Not sure what your objection is. He's being quoted in cnbc, a business TV channel. He has the kind of money to put into action what he believes in. He knows as much about nuclear reactors as Elon Musk knows about the innards of SpaceX; both know enough to attract seriously qualified people to their cause.
This is separate from whether you like their cause or not.
Well, and so what? Nobody claims he is an expert because he appeared on TV. He is an expert because of what he has to say. Even if he paid for it, I am happy we could hear it.
Bill Gates claims expertise in 2 things, global poverty/health and energy.
Given he's spent the last decade studying both, and he can afford to fly the top experts in both fields to teach him 1 on 1, I have no doubts that he has had the means to learn a lot about both fields.
In this case (as in many others), he’s not “voicing off” just for the sake of it, he has active investments in new nuclear technologies and he usually knows what he is talking about.
Bill Gates has been talking about, and investing his own money, in clean energy for years now.
He's been working on global health for a decade.
That's about it. Until recently the public at large didn't really care about either so his massive (billions of $$$) investments in both didn't get regular press attention.
But this isn't anything new for him, it is all stuff he's been focused on for over a decade.
How safe? Would you live next to a plant? And what about the residues? Do they need to be taken care during decades with the risk of a natural disaster and/or lack of proper maintenance releasing them?
Much safer than constant slow poisoning from coal plants. Number of people that died from Fukushima (which is an older, much worse design) can be counted on hand.
It’s not a false dilemma when it is in fact a real forced choice. Many people live next to power plants and that’s unavoidable in the world we live in. The question then becomes which type of power plant you’d rather live close to? Wind, solar, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, or nuclear? I’d choose nuclear for sure because it is the least risky option in my assessment.
Not necessarily. Energy sources we consider as green nowadays have an immense toll on our environment which is massively understated. Take solar panels for example. They are supposed to produce energy without CO2 emissions, which is explicitly true, but implicitly they produce just as much CO2 as coal. The production of these panels isn't as sexy as it seems. Also they tend to degrade after a few decades and lose efficiency exponentially.
There are many other electricity generating solutions which have similar problems.
It's sad, but the least polluting source would be to go nuclear. I believe you and many others would change their mind after a little digging into the topic. I was rather sceptical in the beginning as well, but due to facts I had t o change my mind.
Who you rather live near a coal plant, a nuclear plant, under a Dam, near a copper/neodymium mine or near a cadmium mine?
Would you rather eat vegetables and meat/fish that grew downstream a nuclear plant/uranium mine or those that grew downstream a cadmium mine? Because I'm sure I would rather live near an old uranium mine (well, I do.)
What’s the math on that exactly? How many years of life did those affected lose? And is it just the coal miners or others? I would imagine modern coal mining has PPE to keep the miners safe. Plus the availability of abundant cheap coal energy may have saved lives from what it enabled (like keeping the lights on at hospitals, powering our water pumps, whatever).
PPEs are impractial for (deep) coal mining because of the temperatures down there. Be it geothermal, or heat from the machines. Just look at the whiners against masks now, and now imagine having to do that at 40°C while working hard.
Personally yes, I would live next to a nuclear reactor in preference to any other form of electricity generation. Living near a coal plant is an ugly death sentence. Living in the shadow of a big damn is vastly more risky. Windmills are noisy, and tend to be in very exposed environments.
Nuclear is quiet and clean. The very few accidents still leave it as clearly the lowest-risk method of generating energy.
I would be OK with it, especially if the alternative were living next to a beast like the old Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona. It was creepy to watch the emissions coming out of the smokestacks while it was still running. It felt like watching the planet burn.
A lot of the comments on this page seem dismissive of Gates. While I'm sure he's not the the smartest guy in the room on every subject, I suspect his knowledge about energy, farming and medicine to be superior to almost anyone outside academia. The source of this seems mainly to be the enormous amount of books he reads, which you can get an impression of from his blog https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization
I'd rather see arguments against his arguments than against him. They probably require a lot more time to research, but that's sort of the point.
> I'd rather see arguments against his arguments than against him.
Attacking people, affixing labels to them, and othering them into adversarial tribes is unfortunately the most dominant form of discourse in modern society. I feel like social media made it worse but it’s always been an issue to some extent. I wish it weren’t so.
