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

566 points by jkuria 8y ago

vertline3 8y ago
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.
- gotocake 8y ago
  This isn’t about fusion, but fission. I would assume that Gates being a famously bright man, understands that none of us are seeing fusion power in our lifetimes. Of course Gates is backing an extremely challenging form of breeder reactor called a TWR. Still, any progress on nuclear at this point is good, and desperately needed.
  - vertline3 8y ago
    Oh okay I thought Terra power was working on this magnetic tape thing It's called ybco tape
    - tim333 8y ago
      Nah different technology. The tape is used in prospective fusion designs like MIT SPARC. Terra power have a fission design called a traveling wave reactor.
      - vertline3 8y ago
        Thanks! I will look it up
  - bsder 8y ago
    > This isn’t about fusion, but fission. I would assume that Gates being a famously bright man, understands that none of us are seeing fusion power in our lifetimes And the reason for that is because the funding for fusion is below the "fusion never" stage. https://imgur.com/sjH5r https://imgur.com/sjH5r If Gates were really interested, he'd commit a billion dollars every single year to fusion. That would roughly speaking quadruple the amount of funding driving fusion forward. And, to top it off, even if you didn't get fusion you'd start getting real engineering spinoff technologies that you could use in other facets of power generation, transmission, storage, etc.
- Retric 8y ago
  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 even more money actually building something useful. This could be my own bias talking but fission has seen 100+ Billion in R&D. I have my doubts this is going to move the needle much. PS: I am more than open to any counter arguments you have...
  - krastanov 8y ago
    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...
    - Retric 8y ago
      Costs are the real issue not worker safety. The trucking industry kills lots of people and nobody saftyreally cares. So, it’s really a straw man argument about non issues. Really, I would have no problem with Nuclear if it was cheap, but nobody can get it to be cheap (not even China) even without the need to load follow. We need cheap power and supplemental load following / storage. But, Nuclear is simply well behind the curve on both sides of the equation. Safe, stead production at 4c/kWh without subsidies would be a game changer or load following at much higher prices. Now, if the economics looked great then sure, but this stuff is all about minor improvements that don’t really change the game.
      - 8y ago
nimish 8y ago
He should do it without begging for public handouts. He's wealthy enough.
- omarchowdhury 8y ago
  Might be some regulatory fast tracking if the government also buys in.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    That's right. It's smart to get the opposition on board instead of having to duke it out with them.
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Turning around the public opinion on nuclear power absolutely requires government. And we are taking about adopting a mature tech that was shuned away by misconception...
- smsm42 8y ago
  If you believe one can engage in a massive nuclear energy projects in modern United States without government participation or cooperation, you haven't been paying attention for a while. It's not a question of money, it's a question of public policy, regulation, etc. Gates has more money than whole Department of Energy, it's not about getting more (I recognize in many cases it's about getting handouts, but not in this one), it's about getting this thing moving. And this, unfortunately, does require government help.
jkuria 8y ago
For more context, this is a good read: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-we-need-innovative-nuclear-power/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-we-nee... Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411991
dsign 8y ago
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 ... :-( ...
- dsign 8y ago
  ... write to Congress, today!!...
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  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 "clean coal" in the current political climate.
  - cazum 8y ago
    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".
  - jkravitz61 8y ago
    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.
    - yellowapple 8y ago
hristov 8y ago
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 nowadays that companies that make turbines for nuclear/coal/gas plants are in dire financial straits. (See GE and to a lesser extent Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries). What we need now is a good storage solution, or a flexible on demand power plant. Nuclear is very bad for both of these goals. BTW Mr. Gates' offer is not that generous. He says if the tax payer puts billions of money in his company he will also put a billion of his money in his company. Well gee that is great for you but what does the taxpayer get out of it. What if a stranger comes up to you and says "Hey buddy, if you pay $5000 to fix my car, I will pay $1000 out of my own money to repaint it."
- arduanika 8y ago
  > much cheaper sources of green energy When people stop bragging about how many more jobs green energy creates than fossil fuels, I'll start believing that renewables are cheaper at scale. > What we need now is a good storage solution Collocate the new nuclear plants with facilities that (at high energy cost) recapture carbon into dense fuels.
  - benj111 8y ago
    Re green jobs: I think that's meant as a retort to the "what about coal miners?" Argument. I'm trying to understand your nuclear -> fuel plan. Nuclear reactors already use a storage solution, why are you adding an extra step? Why not combine it with wind/solar? Edit: Are you suggesting the green jobs would lead to high wages and costs? Don't forget theres no fuel cost with renewables.
    - arduanika 8y ago
      > Nuclear reactors already use a storage solution Hmm, not sure what storage solution you're thinking of? Is there a nuclear-specific means of storing the energy produced for later use? What I mean to say is: nuclear power is so cheap that you could use it to power carbon recapture, even at the current cost. There are even people working on using direct air capture to create ultra-dense fuel, e.g. http://carbonengineering.com/ http://carbonengineering.com/ . This is surely very inefficient (lots of energy required to recapture a small amount of fuel), but if we powered it using a nuclear plant's off-peak energy, it's effectively a liquid battery.
aiyodev 8y ago
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.
- superwayne 8y ago
  I would rather say it's like helping someone with an already
- markdown 8y ago
  > The US federal budget is ~$4.1T per year. What is the current US federal budget for building or supporting nuclear energy infrastructure?
  - kirion25 8y ago
    https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/6-things-know-about-nuclear-energy-fy19-budget-request https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/6-things-know-about-nucle... $30.6 billion requested in 2019 for the Department of Energy, which includes more than $757 million for the Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).
- halflings 8y ago
  Why are you comparing something as specific as advanced nuclear power tech to the whole federal budget? 2 billion dollars is nothing to sneeze at. (not even considering the fact that Gates has been working on this since 2006, so there's considerable work that has been done)
- MPSimmons 8y ago
  What's the federal budge that gets reserved for next generation power infrastructure development?
- esmi 8y ago
  A billion here a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
- 8y ago
noobermin 8y ago
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.
- arduanika 8y ago
  How kind has history been to the "safe" renewables? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
- ianai 8y ago
  The public opinion isn’t skeptical of nuclear. They assume nuclear is some white hole of cancer that’s going to kill them and everyone around the plant or uses its power. It kills people, makes them turn green, and grow a third eye/flippers. It’s prejudice.
  - bonesss 8y ago
    It's also a prejudice not shared by people who live near reactors, who tend to be better informed and have much more positive opinions.
- foobarbazetc 8y ago
  Isn’t there also a cost argument here? Both time to ROI and decommissioning costs are enormous? Or have things changed?
