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Bill Gates' nuclear venture plans reactor to complement solar, wind power boom
- toomuchtodo 6y ago> By 2050 “we would see hundreds of these reactors around the world, solving multiple different energy needs,” Levesque said. We can already reach 90% renewables by 2035 without these reactors [1]. If they get built, that’d be great, but they won’t be built in time to avert climate change. TerraPower has existed for 14 years and still hasn’t built a reactor. For comparison, the Kamuthi solar facility in Tamil Nadu, India, has a total generation capacity of 648 MW, covers 10 sq km and took 8 months to build. This work can be parallelized; more generation capacity deployed in the same time or faster with more people. Portugal just had a historic bid close for a 700MW solar facility at 1.3 cents/kWh. Nuclear cannot compete against such economics, even when storage is factored in to enable firm dispatch of renewable energy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707
- em3rgent0rdr 6y agoYour article includes nuclear: "Wind, solar, and battery storage can provide the bulk of the 90 percent clean electricity. The report finds that new fossil fuel generators are not needed. Existing gas plants, used infrequently and combined with storage, hydropower, and nuclear power, are sufficient to meet demand during periods of extraordinarily low renewable energy generation or exceptionally high electricity demand."
- toomuchtodo 6y agoExisting nuclear, not new. Those facilities will eventually be decommissioned, as they’re nearing end of life, but it of course makes sense to extend their operating licenses if safe to do so (to be replaced last after fossil generators). If you break ground on a new reactor this moment, it won’t generate its first kw for years. Historically, over a decade, but folks handwave that cutting regulation and red tape would speed up the process, so I say years to be generous.
- briffle 6y agoIf only we could replace these old, baseload reactors quicker, and cheaper, and maybe with an identical, smaller design, with better tech so one control room could monitor multiple reactors. And if refuelling could be done without turning off all power generation at a site. Maybe if we had something modular......oh, wait
- bob29 6y agoWow its so easy, can't believe all those idiots trying to build nuclear plants the past few decades have never though to simply apply "better tech". Thanks hacker news/silicon valley!
- thomasrognon 6y agoThe barriers, time, and cost for nuclear seem to be primarily of political origin, not technical. It's held to an unreasonable higher standard than anything else.
- bob29 6y agoSo certainly all the non US/EU countries with less strict regulations should have electricity "too cheap to meter" through nuclear, right? since there's no technical challenges here apparently.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThere are technical challenges, but arguably the primary challenges are a) capital costs, and b) nonproliferation treaties.
- natch 6y agoNuclear is an inherently centralized technology, in contrast to solar and wind which can be controlled at a more local level, even down to the individual home owner and land owner. Even with small plants purported to be in the works, the cost scale is not in reach of an individual family like solar panels can be. That centralization of nuclear brings with it things like corruption, taxation, cost overruns, and cleanup costs that are not accounted for in the lifetime of the politicians whose buddies are benefitting from the contracts. So I wouldn't say the higher bar is unreasonable.
- zucker42 6y agoThat study groups nuclear with clean energy.
- blargmaster33 6y agoIt is clean
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- StreamBright 6y agoI wish there was an option for people to run on purely renewables for a year.
- belorn 6y agoFossil fueled power capacity and consumption is still rising faster than any other type of energy source, and by a large margin. If we take consumption from 2010 to 2019, fossil fueled energy consumption increased by 15070 TWh, while solar and win combined increased by 1773 TWh. That is almost a 10x in difference in favor of fossil fuels. There is nothing to even imply that we will reach 90% renewables by 2035. To be fighting over which non-fossil fueled energy source is more economical is just a distraction. There need to be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants. Expand solar and wind production as if they were tanks and munitions during world war 2. Build as many nuclear reactors we can from the current pool of educated nuclear professionals. Throw in some battery technology from tesla, hydro pumps, compressed air, EV transition, dynamic grid, or what else is left that do not depend on burning fossil fuels. Set the date of 2035 as the day we ban burning fossil fuel in the power grid and let the market decide how to deal with it. That is how we avert climate change.
