6 ms·

TerraPower and Bill Gates Have a Radical Vision For the Reactors of Tomorrow

32 points by gatsby 16y ago

jabits 16y ago
"One country he is certain won't be a customer anytime soon is the U.S., which doesn't yet have a certification process for reactors like TerraPower's. It would likely be a decade or more before the reactor could be tested on U.S. soil. "I don't think the U.S. has the willpower or desire to build new kinds of nuclear reactors," Mr. Myrhvold says. "Right now there's a long, drawn-out process." This is the most disappointing part of the piece. This is too often the case with many forward looking technologies these days, high-speed rail, etc. Great news for the planet though!
- juiceandjuice 16y ago
  Nuclear is a special circumstance. Any reactor here that produces Plutonium 239 is a huge proliferation risk unless it can do so in a completely closed cycle.
  - Wientje 16y ago
    Not necessarily. As long as other byproducts like Plutonium 241 etc. are created in reasonable measures as well, the resulting Plutonium will be way to unstable to use in bombs. Any Uranium reactor produces Pu-239 but don't present a serious proliferation risk. Breeding reactors or MOX factories are risky.
- dantheman 16y ago
  Highspeed rail as it's currently proposed - CA, FL doesn't make sense. It only makes sense in the northeast corridor where cities are walkable, and population density can support it. High speed rail requires massive public transit in destination cities, which is why the current proposal in FL (Orlando - Tampa) makes absolutely no sense.
  - m0th87 16y ago
    Unless the original high speed rail plan has been scrapped, it is far more sophisticated than "just" a link from the east coast to the west coast: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-speed-rail/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-sp...
    - VladRussian 16y ago
      >There's no reason why we can't do this. This is America. Exactly. It isn't China, France, Spain or Japan. People in this countries are : 1. used and able to [relatively comfortable] live very close to each other and 2. not able to live far apart - not enough cars, land, etc... In short - they don't have choice. The 1. and 2. are completely reversed for America. I personally like it this way. I spent enough years doing public transportation to value what i have here (Bay Area). Add: and don't tell me about global warming - will talk about it once everybody get really serious. Even today there is enough technology do avoid it - nobody [with real political and economical power] just care about it. For example (do you own research) - 20-30KWt/Hr batteries (300-450Kg) can get you 100-200 miles range. Even at today's prices (no economy of scale) $1000-500 per Kwt/hr - lets say $20K (though you can do even with $10K). Minus complicated engine, transmission and other related stuff (around the same weight) - pretty much the same price of the car. Gas station infrastructure - complete saving. Instead of all these underground and transportation gas tanks, safety measures, etc... - each existing gas station _already_ has high-amperage electrical connect to it - the only investment is a plug with card reader attached.
    - dantheman 16y ago
      Sorry if my comment above was unclear -- there is no plan for a highspeed rail across the US, I was mentioning specific plans in FL and CA. Both of which do no make sense when you run the numbers, and are the ones that are the furthest along in planning.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  While I agree with your thesis, high speed rail is a bad example. The US simply doesn't have the population density for it. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/02/america-wrong-continent-for-high-speed.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/02/america-wrong-cont...
  - khafra 16y ago
    dantheman's criticism is more on-target. There are certainly places in the US with highly-concentrated populations, a significant percentage of which would like to travel to nearby population clusters. But as a Tampa resident, I feel confident that anybody who has much reason to travel from here to Orlando already has a car, and at most a weak preference for high-speed rail. In NYC, Philadelphia, D.C., and Boston I'd feel much less confident.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      We already have high speed rail from DC to Boston. It's very nice (NY to Boston is 3.5 hours), although much more expensive than the Chinatown bus (5-6 hours). http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=AM_Route_C&pagename=am/Layout&cid=1241245664867 http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=AM_Route_C&#38...
      - khafra 16y ago
        It would appear the market knows which continents to build high-speed rail on, and where to build them, which--I would guess--is the point you wanted to make in the first place.
    - jabits 16y ago
      As a monthly Orlando visitor, I would love to be able to hop a train to Tampa, as well as down the eastern shore to Miami. And easier alternative airport options vs MCO would be nice as well. A two hour train ride would make Miami a viable alternative destination for an Orlando visit. Multiple airport destination choices will help alleviate congestion and will help lower the ridiculous spring fares. Better yet, I would like to be able to take modern (read next generation beyond current Amtrak tech) rail all the way from Milwaukee to Orlando for these trips. I think the skies are getting pretty saturated with plane traffic, and security/fear concerns make air travel miserable.
- bugsy 16y ago