"Jabe Blumenthal and Karen Fries are the two former Microsoft colleagues who organized my first learning session on climate change in 2006. In that session, they introduced me to two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira—then at the Carnegie Institution for Science—and David Keith of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with Ken and David that have shaped my thinking.
Ken and a team of his postdoctoral fellows—Candise Henry, Rebecca Peer, and Tyler Ruggles—pored over the manuscript line by line to check for factual mistakes. I’m thankful for their meticulous work. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.
The late David MacKay of Cambridge University inspired me with his wit and insights. I recommend his phenomenal book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject of energy and climate change.
Jabe Blumenthal and Karen Fries are the two former Microsoft colleagues who organized my first learning session on climate change in 2006. In that session, they introduced me to two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira—then at the Carnegie Institution for Science—and David Keith of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with Ken and David that have shaped my thinking.
Ken and a team of his postdoctoral fellows—Candise Henry, Rebecca Peer, and Tyler Ruggles—pored over the manuscript line by line to check for factual mistakes. I’m thankful for their meticulous work. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.
The late David MacKay of Cambridge University inspired me with his wit and insights. I recommend his phenomenal book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject of energy and climate change."
It's the public that needs convincing more so than the government. Billy Gates is probably the best person, apart from Elon, to try and convince people that it's not that bad. It's a good way to build positive PR for something that is considered a hideous, disastrous, dangerous monster of an idea.
> there is no good safe long-term storage solution for nuclear waste in the United States, to name a few.
This is the killer argument. There is frankly no storage or recycling solution for nuclear waste anywhere in the world, which IMHO entirely dismisses nuclear energy as a viable option.
IMHO no, it doesn't. Funding and research for Nuclear dried up ages ago, and given the impending doom most scientists think we are facing, it would be rational to be spending gazillions on developing new tech, processes etc. including storage. What we take out of the ground is radioactive - it's rational to think we can find a way to put it back with slightly less radioactivity. Obviously that's a crude way to put it to the point of metaphor, but it's not irrational either.
If Greenpeace had not killed nuclear, I suggest we might be in a considerably better situation vis-a-vis climate change. Possibly a couple of Fukishimas worse off, but that's not hugely bad either, given the upside.
The amount of nuclear waste (spent rods) produced in the US since the first reactor could be fit into ONE football field about 7 yards deep. We can surely store it somewhere safely. In the mean time we have produced probably thousand times more toxic heavy metals which will also last millions of years and they are leaking into the earth all over the world.
It looks neat until a natural disaster comes in and we have another Fukushima (not that we've dealt with the first one yet).
The Japanese are very smart and organized people, and their nuclear tech is top notch. If they couldn't contain it, we shoudl at least take into consideration other nations won't be able, too. And, sadly, we can't predict everything.
Waste from nuclear is miniscular per unit of energy, just 40 grams per person per year, all energy included [transportation, electricity, heating - all]. 40 grams. [1]
It was quite eye-opening to know that 1GW nuclear plant, working for decades, can keep _all_ of it's waste on site.
As for no recycling in the world - I believe France begs to differ. They do recycle their and even other's nuclear waste into nuclear fuel. And what minimal part that can't be recycled further can be melted into glass [2].
Given that no soul was ever harmed by industrial nuclear waste (it is mostly on site), existing baseload capabilities and _history_ of decarbonizing whole industrialized economies (France/Korea again), I feel it is harmful to completely discount this method of poower generation.
While I agree with a lot of what you say, the line about noone ever having been harmed by industrial nuclear waste is not entirely true. Have a look into the Kyshtym disaster and - more recently - September 12, 2011 incident at Marcoule, France.
But why doesn't it matter how many and how badly people have gotten hurt. With Chernobyl, which is by far the worst possible case, we're talking 50 seriously hurt people, 500 with seriously shortened lifespan, and let's say 100000 to 1000000 with slightly shortened lifespan.
Absolutely no other energy source comes even close to such low numbers, certainly not solar power, oil and especially not everyone's de-facto alternative: coal, which has actually killed millions, and shortened lifespans of certainly a billion people ...
Send them to the space? Last time I heard there are plenty of space over there, might also be a cheaper than maintaining a toxic waste facility essentially forever.
Where to store in space is a different question although. You can't just leave them in orbit around Earth, because of Kesler syndrome, any ideas?
There is no long-term solution to getting murdered in your sleep either, but we manage to live with that.