- delecti 6y agoWhy sodium in particular? I've seen in the past that molten sodium is often proposed as a storage medium, but is there something about it that makes it suited for that use?
- m0zg 6y agoBecause it doesn't decompose into an explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen under extreme temperatures, among other things.
- Hypx 6y agoInstead it just explodes when exposed to water or air...
- fuzzfactor 6y agoSodium decomposes the water itself and releases hydrogen which the sodium ignites as it burns in air. Liquid or pulverized metals are more risky than you think. Powdered nickel not only is a flammable solid, it spontaneously ignites too. But sodium is much more reactive, it can be rapdily oxidized by many more surprising things than oxygen or water. There's always this, kilos of molten sodium can lead to unexpected problems: https://www.csb.gov/t2-laboratories-inc-reactive-chemical-explosion/ https://www.csb.gov/t2-laboratories-inc-reactive-chemical-ex... There was a mushroom cloud but it was not nuclear.
- baybal2 6y agoWater is by far safer in comparison to stuff that corrodes, and eventually eats through pretty much anything. Piping for water can be for sure made to far outlive the plant; for sodium, you have no other option than putting in sacrificial material even if you use toughest nickel alloys, and there only is so much of it you can use.
- spenrose 6y ago345MW for "$1B", which is presumably the delivered cost. Add another $1B for running, insurance, and decommissioning (or show me real numbers). Walney is a new nameplate 588MW offshore wind farm; it will average close to the same delivered energy and cost $3B.[1] If Terrapower can actually deliver at roughly those costs, they might make a real contribution to our energy future. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-49125399 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-49125399
- Rebelgecko 6y agoWhat is 588MW a measure of? Peak output? Average?
- unchocked 6y agoIntermittent sources are usually quoted as peak. That is multiplied by a typical capacity factor to determine average load. For offshore wind, 60% is a reasonable number I think.
- byronr 6y agoThe key word is "nameplate", a colorful term implying engraving and rivets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nameplate_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nameplate_capacity
- saagarjha 6y agoNuclear power is usually run close to nameplate, continuously, as it this is generally more economical.
- yyy888sss 6y agoSeems to be more like 40% [1] and it's worth noting that in a lot of geographies you still need full backup for wind farms as the wind speed can drop low across the whole country/continent. [1] - https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
- jedberg 6y agoI watched the Bill Gates doc on Netflix. They actually had this ready to go in 2017. They were going to build it in China because US regulators wouldn’t allow it. But then we started a trade war with China and they nixed the contract. They were hoping to prove it out in China and then bring it back to the US.
- spenrose 6y agoChina had ambitious plans for nuclear and didn't follow through: https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656 https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656
- wahern 6y agoThat assessment is a little out of date. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China They had several construction starts in 2015 (some are coming online now), and after a 3 year hiatus began several more in 2019. BTW, I'm not just trusting that Wikipedia table. I've confirmed construction and [near] completion of some of those listed (but haven't bothered with all, my doubts assuaged). China's nuclear plans were delayed and reassessed. But their commitment to and follow through on their [apparently] revised plan is still quite ambitious. Predictions of the death of nuclear in China were rather premature, albeit understandable considering the lack of transparency, especially in the Western world given the language barrier.
- legulere 6y agoIf you have sources, then why not correct Wikipedia?
- wahern 6y agoBecause the table wasn't wrong as far as I could tell. And on some of the plant-specific articles there were newer citations. But, point taken--it would have been useful to have added more recent citations to that table.
- Lorin 6y agoI remember Bill being involved in nuclear for a long time. Hope something of general use comes to fruition in our lifetime.
- rtx 6y agoIn today's environment only a billionaire can pull such an project. I am very optimistic that this will come through. And we stop with land polluting windmills and solar farms.
- baybal2 6y ago> I remember Bill being involved in nuclear for a long time. Hope something of general use comes to fruition in our lifetime. Yes, for a very long time, and to very little result. He chases too risky, and unrealistic prospects.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoThis is a pretty horrible attitude to have, but to try to make something positive from this, which problems do you think Gates or someone in his position would be better suited to solving?