chmaynard 8y ago
Is this the way public policy is done now? Dueling billionaires throwing their money around? Gates can take his billions and shove them you know where.
- abootstrapper 8y ago
  Wait until you hear about lobbyists and super pacs!
  - max76 8y ago
    Throwing money around sounds like politics as usual. At least this policy seems to come genuine desire to help.
- cazum 8y ago
  What do you mean "now"? This is the way it's been done for decades.
  - jcaprani 8y ago
    Centuries
- partiallypro 8y ago
  A lot of billionaires in the past have done great things that have solved problems that government couldn't alone. I don't really see how this is a problem. I don't think Musk, Gates and Bezos are harming society as a whole by making big advancements in rocket tech, vaccines, etc for the benefit of humanity...while also making products that also benefit people across the globe.
abootstrapper 8y ago
Ya know, I feel like renewables are the future, but we’re kinda running out of runway here. I think a nuclear + renewables strategy is a great way to get us past fossil fuels quickly. Once we’re over fossil fuels we can tackle replacing nuclear with something better.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  At this point it's fairly obvious that the continued use of fossil fuels will lead us to danger than fission. Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable. We'' just have to figure out how to deal with the fission devil until we get fusion. Hopefully, fusion isn't too far off.
  - darkerside 8y ago
    > Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable Trading the devil you know for the one you don't is wisely considered a bad idea
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      That certainly depends on how devilish are the one you know and a random one. Any advice on that level of generality is useless and better trashed.
      - darkerside 8y ago
        The whole point is, you don't know how devilish the random one is. As bad as global warming will be, we know the risks and we can prepare for them. Whether we'll actually do that is another matter..
        marcosdumay 8y ago
        Getting concrete now, specifically about nuclear power, we know exactly how bad it can be. We have a very large amount of certainty about how the worst case looks like, we know very well how to prepare for some of it, and we know very well what to do to avoid the rest of it. We know those to a much higher certainty than we know the consequences of global warming. It's not a blind choice. The only thing we don't know well is how much improvement current technology brings. We have an idea, but there are probably flaws on our estimative. I don't think nuclear will help, mostly because it's too late. But basing decisions on ignorance is crazy.
meshr 8y ago
Just curious if someone can build nuclear station without Congress. Can Bill Gates buy a ship or island with nuclear station somewhere and “power Microsoft servers” from it?
- bertil 8y ago
  Depending on the technology, that would most likely fell close to non-proliferation treaty and other international arrangements, so the government and possibly IAEA would have rights to control and visit. I know for instance that radioactive materials used for X-ray are under specific surveillance (it was discussed because of Brexit: the UK imports those from Germany). In practice, anyone who knows about those technologies is active in the academic and industrial community. There are a lot of regulation that you can’t understand without professional lobbyists, and most of them are former civil servants. I would compare it to Space exploration: a private actor like SpaceX of BlueOrigin is welcome on principle but has to pay a significant fee for controls. Whether you see that as needed security expertise or fealty is a matter of interpretation.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  No, nuclear related products are incredibly regulated and monitored heavily to stop state actors and terrorists.
raz32dust 8y ago
I think they'll do it if he redirects that $2b for the wall. Not even kidding.
- abootstrapper 8y ago
  To hell with the monument to white nationalism. Trump will be out of office soon enough and we can move on and forget about the damn wall.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    What if he gets a second term?
    - abootstrapper 8y ago
      We continue to fight against “the wall” until he’s out of office. It’s nothing more than a campaign promise to rally his base and it dies with Trumps tenure.
pjc50 8y ago
Three 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-in-war-zones-4536247/ https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurenuclear-plants-i... - budget instability: Wylfa has stopped https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/hitachi-job-losses-uk-nuclear-power-station-wales-wylfa-anglesey-horizon-a8732086.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/hitachi-job... and Hinckley Point C is hanging on by an expensive thread. It is also at risk of inconvenience from Brexit, given that the UK is leaving Euratom and is likely to experience "no deal" chaos for personnell and equipment from EDF. Is the US really able to build nuclear plants with the occasional total budget shutdown for 3 months?
- eBombzor 8y ago
  Also mining for radioactive materials takes a huge toll on the environment. Also, how are they going to get rid of radioactive waste? There doesn't seem to be a good solution to this at all.
  - abledon 8y ago
    Ya, USA can’t m get a handle on its aging infrastructure how will it be 30 years down the line when the holding tanks and cleanup plans are given same treatment . Throw in a random government shutdown too
    - adventured 8y ago
      That US infrastructure is widely crumbling - such that the US somehow can't get a handle on it - is a myth. The US requires targeted infrastructure investment, it is not suffering a broad based problem. https://www.mercatus.org/publications/infrastructure-US-crumbling-highways-roads-bridges https://www.mercatus.org/publications/infrastructure-US-crum...
  - hocuspocus 8y ago
conradk 8y ago
Always the same thing: instead of reducing energy use, humans will find a way to push back problems instead of tackling them head on. Using nuclear energy "because runway is too short" without doing much else is not going to save us. We have to go out of our comfort zone and start pushing for laws that force manufacturers to allow for 20 year repairability of electronical products (some brands already offer 10 years, so 20 years is probably possible too), pushing for automatic 5 year warranty on electronic products instead of 2 in the EU, disallowing environment breaking agriculture, putting extremely high taxes on airplane tickets, etc. Sure, that means that we need to change the way we live. We need to consume less and better. We need to think long term instead of jumping onto the new bright innovation every 2 years. 21st century capitalism has gotten to a point of absurdity in which everything in the world "has to" be available within the reach of a click and max 3 days delivery, whatever the cost (environment is dying, poverty is still not gone despite the absurd amount of wealth produced by modern economies, etc). Maybe we ought to rethink how we consume and what we expect from life.
- javagram 8y ago
  In practice people will riot in the streets like the “yellow vests” in France over even mild measures such as fuel taxes. Extreme measures like you are talking about could not be implemented in any democracy.
  - elcomet 8y ago
    Come on. Fuel taxes have a higher cost on poor people, that's why people are doing riots in France. This is about social justice. You can very well have extreme measures that are also socially fair. The example the parent is taking is very good: having 10 years guarantee on all products is pro consumer (it might increases prices a bit, but I believe people will actually save money in the long run).
- jabl 8y ago
  I do agree that to solve all the big environmental problems we're facing, such as climate change, biodiversity loss etc., we're going to have to change the way we live. Merely replacing gasoline powered cars with electric cars isn't going to cut it. That being said, while improving energy efficiency is good as it makes the challenge of decarbonization easier, when/if we have low-impact electricity generation we could use (lots of) electricity to decarbonize many processes requiring fossil fuels today. Such as production of ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer (today from natural gas), or building heating with heat pumps instead of fuel burning boilers, steel production with hydrogen direct reduction instead of coke, etc.
