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Bill Gates gave an interesting TED talk on this subject[1]. He said that in terms of the real politics, the only way to move to 100% renewable energy is to make it cheaper than fossil fuels so the naysayers have no reason to object. To that end, he has been investing heavily in TerraPower, a company developing a new kind of nuclear reactor that promises to be much safer and use the depleted uranium from other power plants as fuel.

Unfortunately, TerraPower recently received a major setback. It took them 10 years to secure a deal with the Chinese government to build one of their prototype power plants there, and now the Trump administration's aggressive stance toward China has killed that deal. Hopefully they'll be able to find another arrangement before they run out of funding.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en#t-814991

⬐ acqq

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542686/terrapower-quietly...

„six years after it was founded, TerraPower has not yet produced a working prototype. Last week, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the company revealed that it is now pursuing a different advanced reactor concept: a molten chloride reactor“

That was 2016. Any improvements since?

This (and the other) article seems to be adamant that the study was horribly put together. Was the intent of the original study merely to determine the efficacy of screening? That sounds like a really really weird study to want to run, as I'd think you can just get that from already existing cases. (I'm not a medical research person, but I'd expect that there's some cancer.gov database of diagnoses/histories/outcomes that you could chew on.)

I don't know how the Gates Foundation functions, so the level of which Bill should be implicated in the failings of this study are unclear to me. It sounds like the study would have been fairly inexpensive, and thus relegated to maybe just a footnote on one afternoon for Bill.

The eugenics-style arguments seen up in the parent comment seem to be a result of over-extrapolation of his "Innovating to zero" TED talk[1]. He alludes to, but does not cite, statistics correlating quality of life, health, and number of children. I also cannot find a concrete source, but playing around with wolfram alpha, it seems like there is at least a correlation according to their datasets[2].

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates/transcript?language=en#... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+%7C+ch...

On one hand, Bill himself seems to support rather strongly "energy miracles" [1] as well as some sort of carbon tax (he thinks certainty is important)[2]. But the Foundation notably does not address any carbon issues, instead looking for opportunities to provide aid where the climate is creating harm.[3]

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en

2. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-roll...

3. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...

Looks like He's putting his money where his mouth is: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

⬐ neya

Thank you for the link to his TED talk

This is what TerraPower is building: http://www.terrapower.com/Technology/TravelingWaveReactor.as...

Here's Bill Gates' TED talk from February 2010 in which he describes the tech http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

⬐ cr4zy

Gates implies liquid approaches to nuclear are hard compared to TerraPower 23 mins into the TED talk. Liquid as in LFTR (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor)?

⬐ umarmung

Yes, he's trying to wean China off molten salt reactor development, specifically reactors like the LFTR.

China is basically the only market for fission reactors left. They are the only ones purchasing new external nuclear reactor technology as well as aggressively pursuing their own.

Bill Gates realises if China produces anything successfully independent from the West, then even if TWR functioned and functioned well, it would be a dead investment from a market (and personal legacy) perspective.

⬐ cr4zy

Are you saying there's a conflict of interest between finding the best solution and preserving his investment/legacy?

Bill Gates gave a talk on Thorium reactors at TED last year. http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

⬐ niels_bom

Scanning the video again: I'm not entirely sure if Gates is referring to Thorium reactors..

Throughout the whole article no mention of any specific alternatives to be used? 23% is a big amount to make up to.

A relevant TED talk by Bill Gates (Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero): http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

In short, the most viable option currently, in his opinion, is the thorium reactors. Current uranium reactors can be converted to work with thorium.

"The main point of using thorium, in addition to the proliferation issues with uranium, is that there is 10 fold amount of it available compared to Uranium. If you take into account also the fact that we only use uranium-235 in our nuclear reactors, and this consitutes only 0.7% of the total amount of uranium, the increase is 100 fold.

Thorium reactors also operate by burning uranium. This is created from thorium by bombarding it with neutrons. This forms uranium 232, which is highly radioactive and is hence hard to deal. This is why U232 can't be used for nuclear weapons, it's hard to handle."

