Nuclear Fission: Bill Gates backs this new clean energy

Bill Gates is championing a new clean energy called nuclear fission, which is essentially the process of splitting two atoms to create electricity. He says he is backing private nuclear fission firm TerraPower, which will build its pilot plant in China with completion date due in 2024. TerraPower is developing a travelling wave reactor so as to get nuclear fission on the clean energy map; this reactor converts depleted uranium, a byproduct of the nuclear fission process, into usable fuel.

Vincent Kessler/Reuters

Bill Gates is looking for an energy miracle.

Clean energy may still be in its early stages, but Gates sees a lot of different paths to getting us there other than with solar and wind energy.

One solution the wealthiest human alive is particularly keen on: nuclear fission. This is essentially the process of splitting two atoms to create electricity.

In a Q&A with MIT Technology Review, Gates talked about his involvement with private nuclear-fission company TerraPower. Gates serves as its chairman of alongside vice chairman Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's former chief technology officer.

In the interview, Gates said that TerraPower's pilot plant will be built in China with a slated completion date of 2024. That arrival date would mean "sometime in the 2030s you'd have a design that you'd hope all new nuclear builds would adopt, because the economics, safety, waste, and all the key parameters are dramatically improved," Gates said in the interview.

TerraPower is creating a traveling wave reactor to get nuclear fission on the clean-energy map. The big upside of the traveling wave reactor is that it converts depleted uranium, a byproduct of the nuclear-fission process, into usable fuel.

But Gates notes that TerraPower isn't the only possibility to pushing nuclear fission forward.

"There are countries like India, Korea, Japan, France, and the U.S. that have done advanced nuclear stuff, but today about half of all the nuclear plants being built in the world are being built in China, and China's ability to do engineering is very impressive," he said.

In an interview with Tech Insider's Drake Baer, Gates said that for nuclear fission to really become a reality, it will need to be "cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it," but once that happens he thinks it could be "scaled up."

Either way, for anything to get done, there needs to be a channel for more funding on the research and development of clean-energy solutions, from wind to solar to nuclear fission.

"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," Gates said in the MIT Review interview. "We should tilt the odds in our favor by doubling the R&D budget."