- baybal2 6y agoLet's take his toilet program. For the amount of money he spent, he could've build enough sewage treatment plant for a few African countries. Similarly, the "affordable" nuclear powerplant programs are not suitable for developing countries. It unequivocal that a cheapest fossil fuel station is the best option for places that never had an industrial economy. Once it has been kickstarted, you can think of more exotic options.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoFossil fuels are a finite and dwindling resource, and its use is possibly causing an extinction event. The human race can't really afford to buy the cheaper option here.
- doitLP 6y agoThis is great. We could pave the world with solar panels (that need replacing every few years), mining up tons of politically sensitive rare earth elements, and covering over what remains of our ecosystem and we would be close to what we could achieve with modern, safe reactor designs and our virtually unlimited supply of thorium fuel
- watersb 6y agoFWIW, today's front page feature article in the local (Los Alamos) newspaper reports on municipal government progress on a 12 gigawatt, modular nuclear plant. (Warning: this site, like all local newspaper sites, is utterly packed with advertising.) https://ladailypost.com/carbon-free-power-project-advances-to-next-phase/ https://ladailypost.com/carbon-free-power-project-advances-t... New Mexico derives a huge percentage of state tax revenue from natural gas from the Permian basin (southeast NM) and coal (Four Corners area, northwest NM). But there has been a huge push forward with solar and wind feeding into the grid. Multiple projects are happening in the US, local and state governments. Smaller nuclear power plants are coming. Part of a push away from carbon based energy.
- epistasis 6y agoThere's a small typo in your post, it should be 12MW, not GW. A 12 GW reactor would be quite huge!
- fourthark 6y agoPlease consider the reliability of Windows.
- switchb4 6y agoWindows is reliable for general public.
- oblio 6y agoPeople don't want to hear this but Windows in 2020 is probably more reliable than desktop Linux. Windows isn't what it used to be in 1999. And desktop Linux QA standards are nothing to write home about, unfortunately.
- Swenrekcah 6y agoThey have improved a lot, but there are still the forced restarts, as well as the poor document recovery of the office suite. Together this is a bad combo as I'm constantly worried I might have lost some data in the documents I work on. They have improved the document recovery quite a lot in the last two years, but they still manage to make the process rather confusing, so sometimes I accidentally save the version with the lost data instead of the other. OpenOffice had this figured out some 15 years ago. I never lost data to OpenOffice, and I was running it on a laptop (essentially) without a battery.
- oblio 6y agoThe forced restarts are a bit annoying but you can schedule them and for the Office part, you can just run LibreOffice on Windows.
- xupybd 6y agoHmmmm.. yes it is probably more reliable as a desktop with equivalent features. When running a simple tiled WM Linux is solid. If you look at the wider eco system, Windows doesn't look so hot. I've just moved from a Linux based work place to a Windows based work place. The number of times the main file server has to be restarted because it's doing something weird is crazy. This never happened at my old job. The Linux servers were only turned off for hardware changes. They didn't require constant restarts. If something went wrong I was able to trace the problem down and prevent it from happening again. In windows everything is opaque. Some unexplained regedit is suggested for every problem and no one seems to know what those edits actually do.
- antupis 6y agoI think where small nuclear might be very good chance to compete is district heating, now normally those plant run biomass or coal. https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Project-launched-to-develop-Finnish-SMR-for-distri https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Project-launched-to-...
- jabl 6y agoYes, a reactor designed for heating only can use tried and true LWR technology, but be much simpler and safer as it can run at roughly atmospheric pressure.
- de_watcher 6y agoHe's swimming in money and connections, why don't he try to solve fusion? Yes, we have ITER going, but it's not really built efficiently: exact same parts are manufactured on the opposite sides of the world.
