Nice…. especially if Gates' nuclear power plants are as reliable as windows!

You would think that as many times he has recycled and renewed Windows that he would understand by now that the cheaper, faster, and cleaner choice is a combined strategy of Energy Efficiency, Energy Storage, and Renewable Energy…God help us from a computer geek tycoon that hasn't done his homework on energy issues!Nuclear Power = Loser on so many levels!

Actually, no. Efficiency will only get us so far, and it won't help stem the tide of overpopulation. Renewable energy is definitely something to look towards, but it's still going to take us some time before they can deliver as much reliable energy as nuclear. And as for storage, we're still waiting on improvements in battery technology that will allow for adequate energy storage. Nuclear is ready to go now, doesn't have the energy storage issues, and it's actually much safer than coal, natural gas, and the like. Go take a look at the carbon footprint for the average French citizen (France is pretty much entirely nuclear powered) compared to the average American.You can dismiss Windows all you want, but Gates is undeniably informed when it comes to energy.

“Nuclear Power = Loser on so many levels!”Well with in depth analysis such as that I guess the case is closed! I'm not so convinced you've done your homework. Energy Efficiency is a false prophet, we continually improve efficiency for economic reasons which in turn, leads to increased energy use. The more energy efficient devices become the more they proliferate to those who previously couldn't afford them. This is good for mankind but it drives up energy use on the whole. Therefore, we get the well established correlation between progress and wealth creation. Renewables, really??!!! I don't want my hospital running on windmills, they have all the reliability of a chronic gambler. The reason we live in the world we do today is precisely because we moved AWAY from the unpredictable nature of, well nature and moved to energy sources that work 24 / 7 365. Predictibility (timing) is the cornerstone of an advanced economy and technological civilization. Nuclear has the best predictibility of any power station and awe inspiring energy potential. 1 tonne of Uranium will fit in a 14 gallon recycle bin, and when fully fissioned is equivalent to 13.5 MILLION Barrels of Oil! Although we can't use reactors to launch the space shuttle, if we could, it would take about 245 grams of U to do the trick- about what's left in my half empty cough medicine bottle. Nuclear Power= Performance with no excuses by every measure in the book

Nuclear power isn't the problem. The problem is with the reactors we've been using to produce it. If the reactors at Fukushima had been Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) they wouldn’t have had a disaster on their hands.Liquid-fuel reactor technology was successfully developed at Oak Ridge National Labs in the 1960s. Although the test reactor worked flawlessly, the project was shelved, a victim of Cold War strategy. But LFTRs have been gathering a lot of attention lately, particularly since the events in Japan.A LFTR is a completely different type of reactor. For one thing, it can't melt down. It's physically impossible. And since it’s air-cooled, it doesn’t have to be located near the shore. It can even be placed in an underground vault. A tsunami would roll right over it, like a truck over a manhole cover. Imagine a kettle of lava that never boils. A LFTR uses liquid fuel⎯nuclear material dissolved in molten fluoride salt. Conventional reactors are atomic pressure cookers, using solid fuel rods to super-heat water. And that means the constant possibility of high-pressure ruptures and steam leaks. LFTRs don’t even use water. Instead, they heat helium to spin a turbine for generating power. So if a LFTR leaks, it’s not a catastrophe. The molten salt will “pool and cool” just like lava, for easy containment, recovery, and re-use. LFTRs burn Thorium, a mildly radioactive material as common as tin and found all over the world. We’ve already mined enough raw Thorium to power the country for 400 years. It’s the waste at our Rare Earth Element mines.LFTRs consume fuel so efficiently that they can even use the spent fuel from other reactors, while producing a miniscule amount of waste themselves. In fact, the waste from a LFTR is virtually harmless in just 300 years. (No, that’s not a typo.) Yucca Mountain is obsolete. So are Uranium reactors.LFTR technology has been sitting on the shelf at Oak Ridge for over forty years. But now the manuals are dusted off, and a dedicated group of nuclear industry outsiders is ready to build another test reactor and give it a go. Will it work? If it doesn’t, we’ll have one more reactor to retire. But if it does work⎯and there is every reason to believe that it will⎯the LFTR will launch a new American paradigm of clean, cheap, safe and abundant energy.Let’s build one and see.

There is no such thing as “safe nuclear.” It's an oxymoron like “clean coal.” Computers won't make it safe. Algorithms won't make it safe. Our vaunted, beloved, new international religion — technology — will not make it safe. Period. *Children* understand this.

