RE:Bill Gates: How the world can avoid a climate disasterThis is a great post, too bad it was on 60 minutes on Valentines Day when we all had other things to do. Here is the piece on Uranium, very interesting.
But of all his green investments, Gates has spent the most time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear energy -- arguing it's key to a zero carbon future.
He says he's a big believer in wind and solar and thinks it can one day provide up to 80% of the country's electricity, but Gates insists unless we discover an effective way to store and ship wind and solar energy, nuclear power will likely have to do the rest. Energy from nuclear plants can be stored so it's available when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
Anderson Cooper: Were you always a big proponent of nuclear?
In 2008 he founded TerraPower, a company that has re-designed a nuclear reactor.
Anderson Cooper: This is your prototype?
Bill Gates: Exactly. TerraPower's Natrium Reactor. This is a rendering, we haven't built it yet. But here's the nuclear island right here.
Anderson Cooper: This is the reactor?
Bill Gates: Exactly.
Lindsey Boles, Gates and Anderson Cooper with TerraPower's Natrium Reactor Gates says TerraPower's reactor is less expensive to build, produces less waste and is fully automated, reducing the potential for human error. Gates and director of engineering Lindsey Boles showed us what they say is another key to its safety.
Anderson Cooper: What is it that we're looking at here?
Lindsey Boles: So these individual fuel pins are actually where the uranium fuel is. And that's what generates all the heat in our natrium reactor.
Anderson Cooper: This is what everybody is worried about?
Lindsey Boles: Yes, exactly.
Bill Gates: In a normal reactor, it's water that's flowing past and heating up. And it'll boil and-- and generate a lot of high pressure.
That high heat and pressure can cause an explosion, like in Chernobyl in 1986 when radioactive material was spread for thousands of miles.
But Gates says the TerraPower reactor won't use water to cool down the fuel rods -- they plan to use liquid sodium.
Bill Gates: The liquid sodium can absorb a lot more heat. And so we-- we don't have any high pressure inside the reactor.
In October, the Department of Energy awarded TerraPower $80 million to build one of the first advanced nuclear reactors in the U.S.
Bill Gates: Nuclear power can be done in a way that none of those failures of the past would recur, because just the physics of how it's built. I admit, convincing people of that will be almost as hard as actually building it. But since it may be necessary to avoid climate change, we shouldn't give up.