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.
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.
failed every time (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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.
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And it's their money. I hope they can make it work.
At least that's one environmentalist who actually cares about global warming.
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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.
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If the material existed the problem would be solved.
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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?
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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
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The upside is gobs of cheap, dense exploitable power that can displace the many TW of natural gas we currently burn for power. Renewables are great but if less co/2 is our goal all options should be on the table.
The waste can be dealt with, we have lot's of options there simply is not political will to enact those measures. Long term storage combined with reprocessing can deal with a lot of the waste. The way we handle things now is a choice, not a requirement.
The reprocessing will have to be (and should
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Yes, there are lots of golf courses which could be used for the storage of this waste, but the political will isn't there. Drill a deep hole on the 15th fairway, dump in the waste, cover with concrete then backfill the dirt. In a year or two you'd never know anything is buried there.
Since no one lives on or near the 15th fairway we wouldn't have to worry about any NIMBY nonsense. Nor
Re: failed every time (Score:4, Informative)
If the US hadn't all-but-banned spent-fuel-reprocessing in the 70s over nuclear weapons fears, things would be so much better.
Spent fuel reprocessing and the right kinds of reactors can drastically slash the amount of "this will be dangerous for centuries" nuclear waste that gets produced.
Re: failed every time (Score:3, Interesting)
Reprocessing makes nuclear more expensive. If that was ok then we could just use vitrification, which works now. But since nothing which is not cost effective will be adopted, the fact that it's physically possible is irrelevant. And so is the fact that reprocessing is possible. It also doesn't eliminate waste, only reduces it, and makes the remaining waste more hazardous. So then you come back to needing to deal with waste again, and it being expensive again.
Only plans which are compatible with capitalism
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Lots of things are not compatible with capitalism that are still worth doing if we decide they are, either by conflict between what we want and what capitalism is good at or just because we say so. I think everyone in America should have healthcare coverage and it shouldn't cost mroe than a percentage of income. That's incompatible with capitalism and that's fine, we just don't leave those thigns to capitalism.
For America if nuclear power overall is a net benefit, and I believe i can make the case for tha
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I think everyone in America should have healthcare coverage and it shouldn't cost mroe than a percentage of income. That's incompatible with capitalism and that's fine, we just don't leave those thigns to capitalism.
Yes, we do. Here in the real world, we do leave those things to capitalism, especially in the US. There's a large and powerful segment of the political landscape trying to do away with national health care in many nations, as well, notably the UK.
For America if nuclear power overall is a net benefit, and I believe i can make the case for that, and the negatives can be managed then it's something worth doing because it's worth doing.
If the negatives could be managed, we would be managing the waste now, because we know how to do it now. By exactly the same token, if we were going to do it despite the costs, we could do that now. We aren't dependent on any magical future technology, we have the
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And those fears are not unfounded but all that means is that basically the DOE has to build and operate all reprocessing plants, which is probably the smart move.
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The United States isn't the only country with nuclear power, but none of them bother doing large scale reprocessing because it's not economically viable. You have high level nuclear waste that you need to transport and handle. The design of the fuel packages you are reprocessing is not standardized either, so your reactor will probably only be able to reprocess fuel from one other type of reactor built during one specific period of time (because the designs evolve), without very complex and costly adaptatio
Re: failed every time (Score:4, Insightful)
The upside is gobs of cheap, dense exploitable power
I agree with everything except "cheap". Nuclear power is always expensive. The Federal Government is paying half the cost for this demonstration plant. There are questions about where to get "High Assay Low Enriched Uranium", as getting it from Russia is a tad inconvenient at the moment.
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Yeah, fair, i did re-read my comment and thought "maybe cheap is jumping the gun".
I think it can be cheap though if projects like this pan out since these are by design at least trying to be something more scalable and deployable which has always been part of nuclears problems.
I do also agree we need to be funding more mining and processing in the USA and other allied nations. It would be fantastic if Russia wasn't antagonist but thats the way it's looking but it's not like we don't have uranium in the dir
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This is a fast-neutron reactor which produces different waste products with much shorter half lives than conventional pressurized light water thermal-neutron ("slow neutron") reactors. Fast neutron reactors don't produce the minor actinides that thermal-neutron reactors produce. In fact, fast-neutron reactors can be fueled with the waste products from thermal-neutron reactors and "burn" those annoying minor actinides converting them into waste products with much shorter half-lives.
Waste from fast-neutron re
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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.
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Killed by nuclear fear-mongering hippies.
And now they're legalizing weed everywhere. I smell a conspiracy!
Re: failed every time (Score:2)
"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.
Hippies didn't kill nuclear power (Score:2)
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
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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?
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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
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Gates isn't in charge, he's just a funder.
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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.
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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
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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
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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"?