Not even the nastiest caricature of Windows would suggest that Microsoft is TOTALLY immune from the feedback of the marketplace. How can Bill Gates convince himself that things work differently in the electricity market? The market rejection of investment in new nuclear plants — in the private sector, anyway — makes Windows Vista look like a stunning success. When no lender in the world can determine how much it will cost or how long it will take to build a new nuclear plant, the only way loans get made is with government loan guarantees. With a product that seems to have more than a few, ahem, bugs, what's the long-term viability of a marketing strategy that puts all the financial risk on the back of the taxpayer?

The half life of Thorium-232 (the isotope used in thorium reactors) is 14 BILLION years. Thorium nucleids will still be radioactive when the Sun will go supernova.It emits alpha particles, dangerous if ingested (they will tell you that the skin stops alpha particles, it is true, but what if you ingest of inhale it?). It produces lungs, pancreatic and blood cancers, as well as liver diseases.Thorium ignites spontaneously in contact of the air. I guess a nuclear proponent could call this “safe”…

1) Not an economical solution – but is something that will detract vast sums of money away from intelligent deployment of necessary solutions such as: energy efficiency, energy storage, distributed generation on microgrids, and energy from clean renewable sources; 2) Not a solution for climate change given the time necessary to build such facilities and current worldwide shortages of proper grades of steel for reactor vessels and other components;3) Not able to capitalize or indemnify itself in private markets without the guaranteed support of taxpayers’ money – which obviously creates unequal competition in energy markets;4) Not as safe as clean alternative energy sources that do not have the unique ability to contaminate vast swaths of our environment with radioisotopes that accumulate in our food and ourselves; and5) Not as sane as clean alternative energy sources that cannot be diverted into nuclear weapons production and do not produce nuclear waste which we have no good solutions for.Please do us all a favor and research exactly what is involved in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and the use of breeder reactors and what the historical record has been so far concerning routine emissions, inflated waste volumes, and contamination of local envrons produced from such facilities.

“U.S. nuclear-power production fell to the lowest level in almost 12 years as reactors shut in New Jersey, Minnesota and California, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. Power generation nationwide decreased 2,611 megawatts, or 3.7 percent, from April 29 to 68,667 megawatts, or 68 percent of capacity, the smallest amount since May 10, 1999, according to an NRC report today and data compiled by Bloomberg.” In fact according to the U.S Energy Information Agency, 2011 will be the year when wind capacity surpasses nuclear power in the United States.

Energy storage is an important component for all sources of energy and it is already routinely used for: increasing reliability; lowering costs; balancing load variations; storage of power when generation exceeds consumption on The Grid; etc. Keep in mind that these are methods to store power that has been already generated and otherwise would not be used and go to waste… Current costs range from about $500 to $1,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity and the historic trend in costs, just like solar power, have been declining steadily as technological efficiency and options have improved over time.The traditional methods most utilized are pumped hydroelectric storage and compressed air energy storage. Pumped hydroelectric storage has been around since the 1890s and efficiency ranges from 70 to 85 percent world capacity exceeds 90 Gigawatts. The United States installed storage capacity in 2006 was 21,461 Megawatts.Compressed air energy storage has been around since the 1870s and depending on the system technology used may or may not require a source of heat to increase efficiency. Systems requiring heat typically use natural gas or waste industrial heat and operate at about 54 percent efficiency. Compressed air energy storage can also reduce a natural gas turbine power plant fuel use by 40 percent.

A study released by the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan research and policy organization, shows that the federal government has provided substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewables. Subsidies to fossil fuels totaled approximately $72 billion over the seven-year study period.A Battelle report estimated the Federal subsidies (in 2007 dollars) between 1950 and 1977 between $1.2 and $2.2 billion each year for each energy source: coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear power. From 1947 to 1999 the U.S. government spent approximately $150 billion on energy subsidies for wind, solar and nuclear power of which 96.3% went to nuclear power. Lifecycle costs for nuclear power generation in the United States have been estimated at approximately 12 cents per kilowatt hour. NOTE: This doesn’t include spent fuel reprocessing or nuclear waste costs.Lifecycle costs for wind power generation in the United States have been estimated at approximately 4 cents per kilowatt hour. The December 2010 average commercial sector retail price was 9.81 cents per kWh, increasing 1.2 percent from December 2009.With regards to construction costs:In France, from the low-cost point in the mid-1970s to the high-cost point in early 1990s, costs for new reactors have more than tripled. The cost escalation came in three spurts, from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1970s, from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1980s, and in the beginning of the 1990s. French costs increased from a low of just under $1,000/kW to $1,500/kW by the end of the 1970s. The costs escalated to $2,000/kW by the end of the 1980s and $3,000/kW in the 1990s. The projected cost for the reactor currently under construction is in the range of $4,500 to $5,000/kW. The U.S. cost increase was similar to the French in the first decade, from about $1,000/kW to $2,000/kW, with the average cost for the decade of about $1,250/kW. Cost escalation was faster in the U.S in the second decade, with the French going from $2,000/kW to $3,000/kW while the U.S. costs increased to an average of $3,600/kW, with a number of units much higher. The current projected costs of reactors in the U.S. are literally all over the map, with the 2008-2009 cost estimates clustering in the $4,000 to $6,000/kW range, with estimates going as high as $10,000/kW.Decommissioning costs are roughly equivalent to Construction costs so add them into the equations also…And let's not forget the Price Anderson Act which limits liability on Nuclear Power Plants and transfers the excess liability onto taxpayers – a cost that is never figured into the equations…

