Bill Gates making progress on next generation of nuclear power -- In China

The last two weeks of September was quite the time for news – the Pope’s visit, the Speaker’s exit, the Chinese President’s visit, the United Nations General Assembly, huge Hurricane Joaquin, weird House committee rants, flowing water on Mars, more Trumpeting, the new Daily Show. But the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Seattle on his way to the east coast, was little heralded in the nation at large.

Disputes over computer hacking, cyber-plundering and limits on U.S. firms’ access to Chinese markets have tensions high between the two federal governments, to the point where unleashing economic sanctions on Chinese businesses is a definite possibility. China’s increasing territorial assertiveness in South East Asia is also weighing on everyone’s mind.

But Washington State is doing well with China. Washington State exports more stuff to China than to any other nation. Airplanes top the list, but petroleum and agricultural exports aren’t far behind, especially soybeans, wheat, corn, potatoes, fruit, wine and wood. All needed for a population four times as large as the United States.

Now nuclear reactors will enter that list.

Bill Gates looks on as Lee McIntire, CEO of Gates’ nuclear technology company, TerraPower, and Qian Zhimin, President of the China National Nuclear Corporation, signs an agreement that allows the two companies to collaborate on advanced nuclear technologies that address safety, environmental and cost issues – fast reactors that get ten times the energy from the same amount of fuel as old reactors. Source: TerraPower

Bill Gates’ nuclear power company, TerraPower, signed an agreement with the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) allowing the two companies to collaborate on advanced nuclear technologies that address safety, environmental and cost issues. The MOU was signed by TerraPower CEO Lee McIntire and CNNC President Qian Zhimin, as Washington’s Lieutenant Governor Brad Owen and Bill Gates looked on (see figure).

China’s plan to build 400 new nuclear reactors by mid-century means a huge market for any company dedicated to design and build next-generation reactors. Last year, President Jinping called for even faster development of nuclear energy, as discussed in Forbes/Asia. Bill Gates has long understood the essential role of reliable power in eradicating global poverty, and its evil stepchildren war and terrorism, and decided that nuclear was the best long-term solution for base load power.

What is needed for the next thousand years are new-generation nuclear fast-reactors, a design that gets ten times more energy out of the same amount of fuel as a traditional reactor. The waste is much easier to handle, cannot be used to make weapons, and is only hot for a few hundred years – not thousands.

TerraPower’s version of this reactor is called the Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR), a liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor that uses depleted or natural uranium as fuel, and can even burn spent fuel from our old reactors. TerraPower plans to build a 600 MWe plant first by the early 2020s, followed by a larger 1,150 MWe commercial plant.

CNNC isn’t the first nuclear company to sign on with Gates and TerraPower. Last year, Babcock & Wilcox, the big manufacturer of Navy nuclear reactors, agreed to support TerraPower by providing design and fabrication of components and fuel, engineering, materials testing and operations support, among other services.

“Additional work must be done to define what a possible joint venture may look like, but this MOU signals that we are well on track,” said McIntire. Unfortunately, the regulatory environment in America is so glacial that TerraPower and CNNC will build the first unit in China and then deploy commercial versions of this new reactor to global markets within fifteen years.

The nuclear angle dovetails with the big announcement by Jinping that China is instituting a Cap&Trade program to address carbon emissions and global warming. China pledged $3.1 billion to help developing countries combat climate change, about the same as the United States.

China’s air quality is so bad from the burning of coal in places like Beijing, that the government is putting huge flat screen images of nice days to fight the depression that comes with never seeing the sky. China is truly attempting to change from coal to nuclear and renewables, but that change will be slow as their energy use doubles in the next 20 years. A Cap&Trade system for carbon, as announced last week by President Xi Jinping, is one effort. Developing new nuclear reactors that get ten times the energy from the same amount of fuel, like the fast reactors being developed by Bill Gates’ TerraPower, is another. Photo Credit: Feng Li, from the book Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, a book containing powerful and evocative images showing the ecological and social tragedies of humanity’s ballooning numbers and consumption (see https://populationspeakout.org/the-book/view-book/ and http://www.populationspeakout.org/)

It’s important that this Cap&Trade program work for China, as important as it is for the United States. The two countries together produce almost half of all carbon emissions in the world. Efforts by both nations will be front and center at the Paris COP-21 climate talks this December in the hopes of moving the world forward.

“Xi Jinping is scoring a propaganda coup by announcing China’s intention to introduce a national cap-and-trade scheme in 2017,” noted Macquarie University professor John Matthews in The Conversation. The irony is not lost on anyone that China is introducing the very scheme that failed to get through our own Congress amid calls that China would never join us.

China’s announcement may be the critical domino to fall. This week India, the world’s third-largest emitter and last major economy to submit emissions plans, promised to decrease its emissions by a third over the next 15 years. Although its economy is relatively small and weak, and its people too poor for detail goals and timetables, India’s plan is a long-awaited contribution towards reaching a global deal to address global warming at the U.N. climate summit in December.

But as Mark Clifford writes in Forbes/Asia, “Propaganda coups are nice theater, but they don’t clean the air. The euphoria over China’s announcement should not obscure some tough questions.” It is really difficult to build the actual market for Cap&Trade anywhere. But it’s particularly difficult to monitor the program in China, given the relative weakness of the central government relative to the local and regional governments. Cap&Trade lends itself quite well to corruption.

Europe’s experiment with Cap&Trade has been variable, and they’re a better market-driven economy than China in general, and for Cap&Trade in particular. But China needs it to work – if you’ve been to Beijing lately, you know why (see figure). In fact, TerraPower’s CTO, John Gilleland feels that, “They’re very serious. In some ways, they’re more serious than we are.” He knows that China believes in climate change and wants to reduce the smog that’s choking its cities and threatening their emerging health care system.

It is critical that China deals with this issue now. China burns 4 billion tons of coal a year, almost as much as the rest of the world combined, and coal use in China has been rising steadily for the past decade. Despite the recent economic dip, China’s power sector will double in the next 20 years. It’s imperative that clean energy, like new nuclear, dominate that growth – not coal.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/prishe/2015/10/03/with-louisville-basketball-lamenting-alleged-sex-scandal-could-2013-ncaa-title-be-vacated/