Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/03/bill-gates-nuclear/

by k33l0r • 15 years ago

84 102 15 years ago

vibragiel6• 15 years ago

By some estimates, nuclear would be among the safest energy sources (in deaths by TWh, one of the few honest ways of comparing the risks), even safer than wind and rooftop solar power.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

vlisivka• 15 years ago

If we will blow up our planet by huge bomb, it might be even safer (in deaths by TWh, one of the few honest ways of comparing the risks).

Derbasti3• 15 years ago

What kind of numbers did this estimate use as 'deaths by nuclear power'? I bet they used that two-digit death toll for Chernobyl. Look it up on Wikipedia. Estimates range from less than a hundred to one million deaths.

vibragiel6• 15 years ago

You don't need to bet when you can just read.

Duff6• 15 years ago

With most energy generation schemes, including nuclear, many costs and risks are externalized to a third party -- namely the taxpayer.

I'm not familiar enough with the methodology to dispute it's finding regarding deaths, but I'd argue that evaluating risks solely on the number of attributable deaths is not a full accounting of risk.

What is the economic and social impact of the 20 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima? You're looking at a handful of deaths, but many lives have been affected nonetheless. If my rooftop solar panel kills my family somehow, that is a personal tragedy, but the scope in terms of people affected is nothing like a rare, but catastrophic nuclear failure.

vibragiel6• 15 years ago

That's a valid argument, but this thread is all about human safety.

neutronicus4• 15 years ago

You can say similar things about coal and strip-mining.

plesn• 15 years ago

Many things are "externalized" in the process and we are pretty naive about risk.

Do we count the cost of side-effects like wars and oppression in our energy ? Think about Libya for oil or Niger for Uranium. Do we count the cost for democracy of the impact of energy lobbies ? Centralized production entails centralized structures which often have a tremendous influence (in France there was never ever any democratic feedback loop about nuclear energy).

The cynical view though is that this is nothing compared to other "industrial risks" and to the insiduous and continuous risk we are producing by saturating our planet with garbage.

chrismealy• 15 years ago

Is there a HN section for "Rich Man Has Opinions"?

michaelchisari• 15 years ago

The biggest issue with catastrophes like Fukushima aren't the deaths (which will be few), but the costs of the cleanup, which are enormous.

It's a valid concern, but we seem to fixate on the health dangers when coal kills many times more during normal operation and gets a free pass.

rimantas2• 15 years ago

Please tell, who cleans after coal powerplants which polute while in normal working mode?

http://nuclearfissionary.com/2010/06/09/energy-density-and-w...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...

paganel2• 15 years ago

> Gates is putting his money where his mouth is. He is an investor in his friend Nathan Myrhvold’s nuclear reactor startup Terrapower,

Conflict of interests. Move on, people.

sigzero• 15 years ago

Self-serving you mean. However, anyone would invest in something and promote it if they believe in it.

paganel2• 15 years ago

> However, anyone would invest in something and promote it if they believe in it.

Yeah, you're right, but then again, the title should have been more like "Atomic Industry Investor Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer", because right now I tend to read it more like "Renowned philanthropist Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer"

rfrey• 15 years ago

By this standard we should not read a VC who is writing about a portfolio company, or in extremis, a founder talking about her company.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Good TED talk by Gates explaining his vision for nuclear. Basically, fill up old missile silos with nuclear waste, and burn it from the top down. The waste is disposed of, heat energy is produced that can be harnessed, and there are no significant by-products (iirc). Very interesting, I'd never heard of that before, worth watching.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

chadgeidel2• 15 years ago

Can't watch the video here at work, but wouldn't burning nuclear waste be energy-intensive? I assume you have to turn it to plasma to eliminate any radioactive byproducts.

joegester• 15 years ago

That's not really what he means. I'm pretty sure, he's talking about creating special nuclear reactors to do the job and generate power at the same time.

