Bill Gates Sees Future in Nuclear Energy

[Music] the next miracle these are or so far is nuclear energy not particularly popular right now in Japan and Germany and it never been that popular even France the France French public is more negative towards nuclear energy than the US public so even though they're what 70 70 percent of electricity we have more nuclear plants than they do we have over 100 nuclear plants of the 400 in the world so we are the biggest in absolute nuclear electricity generator but yeah but you were personally investing in nuclear right so the plants that are out in the world today are basically generation 1 and 2 plants there's a few generation 3 plants including at the conference Westinghouse Toshiba talked about the ap1000 which is a gen 3 plant that and the Arriba EP are are the two gen 3 plants I think you can build a lot ap 1000s and I think partly because what the Chinese are doing that has by far the inside track a lot of those can get built so that you know Chinese have this goal of 80 gigawatts assuming there's no more accidents that that actually can be done unfortunately because their demand increases so great it only gets you up to at most say 12% best case of Chinese energy the thing I'm investing in and not because I expect to make a ton of money on it it's because it I think because it's zero co2 because the economics are so good is a fourth generation design and there are many fourth generation designs this one is very very attractive from an economic point of view I mean way cheaper than today's no can you we had Nathan Myhrvold here last year but can you explain a little bit about how this technology works okay basically it was you're just among friends here yeah absolutely the part of uranium that's fissile that is that you when you hit it with a neutron it splits in two is about 0.7% and when you break in you Andy - you get a million times as much energy as you do from burning a carbon molecule so you think wow this is good technology it's a million times better now you have to take that factor of a million advantage and say oh crumb that stuff that it splits into that's radioactive that's cesium's bad stop some short half-lives that means it's intensely radioactive some long half-lives that means that it's around for a long time so basically the reactors we have today are burning that 0.7% and that works fairly well there was a concept a long time ago that you would do a different type of reactor called the fast reactor that would make a bunch of another element called plutonium and then you would pull that out and then you would burn that that's called breeding in a fast reactor that is bad because assume plutonium's nuclear weapons material it's messy this the processing you have to get through is not only environmentally difficult it's extremely expensive the concept of this so-called Terra power reactor is that you in the same reactor you both burn and breed and so instead of making plutonium and then extracting it we take uranium the part that you the 99.3% that you normally don't do anything with we convert that and we burn it so it's like a candle a candle wax doesn't burn it room temperature it's the flame converts it to be a liquid and that burn so this is just like a candle our flame is taking the normal depleted uranium that 99.3% that's cheap as heck and there's a pile of it sitting in Paducah Kentucky that's enough to power the United States for hundreds and hundreds of years you're taking that and you're converting it to plutonium and then you're burning that and we have super high power densities we have you know total Fiat failsafe any reactor that a human has to do something that's a little scary what's the scale is scale important here or is it the same are the Terra power reactor the current design is about the same scale that is a typically it's somewhere around gigawatt type design because of the surface-to-volume ratio things the first design we're doing doesn't scale down very well now we have another design that works for the smaller type for more like a hundred megawatt two hundred megawatt design but our first design which on paper really works well and one thing to point out is that digital simulation and this applies all these energy technologies the ability to digitally simulate things is night and day different than in the past when they built say the reactor at Fukushima their ability to simulate things was very limited they wouldn't really know we take our reactor we you know we have magnitude 10 earthquakes we have volcanoes blow over we have tidal waves passing by and we look and we say whoa okay let's put some more concrete in you can understand what's going to happen digitally in a way that you never could before and so the idea of full passive safety gen3 takes us to much much much better passive safety not full passive safety Jen for whoever's Jen for gets built will be a no human required you know no zirconium turning into hydrogen to explode type design timetable for Terra power okay this is really fast it's not you're going to be amazed by 2022 if everything goes perfectly our demo reactor will be in place and by 2028 again assuming everything continues to go perfectly it will be a design that could be replicated and built in many many many places you could build at that point because you have no fuel constraint and according to me you have extremely good economics good safety no proliferation of waste then you could you could go if you could go nuts if everything goes perfectly absolutely how often does everything go perfectly in nuclear oh well you know if you ignore no no come on if you ignore 1979 and 1986 and 2011 come on we've had a good century seriously I mean in terms of raw figures you know coal mining natural gas more people die I mean it wasn't far from here and natural gas you know pipe blew up and incinerated people and so you know it's it's important to keep in perspective that nuclear energy in terms of a overall safety record is better than other other energy okay so we

Channel: Wall Street Journal

Views: 83,660

Rating: 4.8156381 out of 5

Keywords: Bill Gates, nuclear, Nuclear Power (Industry), power plants

Id: _HxI3-DzPWU

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2012