  I don't think the regulation issue is all that important since there are many other countries besides the US. The US is a basket case regarding its paranoia and hysteria regarding nuclear power. The cost of pushing through regulations is not worth it. Besides, energy costs a lot more in other places like island nations that depend on burning very costly ship imported oil to make electricity. That's the place to start, higher profit and the people are easier to deal with. Long after the rest of the world has moved on, its possible that some of the people left in the US, living in caves and without access to electricity, might reconsider and then change regulations on their own accord.
tambourine_man 16y ago
How does that compare to thorium based reactors? The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
- VladRussian 16y ago
  thorium based cycle provides no viable weaponisation path - thus nobody really cares about its development. After overcoming all the technological and political hurdles you'll be left with energy producing device only. Compare with regular nuclear development - energy plus the other stuff, even for the reactors which supposedly aren't that usable for the other stuff :)
  - pjscott 16y ago
    There are loads of countries that already have weapons, and want power reactors -- but the technology for working with uranium is already in place, and fuel costs are so small, so there hasn't been much incentive to work on thorium reactors unless you're going for something dramatically better, like LFTRs. Which China recently announced that they were doing, by the way.
VladRussian 16y ago
the best way to move energy development forward is to force real pricing of energy, ie. by pricing in rights to emit carbon dioxide or any other pollutants. That would level the playing field and make profitable development of other sources of energy (and generate political will for it as a result :). It would even be much more cheaper to put Virginia coal-miners on 10x welfare and move forward than the whole economy and technological progress being kept hostages of making the miners happy electorate. related : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841
- Benjo 16y ago
  I agree. The free market and competition have created more value than any other tool in human history and it's absolutely the best tool for this job. There seems to be a common misconception that free markets will arise naturally and any government involvement will jeopordize them. In reality, government is the method that a capitalist society must use to ensure that no resources are undervalued; that the system is truly generating value, not just moving it from one place to another at a loss. In the case of energy, the role of goverment should be to determine the immediate value and future costs fossil fuel energy production. In practice of course, goverment is too heavily influenced by those who currently happen to have the most resources. As a result, they are incapable of correctly evaluating the true value of immediate energy output versus future greenhouse gas levels. It makes the question of how to solve the energy problem moot, because there's no way to implement that solution under the current political conditions.
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    what you say is true at the national level. Yet there is a hope. This is classical case of "tragedy of commons". Right now the US enjoys the most benefits while the cost is carried by the whole world. In short time China will be enjoying disproportionally much benefits while the costs is spread around the world (i.e. in particular US will be carrying more costs than benefits). This dynamic disbalance will force reconsideration of the current world order.
  - jpadkins 16y ago
rbanffy 16y ago
A pool of liquid Sodium, Plutonium and depleted Uranium buried into the ground, running unattended for a hundred years... What could possibly go wrong?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
thornad 16y ago
Anyone trusts this guy wiht any kind of technology where a small bug can mean the death of millions ? Am I the only one who is missing something ?
- pjscott 16y ago
  This isn't a one-man project, and nuclear engineers are not idiots. The worst-case scenario here is that the sodium coolant gets out somehow and reacts with water, causing a chemical explosion and breaching containment. Sodium-cooled reactors are not a new technology, and there are well-developed methods of making such disaster scenarios vanishingly unlikely, as well as ensuring that the side-effects if they do happen would be minimal. So yes, you are missing something.
  - thornad 16y ago
    Microsoft was not a one man company either. And the only thing that could go wrong was...errrrr...StuxNet ?
    - pjscott 16y ago
      Software people do not have anything like the track record of safety that modern nuclear engineers do. The two are not directly comparable.
pjscott 16y ago
The general attitude over at the Energy from Thorium forum is not enthusiastic: http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=2144 http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=... It doesn't seem to offer much (if any) advantage over other liquid metal fast breeder reactors.
- Wientje 16y ago
  Except that we got ten times more thorium than uranium in the crust.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    Just so we're clear on what everybody's saying, that's a benefit of thorium reactors, not this traveling wave reactor. And it's mostly irrelevant, anyway; we have enough U-238 to run a huge number of TWRs for a very long time, so why worry about the relative uranium and thorium supplies?

