Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and, more recently, a philanthropist tackling AIDS and malaria is now turning his attention to clean energy. Last Friday, he spoke at the TED Talks in Long Beach, CA and told the audience, "If I only had only one wish for the next 50 years, it'd be to invent the thing that halves the cost of CO2."
That one thing seems to be nuclear power.
Gates has invested tens of millions of dollars in Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower, a nuclear reactor company launched on a design called traveling wave reactor. (He's also a principal owner of the company.)
There's a fantastic write up on Earth2Tech about how the traveling wave nuclear reactor works. In short:
TerraPower uses a small amount of enriched uranium at the beginning of the process (see slides at the bottom of the post), but then the nuclear reactor runs on the waste product and can make and consume its own fuel. The benefits are that the reactor doesn’t have to be refueled or have its waste removed until the end of life of the reactor (theoretically a couple hundred years). Using waste uranium reduces the amount of waste in the overall nuclear life cycle, and extends the available supply of the world’s uranium for nuclear by many times.
And just yesterday, the Obama administration announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new nuclear power plants in Georgia.
If nuclear power could be made safe and run without producing all of that nasty waste, then I think it could be a viable option.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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