Apreche 8y ago
Hey Bill. You got more money than the Koch bros. Why not use those billions to donate to the campaigns of (aka bribe) every congressperson. Then, democrat or republican, they will do whatever you ask. They'll impeach Trump. They'll vote for nuclear power. They'll tax the other wealthy people. You could also just buy those evil Koch Brothers/Adelson/etc. They are all smaller than you. Just buy them and shut them down. You can save the country with a wave of your hand. Why are you always making such a small impact with such a large amount of money? Stop trying to bunt to first and smack the home run. Alternative: Give me all your money and I'll do it for you.
- gdy 8y ago
  Another alternative: you make the money yourself like Bill Gates did and do whatever you want instead of writing comments on HN.
simplecomplex 8y ago
We already have enough land to power the entire US with solar. The future is renewables not pushing the can down the road with Nuclear, ignoring all of its negative externalities. Bill Gates doesn’t need government to build solar either.
- philsnow 8y ago
  Can the united states procure enough gallium, cadmium, selenium, indium, and whatever else to build enough solar panels ?
  - campercoder 8y ago
    silicon?
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Yes. Panels based on crystalline silicon have 95% market share and require none of those elements.
  - arduanika 8y ago
    A Tom Lehrer fan, I see
- campercoder 8y ago
  Don't forget that genius invented the backslash and control alt delete. Yes, obviously he should be focusing on battery research, not fusion or improved fission. Solar panels + batteries will do it.
- 4rt 8y ago
  land has never been even close to the shortage for any kind of electricity generation.
  - simplecomplex 8y ago
    All the more reason we should be replacing the whole grid with it.
learnstats2 8y ago
This is why we shouldn't allow people to be billionaires. The government should decide this as representatives of the people, not as arms of extremely wealthy people.
throwaway55676 8y ago
Lol, Bill Gates will "voluntarily" contribute money to a project. That money isn't his, such enormous wealth can only be stolen from society. In any case, if congress wants to build something they can tax him, print money, or adjust various levers to change the expense. The pretentions and preening of the rich should be drowned in laughter.
- qaq 8y ago
  Well it's a good thing you can freely move to North Korea where such atrocities are not possible.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't violate the site guidelines. They ask you to flag egregious comments rather than feeding trolls. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
    - a12432 8y ago
      throwaway actually had a valid informative point, followed by some sarcasm. the troll is the person you replied to, and you yourself. you should not flag, downvote, and shadow* people to make yourself feel more in control of your life. your moderation practices are what has been detrimental to this site more than any trolls or spam. you have turned this site into a subreddit, just with an interface written in 1991. Please don't violate what the site is for. It's for people wanting actual quality information, not for you as a mod to feel satisfied. You are literally removing things people have wanted to see. A quality discussion does not mean "super nice and agrees with my childlike style of humor." It means more pertinent information. You seem to define pertinent information as "troll" while not noticing the actual trolls. Here is a guideline: you need to be replaced.
pgcosta 8y ago
Coal kills more than nuclear. Modern nuclear is safer and reliable. It's similar to the fear of planes vs the actual safety statistics of planes.
- opportune 8y ago
  I think people are always going to be more scared of violent, headline-making deaths than slow, boring deaths
  - edflsafoiewq 8y ago
    Slow and boring like cancer?
- mcjiggerlog 8y ago
  Never mind coal, nuclear is safer than even wind and solar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities The problem, as you point out, is that people are generally very bad at understanding risk.
  - a12432 8y ago
    The problem is people like you redefining what risk means, then saying the people who define it properly don't understand it. The problem is people with small minds or an agenda on their small mind, redefining what is important to others, and calling them stupid. By your false definition, the risk of me getting hit by a car when crossing a street is less than the risk of me getting killed by the smog cars make. While quantitatively true for a statistical population, it is qualitatively false. And people's opinions are qualitative - they're based on a definable reason, not just explainable symptoms. Guess what: black people are 15% of the population but commit 50% of the violent crime, according to FBI statistics. Quantitatively. Does not mean that statistic applies to a single random person on the street and he can be arrested because he's likely to commit a crime. That's your logic applied to risk of getting stabbed. Here's the risk as society that doesn't pretend to be purposefully dense defines it: when something goes wrong, how bad it is. Take all the coal plant disasters, and compare them to all the nuclear disasters. Now let's take a future disaster, the reason for which you don't know and cannot account for with "new design" which will be called "old and faulty design" in a few decades. During that disaster, looking at past disasters, do you want that destroyed power plant to be coal or nuclear? Coal has no risk. Coal has a well defined, predictable, and understood small and slow detriment. You define that as risk. The world defines that as the opposite of risk. Lived in Kiev for a year an a half, took a bus trip to Chernobyl.. Guess what they got in that huge area where no one lives (actually there is a crazy old lady who lives there, still in her house). Did you guess it? Yeah, fresh tree stumps. That radioactive wood is cut down by shady companies for free, and shipped to europe and other parts of Ukraine. Out of it you get houses and furniture. Did you account for risk of sitting on a radioactive couch in a radioactive house when you claimed you fully understood "risk?" Ah, that's because to understand the risk of something you first need to understand what the English word means.
renholder 8y ago
I think this is a good idea but, on the flipside of that coin, would it be too little, too late? Honest question: Would it even, conceivably, be ready in the next 10 years? Coal isn't without it's drawbacks[0], no matter how much it's praised but the fallout[1] (no pun intended) from nuclear disasters has much longer and farther-reaching implications, which we have no way to really recover from - still to this day. As others have pointed out, the disasters have caused a bit of uneasiness with the public and it's understandable, when the general consensus in modern-day society is, "It's not my problem, so I don't care." If we treated it as a "human problem" and not "x" society's problem, we'd probably get a lot further; of course, this assumes that people believe the environment is in serious danger but, alas, there are people who do not. (Did these same people exist during the CFC/Ozone-hole problem?) [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi...
spdustin 8y ago
With today's weakening of regulatory standards, I don't know how safe new fission plants could be. The guy in charge of it all (self-admittedly) doesn't really understand nuclear energy, and would be prone to misunderstanding the science presented by industry leaders, possibly to the detriment of safety. I know, that's a whole pile of variables; but variables should be reduced when it comes to nuclear energy, IMO. That said, I greatly favor nuclear over, you know, burning stuff, and I'd like to see it succeed alongside renewables.
chemmail 8y ago
Would building a reactor underground not be safer?
