Bill Gates Promises Congress $1 Billion To Build Nuclear Reactors For Fighting Climate Change (sfgate.com) 353
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.'"
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.'"
Geothermal (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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 [wikipedia.org] and the hardware keeps improving. I'm not sure if there have been any specific improvements lately, though.
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Using DC means it's not a transmission line [wikipedia.org].
"This article is about the radio-frequency transmission line. For the power transmission line, see electric power transmission."
Re:Geothermal (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...
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Unfortunately, the flat-earth lobby hates transmission lines almost as much as it hates generating plants. They are even trying to stop work on the Stromautobahn ("Power freeway") that is being built to carry northern Germany's coastal wind power to cities in the south.
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But geothermal is extremely location-specific.
Nuclear is also extremely location-specific, because everyone wants to build it in someone else's backyard . . . not in their own.
If Bill Gates wants to support nuclear, he could donate his backyard, where we could build a plant.
Otherwise the biggest challenge to nuclear will always be NIMBY. Technical problems with nuclear are solvable. NIMBY . . . not so easily fixed.
Re:Geothermal (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Nope. Not only is geothermal location-specific but it's also quite diffuse.
The Geysers, the geothermal plant that's been operated by Calpines - mostly - and first came on line in 1960. The whole system, which is distributed across 30 square miles and consists of 22 power plants only produces about 955 MW. Having your production facilities spread across a wide area adds a not-insignificant component of cost.
That's a fair amount less than any single base load coal, natural gas or nuclear plant and they can be
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Geothermal would also meet this criteria.
Geothermal can be thought of as renewable nuclear, and is a good choice for places that have hot spots within a reasonable distance of the surface. I saw it in action in Iceland, on the bleak slopes of Mt. Hengill.
When you drill a thermal well, you can't just drill one. The boreholes keep clogging up with time, like old water pipes, and you have to keep drilling new ones. Your location has to be a place where it is economical to keep drilling more holes.
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Carbon use for mining and transportation applies to all power technologies, and is a self-liquidating argument because it applies to the level of carbon power generation already in the economy. As ICE are replaced by electric motors everywhere and the generating sources for these motors are less carbon intensive, the role of carbon in mining and manufacturing steadily decreases. This will apply in the same way if every generating source was photovoltaic.
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Both PV and the high induction motors used in those windmills require rare earths among other materials
An obligatory fact check: Neither PV nor induction generators require ANY rare earths whatsoever. Seriously, school yourself.
and don't recoup their cost within the lifetime before failure(30 years).
This is also provably wrong, by means of example, since otherwise their operators would be asking for much higher feed-in tariffs than they do nowadays.
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He or she probably modded you down "-1 overrated" because there is no "- 1 batshit insane" option.
Rich people wanting a government handout (Score:2, Troll)
As usual. These new modular reactor designs need more time than money to perfect.
There is already existing nuclear technology that is relatively cheap per kWh generated. It is just that it typically has large upfront costs.
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There is already existing nuclear technology that is relatively cheap per kWh generated.
This is true in theory. In practice, there are always massive cost overruns.
Feel free to list all the excuses, and the reasons the overruns won't happen next time.
Re: Rich people wanting a government handout (Score:3)
No. It isn't him or the greens. Large projects are strongly associated with mismanagement and corruption. That is the major reason that there are cost overruns.
Solar and wind do not have these issues, at least not nearly to the same degree. They aren't nearly as risky an investment, which is why growth has been so strong.
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Yet if you look at the nuclear rampups in the 1960s and 1970s you do not find that.
This is just the same problem as with any engineering project. The first time you make something you are going to make mistakes in budget or time predictions. As you get more experience with similar projects the estimates become more reliable.
It does not help that the amount of paper documentation required today is much larger than it was then either.
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A better approach than going to the US Congress would be equity partnership with a country where the Greens have no influence, like China or Korea, and which is strongly motivated to reduce fossil pollution by doing whatever ittakes. Asian reactors of existing design can be built in 4 years, which reduces costs considerably, freeing up capital for new development.