A plasma is basically a just a gas where the atoms have no electrons. To get rid of nuclear waste, you need to get the nuclei to split into less volatile isotopes.

neutronicus4• 15 years ago

The most long-lived class of nuclear waste, transuranics, is produced by neutron activation of Uranium-238 (~95% by mass) found in the low-enriched uranium used in power reactors. If you remove these nuclides from spent fuel by chemical separation and place them either into a Thorium (Uranium-233, really) reactor or a highly-enriched U-235 reactor, the transuranics will continue to absorb neutrons until they reach mass numbers where they spontaneously fission, and, since there is no U-238, there won't be any new transuranics.

Something of this nature is usually what is meant when people say "burn nuclear waste".

There will still be the other kind of nuclear waste, namely fission products, but their half-lives are on the order of decades instead of centuries.

state_machine2• 15 years ago

Apparently, TerraPower's TWR design doesn't actually burn from the top down like a candle anymore. I guess it's easier to put all the cooling apparati around one criticality region and then move the fuel through.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor#Travelli...

swaits• 15 years ago

I wonder what would happen if we spent the same $/KWh on making coal safe, as we do on nuclear?

hristov3• 15 years ago

We spend shitloads of money on trying to make coal safe. If you listen carefully to budget proposals there are always a lot of money allocated on "clean coal" research.

Unfortunately, it all goes nowhere because there is no way to make it safe. Burning stuff is an old and well understood process, there is just no way to burn stuff in a radically different way. You can use filters of course but the coal pollutants are so small and the smoke is so much filtering gets too expensive. Coal plants do have filters but they do not catch many of the thousands of pollutants that result from burning coal. And filtering cannot take away the CO2 gas.

So our only option is to trap the gas underground, which is pretty much impossible. Thus, safe coal becomes a mirage that is always a couple of years away but you can never get to.

It is clear that we spend less money on safe coal than we do on nuclear. Nuclear receives enormous amounts of subsidies. Most of the budget of the DoE is devoted to nuclear in one way or another. But it is pretty clear that even if we spent more money on coal it would not get us anywhere.

binarray2000• 15 years ago

Interesting article and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2509538

csomar• 15 years ago

Bill Gates here seems to be talking about the world in general, however, for the USA I don't see a high risk for nuclear energy.

The reactor can be installed in a relatively safe place and far from any habitants. This is different from Japan which has relatively a smaller and more dangerous land.

stcredzero• 15 years ago

I could imagine the Daily Show's faux promo video: "Coal. It kills less people at a time! Politicians love it!"

vaspers• 15 years ago

If you think nuke energy is "safe", may we deposit the radioactive waste in your backyard?

enko3• 15 years ago

Sure. Just pay me the several billion dollars earmarked to design, construct and manage secure long term storage facilities and I'll deal with it.

Snoddas• 15 years ago

Yes of course... As soon as you collect all those carbon-dioxides you seem to have misplaced in my atmosphere.

matwood2• 15 years ago

I would love for you do that if you also exempt me from outdated laws that were made in the 70s/80s. The 'waste' isotopes are a $4B+/year business.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690627522614525.html

The fact of the matter is that our outdated laws lead to a lot of waste that really isn't waste. The example of France in the article is very telling.

What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.

alphaBetaGamma• 15 years ago

If you think that nuclear power has a fair amount of tail risk (very small probabilities of catastrophic accidents) then any safety considerations based on historical data is meaningless.

In that case, most of the deaths & cost that occurred in the past would come from the single most sever accident (and this seems to be the case [1])

Moreover, the worse accident (Chernobyl) is not a good guide of how bad things can go: if the probability distribution of number of deaths per accident is fat tailed, then if an accident occurs that is worse than Chernobyl it will probably be much worse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents

shasta• 15 years ago

People commonly make this same mistake when stating "the odds of being killed in a terrorist attack."

neutronicus4• 15 years ago

Chernobyl is a lot worse than anything that could happen today.

Duff6• 15 years ago

I'd accept that nuclear can be safer, if I had any faith in the operational model for the plants.

I live in Albany, NY about 80 miles from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, a Mark 1 GE reactor whose operator has a history of bad practices, like operating at 120% of capacity for extended periods and regularly releasing tritium into the Connecticut River. The facility has exceeded it's service life, and the operator is suing the State of Vermont for a license extension to make some more money on the place before having to clean up the site.