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  It would be safer, as the pathways of radionuclides into the biosphere would be more torturous. It would also be significantly more expensive, as underground construction is big money. Many new reactors put the core below grade, though. It's better for tornadoes, but worse for floods.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  If you take an existing design and plop it underground while ignoring cost, maybe. For getting the most safety per dollar, probably not.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Why complicate things when we already have a non-polluting eternal source of fuel in the sky, AND the technology to harvest it, AND it's actually economical and uncontroversial, AND the available energy is orders-of-magnitude more than needed today? Hmmm. PG&E wouldn't have to worry about 100,000 miles of transmission lines if power-generation could be decentralized. Oh, wait, it can be! And without paying for 10,000 years of security. Of course it won't make anyone rich or powerful, and it's decentralized, and those are bad things. Apparently.
- bkcreate 8y ago
  Are you forgetting about the change where all new homes in CA have to have solar panels? We already are moving towards mass adoption of solar, that doesn't stop us from exploring other options that work in less sunny places, at night, etc. Solar won't work everywhere.
harry8 8y ago
Where's the actual data on safety to people of nuclear vs coal vs wind/rain/sun?
- ggm 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents Every row in the table has a citation at end.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    The table is extremely misleading by not estimating risks for the next 100,000 years.
    - ggm 8y ago
      You're right great Cheops, king of kings, we should stick to bronze swords, the next 100,000 year risk profile of iron smelting hasn't been drawn up yet. Nobody in any environment or endeavour in history applies 100k years risk assessment on any activity. This is green fundamentalism and next comes mandatory veganism and forced sterilization.
      - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        Nice series of strawman and ad-hominem.
        ggm 8y ago
        I thought about that. It is a bit ad-hominemy but the argument stands. This is a longer version without the ad hominem. No proposed electricity solution with a 100,000 year risk assessment exists. All infrastructure related to power distribution and generation such as dams or existing transmission gear, the fundamental constructs of power consumption would be open to question from the plastic insulation on wires to the energy cost of digging cobalt to the ecological damage of dam construction and mining. If a 100,000 year cost is applied to things the reductionist result is to promote a reduced societal load which demands de-population and inevitably less enemy eating and since society is not on a path to either it's probably legislated or enforced. It's the Indian emergency and forced sterilization.
tomcam 8y ago
Nuclear energy sounds great to me except for the disposal of nuclear waste. I cannot seem to find any convincing references that we can do it safely over the long-term. Can someone help me with that?
- moogly 8y ago
  No you're right, it's an unsolved problem right now.
- mrfusion 8y ago
  This folk on Reddit had a great response to that. A bit too long to paste here so I’ll leave the link: https://pay.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7v76v4/what_is_something_that_sounds_extremely_wrong_but/dtqd9ey/ https://pay.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7v76v4/what_is_s...
- gdubs 8y ago
  In Stewart Brand’s book “Whole Earth Discipline” he says that a person’s entire lifetime worth of nuclear waste would fit in a can of soda. And from my understanding, that spent fuel can be reused after a certain amount of time. Yucca Mountain is a good solution if they can ever figure out the local politics.
RickJWagner 8y ago
That's awesome. I really respect it when people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Kudos to Gates.
Havoc 8y ago
Pretty crazy that one person has the power to unilaterally commit a billion and credibly promise another billion in funding. Sure doesn't sound like a lot in the context of ~trillion market cap companies...but this is a billion un-encumbrered. No lawyers...just one person deciding this is happening.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  The kicker is that he will only do that if they use his company, as explained in the article. While I agree that nuclear energy is basically required at this point in order to ween humans off of lighting crap they get out of the ground on fire, bill's antics may not be the best option (can his company deliver? others have already done so.. so why not them instead? it will require more than $2bn... so tax dollars required.)
- Tiktaalik 8y ago
  Yep. We should be taxing the ultra rich more, and then the public instead of the ultra rich would be the one being able to decide what to do with this money.
d6e 8y ago
As a temporary measure, why don't we use renewables with a fallback to fossil fuels? During the day, solar could meet demand and at night, we use coal/gas/whatever.
- vinay427 8y ago
  I think there's a lot of inefficiency in only operating coal plants during some times of day. That was one of the major complaints that utilities in California used for crediting users with residential solar for their power generation. It wasn't actually worth the market rate to the utility if they had to run the plant anyways. I don't have any independent data on this, unfortunately. There are interesting initiatives around the country to curb peaks in usage, however. For example, my parents are signed up for a service where they collect bill credits as they minimize power usage during a pre-announced hour of the week which exceeds normal capacity and would require dirtier and more expensive power plants to operate. https://www.ohmconnect.com/ https://www.ohmconnect.com/
natch 8y ago
It’s not that the technology is good or bad. It’s that the industry has lost all its credibility by promising too-good-to-be-true technology for decades, and then delivering mediocre results in many cases, and catastrophic results in others. With taxpayers left holding the bag. So I would propose, to hedge against the perennial optimism of industry apologists who will never have to back up their claims, have the investors who bet on this also fund an escrow account to the tune of 10x or so of the construction and other initial costs, to make up for gaps in their wildly positive projections. These funds could be invested and returned to the original sources if the project turns out to remain safe and financially worthwhile after x number of years. Not enough money to fund 10x? Then don’t do the project until there is.
Jedi72 8y ago
Fission 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.
- theshrike79 8y ago
  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-nuclears-future-with-or-without-us https://www.npr.org/2011/02/02/133399514/into-eternity-nucle...
  - afroboy 8y ago
    Not that secure. just watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
- a_imho 8y ago
  Also, it works now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mortdeus 8y ago
What if bill gates or his wife ran for potus against Trump 2020? who wouldn't vote for him?
mortdeus 8y ago
isnt his approach to use the nuclear waste of fission in a new reactor?
diafygi 8y ago
As 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-reactors/nuscale-targets-smr-cost-below-90mwh-wider-deployment https://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/small-modular-reac... [2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/record-low-solar-plus-storage-price-in-xcel-solicitation https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/record-low-sola...
ackfoo 8y ago
What an idiotic discussion. Energy-efficient buildings can reduce our power demands by 85%. Then we can talk about which nuclear power plants to shut down, instead of arguing about whether we should build more. The free market prioritizes cheap buildings and profit. One law that requires energy-efficiency for all new structures ends the argument. No offence, but participating in the nuclear argument makes you a moron.
daveheq 8y ago
Thoreum molten-salt reactors or its a waste!
Tsubasachan 8y ago
Every once in a while the idea to build a nuclear powerplant comes up. Then the accountants start working out how much it will cost, everyone understand that you need to multiply that number by a factor of 2, and wisely nothing happens. Most countries actually don't even have the expertise to manage a nuclear industry anymore.
yosito 8y ago
Good. This is literally the only possible way humanity could arrest or at least survive climate change.
adultSwim 8y ago
Bill Gates has shamelessly uses his philanthropy to further his own interests, similar to how he abused Microsoft's monopoly power in the 90s.
- Bajeezus 8y ago
  If you want to call advancing causes that are objectively beneficial for society "furthering his own interests," then sure.

