Bill Gates-backed nuclear contender Terra Power aims to build dozens of UK reactors::A Bill Gates-backed clean energy player is hoping to build dozens of nuclear reactors in the UK and will compete with global rivals.
On the one hand, I think that’s great. We need more nuclear power to mitigate the climate disaster.
On the other hand, I don’t trust anything Bill Gates does after he totally fucked up the U.S. education system.
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You can hardly blame that just on Gates. Every moron in the government has been pushing standardized tests as some way of grading teachers and schools for decades at this point, and this program coincided with Obama’s equally disastrous and very similar federal program. Which was an improvement over Bush’s even more disastrous program.
Especially when you realize Gate’s program was of limited scope while Dubbya/Obama/Trump’s DOE’s fuckups covered the entire country for a far longer period of time.
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Thanks Obummer
This is, honestly, a dogshit “article”.
I’m sorry don’t you think Bush, among many others, had something to do with that as well? There are more oligarchs than just Gates. The leaders of Big Tech are so far up their own ass you don’t even realize you’ve followed them in there.
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We don’t need more nuclear power to mitigate the climate disaster we need to stop endless consumerism and strip of power these who got us here.
Would you prefer using oil or gas instead? If we are going to transition away from fossil fuels, nuclear will have to be a part of our new generation system.
I would prefer using renewable sources and cutting off the useless shit like private jets
The world would be a bit better if everyone flew coach or stayed home, but it would be a lot better if the developing world had access to lighting, air conditioning, washing machines, transportation, fertilizer, and desalinated water without a corresponding increase in carbon emissions.
Renewables (with storage and long-distance transmission) are part of the solution, but we need to invest in all viable forms of carbon-free energy like there’s no tomorrow, because if we don’t, then for a lot of people there won’t be.
The world can’t be better if the plan is to make things worst (planned obsolescence). Feeding these who got us there is not a solution to the problem
I agree that we should build more durable technology and reduce income inequality, but we need to fight the laws of physics first. Debate is a luxury granted by a stable civilization, which largely depends on a stable climate.
We’ll eventually figure out nuclear fusion even in a post apocalyptic nuclear fallout world.
Nuclear power is also a technology for a stable civilization not one ruled by corrupted politicians that play war with each others
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I definitely agree with you on how planned obsolescence and consumerism is a huge issue. But we still need energy from something and this sounds like a great start.
I’m all about the three R’s. Especially prioritizing the order they are in.
REDUCE and REUSE first, recycle only if needed.
And pirate, ARRR!
Good luck. Any plan on how to?
Renewables don’t work.
Renewables power entire countries at this point. What the fuck are you talking about?
That’s a very out of date talking point
We need to do both of those things. Mindless consumerism aside, the best option to solve our base energy needs which are not frivolous (infrastructure, healthcare, education etc etc) is nuclear.
So travelling wave is out and SMRs are in? Right. What both have in common is that they’re just pipe dreams. Nuclear power never was and never will be economically viable. If we could all just accept that we could get on with real solutions.
The energy density of nuclear fuels is unparalleled.
Modern reactor designs are extremely safe and stable, the only downside is the cost.
The cost is so high because they are basically boutique projects. Having a standardized design with mass produced components would go a long way to making nuclear reactors more affordable.
And just why do you think that never happened? The Soviets tried that. And how did that go? The Japanese tried to use American designs without adapting them to local conditions and that’s how we got Fukushima. A nuclear reactor is simply too complex to be built in an assembly line. And all the promises of “small modular reactors” have been nothing but pipe dreams so far. I’m not saying it’s not doable. I’m saying it won’t happen any time soon. Anyone who touts nuclear power as a solution to climate change is either delusional or not arguing in good faith.
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And all countries that run nuclear reactors these days are completely corruption free? Just look at Fukushima and the aftermath. And that’s one of the less corrupt countries of the world.
We’ve had 70 years to figure out how to produce cost-competitive nuclear energy. It’s time to move on.
And electric cars have had over 100 years, so should we have given up on them? Your argument is flawed.
Not at all. We’ve seen massive advancements with EVs, 300+ miles ranges for under $40k are common now. Has nuclear both gotten more capable and cheaper during its lifetime? The answer is a resounding no.
