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Bill Gates Moves Ahead With Nuclear Project Aimed At Revolutionizing Power Generation (apnews.com) 155

schwit1 shares a report: Bill Gates and his energy company are starting construction at their Wyoming site for a next-generation nuclear power plant he believes will "revolutionize" how power is generated. Gates was in the tiny community of Kemmerer Monday to break ground on the project. The co-founder of Microsoft is chairman of TerraPower. The company applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March for a construction permit for an advanced nuclear reactor that uses sodium, not water, for cooling. If approved, it would operate as a commercial nuclear power plant.

The site is adjacent to PacifiCorp's Naughton Power Plant, which will stop burning coal in 2026 and natural gas a decade later, the utility said. Nuclear reactors operate without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases. PacifiCorp plans to get carbon-free power from the reactor and says it is weighing how much nuclear to include in its long-range planning. The work begun Monday is aimed at having the site ready so TerraPower can build the reactor as quickly as possible if its permit is approved. Russia is at the forefront for developing sodium-cooled reactors.

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Bill Gates Moves Ahead With Nuclear Project Aimed At Revolutionizing Power Generation

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  • failed every time (Score:3, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @01:19PM (#64541223) Homepage Journal

    Every time someone tries to prove that a MSR can work, they prove the opposite. The molten salt creates more problems than it solves. Why should we believe this time will be different? Bill Gates has never been responsible for a technical success, only business ones. We need the former, not the latter.

    • Couldn't we go back decades before any technology was sorted out and see people saying pretty much the same thing? MSR seems like it's not some mystical thing we have to do rhythmic chant's to make workin, it's primarily a materials science problem and TerraPower seems like they are trying their own approach. The upside if this works could be huge you have to admit.

      • I am not sure of the decade, but some time a coupla hundred years back or so, many people seemed to think that the stress of going over 30 mph would tear a human body apart. Technology seems to always have detractors, people who are. simply naysayers. before maybe 1920 or so, I am sure people thought that you could not split the atom and get more out than you put in to split it.
      • And it's their money. I hope they can make it work.

        At least that's one environmentalist who actually cares about global warming.

        • Yup but even if it wasn't some things are just so cutting edge with such big upside I think it's reasonable to fund it to make sure it actually see's itself through, even if its a bit of a gamble. I've rather this get built and fail then never get built at all, no other way to know if the problems are solvable until we actually have those problems.

      • If the material existed the problem would be solved.

        • No manmade material exists untilw we invent it though. Iconel wasn't invented until 1932, the first carbon fiber bicycle frame wasn't used until 1986. Those three fellas workin on the transistor, the vacuum tube people might have told them the same thing no?

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The problem with sodium reactors is that the basic idea is flawed. High temperature sodium is very dangerous stuff, and the reactors have to be surrounded by stuff it reacts violently with.

        This type of reactor uses water to transport heat, either in a heat exchanger or by immersing the entire reactor in a pool of it. When sodium and water mix, they create sodium hydroxide and hydrogen. Sodium hydroxide is also known as caustic soda or lye. The hydrogen is even worse, because at the operating temperature of

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Talon0ne ( 10115958 )

      Bill Clinton and John Kerry killed the US Integral Fast Reactor in the 90's. It was working fine.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      Killed by nuclear fear-mongering hippies.

      • by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

        Killed by nuclear fear-mongering hippies.

        And now they're legalizing weed everywhere. I smell a conspiracy!

      • "Bill Clinton and John Kerry killed the US Integral Fast Reactor in the 90's. [...] Killed by nuclear fear-mongering hippies."

        Clinton and Kerry are not hippies. Make up your mind who did what.

      • All you have to do for most hippies is wave climate change in front of them and they will get on board. What killed nuclear power was CEOs skipping maintenance and the reality that we all know in the back of our heads they're going to do it and we're going to let them do it.

        I have never seen a reactor where the CEO can pocket the money need it for maintenance and the reactor can continue to run safely. Everyone in America knows that's how we run infrastructure. Unsafely and into the ground. I'm not goin
        • Yeah, I hear you... but at any given time there's hundreds of flights going all over the country just fine. Maybe we could pull it off if managed correctly?

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Your video is about the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, or EBR-II.

        It was a small 20MW demonstration reactor. It highlighted some serious issues with the concept, such as the fact that they can't clean the site up and instead decommissioned it by placing a dome costing the better part of a billion USD over it, which now has to be monitored and maintained indefinitely.

        The follow-up experiment, Fermi 1, melted down.

        Another follow on, the Sodium Reactor Experiment, also melted down.

        In the UK, the Prototype Fas

    • Gates isn't in charge, he's just a funder.

      • Gates isn't in charge, he's just a funder.

        If he doesn't have any say, then he's irrelevant, why are we even seeing his name? If he is a major funder, he has influence over the project. Which means he is to some degree in charge.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Molten salt is a real bitch on most materials. Yes, _maybe_ these problems are now solved, but it seems rather unlikely. The first prototype will tell, in about 20 years or so. The design can then be refined or more fundamental materials research can be done. Call it 50-200 years of research before a well-working design exists. Call it another 50 years for deployment in large enough numbers to make a difference.