566 points by jkuria 8y ago

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.

gotocake 8y ago
This isn’t about fusion, but fission. I would assume that Gates being a famously bright man, understands that none of us are seeing fusion power in our lifetimes. Of course Gates is backing an extremely challenging form of breeder reactor called a TWR. Still, any progress on nuclear at this point is good, and desperately needed.
- vertline3 8y ago
  Oh okay I thought Terra power was working on this magnetic tape thing It's called ybco tape
  - tim333 8y ago
    Nah different technology. The tape is used in prospective fusion designs like MIT SPARC. Terra power have a fission design called a traveling wave reactor.
    - vertline3 8y ago
      Thanks! I will look it up
- bsder 8y ago
  > This isn’t about fusion, but fission. I would assume that Gates being a famously bright man, understands that none of us are seeing fusion power in our lifetimes And the reason for that is because the funding for fusion is below the "fusion never" stage. https://imgur.com/sjH5r https://imgur.com/sjH5r If Gates were really interested, he'd commit a billion dollars every single year to fusion. That would roughly speaking quadruple the amount of funding driving fusion forward. And, to top it off, even if you didn't get fusion you'd start getting real engineering spinoff technologies that you could use in other facets of power generation, transmission, storage, etc.
Retric 8y ago
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 even more money actually building something useful. This could be my own bias talking but fission has seen 100+ Billion in R&D. I have my doubts this is going to move the needle much. PS: I am more than open to any counter arguments you have...
- krastanov 8y ago
  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...
  - Retric 8y ago
    Costs are the real issue not worker safety. The trucking industry kills lots of people and nobody saftyreally cares. So, it’s really a straw man argument about non issues. Really, I would have no problem with Nuclear if it was cheap, but nobody can get it to be cheap (not even China) even without the need to load follow. We need cheap power and supplemental load following / storage. But, Nuclear is simply well behind the curve on both sides of the equation. Safe, stead production at 4c/kWh without subsidies would be a game changer or load following at much higher prices. Now, if the economics looked great then sure, but this stuff is all about minor improvements that don’t really change the game.
    - 8y ago

nimish 8y ago

He should do it without begging for public handouts. He's wealthy enough.

omarchowdhury 8y ago
Might be some regulatory fast tracking if the government also buys in.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  That's right. It's smart to get the opposition on board instead of having to duke it out with them.
justicezyx 8y ago
Turning around the public opinion on nuclear power absolutely requires government. And we are taking about adopting a mature tech that was shuned away by misconception...
smsm42 8y ago
If you believe one can engage in a massive nuclear energy projects in modern United States without government participation or cooperation, you haven't been paying attention for a while. It's not a question of money, it's a question of public policy, regulation, etc. Gates has more money than whole Department of Energy, it's not about getting more (I recognize in many cases it's about getting handouts, but not in this one), it's about getting this thing moving. And this, unfortunately, does require government help.

jkuria 8y ago

For more context, this is a good read: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-we-need-innovative-nuclear-power/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-we-nee... Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411991

dsign 8y ago

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 ... :-( ...

dsign 8y ago
... write to Congress, today!!...
jjoonathan 8y ago
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 "clean coal" in the current political climate.
- cazum 8y ago
  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".
- jkravitz61 8y ago
  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.
  - yellowapple 8y ago

hristov 8y ago

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 nowadays that companies that make turbines for nuclear/coal/gas plants are in dire financial straits. (See GE and to a lesser extent Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries). What we need now is a good storage solution, or a flexible on demand power plant. Nuclear is very bad for both of these goals. BTW Mr. Gates' offer is not that generous. He says if the tax payer puts billions of money in his company he will also put a billion of his money in his company. Well gee that is great for you but what does the taxpayer get out of it. What if a stranger comes up to you and says "Hey buddy, if you pay $5000 to fix my car, I will pay $1000 out of my own money to repaint it."

arduanika 8y ago
> much cheaper sources of green energy When people stop bragging about how many more jobs green energy creates than fossil fuels, I'll start believing that renewables are cheaper at scale. > What we need now is a good storage solution Collocate the new nuclear plants with facilities that (at high energy cost) recapture carbon into dense fuels.
- benj111 8y ago
  Re green jobs: I think that's meant as a retort to the "what about coal miners?" Argument. I'm trying to understand your nuclear -> fuel plan. Nuclear reactors already use a storage solution, why are you adding an extra step? Why not combine it with wind/solar? Edit: Are you suggesting the green jobs would lead to high wages and costs? Don't forget theres no fuel cost with renewables.
  - arduanika 8y ago
    > Nuclear reactors already use a storage solution Hmm, not sure what storage solution you're thinking of? Is there a nuclear-specific means of storing the energy produced for later use? What I mean to say is: nuclear power is so cheap that you could use it to power carbon recapture, even at the current cost. There are even people working on using direct air capture to create ultra-dense fuel, e.g. http://carbonengineering.com/ http://carbonengineering.com/ . This is surely very inefficient (lots of energy required to recapture a small amount of fuel), but if we powered it using a nuclear plant's off-peak energy, it's effectively a liquid battery.

aiyodev 8y ago

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.

superwayne 8y ago
I would rather say it's like helping someone with an already
markdown 8y ago
> The US federal budget is ~$4.1T per year. What is the current US federal budget for building or supporting nuclear energy infrastructure?
- kirion25 8y ago
  https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/6-things-know-about-nuclear-energy-fy19-budget-request https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/6-things-know-about-nucle... $30.6 billion requested in 2019 for the Department of Energy, which includes more than $757 million for the Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).
halflings 8y ago
Why are you comparing something as specific as advanced nuclear power tech to the whole federal budget? 2 billion dollars is nothing to sneeze at. (not even considering the fact that Gates has been working on this since 2006, so there's considerable work that has been done)
MPSimmons 8y ago
What's the federal budge that gets reserved for next generation power infrastructure development?
esmi 8y ago
A billion here a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
8y ago

noobermin 8y ago

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.

arduanika 8y ago
How kind has history been to the "safe" renewables? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
ianai 8y ago
The public opinion isn’t skeptical of nuclear. They assume nuclear is some white hole of cancer that’s going to kill them and everyone around the plant or uses its power. It kills people, makes them turn green, and grow a third eye/flippers. It’s prejudice.
- bonesss 8y ago
  It's also a prejudice not shared by people who live near reactors, who tend to be better informed and have much more positive opinions.
foobarbazetc 8y ago
Isn’t there also a cost argument here? Both time to ROI and decommissioning costs are enormous? Or have things changed?

chmaynard 8y ago

Is this the way public policy is done now? Dueling billionaires throwing their money around? Gates can take his billions and shove them you know where.