⬐ lispm

Germany does not want a different form of nuclear power. Nuclear power is no option.

The goal is to develop renewable energy to 100% over the next 40 years.

⬐ andrest

Don't take this the wrong way, but when the scientists or the government set an ambitious goal like this, that are 4 decades away. It usually means that currently we have no clue how to go about solving it and hopefully our successors will figure it out.

As Bill Gates explains the current renewable technology is not viable. This is because of various reasons, such as low ratio of energy invested vs energy returned, instability (eg. what you do when the wind is not blowing?), requirements for a possible site, et cetera.. I fully agree that it should be the long term goal to switch over to renewable energy, but with current technology it is out of reach. Therefore we a need a stepping stone that the nuclear energy can provide us with.

It is too early to go all in.

⬐ lispm

You are on a discussion level of ten years ago.

All the questions you mention have been discussed for a full decade here. Numerous research institutes have been working on that for a decade. Several plans have been proposed and discussed. As a first step Germany has jump started its renewable energy industry a decade ago. We moved from 6 to 16% during that decade and now have several hundred thousand employees in that industry, numerous small and medium companies, numerous research institutes, ... we are already exporting a lot of that technology. It is expected that in a few years this industry will be larger than our automotive industry.

Our government actually does something for the tax payer money:

Read it here:

http://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/inhalt/47124/3860/

Renewables' contribution to energy supply in Germany continued to rise in 2010

17 percent share of electricity supply 370,000 employees in the sector

The share of renewable energies in Germany's electricity supply rose further in 2010. At 17 percent, the share was about half a percentage point higher than the previous year. These are the preliminary results calculated by the Working Group on Renewable Energy Statistics (AGEE-Stat) for the Federal Environment Ministry. This growth was achieved in spite of the sector being hampered by adverse weather conditions. As there was very little wind in 2010, the wind power yield of 36.5 billion kilowatt hours (KWh) was the lowest since 2006. Even so, wind energy remained the key pillar of renewables, with around a 6 percent share of the total electricity supply. Clear increases were recorded for electricity generation from biogas and the photovoltaic sector. Solar power almost doubled its contribution, covering around 2 percent of total electricity demand.

Current scenarios show that in just ten years, renewables can cover 40 percent of Germany's electricity supply. An increase of 12 terawatt hours (TWh) per year is considered realistic. (1 terawatt hour = 1 billion kWh).

The renewables' share in total final energy consumption for heat rose from 9.1 percent in 2009 to just under 10 percent in 2010. The renewables' share in fuel consumption rose slightly to an estimated 5.8 percent (2009: 5.5 percent).

Overall, in 2010 renewables covered around 11 percent of Germany's total final energy consumption for electricity, heat and fuels. This is significantly higher than the previous year (2009: 10.4 percent) and is remarkable because energy consumption was considerably higher than in 2009, due to both the economic recovery and the cold weather.

Renewables also increased their contribution to climate protection. In 2010, around 120 million tonnes of greenhouse gases were avoided through the use of renewable energies (2009: 111 million tonnes). Around 58 million tonnes of these savings can be attributed to the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) alone.

The figures prove that renewable energies were able to keep pace with the economic recovery and continue their trend of a steadily growing share in our energy supply.

Alongside this, renewable energies also gained importance as an economic factor. Initial estimates for the BMU show that, at around 26 billion euros, investments in renewable energy installations were around one quarter higher than in 2009 (20.7 billion euros).

This development is reflected in the employment figures linked to the expansion of renewables. Last year, employment in renewables rose again and latest estimates show there are now around 370,000 jobs in the sector. This is an increase of around 8 percent compared to the previous year (around 339,500 jobs), and well over twice the number of jobs in 2004 (160,500).

⬐ andrest

These numbers show the point I'm trying to make here. The resources currently occupied in putting the current inefficient technology to use could be instead used in R&D to develop the next generation solutions faster. During this period of time nuclear reactors (or thorium reactors in the future) could provide a fairly clean and stable source of energy until viable renewable alternatives are found.

