Bill Gates: "Chill Out Guys, I've Got This One Solved"

[Sionnach Glic]

(CNN) -- Say you were to give Bill Gates a really great present -- like the ability to cure crippling diseases or to pick all U.S. presidents for the next 50 years.

Gates would like those gifts, sure.

But you wouldn't have granted his one, true wish.

The Microsoft-founder-turned-philanthropist said at a recent speech in California that, more than new vaccines for AIDS or malaria or presidential selection power, what he really wants is clean energy at half its current cost.

To do that, he said, we'll need new technology.

Gates -- a father of the personal computer and quite the tech powerhouse -- said one of the brightest hopes for clean, cheap power is a new form of nuclear power plant that reuses waste uranium from existing nuclear reactors.

It's kind of like radioactive recycling, and, on its face, can sound like a miracle.

Gates actually described energy innovation in those terms: To prevent famine, poverty and the hardship that will come with global climate change we need "energy miracles," he said at the TED Conference in Long Beach.

Some nuclear scientists and critics say the nuclear technology Gates highlighted is misguided, naive and expensive.

Others, like Craig Smith, a nuclear engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said Gates is helping put the world on the verge of a "nuclear Renaissance" that could provide cheap power for everyone in the world -- forever.

"There's a new enthusiasm not only in the United States but, I think, worldwide for the use of nuclear energy," Smith said.

Smith's argument is bolstered by the fact that President Obama on Tuesday announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for a new nuclear power plant.

The proposed project, to be located in Burke County, Georgia, would be the first nuclear power plant built in the United States in three decades.

How it works

Most nuclear power plants today use radioactive elements like uranium to create nuclear fission and then produce electricity.

One problem: That reaction leaves behind uranium waste. To make matters worse, the United States hasn't identified a safe place to store the waste from the country's 104 nuclear reactors in the long term.

That's where the technology promoted by Gates comes in.

Gates has invested tens of millions of dollars in a Bellevue, Washington, company called TerraPower, according to TerraPower CEO John Gilleland.

TerraPower is working to create nuclear reactors that generate hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.

This has a number of potential benefits, Gilleland said. Among them:

• The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.

• The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.

• The process creates a large amount of energy from relatively small amounts of uranium, which is important as global supplies run short.

• The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."

Gilleland said it's not a matter of if the technology works.

"It's going to work -- for sure," he said. "The question will be precisely how well and how economically. But right now there are lots of people in the world who think it could begin to see common application in the 2020s."

'Pie-in-the-sky'

Others scoff at the idea.

Gates is looking for a "silver bullet" technology to fix the world's climate problems, but no such technology exists, said Thomas B. Cochran, a nuclear physicist and senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group that opposes new nuclear power plants.

"The idea that Gates is going to throw some money at a couple of guys that think they've got a new idea and this is gonna blossom into something that really works is a pretty low probability," he said.

Cochran compared Gates' call for investment in nuclear technology that would reuse uranium to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. It's a scam, he said.

Researchers have been working on similar, utopian ideas for more than 60 years, he said, and with no tangible result.

Action needs to be taken now to blunt the effects of climate change, he said; and new nuclear power technologies will take too long to develop and will be too expensive.
"If you're trying to address climate change mitigation, this is not the way to go in any case because it's too far into the future," he said.

"We need the solutions now. The focus on research and development ought to be on improvements in near-term applications, not these pie-in-the-sky reactor concepts that won't be deployed for decades."

Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an environmental and public-safety group, said the timeline is too slow.

The technology could be ready for testing in 20 years and ready for commercial use 20 years after that, Gates said in California.

"Our belief is that we need to make near-term carbon emissions reductions -- and in that sense, this doesn't help," Mariotte said.

"It diverts resources away from technologies that do work."

Optimism

Others applaud Gates, one of the richest men in the world, for taking on a big problem like climate change with gusto and optimism.

"Look, I think this is the backing of a creative and innovative reactor concept," said Smith, the nuclear engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"That is a very good thing -- to allow people to stretch their minds and come up with new concepts."

It's unclear where the best clean-energy technology solutions will come from, Smith said, but many varieties of next-generation nuclear tech are under development, and the U.S. government has invested in several.

Ted Quinn, a former president of the American Nuclear Society and a consultant for the nuclear industry, said it's important for the United States to find a valuable use for nuclear waste.

"This is like an ultimate design that can burn a different type of fuel than we burn today. This burns the part of the fuel that we can't burn," he said of the Gates-backed project. "It helps the fuel cycle issues."

In his remarks in California, Gates said there will be no easy fix for climate change.

He encouraged optimism, along with heavier investment in solar, wind, battery and nuclear technologies.

That's the only way he will get his biggest wish, he said. "We have to drive full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline."

So, is this plausable? It sounds like bog-standard reprocessing to me, which (AFAIK) does work.