abootstrapper 8y ago
Wait until you hear about lobbyists and super pacs!
- max76 8y ago
  Throwing money around sounds like politics as usual. At least this policy seems to come genuine desire to help.
cazum 8y ago
What do you mean "now"? This is the way it's been done for decades.
- jcaprani 8y ago
  Centuries
partiallypro 8y ago
A lot of billionaires in the past have done great things that have solved problems that government couldn't alone. I don't really see how this is a problem. I don't think Musk, Gates and Bezos are harming society as a whole by making big advancements in rocket tech, vaccines, etc for the benefit of humanity...while also making products that also benefit people across the globe.

abootstrapper 8y ago

Ya know, I feel like renewables are the future, but we’re kinda running out of runway here. I think a nuclear + renewables strategy is a great way to get us past fossil fuels quickly. Once we’re over fossil fuels we can tackle replacing nuclear with something better.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
At this point it's fairly obvious that the continued use of fossil fuels will lead us to danger than fission. Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable. We'' just have to figure out how to deal with the fission devil until we get fusion. Hopefully, fusion isn't too far off.
- darkerside 8y ago
  > Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable Trading the devil you know for the one you don't is wisely considered a bad idea
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    That certainly depends on how devilish are the one you know and a random one. Any advice on that level of generality is useless and better trashed.
    - darkerside 8y ago
      The whole point is, you don't know how devilish the random one is. As bad as global warming will be, we know the risks and we can prepare for them. Whether we'll actually do that is another matter..
      - marcosdumay 8y ago
        Getting concrete now, specifically about nuclear power, we know exactly how bad it can be. We have a very large amount of certainty about how the worst case looks like, we know very well how to prepare for some of it, and we know very well what to do to avoid the rest of it. We know those to a much higher certainty than we know the consequences of global warming. It's not a blind choice. The only thing we don't know well is how much improvement current technology brings. We have an idea, but there are probably flaws on our estimative. I don't think nuclear will help, mostly because it's too late. But basing decisions on ignorance is crazy.

meshr 8y ago

Just curious if someone can build nuclear station without Congress. Can Bill Gates buy a ship or island with nuclear station somewhere and “power Microsoft servers” from it?

bertil 8y ago
Depending on the technology, that would most likely fell close to non-proliferation treaty and other international arrangements, so the government and possibly IAEA would have rights to control and visit. I know for instance that radioactive materials used for X-ray are under specific surveillance (it was discussed because of Brexit: the UK imports those from Germany). In practice, anyone who knows about those technologies is active in the academic and industrial community. There are a lot of regulation that you can’t understand without professional lobbyists, and most of them are former civil servants. I would compare it to Space exploration: a private actor like SpaceX of BlueOrigin is welcome on principle but has to pay a significant fee for controls. Whether you see that as needed security expertise or fealty is a matter of interpretation.
partiallypro 8y ago
No, nuclear related products are incredibly regulated and monitored heavily to stop state actors and terrorists.

raz32dust 8y ago

I think they'll do it if he redirects that $2b for the wall. Not even kidding.

abootstrapper 8y ago
To hell with the monument to white nationalism. Trump will be out of office soon enough and we can move on and forget about the damn wall.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  What if he gets a second term?
  - abootstrapper 8y ago
    We continue to fight against “the wall” until he’s out of office. It’s nothing more than a campaign promise to rally his base and it dies with Trumps tenure.

pjc50 8y ago

Three 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-in-war-zones-4536247/ https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurenuclear-plants-i... - budget instability: Wylfa has stopped https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/hitachi-job-losses-uk-nuclear-power-station-wales-wylfa-anglesey-horizon-a8732086.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/hitachi-job... and Hinckley Point C is hanging on by an expensive thread. It is also at risk of inconvenience from Brexit, given that the UK is leaving Euratom and is likely to experience "no deal" chaos for personnell and equipment from EDF. Is the US really able to build nuclear plants with the occasional total budget shutdown for 3 months?

eBombzor 8y ago
Also mining for radioactive materials takes a huge toll on the environment. Also, how are they going to get rid of radioactive waste? There doesn't seem to be a good solution to this at all.
- abledon 8y ago
  Ya, USA can’t m get a handle on its aging infrastructure how will it be 30 years down the line when the holding tanks and cleanup plans are given same treatment . Throw in a random government shutdown too
  - adventured 8y ago
    That US infrastructure is widely crumbling - such that the US somehow can't get a handle on it - is a myth. The US requires targeted infrastructure investment, it is not suffering a broad based problem. https://www.mercatus.org/publications/infrastructure-US-crumbling-highways-roads-bridges https://www.mercatus.org/publications/infrastructure-US-crum...
- hocuspocus 8y ago

conradk 8y ago

Always the same thing: instead of reducing energy use, humans will find a way to push back problems instead of tackling them head on. Using nuclear energy "because runway is too short" without doing much else is not going to save us. We have to go out of our comfort zone and start pushing for laws that force manufacturers to allow for 20 year repairability of electronical products (some brands already offer 10 years, so 20 years is probably possible too), pushing for automatic 5 year warranty on electronic products instead of 2 in the EU, disallowing environment breaking agriculture, putting extremely high taxes on airplane tickets, etc. Sure, that means that we need to change the way we live. We need to consume less and better. We need to think long term instead of jumping onto the new bright innovation every 2 years. 21st century capitalism has gotten to a point of absurdity in which everything in the world "has to" be available within the reach of a click and max 3 days delivery, whatever the cost (environment is dying, poverty is still not gone despite the absurd amount of wealth produced by modern economies, etc). Maybe we ought to rethink how we consume and what we expect from life.

javagram 8y ago
In practice people will riot in the streets like the “yellow vests” in France over even mild measures such as fuel taxes. Extreme measures like you are talking about could not be implemented in any democracy.
- elcomet 8y ago
  Come on. Fuel taxes have a higher cost on poor people, that's why people are doing riots in France. This is about social justice. You can very well have extreme measures that are also socially fair. The example the parent is taking is very good: having 10 years guarantee on all products is pro consumer (it might increases prices a bit, but I believe people will actually save money in the long run).
jabl 8y ago
I do agree that to solve all the big environmental problems we're facing, such as climate change, biodiversity loss etc., we're going to have to change the way we live. Merely replacing gasoline powered cars with electric cars isn't going to cut it. That being said, while improving energy efficiency is good as it makes the challenge of decarbonization easier, when/if we have low-impact electricity generation we could use (lots of) electricity to decarbonize many processes requiring fossil fuels today. Such as production of ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer (today from natural gas), or building heating with heat pumps instead of fuel burning boilers, steel production with hydrogen direct reduction instead of coke, etc.