What nuvlear needs from congress (Score:2, Insightful)
1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. Note I don't say long term because what we call waste will be very very valuable, it's all transmuted isotopes most of which don't occur in nature.
2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.
Spending money on new designs or upgrading and standardizing current design, would be great as well. Imagine if we had a national standard design
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1 To get a temporary waste repository in place.
We already have adequate temporary storage: The cooling ponds at the nuclear plants.
Just leaving the rods in the cooling ponds for the next 30 years is a good solution. As time goes by, they become less radioactive and easier to handle. Meanwhile we are developing robotics that will make processing the spent fuel way easier and cheaper in the future than it is now.
Also, it is very likely that over the next few decades we will find alternative uses for many of the isotopes in the fuel rods, so we will no
Re:What nuvlear needs from congress (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Also, it is very likely that over the next few decades we will find alternative uses for many of the isotopes in the fuel rods, so we will no longer consider them "waste" at all.
Strange that we did not discover any use during the previous 70 decades, or is it 80 already?
Re:What nuvlear needs from congress (Score:4, Funny)
Strange that we did not discover any use during the previous 70 decades, or is it 80 already?
Damn, I had no CLUE that we had nukes back in the middle ages!
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Ah, I made a typo. /. has no edit option.
Thanx for pointing it out, to bad
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I believe The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch was one of the earlier nuclear weapons, famously used to thwart the Rabbit of Caerbannog.
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The cooling ponds are not a good solution for a couple of reasons.
They need active management and protection. They are potentially dangerous as accidents can cause criticality and other disasters. They also take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money to maintain. That's why reprocessing and burial are done - it's cheaper and a better long term solution.
After all, a lot of this waste won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. Can't just leave it in the pool until then.
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Actually the OP was slightly off. Spent fuel is only kept in ponds for a few months until it cools enough to be transferred to dry cask storage on site. You can see these locations on Google Earth if you know where to look. They're hard to track down because they don't take up much room at all, considering they store 4 decades of spent fuel. Compare that, for example, to a coal ash pile, or the tons of CO2 released by burning natural gas. Heck, compare it to the land mass needed for solar and wind projects.
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Interesting. In the UK they use pools for medium term storage. They have had problems with things like birds picking up contaminated material from the pools due to the poor state of repair they were in. "Dirty 30" is kinda infamous.
Re:What nuvlear needs from congress (Score:4, Interesting)
After all, a lot of this waste won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. Can't just leave it in the pool until then.
And that's a big reason we want to make newer reactor designs. The old LWRs using the U-Pu fuel cycle makes some wastes that have a very long cooling period. The newer Th-U fuel cycle designs make waste that only takes 300 years to cool. And we already have at least 300 years worth of Thorium mined due to all the rare earth mines around the globe.
Most of what is holding back these new designs is ignorance. They are complex but have really interesting qualities and the fact that we won't license the world to develop these technologies is almost criminal.
The LFTR design for instance is being worked on in at least 3 places (US, China, and India). We created the technology (in the 60's) but we can't even get the licenses to commercialize it. A technology that makes enough power (and syn fuel) for the entire globe, can't meltdown, is a sealed solution, doesn't require mining, makes CO2 free power, and produces a grand total of 6 railroad boxcars worth of waste a year if it was used to provide 100% of the world's electricity and fuel needs.
It took 7 years for the engineers to get a license to just do the fluorination work necessary as part of the development of the LFTR. Even worse, as we refuse to do anything with nuclear we let older less safe plants stay online longer than we need to. So all this environmental obstructionism actual makes use less safe and helps the fossil fuel industry. Ignorance is truly our greatest enemy.
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Opening up Yucca Mountain as soon as possible is where Congress can help. Tie the project to a fuel breeder to be built on the same same Nevada Test Site, which is the most secure place in the world for doing anything nuclear. Yucca Mountain can act as a buffer to hold all of our spent fuel for a generation while the breeder is developed and built.
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1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. >> does not work. it
2. Get the NRC out of the way ... >> Yeah, le's reduce the safety checks. What a great idea. Fukushima anyone ?
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built >> will not happen. They are more expensive than renewables.