⬐ lispm

There is little inefficiency.

Thorium reactors won't provide any sizeable contribution until 2050. Plus then we go the nuclear route, but again differently. Germany tried already:

* boiling water reactor * pressurized water reactor * Thorium pebble bed reactor * Fast Breeder

and more

enough is enough

Nobody wants a Thorium reactor in Germany. We had one already. It failed.

Good TED talk by Gates explaining his vision for nuclear. Basically, fill up old missile silos with nuclear waste, and burn it from the top down. The waste is disposed of, heat energy is produced that can be harnessed, and there are no significant by-products (iirc). Very interesting, I'd never heard of that before, worth watching.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

⬐ chadgeidel

Can't watch the video here at work, but wouldn't burning nuclear waste be energy-intensive? I assume you have to turn it to plasma to eliminate any radioactive byproducts.

⬐ joegester

That's not really what he means. I'm pretty sure, he's talking about creating special nuclear reactors to do the job and generate power at the same time.

A plasma is basically a just a gas where the atoms have no electrons. To get rid of nuclear waste, you need to get the nuclei to split into less volatile isotopes.

⬐ neutronicus

The most long-lived class of nuclear waste, transuranics, is produced by neutron activation of Uranium-238 (~95% by mass) found in the low-enriched uranium used in power reactors. If you remove these nuclides from spent fuel by chemical separation and place them either into a Thorium (Uranium-233, really) reactor or a highly-enriched U-235 reactor, the transuranics will continue to absorb neutrons until they reach mass numbers where they spontaneously fission, and, since there is no U-238, there won't be any new transuranics.

Something of this nature is usually what is meant when people say "burn nuclear waste".

There will still be the other kind of nuclear waste, namely fission products, but their half-lives are on the order of decades instead of centuries.

⬐ chadgeidel

Thanks for the explanation!

⬐ state_machine

Apparently, TerraPower's TWR design doesn't actually burn from the top down like a candle anymore. I guess it's easier to put all the cooling apparati around one criticality region and then move the fuel through.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor#Travelli...

I am not sure how active it is but at least to some extent: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

About this talk: At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor TWRs differ from other kinds of fast-neutron and breeder reactors in their ability to, once started, reach a state whereafter they can achieve very high fuel utilization while using no enriched uranium and no reprocessing, instead burning fuel made from depleted uranium, natural uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or some combination of these materials. The name refers to the design characteristic that fission does not happen in the entire TWR core, but takes place in a fairly localized zone that advances through the core over time.

Thats untrue. In his 2009 Ted Speech Bill Gates shows pretty easy why that idea is not realistic: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Bill Gates: We can lower the population through vaccines and medicine. Minute 4:42 http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Not really the go to guy for vaccine info.

⬐ sorbus

The actual quote: "Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower [the population] by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent."

You can read that to mean that he wants to kill people off using vaccines, health care, and reproductive health services, I suppose. I would read it as meaning that he believes that if quality of life increases, making it less likely for an individual to die due to preventable disease or injury, people will have fewer children.

⬐ iterationx

Reproductive health services is a euphemism for condoms and abortion a clear way to lower the population. Vaccines have been used to sterilize people before and maybe in the name of saving the environment they will be used again.

⬐ Opie_taylor

Maybe he just wants to sterilize them with the vaccines?

Wow - that was an incredibly dumb thing for him to say, given some of the third world's beliefs about vaccination.

Barry Schwartz: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...

Richard Dawkins: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism...

Martin Seligman: http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psy...

Philip Zombardo: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_o...

Dan Ariely: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...

Bill Gates: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Sir Ken Robinson: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...

Neil Tyson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfAzaDyae-k (and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPLn9nv26NM)

Especially Neil Tyson, as a matter of fact. I highly recommend anyone watch every single one of his videos on Youtube, if only to reap some of his overflowing passion.

⬐ None

None

⬐ ukdm

If Bill Gates can create another monopoly, but this time offering clean energy for the world, I don't think anyone would complain