Bill Gates disses efficiency, “cute” solar, deployment — still doesn’t know how he got rich

[kristopher]

Pro-geoengineering Bill Gates disses efficiency, “cute” solar, deployment — still doesn’t know how he got rich
On why he invests so much in nuke R&D: “The good news about nuclear is that there has hardly been any innovation.”
By Joe Romm on May 5, 2011 at 7:32 pm

Is there any super-rich tech geek who knows less about WTF he is talking about than Bill Gates? Bizarrely, he keeps dissing technology deployment as a source of innovation, even though that’s how he innovated and got rich (see below).

Even more bizarrely, Gates loves nuclear power because … wait for it … there’s been no innovation. He just said at the Wired business conference:

“The good news about nuclear is that there has hardly been any innovation. The room to do things differently is quite dramatic”

Seriously. That must hold the record for trying to make lemonade out of lemons. It is certainly possible to believe that the lack of innovation in nuclear power is due to, oh, I don’t know, businesses simply sleeping on the job for the past 30 years.

Or perhaps there is another reason, as a 2010 paper argued (see Does nuclear power have a negative learning curve? ‘Forgetting by doing’? Real escalation in reactor investment costs): “It may be more productive to start asking whether these trends are not intrinsic to the very nature of the technology itself: large-scale, lumpy, and requiring a formidable ability to manage complexity in both construction and operation.”

But it isn’t enough for Gates to tout...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/05/05/208032/bill-gates-efficiency-cute-solar/

[diane in sf]

1. Gates is kind of an idiot savant.

[bananas]

2. He's gotten some bad advice from Nathan Myhrvold

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/

An open letter to Steve Levitt
Filed under: Communicating Climate Reporting on climate — raypierre @ 29 October 2009

Dear Mr. Levitt,

<snip>

As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.

Let’s do the thought experiment of building a solar array to generate the entire world’s present electricity consumption, and see what the extra absorption of sunlight by the array does to climate.

<snip calculations>

That’s a square 231 kilometers on a side, or about the size of a single cell of a typical general circulation model grid box. If we put it on the globe, it looks like this:



So already you should be beginning to suspect that this is a pretty trivial part of the Earth’s surface, and maybe unlikely to have much of an effect on the overall absorbed sunlight. In fact, it’s only 0.01% of the Earth’s surface. The numbers I used to do this calculation can all be found in Wikipedia, or even in a good paperbound World Almanac.

But we should go further, and look at the actual amount of extra solar energy absorbed.

<snip>

[kristopher]

3. If so, I doubt it actually related to the effectiveness of renewables.

More likely any discussion between those Gates and Myhrvold on the topic of energy dealt with how to put a chokepoint in the energy generation delivery process so that they could make more money. Which, of course, is one of the major characteristics of centralized thermal generation; a characteristic would become even more pronounced if the technical expertise required for any type of nuclear were to be a factor in reducing competition.

This sounds similar to the Righthaven copyright scam DU had to deal with.

Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures Using Over 1,000 Shell Companies To Hide Patent Shakedown
from the incredibly-lame dept

It's no secret that we think Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures is a dangerous, innovation harming monstrosity. The company used a bait and switch scheme to get a bunch of big tech companies to fund it, not realizing that they were then going to be targets of his shakedown system. Basically, IV buys up (or in some cases, applies for) tons of patents, and then demands huge cash outlays from those same companies (often hundreds of millions of dollars) for a combined promise not to sue over those patents and (here's the sneaky bit) a bit of a pyramid scheme, where those in early supposedly get a cut of later deals. Of course, to just talk to IV requires strict NDAs, so the details of these deals are kept under wraps and only leaked out anonymously. But the hundreds of millions of dollars going towards this sort of trolling behavior, rather than any actual innovation in the marketplace can be seen on various financial filings (you can't hide hundreds of millions of dollars in payments that easily).

Now, for years, Myhrvold tried to avoid the term "patent troll," by claiming that IV had never actually sued anyone. Two years ago, though, it seemed clear that the company was on the verge of breaking out the lawsuits. However, the company still hasn't been directly linked to a lawsuit. Late last year, though, some eagle-eyed reporters noticed that IV patents were showing up in lawsuits, but those lawsuits were from different companies. Reading between the lines, it became clear that IV had decided to protect its brand name by getting other companies or creating those companies itself, giving the patent to those other companies that no one had ever heard of, and having them sue. This is a very common practice among patent hoarders. They set up shell companies for their lawsuits, that often make it difficult to track back who actually owns what patents. It's all a shell game to extort more money.

The NY Times is now running yet another profile (they do this every two years or so) of Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures that covers the usual bogus claims by Myhrvold about how he's creating "invention capital," with very little skepticism. However, it does reveal one interesting tidbit that we had missed. Last year, a research firm released a report highlighting that Intellectual Ventures has up to 1,110 shell companies, with which it can hide its activities. No wonder IV can pretend it doesn't sue anyone. It can simply hide behind its shell companies...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml

[jonthebru]

4. He is actually correct.

Once they got to the point of creating weapons grade plutonium from the reactors the research basically settled on that. There was research done on other nuclear power generation that could be much safer but because those methods didn't help build the bombs they were not fully developed.

[kristopher]

5. No he isn't.

Thorium is a scam and that particular piece of rationalization you are using doesn't pass the smell test.
There is a thorium fuel cycle - true.
It can be made to work - true.

But that is as far as it goes. There is a very competitive environment for vendors of nuclear power and if there were a fuel cycle that was better overall at addressing the cost, waste, safety and proliferation issues then it would be available for sale so that someone could be cornering the market with that "better mousetrap".

This rational - put forth by the those who want federal money for their personal gain - is on a par with claims that automakers are suppressing 100mpg cars that run on water.