Re: failed every time (Score:2)
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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
Nuclear + storage + load following will be huge (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
Ah yes... (Score:2)
Re:Ah yes... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the company he's backing:
https://www.terrapower.com/
Re: Ah yes... (Score:2)
We all grew up reading sci-fi (Score:2)
Re: We all grew up reading sci-fi (Score:2)
Re:Ah yes... (Score:4, Interesting)
...the world renowned nuclear scientist, Bill Gates!
And we're only in the embrace phase! It's the extinguish phase that's really going to be interesting...
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"As universal scientist & generous philanthrop (Score:2)
... my shopping list confirms my expertise"
From: "I Bought Myself A Politician - MonaLisa Twins (Original)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Hamas and Iran want to buy 1500 of them (Score:2)
They'll pay cash.
Re:Hamas and Iran want to buy 1500 of them (Score:4)
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.
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' 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.
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' 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.
May he go *boooom* (Score:2)
Gates' genius is for business, not technology. (Score:2)
The Japanese tried sodium for cooling; not working (Score:2)
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.
We've already made sodium reactors. (Score:2)
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.
We all pray that it runs Unix (Score:2)
Command-alt-delete
I for one welcome mega projects by billionaires.. (Score:2)
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.
Windows has detected an error (Score:2)
Abort, Retry, Evacuate the county?
If it works, I'm all for it (Score:2)
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Good news is Gates has a LOT of land he can put plants on thanks to buying up massive quantities of farmland.
A large chunk of this recently purchased land is on I-10 near Phoenix, right next to our existing nuclear plant. No word on what his plans are here.
Re:Everyone big is on the right side of nuclear no (Score:4)
Just a guess but since one of the selling points of Natrium is can use depleted uranium as fuelstock I imagine theres an easily accessible supply right there and no need fo rcomplicated transport schemes. Plus the site already has a lot of the infrastructure in place.
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The summary says it's sodium cooled.
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A couple things about that. First, the heat will ultimately have to be dumped into the environment so that means dumping that into the air or into some body of water.
Sodium melts at the same temperature that water boils, and boils at 882C. This means two big advantages over water: no high-pressure plumbing needed, and the high output temperature means we can use dry desert air as a heat sink. We will never have to build a reactor in a blue state again.
Re:Everyone big is on the right side of nuclear no (Score:4, Interesting)
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i hear it's not a big reactor because "640MW should be enough for anyone"
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A large chunk of this recently purchased land is on I-10 near Phoenix, right next to our existing nuclear plant. No word on what his plans are here.
Plan for this nuclear plant is to site it next to an existing coal-fired plant that's slated to close.
Good choice, in that the infrastructure to send the power to the grid is already there
Re: Everyone big is on the right side of nuclear n (Score:2)
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Or maybe you would like to just stash some of it under your bed because it's an easily solved problem. [crosscut.com]
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What do you mean? They know where lot's of stuff is. Rocky Flats as I understand it is still a Superfund site so there's a report on it every 5 years,
The government loves buearacracy so here the 2022 report, its 403 pages.
https://lmpublicsearch.lm.doe.... [doe.gov]
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I mean that sounds scary and all but that doesn't really mean anything. It's also very easy to prove if a soil sample is radioactive or contaminated. I'm not saying it's not true but we don't have to wait years to know.
Where i grew up once contained the world largest landfill for trash. Adminiteedly not radioactive but still, 150 million tons of gross shit, now theres a park and housing on top of it and has been for a decade.
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Given that cost is probably the biggest negative to nuclear power if this helps bring down the cost of nuclear (as they seem to think it will) to a more reasonable level then I'm all for it.
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And I have references: https://www.dw.com/en/fact-che... [dw.com]
But the usual morons will not even look at them or be incapable of understanding what they say.
Also, good look trying to get enough of these still theoretical nukes into operation while it still matters.
No idea why so many people fetishize a technology that clearly is over.
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The next shriek is how nuclear is so so so safe. Sure, and that's almost exclusively because it's so wildly over engineered and 17 built in redundant safeties etc...because it absolutely can't fail.
And given the pace of the storage ramp up, I'm thinking we have enough nuclear now or already in pipeline. I could see thorium/molten salt reactors being a de
Re: Everyone big is on the right side of nuclear n (Score:2)
In the US at least that's blatantly false. Nuclear facilities are required by law to set aside a decommissioning fund. Far from being underfunded as you imply, they're actually overfunded, to the extent that there's a couple companies that have bid for the rights to acquire nuclear plants set for decommissioning. They have expertise and assume the project risks, something utilities don't have much interest in, and in exchange the decommissioning companies pocket the excess.
The same is true of waste disposal
Re: Everyone big is on the right side of nuclear (Score:2)
Re:Fully liable (Score:5, Insightful)
Pick your poison, would you like it to be small and contained or to simply breath it every day everywhere?
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If only there was some alternative to nuclear and oil.