In fact, at the risk levels that we are accustomed to dealing with on a day-to-day basis, there are plenty of adequate solutions to disposal and storage of nuclear waste.
Note that it specifically talks about the US, e.g. Finland develops its deep geological repository [0] just fine, while other countries (Russia and France) focus on fuel recycling.
Also this is why it's important to invest into development of breeder reactors. Not only they improve uranium utilization and may allow for thorium to be used as a nuclear fuel, but also they can "burn" the nastiest parts of nuclear waste [1]. Unfortunately, AFAIK only Russia currently seriously invests into this branch of nuclear reactors (see BN [2] and BREST [3]).
Nor is there any good safe long-term storage solution for CO2, or heavy metal pollutants. But while those are technological problems unlikely to be solved for decades, the lack of nuclear storage is simply political.
Remember - nuclear waste is dangerous for centuries, but chemical waste is dangerous forever.
Disagree or not, I admire Bill Gates greatly, as much as I "hated" him and Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s. They made money with monopoly over certain markets, and used bad practices to fend off competition.
And yet, most of his wealth is now being used to try to solve important problems for the world. You know what? I'll take this deal.
I'd also pay greatly to have a full day with him, on his little chalet on the island, to talk about everything and be able to ask him anything. I'd even pitch him my own crazy idea of "the city of the future", a small obsession of mine since I was a kid.
First, I don't think he ever admitted what he was doing was very wrong. Maybe he feels that inside, but I haven't heard many public statement about the actions of MS being morally wrong to the society.
Second, this debt is enormous, and is getting larger. When you buy a PC, most often you still pay the "Microsoft tax". This is the result of Bill's actions from the past, the famous FUD campaigns, calling another operating system cancer, sponoring a long lawsuit against Linux and so on. He will still have to do a lot if he wants to repay all that.
Bill hasn't called Linux cancer, that was Steve. And he was talking about GPL which admittedly is kind of like cancer - if your code touches it, it has to be GPL'ed as well
While he was referring to the GPL, he actually uttered these words [0]. Gates was a chairman then, it's difficult to believe they had different opinions on this issue and many others. Especially when you consider the Halloween Documents were from Gates' era.
More importantly, it was Gates himself who would routinely visit various heads of states lobbying for MS contracts, especially when Linux was considered. The consequences of that will live with us for many decades. Fortynately the web revolution changed many things and there is some hope the future would be more Microsoft-free, but for many years to come all goverments and most businesses and individuals have to pay Microsoft tax, for one reason or another.
Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
So, he was talking about the license (it would also make little sense to say that an OS kernel is cancer).
> Gates himself who would routinely visit various heads of states lobbying for MS contracts
Gates was trying to sell his software to potential clients? What a terrible human being! :) Much worse were the anti-competitive agreements with OEMs, performing super strict license checks on business dealing with Linux and so on.
> Gates was trying to sell his software to potential clients? What a terrible human being!
Well, it depends on how you see it. We're talking not just about Europe, but mainly South Africa and many other developing countries that have to pay Microsoft to this day because of of their previous politician gave in to Gates and agreed to prolong a government contract. Many of these countries are the same he is helping now.
Who cares about that linuxoid mess? They sabotaged the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project !1!! Imagine where we could be now when that would have been 'the industry standard'?
What about those who's wealth he denied with those anti-competitive practices - in the end don't they deserve the credit for the good deeds done with that money, not Bill?
It's similarly irritating when known tax-avoiders become philanthropists - that was societies money anyway, you don't get kudos for being the one who decides where it's spent regardless of where you decide.
I get where you’re coming from but I don’t think this is a practical or helpful attitude.
He should get kudos for doing societally useful things with his money instead of lobbying the government for more tax breaks.
Yes. I think he has done a ton of damage and set computing back at least a cumulative decade. But it's also better that he does something decent with his money. Both can be true.
Renewables still need other sources of electricity when there's no wind (or too much wind) or sunlight, since we can't actually store any excess energy generated.
Renewable are cheaper when you mine, extract, process, transport and cast them with fossile fuel. Uranium pump works with electricity, processing is done with electricity too, at least in France, the only thing we still have to solve is transportation, and even if it was still done with fossile fuel, I'm pretty sure you get more MW/h from 1g of fissible uranium than 200g of cadmium and lead, even if you could recycling them for no energy.
Finland is unable to complete their new reactor. It's not feasible to build new ones at all - too expensive and even if started right away their completion takes 10+ years and is not the solution to the massive climate issues we face today.
