Bill Gates To Develop a Revolutionary Nuclear Reactor With Korea 413
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pledged to develop with Korea a revolutionary nuclear reactor that will leave far less radioactive waste than existing ones. Gates invested US$35 million in a nuclear-power venture company TerraPower in 2010. TerraPower is led by John Gilleland. It was formed from an effort initiated in 2007 by Nathan Myhrvold's company, Intellectual Ventures. The company includes expert staff and individual consultants who have worked for some of the most prestigious nuclear laboratories and engineering companies in the world." You may remember that Gates worked with China to build a reactor late last year.
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:0, Informative)
Yeah, fucking regulations, who needs em [google.com]!
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA dude (yes, I know, this is /. where nobody RTFAs) The reactor is designed to produce significantly LESS waste than existing designs. the problem is that getting permits for experimental reactors in the US is even harder than getting one for a known reactor design. We have hobbled ourselves in the Nuclear power area, indeed in ALL power areas due to our extreme fear of all things nuclear. (Despite living on a radioactive mostly molten ball with a thin hard crust orbiting around a giant fusion reaction in space as we get bombarded with interstellar radiation.)
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates is a Rock Star. (Score:4, Informative)
Warren Buffet pledged most of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.
I believe you are thinking of the late Steve Jobs.
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
Citation needed. I just googled it and all I found was that uranium mining would not be allowed on Federal lands in Arizona, i.e. the Grand Canyon. This is a far cry from the universal ban you claimed or implied.
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
I believe you mean peninsula, not continent; the continent is Asia and the plate is Amuria [wikipedia.org]. The more you know...
As it so happens, though, Koreans invariably refer to their native country as the true and default Korea. That's probably how this story got messed up in the first place.
Re:My God (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see:
Japan invaded China and Manchuria, killing 300k in Shanghai alone.
The US tried the darling of the left, sanctions.
Then, while the Japanese were in Washington, in negotiation with the US on resolving the conflict peacefully, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor one Sunday morning. That afternoon, the Japanese ambassador delivered the declaration of war.
Along the way, there was the Bataan Death March (definitely genocide).
On Saipan, the US had translators and loudspeakers trying to convince the Japanese civilians that they would not be harmed. The Japanese military told them the Americans would kill them. They jumped off a cliff into the sea. Can you have genocide within the same racial group.
Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we asked the Japanese to surrender. Sound of crickets as the Japanese, with their custom, killed the peace proposal with silence.
Then the B-29s were sent out, not with bombs, but risking flak, etc., to drop leaflets telling everyone in town to get out or face a new and powerful bomb. They chose to stay, working in the Mitsubishi Torpedo Works, the shipyards and other armaments plants.
After the first bomb, the US waited three days. Still the sound of crickets from the Imperial Palace.
So, your definition of genocide is striking back in force after an unprovoked attack? Interesting definition.
And, once the Japanese surrendered, we spent millions feeding their people. Genocide?
Re:And why not in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.
Kind of. SFRs are about 50 years old, even in the USA. We have, err, had, about a half dozen of them. Those crazy soviets put them in subs which they promptly set on fire and sunk. Its old icky tech. No one wants them if they can use a PWR or BWR design instead. The latest spin is to try to market them as something new even though they aren't new. Just like IT, everything old is eventually new again, and sometimes it even works. SFRs are the "cloud computing" of nuclear engineering.
For non-nuke noobs, a SFR is just like any other reactor except:
1) The coolant is sodium instead of water, so its hyper flammable and this scares the hell out of everyone involved, so every plant has had excellent safety and production records, well, except for the ones that caught fire.
2) Ditto above water is neutron activated for "a couple seconds" so other than impurities / leakage into the coolant, the coolant is basically radioactively harmless, however sodium does neutron activate and takes a couple days for enough half lifes to pass before its harmless (radioactively). Note I'm talking about the coolant itself not impurities or leakage into the coolant which is unchanged, more or less. So thats a bit freaky. You can draw PWR/BWR primary loop coolant and by they time it flows thru the "just in case" filters its cool enough to dump directly into the sewers. Sodium takes a bit longer and dumping it into the sewers is not exactly encouraged behavior, although I'm sure its terribly entertaining.
3) Other than being flammable and radioactive, sodium is a near ideal coolant. You won't have corrosion issues like hot high pressure water. Endless stories about 20 year old pumps being pulled out of service and appearing to be brand new. Although there were some "hilarious" near disasters with eutectic alloy formation and that was all figured out 40 years ago.