All of those EV advancements were only in the passed 20 years.
The first electric vehicle was made well over 100 years ago. Until very recently they were considered wildly expensive and impractical.
You consider nuclear to me unnecessary and impractical because we’ve had the tech for 75 years and it’s still expensive. Yet nuclear tech is younger than EVs, and you discredit advancements because… reasons.
Your stance confuses me.
Why is it confusing? One is a battery on wheels, the other is controlled nuclear fission, creating steam to drive turbines for electricity generation.
The technology of modern reactors ,like the one in the article, is a greater advancement from early reactors that the 1900th century electric car to a modern one.
The materials, manufacturing techniques, fuels, controls, and components are only achievable due to modern advancements.
The latest reactors will be cheaper, more efficient, and safer. They are a necessary stopgap to overcome the transient nature of renewable energy in the UK and an important piece in ensuring energy availability and detachment from from fossil fuels.
Oh come on. Cheaper? Nuclear reactors frequently go way over budget and take longer than promised to build.
We don’t need nuclear as a stopgap, in fact, it’s not helpful to have base load at all with renewables - nuclear has to run at as close to 100% uptime as possible to make any financial sense. What do you do on windy, sunny days when renewables are generating more power than is required? You can’t switch off a nuclear plant very quickly.
Nuclear makes no sense any more. We need to save the cash and invest in more renewables and storage, and an upgraded power grid.
We did produce cost competitive nuclear. When France went through it’s oil crisis recovery shift to nuclear, they built them every single year for a decade, going from a couple to 40+ in the span of a decade.
We’ve just stopped. So then of course the institutional knowledge disappears.
That’s fair. I’m not anti-nuclear on principle. If we had gone all-in 30 years ago it would’ve made some sense. To build new nuclear now though is a waste of money.
Honestly its a pretty great use of money if you’re thinking long term. A useful if not ideal energy source for the climate crisis especially with batteries not quite being there yet, and thinking past that to more substantial space exploration/colonization its good to already have a working power source that doesn’t rely specifically on earths environment.
Batteries are already “there”, with more chemistries entering production.
You know how nuclear power works, right? It heats water to turn it into steam, which drives turbines so it needs a water source. It’s not something you can use in space. The Mars rover uses the natural decay of plutonium-238 to turn heat into electricity, it’s a completely different thing, no fission required.
No matter how you think about nuclear power in general, it will not be of any substantial help against climate change.
It’s expensive and takes forever to build. Even the optimistic projections of the vendors are well above what wind and solar deliver right now.
Nuclear power is just a tech bro pipe dream. Nobody needs it. It’s just prestige.
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Really?
The country that has extremely old reactors, that need to shut down, because the rivers got too hot from the cooling water?
The country that spend billions on building a single new reactor?
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And expensive in the long run, more expensive than other forms of power. And they take forever to build.
How is that helping again? The reactors going online in 20 years won’t help against climate change.
Lol you better strap on buddy cuz we’re gonna be fighting climate change for a lot longer than 20 years
And the fight has to start for good as soon as possible.
Even ignoring costs, we can’t wait 20, 30 years for all the reactors coming online. Until then it’s too late to mitigate at least the worst effects.
All the renewables are right there. Scalable, cheap, easy to deploy. Why not use them? Why the pipe dreams?
It’s too expensive to fight climat change? Come on.
Solar and wind are way cheaper. Why would any sane person choose the more expensive option?
BTW: you obviously misinterpreted my point. Either intentionally, then you are dishonest, or you are so preoccupied with proving your (moot) point, that you read what you hoped to read.
The goal of several of these new companies is to build small modular plants that are cookie cutter instead of individual boutique designs. That should bring cost down substantially.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear plants were built as large as possible because that was the only way that made any kind of financial sense. SMRs are a waste of money.
It might have been why in the past, but the issues right now with building new plants is getting a design through production that can survive the review process. Costs come down on the second plant because you have a design you can clone rather than developing it from scratch.
There are already several uses by several countries in using miniature nuclear power plants. This is just an attempt to make it more available to everyone.