Apreche 8y ago

Hey Bill. You got more money than the Koch bros. Why not use those billions to donate to the campaigns of (aka bribe) every congressperson. Then, democrat or republican, they will do whatever you ask. They'll impeach Trump. They'll vote for nuclear power. They'll tax the other wealthy people. You could also just buy those evil Koch Brothers/Adelson/etc. They are all smaller than you. Just buy them and shut them down. You can save the country with a wave of your hand. Why are you always making such a small impact with such a large amount of money? Stop trying to bunt to first and smack the home run. Alternative: Give me all your money and I'll do it for you.

gdy 8y ago
Another alternative: you make the money yourself like Bill Gates did and do whatever you want instead of writing comments on HN.

simplecomplex 8y ago

We already have enough land to power the entire US with solar. The future is renewables not pushing the can down the road with Nuclear, ignoring all of its negative externalities. Bill Gates doesn’t need government to build solar either.

philsnow 8y ago
Can the united states procure enough gallium, cadmium, selenium, indium, and whatever else to build enough solar panels ?
- campercoder 8y ago
  silicon?
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Yes. Panels based on crystalline silicon have 95% market share and require none of those elements.
- arduanika 8y ago
  A Tom Lehrer fan, I see
campercoder 8y ago
Don't forget that genius invented the backslash and control alt delete. Yes, obviously he should be focusing on battery research, not fusion or improved fission. Solar panels + batteries will do it.
4rt 8y ago
land has never been even close to the shortage for any kind of electricity generation.
- simplecomplex 8y ago
  All the more reason we should be replacing the whole grid with it.

learnstats2 8y ago

This is why we shouldn't allow people to be billionaires. The government should decide this as representatives of the people, not as arms of extremely wealthy people.

throwaway55676 8y ago

Lol, Bill Gates will "voluntarily" contribute money to a project. That money isn't his, such enormous wealth can only be stolen from society. In any case, if congress wants to build something they can tax him, print money, or adjust various levers to change the expense. The pretentions and preening of the rich should be drowned in laughter.

qaq 8y ago
Well it's a good thing you can freely move to North Korea where such atrocities are not possible.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't violate the site guidelines. They ask you to flag egregious comments rather than feeding trolls. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
  - a12432 8y ago
    throwaway actually had a valid informative point, followed by some sarcasm. the troll is the person you replied to, and you yourself. you should not flag, downvote, and shadow* people to make yourself feel more in control of your life. your moderation practices are what has been detrimental to this site more than any trolls or spam. you have turned this site into a subreddit, just with an interface written in 1991. Please don't violate what the site is for. It's for people wanting actual quality information, not for you as a mod to feel satisfied. You are literally removing things people have wanted to see. A quality discussion does not mean "super nice and agrees with my childlike style of humor." It means more pertinent information. You seem to define pertinent information as "troll" while not noticing the actual trolls. Here is a guideline: you need to be replaced.

pgcosta 8y ago

Coal kills more than nuclear. Modern nuclear is safer and reliable. It's similar to the fear of planes vs the actual safety statistics of planes.

opportune 8y ago
I think people are always going to be more scared of violent, headline-making deaths than slow, boring deaths
- edflsafoiewq 8y ago
  Slow and boring like cancer?
mcjiggerlog 8y ago
Never mind coal, nuclear is safer than even wind and solar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities The problem, as you point out, is that people are generally very bad at understanding risk.
- a12432 8y ago
  The problem is people like you redefining what risk means, then saying the people who define it properly don't understand it. The problem is people with small minds or an agenda on their small mind, redefining what is important to others, and calling them stupid. By your false definition, the risk of me getting hit by a car when crossing a street is less than the risk of me getting killed by the smog cars make. While quantitatively true for a statistical population, it is qualitatively false. And people's opinions are qualitative - they're based on a definable reason, not just explainable symptoms. Guess what: black people are 15% of the population but commit 50% of the violent crime, according to FBI statistics. Quantitatively. Does not mean that statistic applies to a single random person on the street and he can be arrested because he's likely to commit a crime. That's your logic applied to risk of getting stabbed. Here's the risk as society that doesn't pretend to be purposefully dense defines it: when something goes wrong, how bad it is. Take all the coal plant disasters, and compare them to all the nuclear disasters. Now let's take a future disaster, the reason for which you don't know and cannot account for with "new design" which will be called "old and faulty design" in a few decades. During that disaster, looking at past disasters, do you want that destroyed power plant to be coal or nuclear? Coal has no risk. Coal has a well defined, predictable, and understood small and slow detriment. You define that as risk. The world defines that as the opposite of risk. Lived in Kiev for a year an a half, took a bus trip to Chernobyl.. Guess what they got in that huge area where no one lives (actually there is a crazy old lady who lives there, still in her house). Did you guess it? Yeah, fresh tree stumps. That radioactive wood is cut down by shady companies for free, and shipped to europe and other parts of Ukraine. Out of it you get houses and furniture. Did you account for risk of sitting on a radioactive couch in a radioactive house when you claimed you fully understood "risk?" Ah, that's because to understand the risk of something you first need to understand what the English word means.

renholder 8y ago

I think this is a good idea but, on the flipside of that coin, would it be too little, too late? Honest question: Would it even, conceivably, be ready in the next 10 years? Coal isn't without it's drawbacks[0], no matter how much it's praised but the fallout[1] (no pun intended) from nuclear disasters has much longer and farther-reaching implications, which we have no way to really recover from - still to this day. As others have pointed out, the disasters have caused a bit of uneasiness with the public and it's understandable, when the general consensus in modern-day society is, "It's not my problem, so I don't care." If we treated it as a "human problem" and not "x" society's problem, we'd probably get a lot further; of course, this assumes that people believe the environment is in serious danger but, alas, there are people who do not. (Did these same people exist during the CFC/Ozone-hole problem?) [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi...

spdustin 8y ago

With today's weakening of regulatory standards, I don't know how safe new fission plants could be. The guy in charge of it all (self-admittedly) doesn't really understand nuclear energy, and would be prone to misunderstanding the science presented by industry leaders, possibly to the detriment of safety. I know, that's a whole pile of variables; but variables should be reduced when it comes to nuclear energy, IMO. That said, I greatly favor nuclear over, you know, burning stuff, and I'd like to see it succeed alongside renewables.

chemmail 8y ago

Would building a reactor underground not be safer?

acidburnNSA 8y ago
It would be safer, as the pathways of radionuclides into the biosphere would be more torturous. It would also be significantly more expensive, as underground construction is big money. Many new reactors put the core below grade, though. It's better for tornadoes, but worse for floods.
Dylan16807 8y ago
If you take an existing design and plop it underground while ignoring cost, maybe. For getting the most safety per dollar, probably not.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Why complicate things when we already have a non-polluting eternal source of fuel in the sky, AND the technology to harvest it, AND it's actually economical and uncontroversial, AND the available energy is orders-of-magnitude more than needed today? Hmmm. PG&E wouldn't have to worry about 100,000 miles of transmission lines if power-generation could be decentralized. Oh, wait, it can be! And without paying for 10,000 years of security. Of course it won't make anyone rich or powerful, and it's decentralized, and those are bad things. Apparently.

