I’m not a huge Bill Gates fan, but he certainly gets this important issue. Cheap energy is the key to reducing poverty. As long as government policies aren’t insane, of course. And we need it for space as well. The lack of progress in space nuclear reactors for the past half century is appalling.
18 thoughts on “Bill Gates’s Nuclear Ambitions”
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One of the articles mentions Gates is looking at Thorium. Kirk Sorensen is the guy behind Energy from Thorium. Sorensen worked at NASA for 10 years. I believe space exploration is one of the reasons Sorensen is so interested in nuclear power. Low mass, high energy power sources would be helpful for ISRU as well as ion drives.
There’s some KREEP deposits on the moon. Maybe thorium could fuel lunar power plants.
In one of his presentaions, he said he was trying to solve the problem of generating electricity on the Moon and LFTRs were the solution. Then he was like, this is so awesome we should do it on Earth too.
Thanks, I had believed that to be the case but didn’t know it for a fact. Do you know if that presentation is online?
Yup, there are several online but I don’t have any links atm. If you google for videos, look the ones that last an hour or more. Should be a Ted Talk too.
If you are on the moon, particularly up near the poles where there is hydrates,
solar makes a lot more sense.
simple to install, lots of insolation, no heat rejection problem.
a simple alpha joint gets you a lot of power so it’s simple.
Nuclear power is a dying niche industry on earth. Requires massive governmental subsidy,
very few nuke plants make money, and cheap gas and coal is killing the plants on install costs
and cheap wind and solar is killing them on operating costs.
now that said, an outer planets mission, particularly beyond Saturn, well, you are
going to want RTGs or even a small nuke. If you want to do a fast mission to the Oort cloud
or a Kuiper Belt explorer, especially with a mapping radar or orbiters around Neptune or Uranus or Pluto,
well then you really want some power and propulsion.
A 100 KW space rated nuke, would make those missions really interesting.
I agree that it’s exciting plateaus of nearly constant light neighbor the Whipple and Shackleton cold traps.
At this point I don’t know if solar or nuclear would be better power sources at the poles. Being ignorant, I remain agnostic. I’ll toss out some of the things I’m thinking about. Maybe arguments you provide will tilt my opinion one way or the other.
If memory serves ISS solar array wings give about 30 watts per kilogram. Don’t know if that includes the the mass of the SARJ. At 1/6 g it seems to the me a lunar truss and SARJ would need to be stronger than ISS.
Arrays at such a high latitude cast long shadows. So if two arrays are next to each other, an array will cast a shadow on his neighbor at some time during the sun’s 360º trip around the horizon.
I would imagine a few things.
1) place the arrays in a ring, around the pole. And make the ring diameter of reasonable size.
2) stagger the element heights. so the shadows don’t cast onto the other elements.
3) have enough battery so you can smooth out power variations.
No system is ideal.
For space power sources you’re looking for the most watts electricity per kilogram. For solar vs nuclear you haven’t made a case one way or the other.
Most nuclear reactors on earth produce about 3X the heat as they do electricity.
So they have pretty big cooling towers and they use rivers, lakes, oceans to make sure they have plenty of water. So it’s not just the mass of the reactors which is small, it’s the heat exchangers and radiators. On the moon, you don’t have convective cooling, and without water, you can’t really conductively cool.
so all you can do is radiate, so you need big radiators. Look at the ISS
Big heavy and needing lots of ammonia.
To do a nuclear powered ISS, you would need 3X the radiator size.
The USAF has put a lot of effort into space based reactors, and pretty much walked away from it. The russians did nuclear powered birds but, weren’t lighter then US birds. Compare a Big Bird or White Cloud to a Russian nuke bird, do you see a big win there?
if you look at the Topaz 1, you were getting 1.5watts/KG. not exactly a win in cis lunar space.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Non-Power-Nuclear-Applications/Transport/Nuclear-Reactors-for-Space/#.Ukm_HmRga6w
if you look at the chart, most of these were a couple of watts/KG. only SP-100 hit 20W/KG and Sp-100 never flew to my recollection.
http://www.enfsolar.com/ApolloF/solar/Product/pdf/monocrystalline/SBM%20Solar_250W%20Panel_ENFSolarDirectory.pdf
stock terrestial PV arrays are at 18 w/kg space rated will be way past that.
so add some battery margin, and unless you are going deep space, why bother?
Cheap wind and solar? Who are you trying to kid?
You are behind the times.
Unless there has been a massive breakthrough in the ability to store Wind and Solar, he is ahead of you.
Wind turbines have many reliability problems and many are not reaching their designed lifetime. That’s just the one of the technical problems, once you have solved the problems of irregular power levels, energy storage, and environmentalist, who both demand renewable energy so long as it is not in their backyard, on a mountain slope, or visible from the shoreline. Then there is the harm to direct harm to birds caused by wind farms.
There is no such things as cheap solar, and it is very inefficient. The true value of solar is last mile, low voltage solutions. In those cases, the increased cost in production per watt is offset by the near zero cost of having to distribute the power. When you try to scale solar (or wind) to power even a small town, you lose the advantages of not having to distribute the power, and the costs for electricity increases. The people who suffer most are the poor that cannot afford the increased costs.
“Then there is the harm to direct harm to birds caused by wind farms.”
When did you suddenly become an environmentalist?
Nuclear has been REGULATED to death. The time and legal expense to get through licensing and seemingly endless challenges by “environmental” groups make building nuclear facilities far slower and more expensive than it has to be.
yes, that would explain why Nuclear has been such a phenomenal success overseas.
http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/countries-with-most-reliance-on-nuclear-power.html
The only countries with big percentages of nuclear power are european socialists with the sole exception of Seoul.
If Regulation were the only problem to nuclear power, i imagine Somalia would have lots of it.
I just drove through central washington and down the columbia and what came to mind was, they destroyed the environment in order to save it. But city people don’t really care what they do to rural environments as long as some egos get stroked.
The same people who think urban sprawl is bad, have no problems with their monstrosities sprawling over the countryside.