be considered _renewable_.

With fossil fuels and nuclear not only the fuel itself is toxic, but when the energy is released it produces an equal amount of bad stuff.

Petroleum fuel is toxic in more than one way, coal not so much, but the waste carbon monoxide is a well known poison which accompanies the waste CO2 in the exhaust.

Every atom of carbon in all of the fossil fuel burnt puts an equal number of atoms of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

But carbon is actually the smaller less massive component of CO2. Oxygen atoms are a bit heavier than carbons, and there's two oxygens. So CO2 calculates to contain only about 27 percent carbon.

That means for every huge dump truck full of coal, which is basically pure carbon to start with, when burnt it will put almost 4 huge dump trucks in tonnage of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Petroleum is only about 85 percent carbon so an oil well will need to produce about 15 percent more tons of fuel in order to get an equal amount of CO2 into the air compared to coal

Nuclear waste is deadly toxic & radioactive which is the same insidious combination as its fuel, but no one can honestly say the waste has historically been handled as carefully as the nuclear fuel.

And the hazard is similar but the waste is more difficult to handle so it should be done more carefully not just as carefully.

Also, some people will never imagine that Chernobyl or Fukushima were complete failures, since they could have been worse.

Anyway, the non-renewables have so far fallen into a similar category where more money can be made because full liability of the waste stream is not accounted for in the cost per kWh. Future generations will pay whatever price regardless, they have no say in the matter.

If nuclear was really the lowest cost option, or the slam-dunk shareholder opportunity, that would make it the Wal-Mart of power choices.

Too bad Gates is not rich enough yet or he could splurge a little at this point, and do things for clean energy that no one else could afford single-handedly unless they got it made.

Renewable energies, energy efficiency and demand response are already cheaper than most new dirty power plant...