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MSRs sound great, but the problems aren't trivial. Most of the salts are highly corrosive to materials that are good for pipes and other infrastructure, so materials selection becomes the biggest hurtle.
Not saying that's insurmountable, but we already know how to build AP-1000 reactors which are "passive safe" designs.
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2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.
Not a good idea. While the nuclear industry has done a good job, post TMI, of self regulating to focus on safety the NRC still has an important role to play. They need to ensure all regulations are met and prevent the “it’s just a minor deviation from rules / design / etc. so it’s OK” mentality. The regulations may appear onerous but many are written as the result of past mistakes.
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.
That has been done. The combined operating license lets you build and operate the plan and not have to
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Because collecting that energy in solar has massive land use, landfill and ecological implications.
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1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. Note I don't say long term because what we call waste will be very very valuable, it's all transmuted isotopes most of which don't occur in nature.
2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.
Spending money on new designs or upgrading and standardizing current design, would be great as well. Imagine if we had a national standard design that could be quickly deployed and licensed without endless approvals needed.
For once though I feel sorry for Mr. Gates, he is going to find just how much joy dealing with the idiocy environmentalism and the off grid hippies have injected into our society.
No, no, and no. And your beliefs about "regulation" are at least 30 years out of date, to the extent that they ever resembled reality at all.
Bullshit. Not a single MSR design or even a new design other than the AP-X line has been licensed in the US in almost a half century. Multiple lawsuits happen at every chance in the process of building a nuclear plant. If regulators don't want something to work, they will kill it. The nuclear regulation is the exact opposite of what the Republicans do with the EPA. If you put people in charge that don't want it to work, it won't.
Read about those AP-1000 plants in detail. The regulators had no desire
Can nuclear plants be managed without mistakes? (Score:3)
And... Is Bill Gates working to make more money? We could all send him a dollar.
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They're still safer even with mistakes (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"It was me. The thing you left out is that certain radio-isotopes are also toxic and they bio-accumulate in different ways."
They also left out the fact that one good hot particle in your body can kill you.
Re:They're still safer even with mistakes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You can keep telling us that honestly, this time nuclear really is safe,
It is: you hear about every single incident at great lengths. When was the last time you heard about a PV installer die from a fall off a roof?
Nuclear basically only has big, rare accidents. It also puts land out of action so you keep on hearing about it forever. Other forms have smaller but much more numerous accidents, so you never hear about them.
Humans are bad, really really bad at large, rare events versus small common ones. Hell,
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Rooftop solar is one of the worst, but also hard to estimate because how many lives were saved by extending the lifetime of the roof before it needs maintenance? Also a lot of solar is being installed during build now, or as part of the roof refurb.
In any case, you can get insurance for that kind of stuff. You can't get insurance for nuclear accidents. That's just how the world works, and any plan to build lots of new nuclear has to somehow deal with that. Maybe it is unfair or costs more lives, but you sti
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The insurance problem is because instead of allowing markets to form at their own pace, the US government wanted production of nuclear materials in a hurry. Bonus that it made for cheap electricity. So they intervened and created their own insurance company specifically for nuclear plant operators.
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How could any insurance company offer trillions of dollars of coverage?
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"Nuclear basically only has big, rare accidents. It also puts land out of action so you keep on hearing about it forever. Other forms have smaller but much more numerous accidents, so you never hear about them."
Yes, you just summed up there why nuclear is unacceptable. It only has big accidents which put land out of action, among other effects. Unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that Fukushima is still leaking into the sea.
"But renewables are only a complete solution in conutries with enough resou
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Yes, you just summed up there why nuclear is unacceptable. It only has big accidents which put land out of action, among other effects.
Yes, and it doesn't matter how infrequent they are. Apparently putting land out of action is much worse than killing people. Coal is a slaughterhoue compared to nuclear and it pust land out of action, and yet the main thing people worry about is carbon.
The reason nuclear is unacceptable is people are terribly bad at understanding risks and proababilities.
Unless I hear other
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How many coal miners are killed each year compared to the number of people kill by nuclear accidents?
