Bill Gates: It is not time to waste nuclear power and be optimistic about the fourth-generation nuclear power plant

According to foreign media reports, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates called at a corporate meeting on Tuesday (May 3) that although the disaster caused by the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the 311 earthquake in Japan caused nuclear safety concerns to rise to highs; but nuclear energy There is still considerable potential for development. We should not give up.

Bill Gates discussed the current state of the energy industry and the possibility of replacing petroleum and coal with technology at the DisruptivebyDesignBusinessConference, a design business conference organized by WIRED magazine. He pointed out that the Fukushima nuclear disaster proved that the progress of nuclear power plant technology has been so small for a long time in the past; but at the same time, energy technology innovation and investment have reached a fairly mature level.

Gates said that the design of traditional nuclear power plants is assumed to be able to operate in a submersible environment; after that, although the second-generation reactor was developed, due to the nuclear disaster of Three Mile and coal, the development was stopped and the design was followed. Updates are quite limited.

He said that the Fukushima nuclear power plant was an old second-generation reactor built on the design of the 1960s. If compared with the future fourth-generation nuclear power plants, the Fukushima nuclear power plant is a world of difference. The latter is more effective in dealing with “afterheat” caused by radioactive waste from nuclear reactors and can completely avoid this problem.

Bill Gates also proposed that another important tool to help nuclear power generation innovation is simulation software. This will help the power plant anticipate the impact of major natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunami, although no one can predict when such natural disasters will occur.

He hopes that the design of the fourth-generation nuclear power plant will have at least one plant that will be completed in 2020; and he hopes that by 2030, hundreds of nuclear power plants can adopt this special design to make new technologies more widely available. In fact, Bill Gates is one of the investors of the nuclear power reactor design innovation company TerraPower.