      Oh, and the _ecconomic_ problems of will not get fixed by this type of cooling. Meanwhile solar a

      • Sure, solar and wind are getting better and if grid storage comes around then absolutely, all for it. But right now where we sit there's at least 1,659,503 TWh (this came from the stupid google AI and i was lazy so number is probably wrong but you get my point, its a lot) of NG power to displace and nuclear displace gas like for like, GW for GW.

        So just like your renewable scenrio displacing all that gas, we can do that it in why not call it 50-200 years before you can do all that with just wind and solar a

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          I am not even sure I can parse that. "Lets hallucinate that renewables are just as bad and slow to build and expensive to give nuclear a chance since we are all friends here"?

    • Terra power reactors are cooled with liquid sodium, not salt. To me liquid sodium is terrifying.
    • The reactor design being used is not a MSR. It is a solid fuel reactor just like the LWTR currently used in the USA only is uses molten Sodium as a coolant instead of water for the primary coolant loop.

      The advantage of using Sodium is the core and coolant loop doesn't need to be kept at ~70 atmospheres of pressure to keep a water coolant from flashing to steam if there is a containment failure.

      A sodium cooled reactor can still suffer a core melt down but it is much less likely. Fukushima would still have

  • by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @01:56PM (#64541319)

    I believe the fine article left out what may be the most important advancement that this new kind of reactor will bring, the ability to load follow. The inherent energy storage ability of reactors using molten metal cooling is important, and should not be overlooked, but if a nuclear fission reactor can load follow like a natural gas turbine then this will be huge.

    One of the biggest obstacles for nuclear power has been the inability to load follow. It's not that a reactor cannot adjust power output quickly, it is that the steam turbines that are attached to nearly every civil nuclear power reactor cannot adjust power quickly. We can use the heat from a nuclear reactor to get something hot and then draw hat from that as desired for conversion into electricity, desalinate water, or whatever. While there's nothing that I can see that shows a TerraPower reactor cannot adjust power quickly to load follow there's no need to if there's a thermal energy storage system attached. This is the same kind of energy storage being proposed for solar thermal power so this is hardly new or unique, the difference is that with nuclear power a string of cloudy days won't leave an electric utility with a power shortage. This technology is close to 100 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    This is amazing news, and hopefully this reactor will get completed. What's been a big obstacle to nuclear power in the past has been politics, a nuclear power plant may have had government support when it was started and then after an election support falls away then the project is abandoned. We have seen news of the Biden administration giving support for nuclear power, and his most likely opponents in the next election appear to be supportive of nuclear power. We have economic obstacles for nuclear power falling away, a big one being the problem of load following, and the political obstacles falling away.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      All they have done is stick a tank of molten salt onto a nuclear plant, which stores energy as heat so that the output of the generators can be varied, rather than directly coupling their steam loops to the reactor itself.

      The problem is that it is just another cost on top of an already expensive technology, and which could be used to store energy from anywhere (not just nuclear, renewables too).

      Best of all, it's an admission that the need for constant power, aka base load, is going away. We have already see

  • ...the world renowned nuclear scientist, Bill Gates!
    • They'll pay cash.

      Nuclear proliferation is a stupid argument against nuclear power. Pretty much all of the countries/people that we don't want to have access to materials and/or technology that might lead to nuclear weapons already have materials and/or technology being used to produce nuclear weapons. Fighting against nuclear power for these reasons is about as futile as trying to cure psoriasis at a leper colony.

      • ' Pretty much all of the countries/people that we don't want to have access to materials and/or technology that might lead to nuclear weapons already have materials and/or technology '

        The two I mentioned to NOT.

        • ' Pretty much all of the countries/people that we don't want to have access to materials and/or technology that might lead to nuclear weapons already have materials and/or technology '

          The two I mentioned to NOT.

          Iran is extremely close, thanks to Trump.

  • But way way away from me and mine.
  • His ideas for nuclear may or may not succeed financially, but they're not going to transform anything. Nuclear is a very rigid technology for many reasons. You can innovate, sure. You can (very slowly) chip away at the cost structure. But the lead time to make any kind of progress is quite large, whereas renewables evolve so quickly and at such a gritty level (one cell, one panel, one turbine blade at a time). You can experiment with solar and wind at the drop of a hat; you're not gonna have that freed
  • The Monju reactor was cooled with sodium like 30 years ago.
    That didn't work out well because it's not your ordinary backing powder.

  • Sodium is not a moderator, and allows fast fission. Of u238. It lets you "burn" nuclear waste products. There are easy ways to pump sodium coolant thru a reactor. I was amazed to learn it's a "hallam pump" Which only a sf fan could name. We did this in the 60's, it's pretty well established what you Don't do. Read Atomic Accidents, for an overview of the nuke era. Mchaffey, I think.

  • I can't wait for the people that say "if government steps down people will step up" and constantly defend billionaires to tell us how bad this is.

  • Abort, Retry, Evacuate the county?

  • Assuming this comes in competitive and less burdensome to build than a full nuclear reactor, I'm all for it. We need something practical to make the grid not emit CO2 (I wouldn't call nuclear green) Then we can work to use batteries and motors to replace other commonly used engines. Long distance travel will probably be the last leg of fuel burning engines. Landfills, concrete, and the oil and gas industry are probably different stories though

There's no future in time travel.

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