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These days uranium is taken from open pit mines. Uranite is the least concentrated ore that we mine, so that means a bigger open pit per gram of usable material than any other substance. And of course, the mine tends to produce worse runoff than other types.
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Modern uranium mining has more in common with oil and gas drilling than traditional mining. It's called in-situ leaching and is far safer and less impactful on the local environment. Downside risk is that dissolved U might get into local aquifers but proper mapping and monitoring will help avoid that. Like everything that impacts the world, proper management and being responsible for your fellow man is key.
Dollars Per Watt (Score:2, Interesting)
If $1billion built a 1gigawatt plant (pretty sure it's not usually that rosy), that'd be $1/watt. Didn't photovoltaic pass the $1/watt threshold a few years ago? Solar panels are scaleable and mass-produced, whereas nuclear requires years of building before you get the first watt of power. Might photovoltaic + energy storage be cheaper than nuclear?
A PV Watt does not equal a nuclear Watt (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:A PV Watt does not equal a nuclear Watt (Score:4, Interesting)
$1bn/GW is ridiculously optimistic.
Hinkley Point C in the UK is looking at costing around £34 billion. On top of that you have around £50 billion in bill payer subsidies (the rate for electricity generated is guaranteed for many decades) and the usual taxpayer subsidies like free insurance that are impossible to value.
Hinkley C will provide 3.2GW, so ignoring the unlimited free insurance let's say £26.25 billion per GW, which is about $35 billion.
That pushes the nuclear cost up to $38.8 per watt. These are not theoretical costs, these are what have been agreed and are being built in the UK right now.
I note that you also chose to compare with a domestic PV panel rather than a commercial one, or better yet wind.
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I guess I'll sell you a supercapacitor to power your Tesla car when you go to work then.
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A really tiny one.
Re:A PV Watt does not equal a nuclear Watt (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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Can you name three breedees that are operated commercially?
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It's not nonsense.
You're trying to compare maximum output of 2 facilities rated for 1GW.
But a nuclear plant basically outputs at maximum capacity for 90% of the year.
A 1GW solar plant only has maximum output for a fraction of a day, for a fraction of all the days of the year.
So, over the course of a year, a 1GW-rated nuclear plant will output far more power than a 1GW-rated solar plant.
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Mainly that's because of all the regulatory hurdles and lawsuits all you greeny-weenies put into place.
Takes a lot of time... (Score:2)
...they say.
The oldest Reactor in Swirzerland, Beznau 1, turns 60 this year. So we already had 60 years to come up with a better reactor design.
Even if we assume nobody worked on the concept since Tchernobyl, which I highly doubt, in 1986, that gives uns 1. 5 decades of further innovation.
Not to mention block 3 in Tchernobyl was in operation until the year 2000... Considering there are still people living around reactor block 4 despite the catastrophe... And considering that you almost exclusively get a hig
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Russia is still in the process of replacing their RBMK nuclear reactors with LWRs.
There are loads of those things still operational.
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There are better reactor designs than Generation I/II designs i.e. Generation III+ reactors. The Chinese put several units of the APR1000 design into operation recently.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.... [world-nuclear-news.org]
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That brings me to reason any delays beyond that must be man made.
Yes, because men make mistakes. Someone has to find them and someone has to fix them.
article summarized (Score:2)
Article summarized:
Eccentric bazillionaire argues that in order to save the environment the public must spend megabucks on uninsurably dangerous technology that risks badly wrecking the environment.
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Wrong.
Nobody's asking to build any Gen2/Gen3 reactors.
They're looking to build safe-by-default Gen4+ designs.
Re: article summarized (Score:2)
"safe-by-default"
Let me know when one of these magic new "safe" reactors can get private insurance, with no government backstop or special limitation on liability. Don't worry, I won't hold my breath while I wait.
Jerry Pournelle (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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" [wikipedia.org] 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" [youtube.com] if your curious.
As time goes on (Score:2)
Bill has softened and shown he gives a shit about the planet. Maybe it's a 'token gesture' or something but it's more than most at his wealth level.
Good on him.
Gates Donating??? (Score:2)
Gates is not "donating" anything. He's asking for billions of dollars in government subsidies for his failed (and technically impossible) nuclear project.
