nuclear-news

Bill Gates marketing small nukes to China, where nuclear industry is less regulated

“right now the regulatory environment here in the United States means it would take decades just to certify. By partnering with the Chinese, they can move ahead and commercialize the technology around the world when it’s proven.”

Nuclear Industry Thrives in the U.S., but for Export – NYTimes.com By MATTHEW L. WALD March 30, 2011 “……At a clean energy conference in Washington in January, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., then the American ambassador to China, said that he had recently run into Bill Gates in China. Mr. Gates is an investor in a new kind of reactor, part of a class called “small modular reactors,” that are intended to be affordable for smaller utilities and suitable for places where the need is for hundreds of megawatts, not thousands of megawatts.
Mr. Gates is an investor with Nathan P. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, in a company called TerraPower, which has developed a design for something called the traveling wave reactor. For the most part, it makes its fuel as it runs, taking extra neutrons released in the chain reaction and using them to turn a low-value form of uranium into plutonium, which is almost immediately consumed. The approach means that a country could have nuclear power without bothering with enrichment plants, which are a route to nuclear weapons.
While the traveling wave is an American design, Mr. Huntsman noted, “right now the regulatory environment here in the United States means it would take decades just to certify. By partnering with the Chinese, they can move ahead and commercialize the technology around the world when it’s proven.”

March 31, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | marketing, technology, USA