If your assertion is true, please explain why in the United States; 38 states now have utility-scale wind power facilities with a total installed capacity in 2010 of 40,180 Megawatts…Take a look at figures for Europe’s off shore wind, the most expensive kind of wind power and further along in development than in the U.S., the Return On Investment (ROI) is as high as 18 percent according to Martin Billhardt, chief executive officer of PNE Wind AG.“In 2009, for the second year in a row, both the US and Europe added more power capacity from renewable sources such as wind and solar than conventional sources like coal, gas and nuclear, according to twin reports launched today by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21).” – Global Trends in Green Energy 2009: New Power Capacity from Renewable Sources Tops Fossil Fuels Again in US, Europe’ by UNEP, July 15, 2010.Take a look at: 1) ‘An Analysis of Federal Incentives Used to Stimulate Energy Production’ – PNL-2410 REV. – U.S. Department of Energy, Battelle Memorial Institute, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, December, 1978.2) Federal Energy Subsidies: Not All Technologies Are Created Equal’ – Marshall Goldberg, Renewable Energy Policy Project, July 2000.3) ‘America’s Energy Future: Technology and Transformation’ – National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, National Research Council ISBN: 0-309-15710-2, 2010.4) ‘Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State, December 2010 and 2009’ – United States Energy Information Administration, March 11, 2011. 5) ‘Policy Challenges Of Nuclear Reactor Construction, Cost Escalation And Crowding Out Alternatives, Lessons From The U.S. and France For The Effort To Revive The U.S. Industry With Loan Guarantees And Tax Subsidies’ – Mark Cooper, Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis, Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School, September 2010.

Nuclear Power is ready to go now and produce more spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste of which we have no good SOLUTIONS only Management Options…Please read: ‘Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing in France, A research report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials’ by Mycle Schneider and Yves Marignac, April 2008.[Excerpt] “In 2000, an official report commissioned by the French Prime Minister concluded that the choice of reprocessing instead of direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel for the entire French nuclear program would result in an increase in average generation cost of about 5.5 percent or $0.5 billion per installed GWe over a 40-year reactor life or an 85 percent increase of the total spent fuel and waste management (‘back-end’) costs.”[Excerpt] “…there was a total volume of some 344,600 m3 of conditioned high, intermediate and low-level waste as a result of spent-fuel reprocessing in France as of the end of 2004.” “The inventory also does not account for Marcoule waste that was dumped into the sea in 1967 and 1969, the equivalent final volume of which is estimated at 12,000 m3 or more.” That waste was dumped at sea off the costs of Spain and Brittany… [Conclusion Excerpt] “An overall cost-benefit analysis of spent fuel reprocessing in France would find that the economic, environmental, health, safety and security costs clearly outweigh the benefit of minor savings of natural uranium.”France has over 900 metric tons of surplus Mixed-Oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel with blended down Plutonium isotopes of 0.5 to 3 percent that are utilized at a rate of about 33 percent in the reactor’s core for the few conventional nuclear power plants actually using this fuel type. France is accumulating surplus MOX at a rate of an additional 100 metric tons per year – nobody wants it! Unfortunately, the story is the same in Japan