While coal plants in Ohio and Western NY probably pose a greater health hazard, there are other risks as well -- if a black swan event causes a serious incident at this aging facility, I live just outside of the "no humans allowed" zone. My family and relatives are in that radius and would be financially ruined by such an event.

I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner. I want aging reactors replaced by designs where operating safety was a bigger consideration in the design of the reactor. Operating these facilities with a bias towards making money for the operator is not in the public's interest.

bgentry• 15 years ago

I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner.

A quasi-military / government organization operating transparently? Good luck with that.

Derbasti3• 15 years ago

Any technology that makes human interaction and even plain observation impossible in the event of failure is a bad thing.

To my mind, No One can be responsible for something that is impossible to control when things go bad. It is not that I don't trust engineers, but you can not compare profit vs. risk when you can not control risk.

tjogin3• 15 years ago

Sure it's a bad thing, but how can anyone possibly rationalize away the fact that coal plants kill more people than nuclear plants per kilowatt hour produced?

For every one person killed by nuclear plants, thousands die because of coal, and other kinds of power plants don't stack up well against nuclear either.

jrockway3• 15 years ago

My family and relatives are in that radius and would be financially ruined by such an event.

Isn't this exactly the case that insurance is designed for? A catastrophic event that is exceedingly unlikely to happen?

Duff6• 15 years ago

Nope. Insurance companies explicitly exclude these type of events. That should tell you something -- insurance companies don't like open-ended, catastrophic risk.

saraid216• 15 years ago

<i>I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner.</i>

The lack of people who can reliably operate in a perfectly incorruptible governing capacity, whether governing people, budgets, or nuclear power plants, is precisely why we had to invent democracy.

If you find a non-profit, quasi-military like organization working in a transparent manner, give them the freaking world.

msluyter• 15 years ago

I think the general aversion to nuclear is explained in part by our tendency to overestimate the risk of rare, catastrophic events and underestimate the risk of everyday events. This is precisely why we tend to fear flying more than driving, although the latter is far more dangerous. Ezra Klein has a nice summary of this phenomenon today, "How We Get Risk Wrong":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-we-g...

vibragiel6• 15 years ago

Not to mention the generous amount of non-nuclear catastrophic industrial events that already happen from time to time. Oddly enough, nuclear still has a worse reputation than hidroelectric energy, the chemical industry or coal burning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease

rimantas2• 15 years ago

I'd say there are lots of people who think that nuclear power plant can explode like nuclear bomb.

serichsen• 15 years ago

Heh, yeah. It is hilarious at first sight, but this misconception is actually common.

Adam5032• 15 years ago

Doesn't need to blow up like a nuke to kill 10% of the population inside the quarantined zone within 10 years from cancer caused by radiation exposure.

ck2• 15 years ago

Why the heck do we care about Bill Gates' opinion on nuclear power?

It's about as relevant as any random person on the internet.

My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.

jrockway3• 15 years ago

My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.

Their solution is to turn off your electricity. Hope you enjoy your hand-cranked laptop.

alecco• 15 years ago

It's ironic the same crowd sneers at people taking advice from Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey on vaccination and autism.

checker• 15 years ago

Arguably, Gates and Winfrey have built significant companies and become very powerful people. However, I see no good reason to ever listen to McCarthy.

guscost2• 15 years ago

That's fine with me. In all honesty, I would vote for any candidate who proposed a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood. I'm sure you don't believe this, but during a natural disaster the odds are that it would be the safest place in town.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Japanese-take-shelter-in-N-rea...

hugh3• 15 years ago

Well somebody has to talk about it, and people don't seem to trust the people who really are experts on nuclear safety, because they all seem to work for the nuclear industry.

I put more stock into Bill Gates' opinion than random-internet-person though, not just because he's smart but because he has been spending the last decade in the habit of dispassionately ooking through actuarial tables and thinking about real dangers. That's why so much of his philanthrophic efforts are going towards unsexy things like malaria reduction -- because he and his staff decided to look dispassionately at the statistics and figure out where the greatest lives-saved-per-million-spent is.

