Bill Gates' nuclear venture plans reactor to complement solar, wind power boom
reuters.com
reuters.com
But then we started a trade war with China and they nixed the contract.
They were hoping to prove it out in China and then bring it back to the US.
They had several construction starts in 2015 (some are coming online now), and after a 3 year hiatus began several more in 2019. BTW, I'm not just trusting that Wikipedia table. I've confirmed construction and [near] completion of some of those listed (but haven't bothered with all, my doubts assuaged).
China's nuclear plans were delayed and reassessed. But their commitment to and follow through on their [apparently] revised plan is still quite ambitious. Predictions of the death of nuclear in China were rather premature, albeit understandable considering the lack of transparency, especially in the Western world given the language barrier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
Not very "ambitious" in my book, especially given their to solar and wind (wind power generation capacity added in the sole year 2016 produced 4%). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China
Solar is even more dynamic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China
The language barrier remains low here because China builds with non-Chinese partners (French "Électricité de France" for the EPR, Russian "Atomstroyexport" for the VVER) or at the very least builds local extensions to existing architectures which may be exported and therefore are closely followed by foreigners (Brookfield Business Partners, as the new owner of Westinghouse, and the "CAP" potential series). Even the new (and not yet active) local model (Hualong) is potentially exportable and therefore well documented. Moreover all this stuff is submitted to IAEA inspections, which are well-documented and expose it to international experts.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/india-e2-80-99s-first-7...
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/india-to-b...
But no, I don’t think even the Americans could get away with building an unlicensed nuclear power plant near the center of London.
"Less than a day after the attack began, a sudden, very heavy thunderstorm—possibly a hurricane—put out the fires. It also spun off a tornado that passed through the center of the capital, setting down on Constitution Avenue and lifting two cannons before dropping them several yards away. Following the storm, the British returned to their ships, many of which required repairs due to the storm. The occupation of Washington lasted for roughly 26 hours and the British plans are still a subject of debate."
The Washington DC area gets only a few tornadoes per century.
But it just seems fascinating that an embassy would have its own nuclear power source and id love to learn more
Edit: I should add, circa 2004/2005 I used to be able to cut and paste conversational posts from online chat forums like pistonheads and others, paste the post into Google and it would give me a list of other websites where the exact same conversation was taking place albeit with different avatars. Fast forward to 2011 and all becomes clear. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op... You cant do that now, Google has been updated.
The forum I used to post on, used techniques like using the image of a full stop (period) at the end of the sentence, which I spotted because broadband was slow so the placeholder for the image appeared before it got pulled down from a Canadian webserver. The 5 eyes are very real and they even have oversight of Tor contrary to popular belief.
Walney is a new nameplate 588MW offshore wind farm; it will average close to the same delivered energy and cost $3B.[1]
If Terrapower can actually deliver at roughly those costs, they might make a real contribution to our energy future.
Meanwhile off shore wind (which is typically steadier than onshore), continues to fall In cost at a fairly quick pace.
There's a recent Dogger Bank contract for 3.6GW at $9B [1], which is about $2500/kW compared to $5200kW for the Walney project you link, and $2900 for Terrapower's plans. Of course, a wind kW of capacity is not equivalent to a kW of nuclear, but with another 10 years of development I wonder just how cheap offshore wind will be if in 5-10 years it has already fallen by 50% in cost.
[1] https://www.renewablesnow.com/news/sse-equinor-eye-fid-for-3...
I think that's the problem we ran into here in California. As we've decommissioned nuclear and natty plants we've replaced much of that capacity with wind and solar. Then you end up in the situation we had a week ago: power consumption peaks around 6pm when solar is ebbing. If that happens in conjunction with a period of low winds, there's a very thin margin of error and in some cases you have blackouts.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/27/no-renewables-did-not-c...
Real grids are much more complicated than you'd think.
Regarding costs of various plants, usually you calculate it as an average per kWh, which is still not quite right as dispatchable is worth more than non-dispatchable. (And yes, you can have renewable dispatchable.) If you compare those figures across technologies and locations, tread carefully, it is really easy to come to the wrong conclusions. For instance, you might be comparing theoretically estimated numbers with (somewhat old) real-world averages.
[1]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article2451155...
[1] - https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
Of course managing intermittence is not easy and free, but nobody is talking about a 100% wind-power grid, and the current installations can absorb a fair amount of intermittence with extra investment... And wind and solar are becoming so cheap that you have a lot of space to pay for managing intermittence - that can be using differently the current installations, developing a demand-response market, and doing some thermal and electrical storage...