bkcreate 8y ago
Are you forgetting about the change where all new homes in CA have to have solar panels? We already are moving towards mass adoption of solar, that doesn't stop us from exploring other options that work in less sunny places, at night, etc. Solar won't work everywhere.

harry8 8y ago

Where's the actual data on safety to people of nuclear vs coal vs wind/rain/sun?

ggm 8y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents Every row in the table has a citation at end.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  The table is extremely misleading by not estimating risks for the next 100,000 years.
  - ggm 8y ago
    You're right great Cheops, king of kings, we should stick to bronze swords, the next 100,000 year risk profile of iron smelting hasn't been drawn up yet. Nobody in any environment or endeavour in history applies 100k years risk assessment on any activity. This is green fundamentalism and next comes mandatory veganism and forced sterilization.
    - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
      Nice series of strawman and ad-hominem.
      - ggm 8y ago
        I thought about that. It is a bit ad-hominemy but the argument stands. This is a longer version without the ad hominem. No proposed electricity solution with a 100,000 year risk assessment exists. All infrastructure related to power distribution and generation such as dams or existing transmission gear, the fundamental constructs of power consumption would be open to question from the plastic insulation on wires to the energy cost of digging cobalt to the ecological damage of dam construction and mining. If a 100,000 year cost is applied to things the reductionist result is to promote a reduced societal load which demands de-population and inevitably less enemy eating and since society is not on a path to either it's probably legislated or enforced. It's the Indian emergency and forced sterilization.

tomcam 8y ago

Nuclear energy sounds great to me except for the disposal of nuclear waste. I cannot seem to find any convincing references that we can do it safely over the long-term. Can someone help me with that?

moogly 8y ago
No you're right, it's an unsolved problem right now.
mrfusion 8y ago
This folk on Reddit had a great response to that. A bit too long to paste here so I’ll leave the link: https://pay.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7v76v4/what_is_something_that_sounds_extremely_wrong_but/dtqd9ey/ https://pay.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7v76v4/what_is_s...
gdubs 8y ago
In Stewart Brand’s book “Whole Earth Discipline” he says that a person’s entire lifetime worth of nuclear waste would fit in a can of soda. And from my understanding, that spent fuel can be reused after a certain amount of time. Yucca Mountain is a good solution if they can ever figure out the local politics.

RickJWagner 8y ago

That's awesome. I really respect it when people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Kudos to Gates.

Havoc 8y ago

Pretty crazy that one person has the power to unilaterally commit a billion and credibly promise another billion in funding. Sure doesn't sound like a lot in the context of ~trillion market cap companies...but this is a billion un-encumbrered. No lawyers...just one person deciding this is happening.

craftyguy 8y ago
The kicker is that he will only do that if they use his company, as explained in the article. While I agree that nuclear energy is basically required at this point in order to ween humans off of lighting crap they get out of the ground on fire, bill's antics may not be the best option (can his company deliver? others have already done so.. so why not them instead? it will require more than $2bn... so tax dollars required.)
Tiktaalik 8y ago
Yep. We should be taxing the ultra rich more, and then the public instead of the ultra rich would be the one being able to decide what to do with this money.

d6e 8y ago

As a temporary measure, why don't we use renewables with a fallback to fossil fuels? During the day, solar could meet demand and at night, we use coal/gas/whatever.

vinay427 8y ago
I think there's a lot of inefficiency in only operating coal plants during some times of day. That was one of the major complaints that utilities in California used for crediting users with residential solar for their power generation. It wasn't actually worth the market rate to the utility if they had to run the plant anyways. I don't have any independent data on this, unfortunately. There are interesting initiatives around the country to curb peaks in usage, however. For example, my parents are signed up for a service where they collect bill credits as they minimize power usage during a pre-announced hour of the week which exceeds normal capacity and would require dirtier and more expensive power plants to operate. https://www.ohmconnect.com/ https://www.ohmconnect.com/

natch 8y ago

It’s not that the technology is good or bad. It’s that the industry has lost all its credibility by promising too-good-to-be-true technology for decades, and then delivering mediocre results in many cases, and catastrophic results in others. With taxpayers left holding the bag. So I would propose, to hedge against the perennial optimism of industry apologists who will never have to back up their claims, have the investors who bet on this also fund an escrow account to the tune of 10x or so of the construction and other initial costs, to make up for gaps in their wildly positive projections. These funds could be invested and returned to the original sources if the project turns out to remain safe and financially worthwhile after x number of years. Not enough money to fund 10x? Then don’t do the project until there is.

Jedi72 8y ago

Fission 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.

theshrike79 8y ago
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-nuclears-future-with-or-without-us https://www.npr.org/2011/02/02/133399514/into-eternity-nucle...
- afroboy 8y ago
  Not that secure. just watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
a_imho 8y ago
Also, it works now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mortdeus 8y ago

What if bill gates or his wife ran for potus against Trump 2020? who wouldn't vote for him?

mortdeus 8y ago

isnt his approach to use the nuclear waste of fission in a new reactor?

diafygi 8y ago

As 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-reactors/nuscale-targets-smr-cost-below-90mwh-wider-deployment https://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/small-modular-reac... [2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/record-low-solar-plus-storage-price-in-xcel-solicitation https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/record-low-sola...

ackfoo 8y ago

What an idiotic discussion. Energy-efficient buildings can reduce our power demands by 85%. Then we can talk about which nuclear power plants to shut down, instead of arguing about whether we should build more. The free market prioritizes cheap buildings and profit. One law that requires energy-efficiency for all new structures ends the argument. No offence, but participating in the nuclear argument makes you a moron.

daveheq 8y ago

Thoreum molten-salt reactors or its a waste!

Tsubasachan 8y ago

Every once in a while the idea to build a nuclear powerplant comes up. Then the accountants start working out how much it will cost, everyone understand that you need to multiply that number by a factor of 2, and wisely nothing happens. Most countries actually don't even have the expertise to manage a nuclear industry anymore.

yosito 8y ago

Good. This is literally the only possible way humanity could arrest or at least survive climate change.

adultSwim 8y ago

Bill Gates has shamelessly uses his philanthropy to further his own interests, similar to how he abused Microsoft's monopoly power in the 90s.

Bajeezus 8y ago
If you want to call advancing causes that are objectively beneficial for society "furthering his own interests," then sure.