Building new reactors in the 90s? I would have agreed with this but it's too late now from multiple perspectives.
Why should it be too late now? Because Finland botched a single plant? Even though it is preferable that we had more nuclear now I really can't see how you can say that nuclear is not a step in solving the climate problem
Tell it to Rosatom, which builts its VVERs in under 10 years from greenfield to full industrial operation. The problem with Olkiluoto is not about nuclear power per se, but about organizations, loss of competence and about implementing new designs of nuclear plants in "agile" style.
Nuclear power is (unfortunately) the ultimate example of regulation and 'safeguards' blocking real improvement. The old saw about 'the perfect being the enemy of the good' applies here.
I think nuclear would be a great path forward, but it's unlikely to carry the day.
85 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadIt seems that when you're very wealthy, pundits and talking heads always want to quote you.
Given he's spent the last decade studying both, and he can afford to fly the top experts in both fields to teach him 1 on 1, I have no doubts that he has had the means to learn a lot about both fields.
"Yes, but what does Bill Gates think about it?"
He's been working on global health for a decade.
That's about it. Until recently the public at large didn't really care about either so his massive (billions of $$$) investments in both didn't get regular press attention.
But this isn't anything new for him, it is all stuff he's been focused on for over a decade.
Would you rather eat vegetables and meat/fish that grew downstream a nuclear plant/uranium mine or those that grew downstream a cadmium mine? Because I'm sure I would rather live near an old uranium mine (well, I do.)
Personally yes, I would live next to a nuclear reactor in preference to any other form of electricity generation. Living near a coal plant is an ugly death sentence. Living in the shadow of a big damn is vastly more risky. Windmills are noisy, and tend to be in very exposed environments.
Nuclear is quiet and clean. The very few accidents still leave it as clearly the lowest-risk method of generating energy.
Loss of blade accidents and tower failures have been known to occur, also.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Generating_Station
I haven't grown any extra heads yet. :-)
I'd rather see arguments against his arguments than against him. They probably require a lot more time to research, but that's sort of the point.
I'd agree, although I'd also note that he's _often_ the smartest guy in the room about most subjects he's voicing opinions on.
Attacking people, affixing labels to them, and othering them into adversarial tribes is unfortunately the most dominant form of discourse in modern society. I feel like social media made it worse but it’s always been an issue to some extent. I wish it weren’t so.
From the Acknowledgements of his latest book :
"Jabe Blumenthal and Karen Fries are the two former Microsoft colleagues who organized my first learning session on climate change in 2006. In that session, they introduced me to two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira—then at the Carnegie Institution for Science—and David Keith of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with Ken and David that have shaped my thinking.
Ken and a team of his postdoctoral fellows—Candise Henry, Rebecca Peer, and Tyler Ruggles—pored over the manuscript line by line to check for factual mistakes. I’m thankful for their meticulous work. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.
The late David MacKay of Cambridge University inspired me with his wit and insights. I recommend his phenomenal book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject of energy and climate change.
Jabe Blumenthal and Karen Fries are the two former Microsoft colleagues who organized my first learning session on climate change in 2006. In that session, they introduced me to two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira—then at the Carnegie Institution for Science—and David Keith of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with Ken and David that have shaped my thinking.
Ken and a team of his postdoctoral fellows—Candise Henry, Rebecca Peer, and Tyler Ruggles—pored over the manuscript line by line to check for factual mistakes. I’m thankful for their meticulous work. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.
The late David MacKay of Cambridge University inspired me with his wit and insights. I recommend his phenomenal book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject of energy and climate change."
So what about academia? Because I don't see it in particular agreement with him on nuclear fission, either.
Everywhere where democracy is in decline or never was: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
This is the killer argument. There is frankly no storage or recycling solution for nuclear waste anywhere in the world, which IMHO entirely dismisses nuclear energy as a viable option.
https://old.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/hh6mm6/but_wh...
If Greenpeace had not killed nuclear, I suggest we might be in a considerably better situation vis-a-vis climate change. Possibly a couple of Fukishimas worse off, but that's not hugely bad either, given the upside.
Ironic, isn't it.
The Japanese are very smart and organized people, and their nuclear tech is top notch. If they couldn't contain it, we shoudl at least take into consideration other nations won't be able, too. And, sadly, we can't predict everything.