If he's telling me that nuclear is safer than coal then I believe he's gone and genuinely satisfied himself that this is the actual statistical truth.

Natsu2• 15 years ago

> It's about as relevant as any random person on the internet.

He's also investing in them, as you can see from the article, which makes him more newsworthy than some random person.

> My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.

I already live near one. Also, if you look at all the accidents, the workers suffer the most. If they were that against nuclear power, they wouldn't work there.

ww520• 15 years ago

Is there a comparison in term of cost/risk among all major energy source? Cost includes production and risk mitigation, and the health cost.

fjabre• 15 years ago

Same problem as fossil fuels - nuclear is non-renewable.

We need a better long term solution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

corysama• 15 years ago

According to Gates in his TED talk (reference elsewhere in these comments) the US has enough nuclear waste stockpiled to power the country for 200 years. After that, we can get enough thorium(?was that it?) from ocean filtration to continue for the imaginable future. Hopefully, before then we'll have switched to 100% solar.

pjscott3• 15 years ago

Far in the future, the sun will expand, turning into a red giant, engulfing the earth and boiling the oceans away. Ultimately, it will turn into a white dwarf. This hardly counts as renewable energy; it's just really vast energy.

Nuclear energy is far less vast, but still huge compared to what we're using today. If you think of easy energy sources as civilization's starting capital, nuclear can give us a very long runway.

hristov3• 15 years ago

This seems a like a faulty argument to me. Those are not our only two choices. Sure coal is really really bad. But that does not mean that nuclear is our only alternative.

Currently solar power is getting much cheaper and more practical. Same thing with wind power. We also have a natural gas which recently has been getting cheaper as large new discoveries are being made.

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel but it is much much cleaner than coal both in terms of health pollutants and in terms of CO2. There are some issues with natural gas extraction, but even if the various environmentally damaging methods of mining the stuff get banned as they should, we still have plenty of natural gas from new discoveries to last us for the foreseeable future.

Thus, we can use natural gas while solar and wind catch up price wise, which will happen sooner than we think. Solar especially is improving faster than anyone thought. Then we can still use natural gas for occasions where solar and wind aren't working.

So the coal/nuclear argument is a false dichotomy. We can have neither. Of course we should run the current nuclear plants until the end of their lives, but there is no reason to build new ones unless some revolutionary technology that makes everything much safer emerges. I would say the only new nuclear plants we should build are ones that burn the waste of the old ones, because those would technically make things safer by removing waste.

vibragiel6• 15 years ago

But your argument seems like a straw man to me, as nobody is proposing that dichotomy. As long as renewable energy sources can't stand as a viable substitute in terms of costs (economic, environmental, power per unit land, etc) and can't cope with an increasing energy demand, I don't see the need of relinquishing an energy source that has proven viable by all those standards and moreover is pretty safe.

tptacek• 15 years ago

This comment reads like a clever way of getting people to nod their heads (natural gas does indeed seem better than coal) while at the same time getting them to overlook an unsupported assumption (that nuclear is less safe than natural gas in the long run).

Statistically, the long-term damages attributable to total nuclear fuel chains are lower than those of the total natural gas fuel chain.

hristov3• 15 years ago

Uh ... source?

mortenjorck• 15 years ago

Currently solar power is getting much cheaper and more practical.

Every now and then, I see a tech news article about a new breakthrough in solar that should be ready for the market in the mythical "3-5 years" timeframe, then I never hear about it again. I'd be very happy to see some evidence that there's real, marketable progress being made right now that isn't marginal improvements to existing inefficient and expensive technology.

api• 15 years ago

Two words: peak oil.

Two more words: electric car.

In the next 30 years a significant fraction of the transportation and other oil-powered infrastructure is going to get connected to the power grid. Solar and wind can barely make a dent in current demand with current technology.

When electric cars get cheap, power demand will explode.

cwbrandsma• 15 years ago

Electric cars (and solar) will work a lot better when we figure out a better way to store the energy. So far, our battery technology barely fits the bill, and is expensive.

joejohnson• 15 years ago

Exactly.