Nuclear has never been competitive in terms of cost against the alternatives, first coal and gas, now renewables. In fact, nuclear is only getting more expensive. I really don’t understand why you want to pay more for power than is necessary. I don’t.
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Well, the idea is to save the planet.
But it’s a waste of resources, remember money is a token used to distribute production potential and reconsider it - all those people and resources could be allocated to other more efficient projects.
Nuclear in twenty years or solar, wind, trains, more efficiently insulated buildings, localized and ecologically sustainable infrastructure and industry before the end of the decade?
We need to compare the cost of nuclear against firm renewables, including storage (developing technology) and long-distance transmission (location-dependent political/technical challenges).
Comparing against coal and gas is meaningless unless we include the atmospheric cleanup costs.
In places where this has been studied extensively renewables with storage are still the cheapest by a long way. Australia has the whole state of South Australia (plus Tasmania) as a test case. SA has transitioned to almost 100% renewable supply in under a decade.
We have a cost effective, distributed, redundant, easy to build solution. SMRs are not proven in cost or reliability. They should be studied and trialed, but not at the expense of acting responsibly today.
The Westinghouse AP1000 was a modular design approved in 2004. The US started building one in 2010 and just finished this year (well, it’s not actually finished yet, but the first reactor is now online).
I think China was the only country to build one in less than a decade - and it’s much easier to perform public works when you’re a authoritarian government who doesn’t have to deal with public or environmental concerns.
Well, then show me any viable concept. Just one. Not an “experimental protoype”. An actual concept, that is even roughly comparable in cost to currently deployed systems.
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Hi, I’m a physicist who believes that nuclear power is the most realistic option of moving ourselves off fossil fuels, without the astronomical cost and untested technology that would be required in order to create a majority intermittent grid.
I do also have strong feelings about crypto, mostly about how much of a incredible waste of resources it is and how disgusting it is that the obvious scam nature of most of it hasnt been clamped down on by governments
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If you’re a physicist why are you stating what you “believe”? I would’ve thought facts and evidence would be more appealing than feels. Of course facts and evidence point to nuclear being a massive waste of everyone’s money when far cheaper alternatives are now available. Maybe that’s why?
Facts and theory can only tell you so much, eventually things need tested and there are a lot of factors going into a potential move t nuclear power
bevaise human afairs cant be reduced down to a sime harmonic oscillator and solved. There is no equation to solve for “best societal outcome”.
renewables are good to an extent but storage is an unsolved and difficult problem. Including enough storage to make them work as the majority source of power for a grid is vastly more expensive than nuclear power. Currently we are nowhere near that however, and given solar and wind deployment are bottlenecked in many places the obvious way forwards is to build as much renewables AND nuclear as possible.
Source on “storage is an unsolved and difficult problem” and “the majority source of power for a grid is vastly more expensive than nuclear power” because both of those appear to be false.
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what timeline are we in that bill gates is not the worst guy
Crazy times indeed. He is for sure not the lesser evil of all the billionaires but he has the best PR team of them all.
i’d argue that musk has even better pr team, if your goal is forming a cult that is
Lets hope they don’t run windows.
Rolls Royce SMRs are more likely to get govt support in the UK
General rule of thumb - if the current UK government is in favor of something it’s probably a really terrible idea.
I trust RR to build an SMR more than some tech bros.
They literally grow aerospace parts from crystals
I’m not suggesting that a SMR can’t be built, I’m saying that they’re a massive waste of money, unless you hold RR stock.
Well, this Tera Power project is also for SMRs…
SMRs are great for decentralization of the power grid.
Which makes the viability of renewables like wind and solar much more viable, as you can have the reactor for each mini grid throttle down based on current renewable yield, and throttle back up when the sun goes down or the wind stops.
It also means that issues like Texas had in the winter of 2021 would be a lot smaller in magnitude, as having one SMR and renewables go offline would only cause a local power outage, instead of entire cities suddenly being without heat or power.
I can’t find any sources that support SMRs being used as peaker plants, conventional nuclear certainly can’t behave this way. Do you have any links?
You can do this but it makes them even more expensive, because you’ve built an expensive plant for operational capacity that you don’t use.