[1] see for example https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... keeping in mind the average capacity factor include older equipment with low capacity factor... and that offshore wind is "just starting"
They're not producing all of the time. Renewable power production vary greatly: it's actually problematic that they produce way too much at peak hours, while none at all on windless nights.
You need a stable base production. What better to replace coal and natural gas than nuclear?
A combination of storage, demand shifting and gas.
In a well managed system the gas could be used spasparingl
Then you have thermal storage ; a big share of the electricity we use is to generate cold and heat, and there are a lot of cheap technology out there for thermal storage. It used to be at the clients place for short duration storage(typically storage eater, and now some ice aircon, but there are much more technologies and innovation, at all scales, which include seasonal storage. Most of those tech use thermal storage then to directly use the heat/cold, few use it to generate back some electricity and then could be part of the next paragraph too...
And there are many different technologies taking electricity (or heat that could had generate electricity) and giving back electricity... Pumped hydro is the biggest and oldest player here, but with some innovation coming... There are also different batteries technologies, and many other more exotic possibilities including piling up some concrete blocs...
Lasard Bank write every year a report monitoring the price of the leading technologies. Greentechmedia is a good source to learn more about the development of these technologies and of the market
"The intermittency of other sources such as wind and solar photovoltaic can be addressed by interconnecting power plants which are widely geographically distributed, and by coupling them with peak-load plants such as gas turbines fueled by biofuels or natural gas which can quickly be switched on to fill in gaps of low wind or solar production."
So we can burn the fossil fuel natural gas or a similar gas generated by decomposing bio material. That seems a bit of an odd proof. It seems pretty obvious that burning fuels that releases carbon into the air solves the issue of providing a baseload for renewables, but it has the general problem of releasing carbon into the air. Biofuels are also pretty controversial since they take up a lot of land and fertilizers are not themselves carbon neutral, and current methods for both creating the fuel and the fertilizers has shown to be a major contributor of methane leaking into the air.
As I like to say in this kind of threads, lets ban the act of burning fossil fuels for power. If the market can manage the energy grid without fossil fuels then let the market do that. Which ever technology comes out on top is less important than the fact that we can purge fossil fuels from being used when there is a cleaner alternative.
If you have to depend on gas for the next decade and abolish coal for that, it's still a huge win and progress with an outcome that looks much brighter than this of building a single new nuclear plant or even drowning even more money into research of something that may or may not become realistic in many decades (like fusion).
@the market: if we've learned something in the recent decades than it is that "the market" can't do shit without rules and regulations. Literally. They'll mess up everything they get into their hands and bring out the worse of it.
PS. you are aware that there are already uses for Methane and that there is even P2G generation going on where you gather CO2 from the atmosphere to generate Methane which is than burned afterwards to generate energy.
If that resistance disappeared - even if it was just lessened significantly because of policy - storage, local grid, state grid, national grid and even international grid solutions would all start taking huge leaps forward.
At this point nuclear is for technological nostalgics. There's no role for it, and no need for it. It's an overcomplicated, fragile, dirty, high risk technology which requires strict political, financial, and operational oversight. And when TCO is calculated - something nuke proponents seem to avoid - it isn't even particularly cheap.
Speaking as someone from Sweden, we have already reached maximum exploitation of rivers for hydropower, and it is barely managing to maintain the grid in the winter when the wind is laying low. Expanding it more is not seen as an option, and when the few nuclear plants that is still operational goes offline there are claims that we will need to start import fossil fueled energy during some days of the year.
That's most likely too drastic, leading to a massive immediate economic crash. That being said, what could be done is to start a massive society-wide decarbonization program (think WWII style industrial mobilization), which would start with a few years of building up industrial capacity, followed by a ban on building any new fossil infrastructure or equipment. See e.g.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-...
If we are to take climate change seriously, it's too late to waffle around the margins with carbon taxes etc. and expect that the free market will take care of it all.
I have heard this argument before but not much evidence to support it. There was identical arguments here where I live when they decided to phase out nuclear, and in fairness to the politicians back then, it did not cause an immediate economic crash. Just stopping the production of new plants and letting existing plants operate until they reach their expected operation life time span works pretty well. The energy markets adapts and there are instead an renewed interest to invest as people know that in the future there will be a vacant spot in the market when those plants get decommissioned. Some even argued that it caused stability in the energy market.
The major problem right now is that for the last 10 years, for every extra 1 WGh of new renewable being consumed the fossil based energy also expand by 10 WGh. Looking at world politics and right now there is a lot of focus on expanding fossil fuel extracting and exporting, especially for natural gas. In the EU there are military right now being mobilized because of interest to drill for more natural gas. Investment into new fossil fuel infrastructure has not slowed down but is rather picking up speed.