4) Sodium solidifies into a solid lump at room temp. This is kind of an issue for operational concerns. OK time to boot up the reactor, pull the control rods. Oh wait, they're frozen in place. Well then. And once you fix that and get the reactor cooking, the pumps are jammed so you've got to heat them.
5) Vapor pressure at operating temp is basically nil, at least compared to water. So the reactor vessel is more or less unpressurized (well yeah you blow argon over it instead of room air, but ... its just a argon blanket not 1000 psi steam like PWRs / BWRs) So all this fukushima splitting open stuff is not really relevant. Of course if you did split one in half it would be the end of the freaking world...
6) The "overheat leads to high temp chemical reaction with cladding leads to H2 buildup leads to kaboom" aka fukishima is literally chemically impossible. "unplug" a SFR like happened in Japan and basically nothing happens it just inherently calms itself down and eventually will freeze itself solid. Crazy but true. Isn't nuclear engineering cool that way? PWR and BWR to some extent or another will try to blow themselves up if abandoned so you engineer "fail safe" by making them really tough, but an abandoned SFR just kinda sits there all hot at a constant temperature and does nothing. Its kind of boring that way. Until the local fire department decides to hose it down with fire hoses. Sodium doesn't like water very much. Err actually red hot sodium likes water a lot, its just the nearby humans that dislike the fireball.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor [wikipedia.org]
Ted talk (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My God (Score:4, Informative)
When your country name has "democratic" in it, you can usually count on that not actually being the case:
-Democratic Republic of the Congo (non-functioning government)
-Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Communist)
-People's Democratic Republic of Laos (Communist)
Democratic is NOT the opposite of Communist. You are looking for dictatorship. There is nothing inherently oxymoronic about Democratic Communism, which is what Trotsky was all about.
Re:My God (Score:4, Informative)
While I won't argue that Japan did some really terrible things (war crimes, crimes against humanity) I think it is important to understand that the average Japanese person was not generally supportive of those acts. Just like in Nazi Germany most of the population was tired of war and would not have supported mass slaughter had they known exactly what was happening and had the power to do anything about it.
Again, I am not arguing that what happened was wrong, I just want to point out that some of the events you describe were not quite how you pitch them. For example when the US told people to get out of Hiroshima they would have had to consider the possibility that the enemy was just lying in an attempt to harm their war effort and the fact that the government would have acted to prevent a mass exodus. There was also loyalty to Japan and the war effort to consider, no matter how misguided it was. Even the second time around in Nagasaki word of what happened in Hiroshima had not exactly been publicised or explained to most Japanese people. Remember there was no TV and all radio and newspaper output was censored or written by the government anyway, and they were not keen on rumours of this new weapon spreading. My point is just that the civilians didn't "choose to stay" in the face of nuclear attack.
Similarly the attack of Pearl Harbour was an act of desperation by the Japanese. They didn't want to enter a war with the US because they knew it would be extremely difficult to win, and they had to consider the likely possibility of other nations attacking them too from the west. If you look at the records of what the Japanese government was doing at the time it is clear that there was much dissent over Pearl Harbour, and the feeling that surrender was inevitable well before the atomic bombs were dropped. In fact some argued that it would be better to negotiate a surrender earlier, before unconditional surrender was forced on them. As it happens McArthur was the right man to accept the surrender and allow Japan to keep some of its dignity, which I can't commend him enough for.
War is rarely black and white. The Japanese people were as much victims of their government as anyone else. Plus the alternative to not helping them after the war would have been to create another post-WWI Germany.
Re:My God (Score:5, Informative)
NK doesn't even pretend to be communist these days. Apparently it wasn't such a good descriptor because none of the Kims invented the word, and so people could think that someone else was smarter than them or something; while in reality, of course, all revolutionary political thought that leads the great Korean people to their superior destiny only originates with the Kims. So now it's all about Juche and songun. They've even dropped all mentions of "communism" from their constitution in 2009.
Traveling wave reactor criticism (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nuclear Power is unnecessary. (Score:4, Informative)
I have never claimed thorium reactors are running in production, much less that an entire country could switch over to it as its sole means of energy production.
However, the Canadian CANDU reactors are designed to run on several kinds of fuel, including thorium. I don't know if they are using it now, but it is designed. http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm [nuclearfaq.ca]
But I guess I'm the idot :)
Wow, I'm backing up claims I never made with less than a min of googling!