LFTRs are not without thier own risks. I believe that we should research them and perhaps build a demonstration plant if several engineering and operational issues can be solved…While theoretically true that a LFTR design can burn up more of the produced transuranic actinides that pose the largest threats concerning the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear wastes; in most designs the LFTR is configured as a thermal breeder reactor – which means that its fuel cycle is actually converting the Thorium-232 into additional fissile material and increasing the amount of nuclear fuel.Less nuclear waste is not zero nuclear waste. And the question still begging is if any nuclear reactors are desirable given their propensity to discharge radioactive materials into our environment, the unsolved nuclear waste dilemma, their inevitable ties to potential nuclear weapon production and the abundance of non-nuclear alternatives (i.e. clean renewable energy sources).$2 billion in 1972 dollars is the estimate to build a demonstrable LFTR – although I have said that I do think that research and demonstration of the LFTR should be supported if possible -there remain numerous engineering problems which must be solved – the least of which is still the same issue of what to do with both routine radioisotope emissions (mostly gaseous) and nuclear wastes (nuclear fuel poisons such as Uranium-232 and 234; along with Protactinium-233 that are strong neutron absorbers) etc. If the Protactinium-233 is not removed then it will absorb an additional neutron and become non-fissile Uranium-234.The gaseous radioisotopes are mostly Tritium and Nobel gases. While common Nobel gases are nonreactive, many of their radioactive isotopes do decay into long-lived radioactive daughter isotopes which are actively concentrated in the food chain and living organisms. For a 1,000 Megawatt LFTR Tritium production is estimated at approximately 2,400 curies per day or nearly a fifty fold increase when compared to current Boiling Water Reactors (BWR). It has proven almost impossible to eliminate routine discharges of these gaseous radioactive materials from any known nuclear reactor design.

Well, I guess you've won the argument Shannon!

Post-Fukushima, there is no argument to win.

Bob, Clippy, Vista, Zune, Windows phones, Bing…nukes? The only thing Microsoft is good at is monopoly. (disclaimer: I run Ubuntu)

The writer of this article is not qualified enough on the subject of energy production for his opinion to be worth consideration. To many false premises to mention. The article is little more than a forum for Bill Gates to promote his investments.

Sorry that is not just wind power but all renewable energy combined… My bad for not reading the chart properly… Wind does make up a large part of that along with biomass. And wind power expansion this year will be what puts renewable over the top in installed capacity.

All of those objections may be true for first- and second-generation designs, but not necessarily for third- or fourth-generation. It is very encouraging to learn about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), a 4th-gen design which can actually consume much of the high-level nuclear waste from older, solid-fuel-using plants. Solid fuel comes in the form of solid bars, which eventually crack and crumble due to the radiation damage of their contents, and must be reprocessed or retired after a relatively short time of use, while still is highly radioactive. Since the fuel in a Liquid Reactor is liquid, it doesn't crack, doesn't need to be reprocessed, and can be kept indefinitely in the liquid fuel supply. Plus, since it is kept close to a fresh supply of neutrons while in the fuel, it is stimulated to decay more quickly, and is consumed more thoroughly in a shorter time. The total amount of nuclear waste from a LFTR would be less than 1% of that from solid-fuel reactor designs, and would cool much more quickly, having a half life of around 300 years, rather than the 10,000 years for solid fuel. The cost of reprocessing the fuel is eliminated, and the cost for dealing with spent fuel is phenomenally reduced.If you look into the history of *thorium* as a nuclear fuel, you will discover that while the nuclear scientists considered it a better energy source than uranium, the military rejected it because it would be exceedingly difficult to use it for weapons production. Sadly, the military prevailed, and thorium was never used.LFTRs would be safer in unusual circumstances, too, than the types now in use, because the 'liquid' must be __heated__ far above room temperature for the fuel mixture to melt and be pumped through the system. If, for any reason, outside power to heat the fuel is lost (as happened with the tsunami), then the fuel drains itself into a holding tank and the system shuts itself down. LFTRs don't require high-pressure containment vessels because there is no steam being used in the system, at high pressure or otherwise. There is no production of hydrogen from the breakdown of water due to radiation exposure, so there would be no explosions like the ones in Japan due to accumulated hydrogen gas. There would be a phenomenal construction cost reduction compared to 1st- and 2nd-gen designs, since much of the cost of construction goes to the high-pressure containment system. Operation of the system is much more simple, because there is no high-pressure system to monitor and adjust. This also results in a cost reduction compared to 1st- and 2nd-gen designs.Thorium is so plentiful that it is considered a nuisance waste material in rare-earth mining operations. Some studies show that energy from LFTRs would be so cheap there would be no point to metering it. The design of LFTRs also lends itself quite nicely to energy production on a very small scale: multiple, tiny reactors could easily be deployed. They don't require a water source and don't need to be built near rivers or oceans. They could be situated close to the places where the power is to be used, allowing for smaller-sized transmission grids, which would greatly mitigate the problems that would arise should another Carrington Event occur.But, LFTRs can't make fuel that's easily usable in nuclear weapons, so never mind… (says the military).