It was quite eye-opening to know that 1GW nuclear plant, working for decades, can keep _all_ of it's waste on site.
As for no recycling in the world - I believe France begs to differ. They do recycle their and even other's nuclear waste into nuclear fuel. And what minimal part that can't be recycled further can be melted into glass [2].
Given that no soul was ever harmed by industrial nuclear waste (it is mostly on site), existing baseload capabilities and _history_ of decarbonizing whole industrialized economies (France/Korea again), I feel it is harmful to completely discount this method of poower generation.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch
[2] https://www.livescience.com/62623-radioactive-waste-trapped-...
Absolutely no other energy source comes even close to such low numbers, certainly not solar power, oil and especially not everyone's de-facto alternative: coal, which has actually killed millions, and shortened lifespans of certainly a billion people ...
How does this compare?
Where to store in space is a different question although. You can't just leave them in orbit around Earth, because of Kesler syndrome, any ideas?
EDIT: someone else did the math and it turns out this is impractical, plus there are risks of rocket failures https://www.universetoday.com/133317/can-we-launch-nuclear-w...
In fact, at the risk levels that we are accustomed to dealing with on a day-to-day basis, there are plenty of adequate solutions to disposal and storage of nuclear waste.
Also this is why it's important to invest into development of breeder reactors. Not only they improve uranium utilization and may allow for thorium to be used as a nuclear fuel, but also they can "burn" the nastiest parts of nuclear waste [1]. Unfortunately, AFAIK only Russia currently seriously invests into this branch of nuclear reactors (see BN [2] and BREST [3]).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)
Remember - nuclear waste is dangerous for centuries, but chemical waste is dangerous forever.
And yet, most of his wealth is now being used to try to solve important problems for the world. You know what? I'll take this deal.
I'd also pay greatly to have a full day with him, on his little chalet on the island, to talk about everything and be able to ask him anything. I'd even pitch him my own crazy idea of "the city of the future", a small obsession of mine since I was a kid.
Second, this debt is enormous, and is getting larger. When you buy a PC, most often you still pay the "Microsoft tax". This is the result of Bill's actions from the past, the famous FUD campaigns, calling another operating system cancer, sponoring a long lawsuit against Linux and so on. He will still have to do a lot if he wants to repay all that.
While he was referring to the GPL, he actually uttered these words [0]. Gates was a chairman then, it's difficult to believe they had different opinions on this issue and many others. Especially when you consider the Halloween Documents were from Gates' era.
More importantly, it was Gates himself who would routinely visit various heads of states lobbying for MS contracts, especially when Linux was considered. The consequences of that will live with us for many decades. Fortynately the web revolution changed many things and there is some hope the future would be more Microsoft-free, but for many years to come all goverments and most businesses and individuals have to pay Microsoft tax, for one reason or another.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...
Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
So, he was talking about the license (it would also make little sense to say that an OS kernel is cancer).
> Gates himself who would routinely visit various heads of states lobbying for MS contracts
Gates was trying to sell his software to potential clients? What a terrible human being! :) Much worse were the anti-competitive agreements with OEMs, performing super strict license checks on business dealing with Linux and so on.
Well, it depends on how you see it. We're talking not just about Europe, but mainly South Africa and many other developing countries that have to pay Microsoft to this day because of of their previous politician gave in to Gates and agreed to prolong a government contract. Many of these countries are the same he is helping now.
It's similarly irritating when known tax-avoiders become philanthropists - that was societies money anyway, you don't get kudos for being the one who decides where it's spent regardless of where you decide.
What I mean is that it’s not helpful to bash billionaires for sincere altruism and for investing in societally useful activities.
It can be helpful to bash government for shitty policies that don’t tax wealth properly or something like that.
It can also be helpful to bash billionaires that don’t carry their weight.
If you’re angry at the students that don’t show up to class, don’t yell at the ones that do.
My lord, is that, legal?
I will make it legal.
Also the east problem is still not solved and getting enough and cool enough water becomes more and more a problem for reactors.
You are right though, that intermittent renewables are a new sort of problem. But there are also solutions like a super grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy
Building new reactors in the 90s? I would have agreed with this but it's too late now from multiple perspectives.
I think nuclear would be a great path forward, but it's unlikely to carry the day.
I wish we could generate energy with anti-intellectualism. We'd have all the environmental issues figured out by now.