Bill Gates supporting nuclear fission as clean energy source

Bill Gates has discussed his interest in nuclear fission and his role in private nuclear fission company TerraPower, of which he is co-chairman, with MIT Technology Review. Nuclear fission is the process whereby electricity is created through the splitting of two atoms. Gates revealed that the company’s pilot plant – scheduled for completion in 2024 – will be built in China. Around half of the nuclear plants currently being built are located in that country. By the 2030s TerraPower aims to have created a design that will be incorporated by all new nuclear builds. At present, the company is designing a travelling wave reactor that can convert depleted uranium – which is one of the byproducts of nuclear fission – into fuel.

For instance, the wind guys need really strong materials, and they need really good magnets. And if we can do solar chemical8, and somebody figures out how to take the production of photons to hydrocarbons and scale that up by a factor of a hundred so that it becomes economic, that’s pretty miraculous, because you’re creating a liquid hydrocarbon that a lot of our infrastructure, including transport, knows how to deal with today. You’d not be switching out everything except the actually primary generation piece.

“Even though the Paris thing was a big step forward, there is so much work to be done in each country.”

Now, I don’t have a pure mapping of how much you spend on R&D to how quickly you get the breakthrough. As with cancer research, there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what scientific possibilities are out there. We don’t have a good equation. You know, it’s possible there’s some guy in a laboratory today who’s inventing something miraculous, but because of climate change and the value of having cheaper energy, we shouldn’t just sit around and hope for his miracle; we should tilt the odds in our favor by doubling the R&D budget.

It’s striking that all of your examples have to do with chemistry and materials science. That’s not a coincidence, is it?

No. Take TerraPower9, the nuclear fission company that I’m very involved with [along with former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold]: all our biggest challenges have been in materials science. We have very high neutron bombardment of our steel plating, and the toughest engineering problem to solve has been proving that over long periods of time we don’t have degradation. But the ability to model materials comes up in almost all energy breakthroughs.

How do you respond to the argument that commercializing inventions like solar paint10 would take far too long to meet the time line of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050? How do you answer the thesis that to avert the worst impacts of climate change, we must deploy the clean technologies we have, while simultaneously investing in more fundamental breakthroughs as well?

For countries that are quite wealthy, like Europe and the United States, we could bear to have energy costs go up even a factor of two in deploying what we have today. It would be a huge political trade-off, and I don’t know if countries would choose to do it, but you wouldn’t be impoverishing anybody.

But look at a country like India, which is paradigmatic and numerically very significant in terms of its expected additions to hydrocarbon use over the next 30 years. If you give Indians the dilemma of electrifying their country using coal or meeting a greenhouse-gas constraint that would dramatically reduce how much electrification gets done, you give them a very tough trade-off. They will ask, “Shouldn’t we save millions of lives? Shouldn’t we give women electric stoves instead of burning wood? Shouldn’t we avoid the environmental degradation all that wood gathering involves, and all the time it demands?” I can’t predict, but I imagine they’ll lean toward electrifying the country, which will mean a global-scale experiment with high carbon dioxide.

So if it wasn’t for technological innovation, I wouldn’t be very optimistic about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But if we have the innovations, then we can say to India, “You can achieve two goals: you can be a great global citizen by not emitting into the atmosphere as much carbon dioxide per person as the rich nations emitted to fuel their growth, and you can electrify your country.”