Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-we-g...

I live in Albany, NY about 80 miles from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, a Mark 1 GE reactor whose operator has a history of bad practices, like operating at 120% of capacity for extended periods and regularly releasing tritium into the Connecticut River. The facility has exceeded it's service life, and the operator is suing the State of Vermont for a license extension to make some more money on the place before having to clean up the site.

While coal plants in Ohio and Western NY probably pose a greater health hazard, there are other risks as well -- if a black swan event causes a serious incident at this aging facility, I live just outside of the "no humans allowed" zone. My family and relatives are in that radius and would be financially ruined by such an event.

I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner. I want aging reactors replaced by designs where operating safety was a bigger consideration in the design of the reactor. Operating these facilities with a bias towards making money for the operator is not in the public's interest.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

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

Current nuclear reactors basically suck because they are the children of war ! They wanted to make a big scary bomb first. No surprise they chose the most dangerous element ! It's the same thing as why space flight is so expensive. Each communications satellite has to be the shape of a hydrogen bomb.

Thorium reactors are still in research phase. However, take a look at these quick bits from Wikipedia:

  - Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.
  - just 8 tablespoons of thorium could provide the energy used by an American during his or her lifetime.
  - there is no possibility of a meltdown
  - it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles
  - Weapons-grade fissionable material (233U) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor
  - Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste
  - Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235
  - Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming, so fission stops by default.
  - However, unlike uranium-based breeder reactors, thorium requires a start-up by neutrons from a uranium reactor. But experts note that "the second thorium reactor may activate a third thorium reactor
  - Thorium is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about four times more abundant than uranium, and is about as common as lead
  - Thorium-containing minerals occur on all continents.

In that case, most of the deaths & cost that occurred in the past would come from the single most sever accident (and this seems to be the case [1])

Moreover, the worse accident (Chernobyl) is not a good guide of how bad things can go: if the probability distribution of number of deaths per accident is fat tailed, then if an accident occurs that is worse than Chernobyl it will probably be much worse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents

It's a valid concern, but we seem to fixate on the health dangers when coal kills many times more during normal operation and gets a free pass.

Currently solar power is getting much cheaper and more practical. Same thing with wind power. We also have a natural gas which recently has been getting cheaper as large new discoveries are being made.

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel but it is much much cleaner than coal both in terms of health pollutants and in terms of CO2. There are some issues with natural gas extraction, but even if the various environmentally damaging methods of mining the stuff get banned as they should, we still have plenty of natural gas from new discoveries to last us for the foreseeable future.

Thus, we can use natural gas while solar and wind catch up price wise, which will happen sooner than we think. Solar especially is improving faster than anyone thought. Then we can still use natural gas for occasions where solar and wind aren't working.

So the coal/nuclear argument is a false dichotomy. We can have neither. Of course we should run the current nuclear plants until the end of their lives, but there is no reason to build new ones unless some revolutionary technology that makes everything much safer emerges. I would say the only new nuclear plants we should build are ones that burn the waste of the old ones, because those would technically make things safer by removing waste.

This would make the storage of waste a lot more manageable.

The reactor can be installed in a relatively safe place and far from any habitants. This is different from Japan which has relatively a smaller and more dangerous land.

It's about as relevant as any random person on the internet.

My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.

We need a better long term solution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

I'll wait for the next option, thanks.

DO you know why originally Nuclear power was pushed as a safe energy source?

To make nuclear weapons, they needed a guaranteed supply of raw fuel material. All nuclear plants with the exception of some recent designs which get further away from this produce nuclear material that is ideal to use in nuclear weapons.

It had very little due with any actual safety concerns.

It is one of the most extreme hazards forced on the world by the industrial-military complexes of all nations.

Lets stop calling it safe and call it what it is in reality..in fact a experimental way to generate energy that is somewhat dangerous.

Conflict of interests. Move on, people.