[Tyyr]

Reprocessing works and is a fairly common technology. It's not been applied in the US thanks to Carter's misguided attempt to halt proliferation. It's not as cost effective as simply digging up new fuel so you'd need a government mandate to use it but it's a mature technology. That alone would solve the nuclear waste, "problem," in the US.

The Canadian designed CANDU series of reactors can already run on non-enriched fuel and are a very nice design that can be safely disseminated without concerns they'd be used for uranium enrichment.

• The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."

Though I do call thermodynamic bullshit on this one.

[Aaron]

"Effectively indefinite", I choose to interpret that as "with mining and reprocessing we have enough fissionables to sustain us." Which as I understand it it is effectively true, the Sun will swallow Earth before we run out.

[Tyyr]

Except that the statement specifically says that the process itself generates uranium to be burned again making an effectively infinite fuel supply. The statement is just wrong. Now if you want to read into it and interpret it to something that makes sense that's fine, but as is they're claiming to break at least two out of the three laws of thermodynamics.

[Aaron]

Except that the statement specifically says that the process itself generates uranium to be burned again making an effectively infinite fuel supply. The statement is just wrong. Now if you want to read into it and interpret it to something that makes sense that's fine, but as is they're claiming to break at least two out of the three laws of thermodynamics.

Of course they are. I don't necessarily take whats said as gospel though (neither do you I imagine), otherwise I would be forced to believe that their are some very retarded folks responsible for making some very important decisions.

[Tyyr]

Bad news, there are.

No, I don't take it at face value, however many people will read that and think its true. Marketing people should be kept on a much shorter leash than they are, especially when discussing technical matters.

[Graham Kennedy]

Fission only needs to last until we get fusion anyway, and that's likely to be 30 or so years.

[Sionnach Glic]

Won't we still need some sort of fuel for a fusion reactor?

[Captain Seafort]

Yep - hydrogen. If we start running out of that I'll be worried.

[Sionnach Glic]

Is that all we'd need? In that case, go for it. The ultimate sollution to the energy crisis - fusion!

[Aaron]

Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it.

[Graham Kennedy]

I was at a lecture by a couple of fusion researchers a year or so back. Fascinating stuff. They say current research fusion reactors can produce about 15 MW, but only for a second or so at a time. But the next generation research reactor is already on the drawing boards, and being funded. It's called ITER and will produce 500 MW for up to 1,000 seconds at a time. Eight years to build that, twenty years to experiment with it, and he claimed that they expected to be at a point where they could build a prototype for a commercial fusion power station.

The fuel is deuterium and tritium. Deuterium can be extracted from seawater, and there's enough of that to last for thousands of years. It's even easy and cheap to extract compared to the likes of Uranium enrichment. The tritium is the hard part, because there's very little of it around. Fortunately you can make tritium by squirting neutrons at Lithium... and neutrons are a product of the deuterium-tritium fusion in the first place, which is handy! The world's supply of lithium is far from infinite, but again there's no great shortage of it - it currently costs something like $100 a kilo and it's already mined by the thousands of tons.

Plus it doesn't produce oodles of nuclear waste and it doesn't contribute to weapons research, so once we have it we can sell it all over the place without worrying.

[sunnyside]

• The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."

Though I do call thermodynamic bullshit on this one.

Well, I'm not sure what Gates thing is, however plenty of alchemy is going on in a nuclear reactor. If they're talking about changing a non fuel isotope of Uranium into one that can serve as a fuel that's exactly the idea of a breeder.

They could also mean turning plutonium or some other element into Uranium though.

Since they say effectively infinite instead of infinite I think they mean one of those things.

@GrahamKennedy

If you're bombarding anything with neutrons you're going to be making nuclear waste. Probably pretty hot stuff. Though I don't know how much it would need as I haven't heard of that method yet.

[Graham Kennedy]

The inside of the reactor vessel itself will end up radioactive, for sure. But you won't have anything like the kind of ongoing production of waste material - spent fuel and all that - that you do now.

[Tyyr]

Well, I'm not sure what Gates thing is, however plenty of alchemy is going on in a nuclear reactor. If they're talking about changing a non fuel isotope of Uranium into one that can serve as a fuel that's exactly the idea of a breeder.

The process is not effectively infinite however. You eventually run out. Breeder's also have significant draw backs in getting built, namely you just so happen to wind up with weapons grade plutonium from them to boot.

Nothing they're claiming to do can't already be done. Hell isn't already being done.

CANDU reactors can already run on non-enriched fuel. They're the perfect nuclear technology to people who need cheap electricity but you don't want making bombs.

Fuel reprocessing can already use up our nuclear waste and extend the fuel supply 20 to 25 times what it currently is at a marginally increased cost over mining new uranium.

These established, tested, and proven technologies should be pursued now rather than reinventing the wheel and getting it functional in 20 years.

If you're bombarding anything with neutrons you're going to be making nuclear waste. Probably pretty hot stuff. Though I don't know how much it would need as I haven't heard of that method yet.

Compared to the waste stream of a nuclear reactor it's minimal.