Massive society-wide decarbonization program where we turn existing fossil fuel plant into carbonfree alternatives are needed, but we should stop people from furthering investing into fossil fuels when there exist a purpose serving alternative. I don't see any good reason to wait.
Apart from that Internet thing, perhaps.
With fossil fuels and nuclear not only the fuel itself is toxic, but when the energy is released it produces an equal amount of bad stuff.
Petroleum fuel is toxic in more than one way, coal not so much, but the waste carbon monoxide is a well known poison which accompanies the waste CO2 in the exhaust.
Every atom of carbon in all of the fossil fuel burnt puts an equal number of atoms of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2.
But carbon is actually the smaller less massive component of CO2. Oxygen atoms are a bit heavier than carbons, and there's two oxygens. So CO2 calculates to contain only about 27 percent carbon.
That means for every huge dump truck full of coal, which is basically pure carbon to start with, when burnt it will put almost 4 huge dump trucks in tonnage of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Petroleum is only about 85 percent carbon so an oil well will need to produce about 15 percent more tons of fuel in order to get an equal amount of CO2 into the air compared to coal
Nuclear waste is deadly toxic & radioactive which is the same insidious combination as its fuel, but no one can honestly say the waste has historically been handled as carefully as the nuclear fuel.
And the hazard is similar but the waste is more difficult to handle so it should be done more carefully not just as carefully.
Also, some people will never imagine that Chernobyl or Fukushima were complete failures, since they could have been worse.
Anyway, the non-renewables have so far fallen into a similar category where more money can be made because full liability of the waste stream is not accounted for in the cost per kWh. Future generations will pay whatever price regardless, they have no say in the matter.
If nuclear was really the lowest cost option, or the slam-dunk shareholder opportunity, that would make it the Wal-Mart of power choices.
Too bad Gates is not rich enough yet or he could splurge a little at this point, and do things for clean energy that no one else could afford single-handedly unless they got it made.
In the winter months there is 9 hours of overcast daylight. There isn’t any room to build a solar farm. There isn’t any room to build a wind farm unless it’s in the water.
Hell I’d like to see a realistic plan to power DFW with renewables.
https://news.energysage.com/states-with-100-renewable-target...
It's not really that hard. Build a lot of wind turbines (more than 100% coverage), reinforce the grid and add some storage.
Offshore wind turbines is a thing. The tech is still somewhat in its infancy, but the costs are coming down.
For a high bound regarding storage, take hydrogen, otherwise whatever cheaper will be in production when you get to it. There are several academic studies of this.
It's not rocket science, just lots of incremental engineering and economics of scale.
If your point is that cities don't have space to provide their own power, yes, you're right, just as they don't have space to grow their own food.
Yes, for a very long time, and to very little result. He chases too risky, and unrealistic prospects.
I do think one of the biggest possible changes could be a new religion based on 'working together', sustainability, education etc. but without any god figure.
Build up this religion in form of a hierarchical network. Bring in everyone and give them a chance to do things together.
Make basic rules which do not exclude too many people but make those basic rules clear and do not allow any racist crap, make it clear that its also not here to solve every problem.
I would like to do things and i sometimes clean our park but i'm not religion. I'm not going to a group every week and i will not take part in a social group which is based on religion. But i would love to meet up every week in something like a youth club for adults, etc.
With this network, he would be able to funnel money directly where it could make sense. Like the central club house which also hosts a school, basic internet etc. (more relevant of course in other countries); Add small hostel system to it, people travel around, share and care etc.
One problem Bill Gates has: When he is gone, who really will pursue it like him? I thought its not to relevant who is doing it as someone will do it but it took Bill Gates years to think more like he does now for one thing and on the other side, it needed him to take action when the polio vaccine stagnated.
Reach out to your local political party (hierarchical network designed to raise funds), the one most aligned to your values as that’s were you’ll meet a bunch of people, most over 50s that have been working to solve the exact problems you listed and they will be members of many other local groups with no party links.
They will have working groups and forums that meet regularly with people that have been campaigning and working for the last 20 to 70 years with your local community, on the ground, trying to solve racism, sexism, sustainability, education, local economy, corruption, inequality, poverty, hunger, climate change, civil rights...you name it.
The best part is that you can avoid 100% the politics if you so wish as they are most likely desperate for (younger) people that will actually get any work done, you’ll be so busy solving real world issues or implementing the structural changes you talk about that you won’t have time for politics.
Speaking from experience.
I don't wanna look through a catalog of different organizations doing different things.
I wanna build and do things together with similar minded people.
Togetherness requires compromise. Togetherness requires empathy. Togetherness requires _understanding_. And sometimes we - not the proverbial "they" - must take the first steps.
