{"id":200230,"date":"2021-06-03T18:23:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T23:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/06\/03\/nuclear-power-meet-blue-screen-of-death\/"},"modified":"2021-06-03T18:23:00","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T23:23:00","slug":"nuclear-power-meet-blue-screen-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/06\/03\/nuclear-power-meet-blue-screen-of-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear Power, Meet Blue Screen of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve written about <a href=\"https:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/search?q=gates+bill+nuclear&amp;max-results=20&amp;by-date=true\">Bill Gates plans to create a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor<\/a> before.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Well, they (Warren Buffet is involved as well) have now <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2021\/jun\/03\/bill-gates-warren-buffett-new-nuclear-reactor-wyoming-natrium\">selected a location for the prototype reactor<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I have a number of problems with the reactor in addition to Bill Gates&#8217; involvement:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<li>Molten sodium will leak, and it is highly flammable, and is potentially explosive. (The history of sodium cooled reactors is universally horrible)<\/li>\n<li>The reactor uses 20% Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), which enriched is enough to make a bomb.&nbsp; (You can at levels in excess of 10% enrichment)<\/li>\n<li>By design, it produces large amounts of Plutonium. (Traveling Wave Reactor)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Needless to say, I am not sanguine:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">Power companies run by billionaire friends Bill Gates and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/business\/warrenbuffett\">Warren Buffett<\/a> have chosen Wyoming to launch the first Natrium nuclear reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant.<\/p>\n<p>TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffett\u2019s Berkshire Hathaway, said on Wednesday that the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant was expected to be announced by the end of the year.<\/p>\n<p>Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels to traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Regarded by some,&#8221; Huh? &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Maybe if your last name is, &#8220;Strangelove.&#8221; <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026 <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">\u201cThis is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative,\u201d Wyoming\u2019s governor, Mark Gordon, said. \u201cNuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy\u201d in Wyoming, the country\u2019s top coal-producing state.<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This statement is absolutely false.&nbsp; The construction of time for reactors is measured in decades, while wind turbines go up in a few months.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>If we need to move now, pretty much any other power source is online faster.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system\u2019s power output to 500MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1bn.<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The molten salt energy storage, but using mechanical storage like pumped water is simpler, cheaper, and more efficient. <\/p>\n<p>About the only thing more terrifying than Bill Gates starting up a bunch of nuclear reactors, he&#8217;s alreay half way to a bond villain, would be if Comcast were to be running those plants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve written about Bill Gates plans to create a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor before.&nbsp; Well, they (Warren Buffet is involved as well) have now selected a location for the prototype reactor. I have a number of problems with the reactor in addition to Bill Gates&#8217; involvement: Molten sodium will leak, and it is highly &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,987,1163,1044,1042],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-fail","category-nuclear-power","category-nuclear-weapons","category-proliferation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}