We should be load following with storage, not nukes.
Do you have a source on that? I can’t find anything supporting SMRs for peak use. How quickly can they come online? How much notice to take offline? How long to reach peak generation?
Why would you get a small unit when you can get big one.
Why?
Dismissing all ideas of those you don’t like is a stupid idea and leads to you becoming dissociated from the views of the population at large but you do you I guess
At least break ideas down into categories small enough that you form a viewpoint on it to compare to theirs, as it’s near impossible to find a group you agree or disagree with on everything
It’s called, “paying attention”. I’ve been watching these crooks dismantle the UK for the past 13 years.
If 90% of their ideas are stupid, you’d still be missing out on a tonne of at least ok ideas
Sounds like you’re not paying attention but instead thinking you know best and so there’s no need to pay attention to anything else
If you want to filter through a mountain of bullshit in order to possibly find a few OK ideas, you’re free to waste your time. You sound like you really don’t have anything interesting to say but you’d like to tone police anyway.
It’s not like you’re looking retrospectively… You sound like a late teen who thinks they’ve got the world all figured out and so have shut everything out, including the things that would make you realise that you actually haven’t
Counterpoint: I’ve actually done the research on this, have you?
Idk about you but in a world where collapse is a distinct possibility, I’d rather not have a bunch of nuclear facilities just hanging around.
You should inform yourself better. Nuclear power plants are not like on the Simpsons.
I know nuclear power plants need vast amounts of water pumped around them to keep them cool. If the worst of the climate models come true (which is likely as it stands) and we have mass civil unrest, there’s no guarantee water and power will flow to them.
It’s an unnecessary risk, we have other options.
You think the seas are just going to dry up? You’re more dense than the uranium powering these plants.
Lol “water exists so how can a nuclear power plant possibly not get it”. Who’s the dense one here.
Keep being a science illiterate retard lmao
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As much as I dislike Bill Gates, I hope that this project finds success. With that said however, they’re going against Rolls Royce, GE, and Hitachi, which are probably more trustworthy for the government than a relatively new startup
Rolls Royce, GE, and Hitachi are more likely to succeed, but they’re doing little to innovate beyond light water reactors. Even among LWRs, NuScale has a more interesting design because it contains enough water to shut down without human intervention.
It’s good that some startups are trying to improve long-tail safety, because the probability of failure increases with the number of reactors in the world.
I’d cheer if it was Thorium. Uranium is only going to get more expensive. And I worry Bill is only after the tech that goes into UK submarines powered by these small RR reactors.
Thorium is nowhere even close to being a viable technology. Even at the most optimistic estimates (that are somewhat based in reality) it’ll be multiple decades until this stuff can make an impact. We don’t have that kind of time.
I accept that. But if were Thorium I’d be jumping up and down with pompoms.
Is it a clean energy player or do thed build nuclear power plants? Both is not possible at the same time, since nuclear power plants need mines and produce toxic waste.
All sources of power require some amount of mined materials, even if its just in construction. Nuclear waste is much less problematic than CO2 emissions, and nuclear power has the advantage of providing a consistent base load.
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Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Don’t trust anything this guy does, nuclear power is a gateway to power and building a monopoly on energy
Lol what
EEE was this guy company motto for a while
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish
EEE is not applicable here as adding additional source of energy to the market is always a good thing. If he takes a monopoly on it you can still use solar, wind, fosils
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It absolutely is exactly how it works, they get the UK to focus all their efforts on nuclear which means money doesn’t get spent on building renewable focused infrastructure so it’s harder to add renewables and it doesn’t matter anyway because the money is already tied up in nuclear projects that haven’t even been finished being built by the time they’re obsolete…
Really it’s more like vendor lockin that gates also was a big pioneer of, manipulating government into reliance on their software and making it increasing hard to switch as prices get ramped up.
Trusting a man who made his obscene amounts of money creating monopolies with highly corrupt and immoral business practices is dumb, that’s who he is and how he thinks - he’s not suddenly turned into a saint that’s going to be your best friend, he’s manipulating you by telling you what you want to hear so he can screw you over again.