This reminds me of the Monty Python spam sketch, where every dish contains spam... Except for the first few items on the menu, which are free of spam, but inexplicably ignored.
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Let's compare the clean up required for using a nuclear reactor for 50 years vs using oil for 50 years...
Let's compare your false dichotomy to a real argument which is not logically fallacious.
Re:Popcorn ready! (Score:4, Interesting)
Endless power generated by slashdotters rotating between love and hate.
Re:Popcorn ready! (Score:5, Informative)
Well lets see the numbers. Terrapower company itself gives us:
- 345 MWe
- In 2022, the company estimated that its Kemmerer reactor would cost $4 billion
If we assume average life span of 30 years, that would be 15220 dollars per hour, giving us 44,1 dollars per MWh and this is not including fuel cost, waste cost and maintenance and operating cost. You can get solar and wind at 24 dollars per MWh, and those prices can go down also after some new innovation.
Conclusion: It will be really hard to compete with solar and wind in price, especially within few years when we are starting to get new batteries for wind and solar in use. Only use case would be areas that get hardly any solar during the winter, and during such a winter, days that don't also have any wind. But if it is used only during those times, the cost of electricity will go up to at least 176 dollars per MWh and most likely even more.
I think it is more likely that we start producing hydrogen with the extra power during windy/sunny days and burn that during the times when there is no wind/solar. In addition to this, in the cold areas we most likely use sand batteries (that store just heat) to make heating the homes more efficient and cheaper.
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If we assume average life span of 30 years
The average operational life of a nuke is 60 years. I have no idea if a sodium SMR could last that long.
44,1 dollars per MWh
For comparison, Vogtle, the last PWR build in America, has a cost of $178 per MWh.
So Bill's reactor is cheaper by a factor of four.
You can get solar and wind at 24 dollars per MWh
That's not a fair comparison. Power that is reliably available 24/7 is worth more than intermittent power.
Re: Popcorn ready! (Score:2)
Zero Details (Score:3)
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it was not a success so what has changed?
I don't know what's changed.
But Bill is a smart guy and he wouldn't be backing it if he didn't think it would work.
Bill is no Physicist (Score:3)
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Here's a thought. What about the externalities of solar and wind? Covering areas of landscape. Mining. And the costs of decommissioning. Nuclear has been around long enough for us all to be painfully aware of these issues. Solar and wind still seem to be in their honeymoon phase.
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Here's a thought.
Where?
What about the externalities of solar and wind?
Minuscule compared to Nuclear.
Covering areas of landscape.
Solar and wind can both be colocated with many other land uses. They are often however placed where the land is not being used for anything else.
And the costs of decommissioning.
BabaHAhAhAHahHahaHA
Nuclear decomissioning costs are orders of magnitude higher than anything else. You are not a serious person with that trash argument.
Not a Competition, No Details Though (Score:2)
Conclusion: It will be really hard to compete with solar and wind in price
Not on a calm night. Seriously though that is the reason for needing things like nuclear: solar is only available for a fraction of the day and wind is highly variable and tends to be correlated over large areas. Batteries can help but if you factor in the cost of those it will massivley increase the price of solar and wind. Nuclear, or predictable renewables like tidal power and geothermal, are the only carbon-free means we have to generate power on demand and so are a great way to replace the final fossi
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yes, you need both solar *and* wind, correct
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Gates hate wins. If the technology succeeds, it won't be because of Gates.
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"But they do emit a lot [of CO2] when being built, when being torn down and fuel mining, processing "
So do solar panels. Mine silica, use carbon to reduce silica to metallurgical grade silicon. Dissolve some of the MG grade in hydrochloric acid to make silicon tetrachloride, put that and some more MG grade into a chemical reactor at high temperature, add hydrogen made from natural gas to produce trichlorosilane. Then after multiple distillation steps (the distillation columns are heated by burning natural g
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The comparison in the reference is total CO2 emitted. Solar panels are at around 1/3 of nuclear. So try to confuse the issue as much as you like with irrelevant detail, nuclear still sucks in comparison to solar.
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"yes, once again the private sector does what government can't or won't! oh BTW, we'll need to government to insure the whole deal because the private sector refuses to, but BOOO GUBBERMENT"
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the private sector refuses to
No, the private insurance industry can't insure it. A Chernobyl-like disaster would bankrupt any insurance company, and they would be unable to pay any claims.
Private insurance doesn't work for risks that are extremely unlikely but also extremely expensive.
Re: As a wise man once said... (Score:2)
The government tells the private industry they canâ(TM)t insure it and makes inane requirements for the insurance itself. Construction cost is a fraction of the total cost here. There is no reason private insurance canâ(TM)t cover the actual risk which is near to zero.
Re: I'm nervous because (Score:2)
Your description was inadequate.
I corrected it.
You can suck it up, buttercup, or you can look like a dildo.