Bill Gates Push Forward for New Source of Safe Nuclear Energy
Posted Sat, Mar 27, 2010 by Juan Pablo
Bill Gates is surely one of the most affluent and wealthiest men in the world and he certainly wields a lot of influence, clout and power in the technological world. And in an effort to advance the world's capability to generate energy with minimal risk, he publicly announced his immediate plans to fund a potential nuclear technology called traveling-wave reactor or TWR. And he is excited by the brewing partnership and collaboration of TerraPower, a TWR nuclear company he finances heavily and Toshiba Corporation, a primary force in the commercial nuclear power enterprise.
Traveling-wave reactors has been widely debated in technological circles for decades as a cheaper and safer alternative to conventional fission reactors. Until now the supercomputers and its maintenance required to make such efficient technology possible were simply too expensive. Good thing that Bill Gates has lots of money to invest and he is very generous and humanitarian as he is brilliant and wealthy.
Instead of using enriched uranium which is volatile, unstable and very deadly in the wrong hands, TWR can burn depleted uranium and other low-grade radioactive fuel stocks. It can also burn them for long periods of time thereby reducing waste and harmful by-products. In traveling-wave reactors, a long-term and sustained reaction is created in which the waste from breeding the fuel is reused to generate more fuel inside the reactor. In theory, a nuclear reactor could operate for 100 years without changing the fuel rods, and the waste generated by these operations would be much less radioactive and detrimental to security and health than the waste of our modern-day reactors which are unstable and inefficient.
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