You're right about Thorium-232. However, the point about LFTRs is, that the Th-232 is bombarded with neutrons and converted to Th-233, which then transmutes to U-233, which has the 300-year decay path. (While you can find naturally-occuring U-235 and U-238, all of the naturally-occuring U-233 has already decayed.)”Alpha particles” are two-protons-plus-two-neutrons: in other words, they are helium-without-electrons. Since they are so massive, they don't travel far before they are absorbed by any shielding of any sort – say, ONE sheet of paper. Once they find two electrons to pair up with, they form helium, which is about the most chemically inert (and medically benign) substance you can possibly find.”Thorium ignites spontaneously in contact of the air”, IF it has been reduced chemically to metallic thorium – which is difficult, expensive, and pointless unless you're interested for some reason in doing a lab study on the properties of metallic thorium. In nature, it occurs in the ore monazite, and is an oxide. When it is to be used in a LFTR, it is treated with HF to form ThF4, which is INCREDIBLY stable. The fluorine __really likes__ being with the thorium, and just like the fluorine attached to carbon in teflon, it stays there, air or no air.But, LFTRs don't produce anything that could conveniently be used to make nuclear weapons, so the military isn't interested in it being funded. Since military applications were the driving force behind reactor development 50 years ago, thorium-as-nuclear-fuel got no support, so you don't see it being used now. Most of the objections to “nuclear” simply don't apply to LFTRs.

True, the molten salt reactor that was tested at Oak Ridge in the 60's was intended to be a demonstration of a breeder reactor. But, they used uranium fuel rather than thorium, because thorium isn't suitable as a breeder fuel (which was what the military wanted); it does not increase the amount of nuclear fuel. While LFTRs __could__ be configured as breeders, it would require adding other elements than thorium, in which case it would be some-other-type-of-molten-salt-reactor, not a “LFTR.” “Less nuclear waste is not zero nuclear waste.” Well, a LFTR would produce less than 1% of the amount of nuclear waste that a first- or second-generation reactor would, for two reasons: 1) A SOLID-fuel reactor can't keep using the fuel rods until they're consumed, because the radiation damage to the rods causes cracks and crumbling: not a problem with LIQUID fuel, where you can just keep burning the nuclear fuel until it's consumed. You don't need to reprocess or store partially-spent rods, as with solid fuel. 2) Reactors using U-235 or U-238 as the fuel, produce waste having decay chains with much longer lifetimes than the U-233 that the thorium transmutes to. The decay chain for Th-232 -> U-233 waste has a half-life of 300 years, compared to the waste currently being produced which has a lifetime of 10,000 years. So there is, in fact, a considerable improvement in the nuclear-waste-disposal problem.In addition to its shorter half-life, one other aspect of the Th-232 -> U-233 decay chain, is that it involves emission of a LOT of gamma radiation compared to U-235 or U-238. If the fuel is still in the reactor, where it's shielded, this is not a problem for the reactor. BUT, it is a HUGE problem if you want to make a nuclear weapon out of the fuel. The gamma rays are easily detected so you couldn't hide this sort of weapon for terrorist uses. The gamma rays break down electronics very quickly so you can't store a weapon make from this stuff and expect it to be usable after any length of time. And, while you're assembling it, you can't get near it except by using remote-control robotics – and the gamma rays will be damaging the robotics, too, so they'd have to be replaced frequently – it just isn't practical to try to make weapons from this stuff. Easier, on the whole, to just steal some existing weapon and use it… Like I said, the reason thorium was never developed as a nuclear fuel was that the military had no use for it, compared with U-235 and U-238.

If you don't like “technology,” then why are you using the Web? when you could be using snail mail?? or a fax machine??? or smoke signals????Do you use cotton fabrics, or do you pound flax fibers with rocks and weave them at home on your loom? Do you have a refrigerator??????

Dale Bridenbaugh was a GE engineer who quit his job in 1975, in protest that the 1960's design of the reactor-type that was built at Fukushima would inadequately handle a hydrogen explosion such as the one that occurred at Fukushima. This has been a known, expected, ignored, covered-up problem for decades. None of the problems that occurred at Fukushima would have happened if they had used LFTRs, if for no other reason than that a LFTR doesn't need water cooling and wouldn't have been placed next to the ocean, at a location where it was a known (and ignored) problem that tsunamis had occurred in the past.Okay, Shannon: I agree: let's not use 1960's technology any more.