Bill Gates To Help China Build Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor 467
First time accepted submitter BabaChazz writes "Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates says he is in discussions with China to jointly develop a new kind of nuclear reactor. During a talk at China's Ministry of Science & Technology Wednesday, the billionaire said: 'The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste.' Gates backs Washington-based TerraPower, which is developing a nuclear reactor that can run on depleted uranium."
Re:Actually, this is good news. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's another reason they don't get used. The 'standard' reactors require enriched fuels. The same companies that sell the reactors also supply the fuels, or the enrichment services. It's basically vendor lock-in.
Re:Actually, this is good news. (Score:1, Interesting)
What matters is CO2 emission per land area, not per capita. CO2 emission is almost entirely a function of fossil fuel usage. And CO2 sequestration is almost entirely a function of biomass. Any large country's ability to mitigate CO2 emissions will ultimately be proportional to their land area.
The US and China have nearly the same land area, yet China emits 28% more CO2.
The reason why is immaterial. But let's look at it regardless. Those people didn't just magically appear. China's government got the brilliant idea that overpopulation would be a great economic boon. Surprise, surprise, it wasn't. Taking this into account is like saying a country that purposely over-fishes it's waters should be given more of them. It's retarded, creates the wrong incentives, and will only lead to failure.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Sand is that dangerous? Oh I get it - homeopathic toxins where the stuff with the lowest concentration is the most dangerous. I think you've wandered into the wrong place. Engineers lurk here and we're very big on the physical sciences instead of the metaphysical crystal worshipping bullshit.
Are these people growing up in sealed boxes? Haven't you heard of a place called Iran where their concentration of radioactive material is in the news? The way it works is very large amounts of material are mined and then a very difficult and energy intensive process (including in one process such "clean" stuff as Uranium Flourides as a gas - well I suppose that would "clean" you to your bones and then dissolve the bones) which then gives you a small amount of fuel from a large amount of ore.
Re:Nuclear reactor... (Score:4, Interesting)
this substance is more chemically and radiologically toxic than Pu
Do you guys just make this stuff up as you go along? The half life of natural Thorium is 1.405×10^10 years. Radioactivity is the inverse of half life. (By contrast, the half life of Pu-239 is ~24,000 years, and the Iodine-125 they inject you with when you get an MRI has a half life of 59 days.)
But does it burn transuranic elements? (Score:5, Interesting)
They can't help leaving behind fission products (that's where they get their energy from), which isn't too much of a problem, as it takes only about 300 years for them to decay to levels of radiotoxicity of natural uranium in equilibrium with its decay products.They will leave behind some Uranium, but this can still be used in other reactors.
The problem is mainly residual Plutonium, Americium and other elements, with half-lives of several thousand or tens of thousands of years, which require hundreds of thousands of years to decay to such levels. (Because of the very damaging high energy alpha decay, rather than lower energy and much less damaging beta and gamma decays.)
On the one hand non-fissle transuranic elements capture neutrons and interfere with the chain reaction, on the other hand capturing neutrons either splits them or eventually transmutes them into fissle elements. This turns them into fission products, which we can handle with reasonable confidence. The question now is: does the travelling wave in the travelling wave reactor provide enough neutrons to transmute and split the transuranic elements it breeds, such that the reactor as a whole reaches a stable equilibrium before the end of its operating time? Conventional reactors don't, because the chain reaction is stopped for lack of neutrons long before a stable equilibrium is achieved. Most breeder reactors do, but it depends a lot on how tight the neutron economy of the particular reactor is. And afaik (correct me if you know better or have access to specifications), the neutron economy of the travelling wave reactor is rather tight and might well be possible, that the wave leaves ever more transuranics in its wake as it moves, without ever reaching an equilibrium over the whole of the reactor.
Why is reaching a stable equilibrium before the end of operation enough? In this case you can add some additional transuranics at the start of operation and still reach the same equilibrium at the end of operation. If the amount you can add at the start (and still reach equilibrium) is larger than the amount left at the end of operation, you effectively reduced the total amount. Given that, you effectively solved the long-term problem of transuranic waste, by limiting its amount and eventually burning it.
The question is, can the travelling wave reactor do that or not? (There are other options ex post, but it is always best to not let the problem exist in the first place rather than dealing with it later.)
You would've made a great British aristocrat. (Score:0, Interesting)
Firstly, Billy G. is not very smart.
Secondly, the very notion that intelligence brings insight is ludicrous.
Thirdly, the idea that smart people should rule stupid people is elitism at it's purest.
And finally, there's very little difference between the chauvinism you just expressed and the racism of the KKK. Indeed, the notion that "I have the right to decide over your life because your so stupid" is something so awful -- even the ultra-conservative Koch brothers would be appalled.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Handling dangerous waste for thousands of years is a problem, but a lot of that can be taken care of by just reusing the waste in newer types of reactors. Banning nuclear technology by preventing new nuclear plants from being built just makes the problems worse, because you can't build modern reactors that reduce or eliminate the problems with the older ones. Meanwhile, the old ones are just getting older and more dangerous, but can't be replaced because it's illegal to build any new ones...
And making several square miles of land is not a very big deal unless you've got an extremely high population density like Japan. And compared to coal mining, even if standard practice was to just abandon old nuclear reactors once they ran for a couple of decades, they'd still be wasting less land.
Re:Too bad (Score:3, Interesting)
[quote]The problem is lack of effective regulations and oversight. [/quote]
I'm not sure I can agree with that. The problem appears to be that right now, most nuclear plants are of a very old design, and that there is so much red tape in replacing them that it endangers lives.
To use a dreaded Slashdot car analogy: Most people wouldn't feel comfortable having a car using 1960's safety technology as their daily driver. Why should people be more comfortable with something as complex as nuclear power generation using 1960's safety technology and design?
Although it can be argued that the walls protecting Fukushima were not high enough (where does that arms race against nature stop?), that ignores the fundamental design flaws that allowed all the backup systems to fail. These are design flaws that could really only have been corrected by rebuilding the entire plant.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at a nuclear plant, we use NT4 for our Plant Process Computer. Service pack 5 btw.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Interesting)
More to the point, this particular reactor design works on *depleted* uranium, so you're not enriching it, but you're actually using waste from the enriching process as fuel.
There is a massive amount of depleted uranium laying around that has been stockpiled since the Manhattan Project. Using it as fuel would be far more environmentally friendly than any other base-load generation, since we've already extracted it from the ground, and it's just sitting in storage.
Using what you already have is much preferable to using what you need to go get.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Interesting)
You have failed to take into account the practical reality of turning a research thorium reactor into a working commercial scale one. Demand for nuclear is falling and development will take at least a decade and tens of billions of dollars minimum, so good luck getting someone to invest in that.
Back in the 60s when it was assumed that nuclear power would be too cheap to meter people were willing to throw lots of money at the problem, but by the 70s it was clear that actually it was going to be horrendously expensive and not economically viable for private companies to do by themselves.