Bill Gates' nuclear venture plans reactor to complement solar, wind power boom
> By 2050 “we would see hundreds of these reactors around the world, solving multiple different energy needs,” Levesque said.<p>We can already reach 90% renewables by 2035 without these reactors [1]. If they get built, that’d be great, but they won’t be built in time to avert climate change. TerraPower has existed for 14 years and still hasn’t built a reactor. For comparison, the Kamuthi solar facility in Tamil Nadu, India, has a total generation capacity of 648 MW, covers 10 sq km and took 8 months to build. This work can be parallelized; more generation capacity deployed in the same time or faster with more people. Portugal just had a historic bid close for a 700MW solar facility at 1.3 cents/kWh. Nuclear cannot compete against such economics, even when storage is factored in to enable firm dispatch of renewable energy.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707</a>