
Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer - k33l0r
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/03/bill-gates-nuclear/
======
msluyter
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...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-we-get-risk-
wrong/2011/05/03/AF6JF3fF_blog.html)

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

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

------
Duff
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.

~~~
jrockway
_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?

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

~~~
jrockway
Fortunately, the US government has $12 billion to help people out in the event
of a catastrophe:

[http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-
sheets/fu...](http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/funds-
fs.html)

------
vibragiel
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...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html)

~~~
Duff
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.

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

~~~
Duff
That's a problem -- engineers are frequently frustrated with the public
perception of nuclear because they focus on a single metric which is just one
of many considerations.

~~~
vibragiel
But that's wrong. Just because this thread is about human safety doesn't mean
that a lot (lot, lot) hasn't been written about socioeconomic aspects of the
different energy sources.

------
SkyMarshal
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>

~~~
chadgeidel
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.

~~~
neutronicus
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.

~~~
chadgeidel
Thanks for the explanation!

------
b0rsuk
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel)

------
alphaBetaGamma
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>

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

------
michaelchisari
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.

~~~
rimantas
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://nuclearfissionary.com/2010/06/09/energy-density-and-waste-
comparison-of-energy-production/)

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-
is...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-
radioactive-than-nuclear-waste)

------
pradocchia
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%.

~~~
pjscott
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.

------
hristov
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
hristov
Uh ... source?

------
neutronicus
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.

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

------
csomar
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.

------
ck2
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.

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

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

------
VladRussian
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.

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

We need a better long term solution:

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

~~~
pjscott
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.

------
binarray2000
Interesting article and discussion:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2509538>

------
ww520
Is there a comparison in term of cost/risk among all major energy source? Cost
includes production and risk mitigation, and the health cost.

------
Adam503
Eating uncooked meat from Jack in the Box is safer than playing Russian
Roulette.

I'll wait for the next option, thanks.

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

~~~
hristov
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.

------
guscost
Bill Gates has to weigh in before people understand this?

------
shareme
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
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel)

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

~~~
enko
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.

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

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

~~~
paganel
> 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"

~~~
matwood
I think you're making as assumption that Gates cares about making more money
at this point in his life. Based on his other philanthropy it looks to me that
he cares more about his legacy as it pertains to changing the world for the
better and very little about money now.

The flip side of your argument is that if Gates thinks nuclear is the next
great thing then why is he NOT investing in it? Personally, I would find it
odd if Gates thinks something is the right way to go and didn't invest. It
would signal he's not very serious about the issue.