This doesn't make Nuclear energy a smart choice, just because it is better than an even worse choice. We need to stop limiting our view to these two technologies, and start funding crazier energy options that could be cleaner, safer and smarter for the long run.

kwantam2• 15 years ago

In order to actually address the total energy consumption of the world using solar energy, based on 2009 consumption numbers (~500 EJ), we'd have to convert 30% of the total incident solar energy (~1600 EJ) to a usable form.

Doing this would cool the earth by about the same amount as moving it ~12.5% further away from the sun.

Solar is not a viable long-term solution.

Pinckney• 15 years ago

Where are you getting your figure for total incident solar energy? Using 17410^15 W total solar flux from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Incomin...

I'm getting 5.510^24 J/yr ~= 5,500,000 EJ/yr (all wavelenghts).

guscost2• 15 years ago

Bill Gates has to weigh in before people understand this?

neutronicus4• 15 years ago

Something that's often overlooked in these debates is that if we were willing to eat the proliferation risk and increased cost of high-enriched uranium we could reduce our production of long-lived alpha-emitters by an enormous amount.

This would make the storage of waste a lot more manageable.

b0rsuk• 15 years ago

Thorium, people !

Current nuclear reactors basically suck because they are the children of war ! They wanted to make a big scary bomb first. No surprise they chose the most dangerous element ! It's the same thing as why space flight is so expensive. Each communications satellite has to be the shape of a hydrogen bomb.

Thorium reactors are still in research phase. However, take a look at these quick bits from Wikipedia:

  - Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.
  - just 8 tablespoons of thorium could provide the energy used by an American during his or her lifetime.
  - there is no possibility of a meltdown
  - it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles
  - Weapons-grade fissionable material (233U) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor
  - Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste
  - Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235
  - Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming, so fission stops by default.
  - However, unlike uranium-based breeder reactors, thorium requires a start-up by neutrons from a uranium reactor. But experts note that "the second thorium reactor may activate a third thorium reactor
  - Thorium is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about four times more abundant than uranium, and is about as common as lead
  - Thorium-containing minerals occur on all continents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fu...

pradocchia• 15 years ago

Nuclear power presupposes a competent and responsible society continuously from now until the distant future. Now look at Japan: no other society was better prepared for disaster, and still they came very close to a catastrophic nuclear disaster. Then look at all the other countries in the world w/ nuclear power, and project their histories forward 100 years. How many will experience a civil war? An external war? regulatory incompetence? etc. The chance of a catastrophic disaster somewhere, sometime, is 100%.

pjscott3• 15 years ago

You can apply that same logic to any potentially dangerous industrial technology. And yet, for some reason, I don't see people fretting too terribly much about, say, oil drilling technology in irresponsible hands.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

there isn't much difference between coal and nuclear. A primitive civilization mines a substance that produces heat after performing a primitive operation upon it. It is like "gathering and hunting" state of civilization when compared to the "animal domestication and agriculture" state. It is time for human civilization to move on to renewable energy the same way like it moved to renewable food production 10K years ago.

shareme• 15 years ago

I think Mr Gates refuses to learn from history..

DO you know why originally Nuclear power was pushed as a safe energy source?

To make nuclear weapons, they needed a guaranteed supply of raw fuel material. All nuclear plants with the exception of some recent designs which get further away from this produce nuclear material that is ideal to use in nuclear weapons.

It had very little due with any actual safety concerns.

It is one of the most extreme hazards forced on the world by the industrial-military complexes of all nations.

Lets stop calling it safe and call it what it is in reality..in fact a experimental way to generate energy that is somewhat dangerous.

elithrar• 15 years ago

That's not a fair statement — branding all nuclear energy technology as a means to generate material for weapons is incorrect.

A good example? Thorium reactors [1], which generate very little in the way of weapons-grade by products. Why is it we cannot get our governments to allow research & construction into this arm of nuclear power?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fu...

Adam5032• 15 years ago

Eating uncooked meat from Jack in the Box is safer than playing Russian Roulette.

I'll wait for the next option, thanks.

Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer

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