- evgen 6y agoBecause you do not get to be a billionaire by pissing away all of your money on a fool's errand. Fusion is a black hole of broken promises that will not delivery a single watt of useful energy to consumers in your lifetime and additional funding from Gates won't change this. Fission works. Fission delivers today. Fission gets the job done. Making fission cheaper, easier to deploy, and safer will have a much bigger impact than chasing fusion dreams.
- de_watcher 6y agoBecoming a billionaire and trying to push the envelope are different activities, although sometimes they align. And as you describe, when a guy catches some important near term thing that nobody sees - that's where he finds billions. But the unreachable areas are sometimes not that unreachable. Look at the space industry companies. If you ignore the flagship ones that popped up in a scale of mere years then moving out in your lifetime looks like a pipe dream too.
- summerlight 6y agoThe problem is urgency and we don't have an enough amount of uncertainty budget to chase fusion reactors. The scale of the problem is so huge that even Bill's fortune could be insufficient to make a dent to the problem in a foreseeable future. Yes, it'd be nice if Bill can make it happen but if not, he's going to regret it. I'm pretty sure that Bill already has done the math, concluded that we probably have only less than 10 years and next-gen nuclear fission reactor is the only feasible mid-term technology to fight against climate change.
- de_watcher 6y ago
- wbl 6y agoRickover's quote on new reactors vs existing ones is apt to every development in this field. Sodium cooling is temperamental with the US navy abandoning it due to leak problems, and France having mixed experiences. The coolent catching fire whenever it leaks is not so fun. Fast spectrum with metallic fuel and pyroprocessing was demonstrated in the IFR but is messier than you might naively expect, with leaks of xenon that need control. The HEU for startup is also problematic but maybe derated plutonium could be used.
- jabl 6y ago> Rickover's quote on new reactors vs existing ones is apt to every development in this field. Indeed, it's easy to get carried away by the promises of new exiting tech on the horizon. Then again, we're never going to innovate if we expect everything new to immediately prove superior economics. > Sodium cooling is temperamental with the US navy abandoning it due to leak problems, and France having mixed experiences. The coolent catching fire whenever it leaks is not so fun. Indeed, sodium has downsides. As well as upsides, which is why most fast reactor designs to date have used it as coolant. > Fast spectrum with metallic fuel and pyroprocessing was demonstrated in the IFR but is messier than you might naively expect, with leaks of xenon that need control. Well, isn't that true for all reprocessing? When you crush or otherwise process the spent fuel, the radioactive noble gases will escape. > The HEU for startup is also problematic but maybe derated plutonium could be used. HEU for civilian applications is non-viable, I think. Modern fast reactor designs are designed to work with HALEU, before (potentially) switching to a U-Pu closed cycle. One can of course quibble where to draw the line between HEU and HALEU. The current 20% is certainly a conservative choice. But it's also a quite minor hill to die on.
- Krasnol 6y agoMeanwhile in todays nuclear industry world: > The Lehi City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to withdraw the city from a multiagency nuclear power project that would provide nuclear power to cities across Utah, citing concerns over increasing costs https://outline.com/kkqcRa https://outline.com/kkqcRa > Exelon Generation to Retire Illinois’ Byron and Dresden Nuclear Plants In 2021 [...] Despite being among the most efficient and reliable units in the nation’s nuclear fleet, Dresden and Byron face revenue shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars because of declining energy prices and market rules that allow fossil fuel plants to underbid clean resources in the PJM capacity auction, even though there is broad public support for sustaining and expanding clean energy resources to address the climate crisis. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200827005445/en/Exelon-Generation-Retire-Illinois%E2%80%99-Byron-Dresden-Nuclear https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200827005445/en/Exe... > Nuclear advocates fret as first maker of small reactors encounters trouble [...] The company expected to be the first in the United States to operate a small nuclear reactor is facing setbacks that have caused supporters to question whether the novel technology will ever realize its potential as a tool to combat climate change. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/nuclear-advocates-fret-as-first-maker-of-small-reactors-encounters-trouble https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/nuclear-adv...
- ngcc_hk 6y agoWhat happen later after it has to decommission. And what if someone get to those material. Money he had but like his other action sometimes ill conceived due to scale.