A Nuclear Renaissance

Filed in archive Nuclear on March 16, 2010

© Topato


If someone told you that ten years from we'd all probably drive cars that got 75 miles per gallon and ran off of a juice we made ourselves out of grass clippings from our own yard, would you scoff?

Would you scoff if the person who told you that was Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates?

Gates has made a few waves recently (and been in the news) over an energy idea that he thinks could eventually provide an almost infinite source of clean energy at half the current cost of the energy we use now. It's not grass clippings; it's a new nuclear technology that (according to Gates) has a number of benefits over the last generation of nuclear power generators.

While Gates has some academic supporters, many in the nuclear industry are scoffing at his idea. But if Gates is right, his new reactors would be safer (because the burn less intensely) and would recycle their own waste. That last point is a biggie; we've never come up with an acceptable long term solution to storing nuclear waste from the 104 active nuclear reactors we have in service now.

CNN provides more details on the proposed technology.