Bill Gates and the 'nuclear Renaissance'

[OnePimpTiger]

Bill Gates and the 'nuclear Renaissance'

...Gates -- a father of the personal computer and quite the tech powerhouse -- said one of the brightest hopes for clean, cheap power is a new form of nuclear power plant that reuses waste uranium from existing nuclear reactors...

...Some nuclear scientists and critics say the nuclear technology Gates highlighted is misguided, naive and expensive.

Others, like Craig Smith, a nuclear engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said Gates is helping put the world on the verge of a "nuclear Renaissance" that could provide cheap power for everyone in the world -- forever...

...Most nuclear power plants today use radioactive elements like uranium to create nuclear fission and then produce electricity.

One problem: That reaction leaves behind uranium waste. To make matters worse, the United States hasn't identified a safe place to store the waste from the country's 104 nuclear reactors in the long term.

That's where the technology promoted by Gates comes in.

Gates has invested tens of millions of dollars in a Bellevue, Washington, company called TerraPower, according to TerraPower CEO John Gilleland.

TerraPower is working to create nuclear reactors that generate hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.

This has a number of potential benefits, Gilleland said. Among them:

• The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.

• The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.

Gilleland said it's not a matter of if the technology works.

"It's going to work -- for sure," he said. "The question will be precisely how well and how economically. But right now there are lots of people in the world who think it could begin to see common application in the 2020s."

Very impressive, if it does work. And it joys me to no end to see possible advances like this coming from private sector investment.

[mikesilvia]

I just looked and TerraPower is not public, or I would consider an investment!

[OnePimpTiger]

I've been wishing I had some money to invest in nuclear energy. Even before Obama's announcement, it was looking like a pretty pick.