I'm not advocating you join a religion. But if you attend a service or support an event or read a book...you'll be just fine. No bunnies or puppies will die.
Yes, some are over-zealous. No different than (e.g.) many Democrats and Republicans. Or Capitalists. Or crossfit'ers :) If you can't figure out what makes committed people tick your faux religion will forever be a religion of one.
As human beings we are flawed, as are so many of our paradigms and constructs. We tend to want to over-simplify. We're complicated. Life is nuanced.
The point is, the meeting point - for all of us, like it or not - is half way. The world is suddenly not going to come to us. We must go to it. Engage it. And nudge it and ding it from there.
Yes. Very unHN. I may be punished for it. I'll live :)
I tolerate religious people. I do believe that those religions put a deep wedge in our society but that has nothing to do what i meant.
I personally will not work/help an organisation which is build around a religion. I'm not a Christ, so why would i go to the Caritas?
My main problem is, with current existing big systems like churches, they put a lot of rules out. Don't be homosexual, they discriminate against females etc.
Now they do have and had a huge number of followeres. We need something similiar and with we i mean people who care about the environment and think its crucial for us to change. And that is more inclusive as the basic rule is not 'do not be religious' its just not based on it.
We do have science in a way, or at least i have as a believe system but 'we' dont have a lobby. We are not organized.
Nonetheless nothing like it exists. Your list is business based and both 'clubs' have only over a million people.
Similarly, the "affordable" nuclear powerplant programs are not suitable for developing countries. It unequivocal that a cheapest fossil fuel station is the best option for places that never had an industrial economy. Once it has been kickstarted, you can think of more exotic options.
Steam turbines are bigger, and more expensive than equivalently powerful turbines of a gas-turbine engine, and not to say that gas turbine is also its own source of hot gas.
I think the best option for undeveloped nations is to rent their power generation equipment until they can bootstrap their electric grid, and build proper power stations.
> The Lehi City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to withdraw the city from a multiagency nuclear power project that would provide nuclear power to cities across Utah, citing concerns over increasing costs
> Exelon Generation to Retire Illinois’ Byron and Dresden Nuclear Plants In 2021 [...] Despite being among the most efficient and reliable units in the nation’s nuclear fleet, Dresden and Byron face revenue shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars because of declining energy prices and market rules that allow fossil fuel plants to underbid clean resources in the PJM capacity auction, even though there is broad public support for sustaining and expanding clean energy resources to address the climate crisis.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200827005445/en/Exe...
> Nuclear advocates fret as first maker of small reactors encounters trouble [...] The company expected to be the first in the United States to operate a small nuclear reactor is facing setbacks that have caused supporters to question whether the novel technology will ever realize its potential as a tool to combat climate change.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/nuclear-adv...
(Warning: this site, like all local newspaper sites, is utterly packed with advertising.)
https://ladailypost.com/carbon-free-power-project-advances-t...
New Mexico derives a huge percentage of state tax revenue from natural gas from the Permian basin (southeast NM) and coal (Four Corners area, northwest NM). But there has been a huge push forward with solar and wind feeding into the grid.
Multiple projects are happening in the US, local and state governments.
Smaller nuclear power plants are coming. Part of a push away from carbon based energy.
Sodium cooling is temperamental with the US navy abandoning it due to leak problems, and France having mixed experiences. The coolent catching fire whenever it leaks is not so fun.
Fast spectrum with metallic fuel and pyroprocessing was demonstrated in the IFR but is messier than you might naively expect, with leaks of xenon that need control. The HEU for startup is also problematic but maybe derated plutonium could be used.
Indeed, it's easy to get carried away by the promises of new exiting tech on the horizon.
Then again, we're never going to innovate if we expect everything new to immediately prove superior economics.
> Sodium cooling is temperamental with the US navy abandoning it due to leak problems, and France having mixed experiences. The coolent catching fire whenever it leaks is not so fun.
Indeed, sodium has downsides. As well as upsides, which is why most fast reactor designs to date have used it as coolant.
> Fast spectrum with metallic fuel and pyroprocessing was demonstrated in the IFR but is messier than you might naively expect, with leaks of xenon that need control.
Well, isn't that true for all reprocessing? When you crush or otherwise process the spent fuel, the radioactive noble gases will escape.
> The HEU for startup is also problematic but maybe derated plutonium could be used.
HEU for civilian applications is non-viable, I think. Modern fast reactor designs are designed to work with HALEU, before (potentially) switching to a U-Pu closed cycle. One can of course quibble where to draw the line between HEU and HALEU. The current 20% is certainly a conservative choice. But it's also a quite minor hill to die on.
