Bill Gates thinks he has a key part of the answer for combating climate change: a return to nuclear power. The Microsoft co-founder is making the rounds on Capitol Hill to persuade Congress to spend billions of dollars over the next decade for pilot projects to test new designs for nuclear power reactors.
Gates, who founded TerraPower in 2006, is telling lawmakers that he personally would invest $1 billion and raise $1 billion more in private capital to go along with federal funds for a pilot of his company’s never-before-used technology, according to congressional staffers.
“Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day,” Gates said in his year-end public letter. “The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation.”
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday January 28 2019, @11:21AM
I would argue that the technological issues are precisely to prevent "political patronage and careless cost cutting". As in: the technology has to be cheap enough to prevent too much pork. The safety design likewise has to be build-in (thereby cheap as per the previous point), robust (as in: low maintenance cost), and possible fall-out must be easy to contain.