32 points by gatsby 16y ago

"One country he is certain won't be a customer anytime soon is the U.S., which doesn't yet have a certification process for reactors like TerraPower's. It would likely be a decade or more before the reactor could be tested on U.S. soil. "I don't think the U.S. has the willpower or desire to build new kinds of nuclear reactors," Mr. Myrhvold says. "Right now there's a long, drawn-out process." This is the most disappointing part of the piece. This is too often the case with many forward looking technologies these days, high-speed rail, etc. Great news for the planet though!

juiceandjuice 16y ago
Nuclear is a special circumstance. Any reactor here that produces Plutonium 239 is a huge proliferation risk unless it can do so in a completely closed cycle.
- Wientje 16y ago
  Not necessarily. As long as other byproducts like Plutonium 241 etc. are created in reasonable measures as well, the resulting Plutonium will be way to unstable to use in bombs. Any Uranium reactor produces Pu-239 but don't present a serious proliferation risk. Breeding reactors or MOX factories are risky.
dantheman 16y ago
Highspeed rail as it's currently proposed - CA, FL doesn't make sense. It only makes sense in the northeast corridor where cities are walkable, and population density can support it. High speed rail requires massive public transit in destination cities, which is why the current proposal in FL (Orlando - Tampa) makes absolutely no sense.
- m0th87 16y ago
  Unless the original high speed rail plan has been scrapped, it is far more sophisticated than "just" a link from the east coast to the west coast: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-speed-rail/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/a-vision-for-high-sp...
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    >There's no reason why we can't do this. This is America. Exactly. It isn't China, France, Spain or Japan. People in this countries are : 1. used and able to [relatively comfortable] live very close to each other and 2. not able to live far apart - not enough cars, land, etc... In short - they don't have choice. The 1. and 2. are completely reversed for America. I personally like it this way. I spent enough years doing public transportation to value what i have here (Bay Area). Add: and don't tell me about global warming - will talk about it once everybody get really serious. Even today there is enough technology do avoid it - nobody [with real political and economical power] just care about it. For example (do you own research) - 20-30KWt/Hr batteries (300-450Kg) can get you 100-200 miles range. Even at today's prices (no economy of scale) $1000-500 per Kwt/hr - lets say $20K (though you can do even with $10K). Minus complicated engine, transmission and other related stuff (around the same weight) - pretty much the same price of the car. Gas station infrastructure - complete saving. Instead of all these underground and transportation gas tanks, safety measures, etc... - each existing gas station _already_ has high-amperage electrical connect to it - the only investment is a plug with card reader attached.
  - dantheman 16y ago
    Sorry if my comment above was unclear -- there is no plan for a highspeed rail across the US, I was mentioning specific plans in FL and CA. Both of which do no make sense when you run the numbers, and are the ones that are the furthest along in planning.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
While I agree with your thesis, high speed rail is a bad example. The US simply doesn't have the population density for it. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/02/america-wrong-continent-for-high-speed.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/02/america-wrong-cont...
- khafra 16y ago
  dantheman's criticism is more on-target. There are certainly places in the US with highly-concentrated populations, a significant percentage of which would like to travel to nearby population clusters. But as a Tampa resident, I feel confident that anybody who has much reason to travel from here to Orlando already has a car, and at most a weak preference for high-speed rail. In NYC, Philadelphia, D.C., and Boston I'd feel much less confident.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    We already have high speed rail from DC to Boston. It's very nice (NY to Boston is 3.5 hours), although much more expensive than the Chinatown bus (5-6 hours). http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=AM_Route_C&pagename=am/Layout&cid=1241245664867 http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=AM_Route_C&#38...
    - khafra 16y ago
      It would appear the market knows which continents to build high-speed rail on, and where to build them, which--I would guess--is the point you wanted to make in the first place.
  - jabits 16y ago
    As a monthly Orlando visitor, I would love to be able to hop a train to Tampa, as well as down the eastern shore to Miami. And easier alternative airport options vs MCO would be nice as well. A two hour train ride would make Miami a viable alternative destination for an Orlando visit. Multiple airport destination choices will help alleviate congestion and will help lower the ridiculous spring fares. Better yet, I would like to be able to take modern (read next generation beyond current Amtrak tech) rail all the way from Milwaukee to Orlando for these trips. I think the skies are getting pretty saturated with plane traffic, and security/fear concerns make air travel miserable.
bugsy 16y ago
I don't think the regulation issue is all that important since there are many other countries besides the US. The US is a basket case regarding its paranoia and hysteria regarding nuclear power. The cost of pushing through regulations is not worth it. Besides, energy costs a lot more in other places like island nations that depend on burning very costly ship imported oil to make electricity. That's the place to start, higher profit and the people are easier to deal with. Long after the rest of the world has moved on, its possible that some of the people left in the US, living in caves and without access to electricity, might reconsider and then change regulations on their own accord.