I think one advantage is that it's relative cheap and light compared to other atmospheric pressure coolant (and that it can be both fuel and coolant).
Liquid or pulverized metals are more risky than you think.
Powdered nickel not only is a flammable solid, it spontaneously ignites too.
But sodium is much more reactive, it can be rapdily oxidized by many more surprising things than oxygen or water.
There's always this, kilos of molten sodium can lead to unexpected problems:
https://www.csb.gov/t2-laboratories-inc-reactive-chemical-ex...
There was a mushroom cloud but it was not nuclear.
Piping for water can be for sure made to far outlive the plant; for sodium, you have no other option than putting in sacrificial material even if you use toughest nickel alloys, and there only is so much of it you can use.
Problem with water is that for temperatures sufficient to run turbines at any decent efficiency, you need very high pressure, meaning expensive and bulky equipment. Hence it's not really usable as a heat storage medium.
Hot water or steam is actually surprisingly corrosive, though we have a lot of experience how to handle it properly.
> for sodium, you have no other option than putting in sacrificial material even if you use toughest nickel alloys, and there only is so much of it you can use.
Sodium is actually very compatible with normal structural stainless steels. E.g. when the steam generators for EBR2 were dismantled after 30 years of operation the sodium side were as if brand new.
Money he had but like his other action sometimes ill conceived due to scale.
Yes, we have ITER going, but it's not really built efficiently: exact same parts are manufactured on the opposite sides of the world.
But the unreachable areas are sometimes not that unreachable. Look at the space industry companies. If you ignore the flagship ones that popped up in a scale of mere years then moving out in your lifetime looks like a pipe dream too.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Bill-G...
Geoff Bezos has as well. As do Y Combinator.
There has been quite a growth in private Fusion funding in the past few years:
https://www.cleantech.com/fusion-energy-innovation-accelerat...
Windows isn't what it used to be in 1999. And desktop Linux QA standards are nothing to write home about, unfortunately.
If you look at the wider eco system, Windows doesn't look so hot. I've just moved from a Linux based work place to a Windows based work place. The number of times the main file server has to be restarted because it's doing something weird is crazy. This never happened at my old job. The Linux servers were only turned off for hardware changes. They didn't require constant restarts. If something went wrong I was able to trace the problem down and prevent it from happening again. In windows everything is opaque. Some unexplained regedit is suggested for every problem and no one seems to know what those edits actually do.
They have improved the document recovery quite a lot in the last two years, but they still manage to make the process rather confusing, so sometimes I accidentally save the version with the lost data instead of the other.
OpenOffice had this figured out some 15 years ago. I never lost data to OpenOffice, and I was running it on a laptop (essentially) without a battery.
I tried to say it in the least snarky way I could.
I am seriously concerned about nuclear power plants that bluescreen.
We can already reach 90% renewables by 2035 without these reactors [1]. If they get built, that’d be great, but they won’t be built in time to avert climate change. TerraPower has existed for 14 years and still hasn’t built a reactor. For comparison, the Kamuthi solar facility in Tamil Nadu, India, has a total generation capacity of 648 MW, covers 10 sq km and took 8 months to build. This work can be parallelized; more generation capacity deployed in the same time or faster with more people. Portugal just had a historic bid close for a 700MW solar facility at 1.3 cents/kWh. Nuclear cannot compete against such economics, even when storage is factored in to enable firm dispatch of renewable energy.
"Wind, solar, and battery storage can provide the bulk of the 90 percent clean electricity. The report finds that new fossil fuel generators are not needed. Existing gas plants, used infrequently and combined with storage, hydropower, and nuclear power, are sufficient to meet demand during periods of extraordinarily low renewable energy generation or exceptionally high electricity demand."
If you break ground on a new reactor this moment, it won’t generate its first kw for years. Historically, over a decade, but folks handwave that cutting regulation and red tape would speed up the process, so I say years to be generous.
The real challenges in nuclear power plant construction are the total lack of economies of scale. Nobody wants a bloody $30 billion plant. People want 10 plants for that price.
There is nothing to even imply that we will reach 90% renewables by 2035. To be fighting over which non-fossil fueled energy source is more economical is just a distraction. There need to be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants. Expand solar and wind production as if they were tanks and munitions during world war 2. Build as many nuclear reactors we can from the current pool of educated nuclear professionals. Throw in some battery technology from tesla, hydro pumps, compressed air, EV transition, dynamic grid, or what else is left that do not depend on burning fossil fuels. Set the date of 2035 as the day we ban burning fossil fuel in the power grid and let the market decide how to deal with it.
That is how we avert climate change.