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Bill Gates: Nuclear power will ‘absolutely’ be politically acceptable again
- chovybizzass 6y agohonestly the more this guys speaks the more I don't like him and I already didn't like him.
- kvakkefly 6y agoWhy?
- ratsmack 6y agoBill Gates seems to be an expert on just about everything, or so he believes. It seems that when you're very wealthy, pundits and talking heads always want to quote you.
- sriram_malhar 6y agoNot sure what your objection is. He's being quoted in cnbc, a business TV channel. He has the kind of money to put into action what he believes in. He knows as much about nuclear reactors as Elon Musk knows about the innards of SpaceX; both know enough to attract seriously qualified people to their cause. This is separate from whether you like their cause or not.
- aww_dang 6y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+as+super+hero https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+as+super+hero
- com2kid 6y agoBill Gates claims expertise in 2 things, global poverty/health and energy. Given he's spent the last decade studying both, and he can afford to fly the top experts in both fields to teach him 1 on 1, I have no doubts that he has had the means to learn a lot about both fields.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoHe's been voicing off on so many things, it's become a running joke between me and my partner to say: "Yes, but what does Bill Gates think about it?"
- MattGaiser 6y agoHe always has. It is just that people are listening because his pandemic prediction came true.
- donny2018 6y agoIn this case (as in many others), he’s not “voicing off” just for the sake of it, he has active investments in new nuclear technologies and he usually knows what he is talking about.
- com2kid 6y agoBill Gates has been talking about, and investing his own money, in clean energy for years now. He's been working on global health for a decade. That's about it. Until recently the public at large didn't really care about either so his massive (billions of $$$) investments in both didn't get regular press attention. But this isn't anything new for him, it is all stuff he's been focused on for over a decade.
- mclightning 6y ago"Put your money where your mouth is"...he has put the money, maybe he should have opinions.
- jjordan 6y agoIt certainly should be. Gen3+ reactors like the AP1000 are safe and reliable sources of carbon-free electricity.
- user568439 6y agoHow safe? Would you live next to a plant? And what about the residues? Do they need to be taken care during decades with the risk of a natural disaster and/or lack of proper maintenance releasing them?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zekica 6y agoMuch safer than constant slow poisoning from coal plants. Number of people that died from Fukushima (which is an older, much worse design) can be counted on hand.
- user568439 6y agoFalse dilemma. I didn’t say that the alternative should be coal.
- profile53 6y agoIt’s not a false dilemma when it is in fact a real forced choice. Many people live next to power plants and that’s unavoidable in the world we live in. The question then becomes which type of power plant you’d rather live close to? Wind, solar, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, or nuclear? I’d choose nuclear for sure because it is the least risky option in my assessment.
- therufa 6y agoNot necessarily. Energy sources we consider as green nowadays have an immense toll on our environment which is massively understated. Take solar panels for example. They are supposed to produce energy without CO2 emissions, which is explicitly true, but implicitly they produce just as much CO2 as coal. The production of these panels isn't as sexy as it seems. Also they tend to degrade after a few decades and lose efficiency exponentially. There are many other electricity generating solutions which have similar problems. It's sad, but the least polluting source would be to go nuclear. I believe you and many others would change their mind after a little digging into the topic. I was rather sceptical in the beginning as well, but due to facts I had t o change my mind.
- stkdump 6y agoYes, nuclear fusion. But deployment on a wider scale will happen after (possibly long after) switching almost fully to renewables.
- naebother 6y agoUnless you're Iran. Then we starve you.
- vages 6y agoA lot of the comments on this page seem dismissive of Gates. While I'm sure he's not the the smartest guy in the room on every subject, I suspect his knowledge about energy, farming and medicine to be superior to almost anyone outside academia. The source of this seems mainly to be the enormous amount of books he reads, which you can get an impression of from his blog https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization I'd rather see arguments against his arguments than against him. They probably require a lot more time to research, but that's sort of the point.