Kind of like when he "donating" Windows to schools and developing countries... just a scam to lock people into his POS OS.
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we can affordably transmute lead into gold. How cool is that?
Converting lead into gold is a very messy process that produces lots of radioactive contaminants.
It is easier to convert bismuth into gold, but still no where near worth it. Even getting gold from asteroids would be more cost effective than nuclear transmutation.
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stars give us fusion power and gold from other elements, so we don't have to do either one.
in other words, let's get those 100 square miles of desert paved with panels and storage and stop worrying
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Asteroids you say! Let me tell you about asteroids.... blah blah blah blah blah blah... asteroids... blah blah blah blah.
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No.
We don't care about your mother.
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The thing is nuclear is not cheap at all, and it'S cost will only increase.
Usual electricity pricing for nuclear does not take in account the cost of cleanup, which is extremely high.
Also, nuclear base load has to give way to renewables today, which means it is not baseload any more, and so the general load factor will reduce, driving costs of nukes up.
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When nuclear is used, the baseload for the design(s) is to hold around 60-70% of all the generation for a specific area. Gen II reactors have a cleanup cost that's high, Gen I are astronomical. The reason those old reactors keep being used is because environuts keep protesting the replacement of aging nuclear plants. See the glorious fuckup that led to in Japan for instance, since replacing PWR designs with Gen III were and are still stuck in the courts. You can see similar circumstances in the US, and
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(We're talking about infinite energy here, why not talk about perfect efficiency at the same time? About as realistic)
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Think of this as a rich man's version of ITER. The state pays for it, then MAYBE you will get a usable generator in two generations. Except he gets to keep the patents to himself while the state pays for most of the bill.
This is the rich man's version of the stone soup folk story.
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Actually something can be accomplished by doing the first two.
Something like 40% of energy usage in the US is consumed by HVAC in BUILDINGS.
We have all these badly designed structures that simply bleed heat and waste power trying to eternally play catch-up.
We can individual homes to the point where you could space heat them with a TOASTER and solar gain when people aren't actually in the home warming them with waste body heat. And even current homes could be retrofit to this standard.
It's possible to engin
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Yep. But when you aged bulldog farts the house will stink for days.
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And what do we do in the mean time? Just suck it until such power beaming is feasible?
As I've said about nuclear and fusion.
Fission-for-now, and fusion-when-feasible.
The same thing would go for power beaming.
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He tried.
Recent changes in US laws have made doing so unfeasible for him.
Re:A few billions are peanuts ... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. An MSR is actually fairly simple. The expensive part is all the regulatory BS, plus the endless lawsuits.
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No. An MSR is actually fairly simple. The expensive part is all the regulatory BS, plus the endless lawsuits.
Another problem is they need to stay warm or risk rocking up; as well as issues of coolant reactions causing problems. The Soviets had several Alphas do that and as a result were decommissioned. They kept the reactors running even in port to key the bismuth warm. The US Navy tried a liquid sodium reactor in the Seawolf since it was a lot quieter than a water cooled reactor but wound up replacing it with one because of the problems maintaining it.
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Old vehicles are highly recyclable.
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True. But the same can be said of ANY form of generation technology.
And, due to nuclear power's sheer power density, it's carbon offset point comes FAR sooner than anything else out there.
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He's not looking to build an actual power plant.
He's looking to build a test reactor and explore how to reduce costs via unitization and economies of scale.
The biggest cost for reactors (outside of the regulatory burdens and lawsuits) is the fact that each and every reactor is it's own unique thing.
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If you throw that billion dollars the right way, it just might.
If his endeavor can deliver a modular reactor design that can be unitized to take advantage of economies of scale?
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You're envisioning it this way because you've been indoctrinated by decades of "Nookyoolur = BOMZ!" groupthink.
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Nuclear is only expensive because of all the regulatory hurdles that've been put in it's way, as well as the nigh-endless lawsuits from greenie-weenies.
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Additionally, he's not looking to build a nuclear plant right off the bat.
He's looking to build a test reactor so he can explore ways to make building them more efficient and better able to take advantage of economies of scale,