tambourine_man 16y ago

How does that compare to thorium based reactors? The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8

VladRussian 16y ago
thorium based cycle provides no viable weaponisation path - thus nobody really cares about its development. After overcoming all the technological and political hurdles you'll be left with energy producing device only. Compare with regular nuclear development - energy plus the other stuff, even for the reactors which supposedly aren't that usable for the other stuff :)
- pjscott 16y ago
  There are loads of countries that already have weapons, and want power reactors -- but the technology for working with uranium is already in place, and fuel costs are so small, so there hasn't been much incentive to work on thorium reactors unless you're going for something dramatically better, like LFTRs. Which China recently announced that they were doing, by the way.

VladRussian 16y ago

the best way to move energy development forward is to force real pricing of energy, ie. by pricing in rights to emit carbon dioxide or any other pollutants. That would level the playing field and make profitable development of other sources of energy (and generate political will for it as a result :). It would even be much more cheaper to put Virginia coal-miners on 10x welfare and move forward than the whole economy and technological progress being kept hostages of making the miners happy electorate. related : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841

Benjo 16y ago
I agree. The free market and competition have created more value than any other tool in human history and it's absolutely the best tool for this job. There seems to be a common misconception that free markets will arise naturally and any government involvement will jeopordize them. In reality, government is the method that a capitalist society must use to ensure that no resources are undervalued; that the system is truly generating value, not just moving it from one place to another at a loss. In the case of energy, the role of goverment should be to determine the immediate value and future costs fossil fuel energy production. In practice of course, goverment is too heavily influenced by those who currently happen to have the most resources. As a result, they are incapable of correctly evaluating the true value of immediate energy output versus future greenhouse gas levels. It makes the question of how to solve the energy problem moot, because there's no way to implement that solution under the current political conditions.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  what you say is true at the national level. Yet there is a hope. This is classical case of "tragedy of commons". Right now the US enjoys the most benefits while the cost is carried by the whole world. In short time China will be enjoying disproportionally much benefits while the costs is spread around the world (i.e. in particular US will be carrying more costs than benefits). This dynamic disbalance will force reconsideration of the current world order.
- jpadkins 16y ago

rbanffy 16y ago

A pool of liquid Sodium, Plutonium and depleted Uranium buried into the ground, running unattended for a hundred years... What could possibly go wrong?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

thornad 16y ago

Anyone trusts this guy wiht any kind of technology where a small bug can mean the death of millions ? Am I the only one who is missing something ?

pjscott 16y ago
This isn't a one-man project, and nuclear engineers are not idiots. The worst-case scenario here is that the sodium coolant gets out somehow and reacts with water, causing a chemical explosion and breaching containment. Sodium-cooled reactors are not a new technology, and there are well-developed methods of making such disaster scenarios vanishingly unlikely, as well as ensuring that the side-effects if they do happen would be minimal. So yes, you are missing something.
- thornad 16y ago
  Microsoft was not a one man company either. And the only thing that could go wrong was...errrrr...StuxNet ?
  - pjscott 16y ago
    Software people do not have anything like the track record of safety that modern nuclear engineers do. The two are not directly comparable.

pjscott 16y ago

The general attitude over at the Energy from Thorium forum is not enthusiastic: http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=2144 http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=... It doesn't seem to offer much (if any) advantage over other liquid metal fast breeder reactors.

Wientje 16y ago
Except that we got ten times more thorium than uranium in the crust.
- pjscott 16y ago
  Just so we're clear on what everybody's saying, that's a benefit of thorium reactors, not this traveling wave reactor. And it's mostly irrelevant, anyway; we have enough U-238 to run a huge number of TWRs for a very long time, so why worry about the relative uranium and thorium supplies?