Good news! Bravo Bill Gates!
The U.S. is strangely and far behind in the development of nuclear power!
And how about the horrible and totally disproportional influence of the environmental lobby on preventing the use of more nuclear power? Absolutely incredible and preposterous! They have exploited alarmism and hysteria about nuclear power to the extreme. How much of this was financed and supported by the enemies of open societies?
On the other hand we have hundreds of nuclear power plants around the world (over 400) running every day without any major incidents for decades. Only banana republics like Germany willfully shut down their running nuclear and coal fired power plants in a fit of madness.
It appears this New Atlas science article has twisted the story by claiming Bill Gates only wanted this new reactor as a backup for unreliable and intermittent renewable energy. The article's author does not provide anything in support of this claim. Bill Gates in his news release (see below) ,on which the article depended, did not say anything about that purpose (unless Bill Gates revised his news release in the meantime).
"... Despite being one of the pioneering nations in the development of commercial nuclear energy, the United States nuclear industry has been moribund for decades. Since 1978, only two plants have begun construction – and that was in 2013 with none since then. Worse, these have all been conventional pressurized water and boiling water reactors without a single advanced type built since the 1970s. ...
However, Gates has other ideas and having a few odd billion dollars cluttering up his junk drawer he founded TerraPower in 2008 with the view of building the first commercial Generation IV reactor in the US.
Called Natrium, it's a 345-MWe molten sodium reactor hooked to a 1-GWh molten salt energy storage system that's designed to allow the reactor to act as an on-call backup to intermittent power sources like wind and solar. The idea is that the reactor generates power at a constant rate, which is the most efficient approach, and stores the energy as heat in the molten salt. When the wind isn't blowing or blowing too fast, or the sun isn't shining, the molten salt is used to produce steam to turn turbines and generate electricity. ..."
Bill Gates breaks ground on first Gen-IV nuclear plant in the US Bill Gates has helped break ground to mark the construction of the first next-generation nuclear reactor in the United States. The joint project by TerraPower and the Department of Energy plans to build a sodium test reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming by 2030.
