The Atomic dreams of William Henry Gates III
The billionaire bard of Bellevue believes nuclear has to be a part of any short-term climate change solution. He's betting a lot of his own money to make it happen.
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Nobody can ever accuse Bill Gates of being a Billy-come-lately to the battle against climate change or the increasingly rancorous debate about nuclear energy’s role—if any—in solving the problem.
Back in the early 2000s, Gates began focusing his attention beyond Microsoft toward a future agenda of ambitious socially significant projects that he wanted to take on once he left the company. None were bigger or more significant than limiting carbon emissions and finding alternatives to fossil fuel. He quickly realized that betting that the electricity grid of the future would be powered solely by solar, wind, and hydropower was—while theoretically possible—unlikely to happen within a time-frame that would avert a global warming catastrophe. Then, as today, renewables make up a tiny part of the grid, and battery storage for days when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow is still limited.
The only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day, he realized, is nuclear which, at the time, seemed to be a dying industry because of the mammoth costs of building new plants, the fear of disposing of radioactive waste, and a handful of high-profile accidents that had made the industry “feel” more dangerous than it actually is.
Gates began talking to former Microsoft executives Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, who had formed a private investment partnership called Intellectual Investments to fund edgy and innovative startups, and they put him in touch with astrophysicist Lowell Wood who was working with Edmund Teller to try to revive a 60-year-old idea of a Russian physicist named Saveli Feinberg, who suggested at the Second International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva in 1958, that it would be possible to construct a reactor that produced its own fuel.
The result of those contacts is that in 2006, the year he sort of retired from Microsoft, Gates became the primary investor in TerraPower, a branch of Intellectual Ventures, that is currently working on developing a Traveling-Wave Reactor (TWR). He is also the company’s chairman.
TWRs are what are called breed-and-burn reactors. They are fueled, for the most part, by uranium waste. A small amount of enriched uranium is needed to get started, but it then runs on the waste, making and consuming its own fuel. The simplest analogy is a candle which once lit, burns very slowly from the top in an advancing wave until all the wax is consumed The beauty of this design is that enriched rods don’t have to be removed, disposed of, and replaced every year and a half to two years. In principle, a TWR can run for decades without refueling.
I say, in principle, because nobody’s actually tested TWRs in a real-life situation yet.
If all goes as planned, that’s about to change. Last October, the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) awarded TerraPower, in partnership with GE Hitachi and X-energy, a Rockville, MD startup $80 million each in initial funding to build two advanced nuclear reactors that can be operational within seven years.
Both of the winning designs differ fundamentally from nuclear reactors of the past. In a conventional power reactor, the energy heats highly pressurized “cooling” water that circulates through the core and flows to an external steam generator, where it boils water in a separate circuit, producing steam that drives turbines to generate electricity.
The planned reactor from TerraPower and GE Hitachi, which is branded Natrium, Latin for “sodium’, uses molten sodium metal as a coolant. Because sodium has a much higher boiling temperature than water, the coolant does not have to be pressurized, which should greatly reduce the plant’s complexity and cost.
The sodium transfers its heat to molten salt, which flows directly to a steam generator or a storage tank, to be held to generate steam and electricity later. That would allow the Natrium plant to quickly ratchet up or down its total output, unlike conventional reactors, and facilitate backing up fluctuating renewable sources such as wind and solar energy.
Energy-X uses a fuel called Triso, which is short for “tristructural isotropic,” made from a mixture of low enriched uranium and oxygen surrounded by three alternating layers of graphite and a ceramic called silicon carbide. Each particle is smaller than a birdseed, but its layered shell can protect the uranium inside from melting under even the most extreme conditions.
So far, Triso has proven to be meltdown proof which may prove decisive for the future of nuclear energy since sodium has had some serious problems that TerraPower will need to overcome. Japan’s Monju plant caught fire in 1995 as a result of leakage of liquid sodium coolant and was closed down permanently in 2016.
The awards are cost-shared partnerships with industry that promise to deliver two first-of-a-kind advanced reactors to be licensed for commercial operations. DOE will invest a total of $3.2 billion over seven years, subject to the availability of future appropriations, with the industry partners providing matching funds.
Just as importantly, the DOE announced in February 2019 that it is building a Versatile Test Reactor (VTR), to be completed by 2026. The effort is being led by Idaho National Laboratory in partnership with five national laboratories (Argonne, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Savannah River) and a host of industry and university partners
The DOE’s push to revive the moribund nuclear energy industry may prove to just be another example of pissing in the wind, to quote the great Jerry Jeff Walker. There have been several attempts in the past that have failed but you have to admire the tenacity of supporters like Bill Gates who believe fervently thatnuclear energy has to be a player if we’re going to beat climate change, at least in the short term.
I stumbled across an article in Power magazine from March 27, 2010 which contained these pessimistic remarks about TWRs and TerraPower in specific:
Problems? Plenty. First, the traveling wave reactor doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s entirely hypothetical. That means it will require years, maybe decades, to see it if works, requiring scarce Department of Energy (taxpayers) dollars. Nobody in the real world would fund this research at the scale required to get a legitimate test reactor running.
Bill Gates apparently didn’t get the memo.
Note: If you have thoughts about whether it’s possible to get to net-zero without nukes before 2050, leave a comment or email me and maybe I’ll quote you as a source in a future post on the topic.
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Dig Deeper
The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World
How It Works: Traveling-Wave Reactor
Traveling Wave Reactors: Wave Goodbye
Department of Energy picks two advanced nuclear reactors for demonstration projects
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Why we have to stop worrying and learn to love nuclear energy