- peteretep 6y ago> While I'm sure he's not the the smartest guy in the room on every subject I'd agree, although I'd also note that he's _often_ the smartest guy in the room about most subjects he's voicing opinions on.
- throwawaysea 6y ago> I'd rather see arguments against his arguments than against him. Attacking people, affixing labels to them, and othering them into adversarial tribes is unfortunately the most dominant form of discourse in modern society. I feel like social media made it worse but it’s always been an issue to some extent. I wish it weren’t so.
- sien 6y agoIt's also the people he talks to. From the Acknowledgements of his latest book : "Jabe Blumenthal and Karen Fries are the two former Microsoft colleagues who organized my first learning session on climate change in 2006. In that session, they introduced me to two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira—then at the Carnegie Institution for Science—and David Keith of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with Ken and David that have shaped my thinking. Ken and a team of his postdoctoral fellows—Candise Henry, Rebecca Peer, and Tyler Ruggles—pored over the manuscript line by line to check for factual mistakes. I’m thankful for their meticulous work. Any remaining errors are my responsibility. The late David MacKay of Cambridge University inspired me with his wit and insights. I recommend his phenomenal book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject of energy and climate change. Jabe Blumenthal and Karen Fries are the two former Microsoft colleagues who organized my first learning session on climate change in 2006. In that session, they introduced me to two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira—then at the Carnegie Institution for Science—and David Keith of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with Ken and David that have shaped my thinking. Ken and a team of his postdoctoral fellows—Candise Henry, Rebecca Peer, and Tyler Ruggles—pored over the manuscript line by line to check for factual mistakes. I’m thankful for their meticulous work. Any remaining errors are my responsibility. The late David MacKay of Cambridge University inspired me with his wit and insights. I recommend his phenomenal book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject of energy and climate change."
- Krasnol 6y agoIt already is. Everywhere where democracy is in decline or never was: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.742611.de/dwr-20-11-1.pdf https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
- Cockbrand 6y ago> there is no good safe long-term storage solution for nuclear waste in the United States, to name a few. This is the killer argument. There is frankly no storage or recycling solution for nuclear waste anywhere in the world, which IMHO entirely dismisses nuclear energy as a viable option.
- WalterBright 6y agoDump it in the seam where one tectonic plate dives under another.
- sien 6y agoThis might interest you : https://old.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/hh6mm6/but_what_about_the_waste/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/hh6mm6/but_wh...
- jariel 6y agoIMHO no, it doesn't. Funding and research for Nuclear dried up ages ago, and given the impending doom most scientists think we are facing, it would be rational to be spending gazillions on developing new tech, processes etc. including storage. What we take out of the ground is radioactive - it's rational to think we can find a way to put it back with slightly less radioactivity. Obviously that's a crude way to put it to the point of metaphor, but it's not irrational either. If Greenpeace had not killed nuclear, I suggest we might be in a considerably better situation vis-a-vis climate change. Possibly a couple of Fukishimas worse off, but that's not hugely bad either, given the upside.
- WalterBright 6y ago> If Greenpeace had not killed nuclear, I suggest we might be in a considerably better situation vis-a-vis climate change. Ironic, isn't it.
- jariel 6y agoThey did save the whales so, so 1 for 2 on the big items.
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoDisagree or not, I admire Bill Gates greatly, as much as I "hated" him and Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s. They made money with monopoly over certain markets, and used bad practices to fend off competition. And yet, most of his wealth is now being used to try to solve important problems for the world. You know what? I'll take this deal. I'd also pay greatly to have a full day with him, on his little chalet on the island, to talk about everything and be able to ask him anything. I'd even pitch him my own crazy idea of "the city of the future", a small obsession of mine since I was a kid.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoHe is paying off his debt to the society, obviously.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoFirst, I don't think he ever admitted what he was doing was very wrong. Maybe he feels that inside, but I haven't heard many public statement about the actions of MS being morally wrong to the society. Second, this debt is enormous, and is getting larger. When you buy a PC, most often you still pay the "Microsoft tax". This is the result of Bill's actions from the past, the famous FUD campaigns, calling another operating system cancer, sponoring a long lawsuit against Linux and so on. He will still have to do a lot if he wants to repay all that.
