Bill Gates funds next gen Nuclear Power plant

[n2doc]

Bill Gates: Billions for next-gen nuclear
Bill Gates plans to commit billions in a partnership between Toshiba and next-generation nuclear company TerraPower.
Wed, Mar 24 2010 at 5:45 AM EST

After releasing fireflies onto his audience at this year's TED conference, Bill Gates announced his plans to fund a viable, next-generation nuclear technology called traveling-wave reactor (TWR). And now Gates has announced an exploration between TerraPower, a TWR nuclear company he largely funds, and Toshiba Corporation, a leader in the commercial nuclear power business.

TWR has been theorized for decades as a cheaper and safer alternative to typical fission reactors, but until now the supercomputers required to make such technology possible were simply not affordable. It is thus no coincidence that Gates has found the perfect match for both his humanitarian and technological aims.

The TWR prototype developed by TerraPower will rely upon Microsoft's supercomputing prowess and a whole lot of computer hardware — 1,024 Xeon core processors assembled on 128 blade servers offering “over 1000 times the computational ability as a desktop computer.”

This may be one of the first times I'm actually excited about nuclear energy. In one of my original posts called The 6 Myths of Nuclear Energy, I clearly lay out all the reasons why today's version of nuclear technology is simply not viable — too expensive, too dangerous, too water-consuming, too politically destabilizing, and on and on. There are so many reasons NOT to fund current nuclear reactor technologies even with the advancements that have been made over the last decade.

But TWR is a real game-changer. Instead of requiring enriched uranium, TWR can burn depleted uranium and other low-grade radioactive fuel stocks. It can also burn them for a long, long time. In TWR, a long-term reaction is created in which the waste from breeding the fuel is recombined to create more fuel inside the reactor. Theoretically, a nuclear reactor could operate for 100 years without changing the fuel rods, and the resultant waste would be much less radioactive than the waste of our modern-day reactors.

more:

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/bill-gates-billions-for-next-gen-nuclear#

[NNadir]

1. Really? Some mindless guy who worships Billionaires thinks today's nuclear power is too dangerous?

Maybe he's located as many people who were killed by nuclear power in this country who were killed by trucks hauling giant loads of semiconductor based consumer shit around.

Nuclear power doesn't need Bill Gates's imprimatur to be safer than all the stuff this guy doesn't care about.

Nuclear power plants were operating safely before Bill Gates stopped wearing diapers. It's a mature technology that has produced hundreds of exajoules of energy without a single loss of life.

I hate it when stupid people damn with faint praise.

[Statistical]

2. The "safer" claim was made by article's author.

I watched Gates speech at TED. He doesn't make safer claim. His reason for supporting TWR is simply scale.

Solar & Wind will never provide a majority of power. To completely come of fossil fuels will requires thousands of reactors. They can't all be PWR/BWR or we will exhaust uranium too rapidly. Reprocessing can lengthen fuel supply but nuclear fuel can only be reprocessed so much before building up of neutron poisons makes it ineffective in a moderated (thermal) reactor.

So new reactor designs will need to be added to the mix:
Fast Breeder is one option
Thermal Breeder of Thorium is another
Traveling Wave Reactor is a third option

Since a Traveling Wave Reactor is a self breeder it can be loaded with a tiny amount of enriched uranium (or plutonium) as a seed plus 100 years worth of Depleted Uranium.
We have thousands of tons of Depleted Uranium looking for a use. TWR would actually work in tandem with current PWR/BWR. As part of enrichment fabrication of PWR/BWR fuel DU is produced and that DU can be burned up in TWR. We extract more of the potential energy from each kg of uranium mined.

Likely a combination of all 4 types of reactors will provide best utilization of our nuclear fuel on a long term scale (200 years).