- yread 6y agoBill hasn't called Linux cancer, that was Steve. And he was talking about GPL which admittedly is kind of like cancer - if your code touches it, it has to be GPL'ed as well
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago> And he was talking about GPL While he was referring to the GPL, he actually uttered these words [0]. Gates was a chairman then, it's difficult to believe they had different opinions on this issue and many others. Especially when you consider the Halloween Documents were from Gates' era. More importantly, it was Gates himself who would routinely visit various heads of states lobbying for MS contracts, especially when Linux was considered. The consequences of that will live with us for many decades. Fortynately the web revolution changed many things and there is some hope the future would be more Microsoft-free, but for many years to come all goverments and most businesses and individuals have to pay Microsoft tax, for one reason or another. https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...
- snissn 6y agoIt feels like he has an endless supply of bad takes recently
- lpapez 6y agoThis feels like that Palpatine scene from Star Wars: My lord, is that, legal? I will make it legal.
- hulitu 6y agoSame procedure as with Windows
- legulere 6y agoI doubt it, as it is not economically feasible in western countries. It’s a pretty hard sell when you can have renewables for much cheaper. Also the east problem is still not solved and getting enough and cool enough water becomes more and more a problem for reactors.
- Hamuko 6y agoRenewables still need other sources of electricity when there's no wind (or too much wind) or sunlight, since we can't actually store any excess energy generated.
- legulere 6y agoVariable electricity usage is also a problem for nuclear energy, as it fits mostly base load tasks. You are right though, that intermittent renewables are a new sort of problem. But there are also solutions like a super grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy
- orwin 6y agoRenewable are cheaper when you mine, extract, process, transport and cast them with fossile fuel. Uranium pump works with electricity, processing is done with electricity too, at least in France, the only thing we still have to solve is transportation, and even if it was still done with fossile fuel, I'm pretty sure you get more MW/h from 1g of fissible uranium than 200g of cadmium and lead, even if you could recycling them for no energy.
- neuronic 6y agoFinland is unable to complete their new reactor. It's not feasible to build new ones at all - too expensive and even if started right away their completion takes 10+ years and is not the solution to the massive climate issues we face today. Building new reactors in the 90s? I would have agreed with this but it's too late now from multiple perspectives.
- owlmirror 6y agoWhy should it be too late now? Because Finland botched a single plant? Even though it is preferable that we had more nuclear now I really can't see how you can say that nuclear is not a step in solving the climate problem
- fuoqi 6y agoTell it to Rosatom, which builts its VVERs in under 10 years from greenfield to full industrial operation. The problem with Olkiluoto is not about nuclear power per se, but about organizations, loss of competence and about implementing new designs of nuclear plants in "agile" style.
- nickff 6y agoNuclear power is (unfortunately) the ultimate example of regulation and 'safeguards' blocking real improvement. The old saw about 'the perfect being the enemy of the good' applies here. I think nuclear would be a great path forward, but it's unlikely to carry the day.
- orwin 6y agoOther comments show I'm more partial to social democracy, but you're right, nuclear regulation is turning me into a liberal.
- Krasnol 6y agoYeah, let's deregulate the potentially most dangerous source of energy generation on the planet. What could go wrong? I wish we could generate energy with anti-intellectualism. We'd have all the environmental issues figured out by now.
- tim333 6y agoIf regulation and safeguards were the main problem you might see China or Russia crack ahead. The main problem seems more to be economics.
- nickff 6y agoChina has been building nuclear reactors at a relatively rapid clip for over 20 years https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...