Dr. Conca reports that the Bill Gates nuclear power company, TerraPower, signed an agreement with the China National Nuclear Corporation allowing the two companies to collaborate on advanced nuclear technologies that address safety, environmental and cost issues.
China has plans to build 400 new nuclear reactors by mid-century and this means a huge market for any company dedicated to design and build next-generation reactors. Last year, President Jinping called for even faster development of nuclear energy, as discussed in Forbes - Asia.
Bill Gates has long understood the essential role of reliable power in eradicating global poverty, and its evil stepchildren war and terrorism, and decided that nuclear was the best long-term solution for base load power. What is needed for the next thousand years are new-generation nuclear fast-reactors, a design that gets ten times more energy out of the same amount of fuel as a traditional reactor. The waste is much easier to handle, cannot be used to make weapons, and is only hot for a few hundred years, not thousands.
The TerraPower version of this reactor is called the Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR), a liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor that uses depleted or natural uranium as fuel, and can even burn spent fuel from our old reactors. TerraPower plans to build a 600 MWe plant first by the early 2020s, followed by a larger 1,150 MWe commercial plant.
CNNC isn not the first nuclear company to sign on with Gates and TerraPower. Last year, Babcock and Wilcox, the big manufacturer of Navy nuclear reactors, agreed to support TerraPower by providing design and fabrication of components and fuel, engineering, materials testing and operations support, among other services. Unfortunately, the regulatory environment in America is so glacial that TerraPower and CNNC will build the first unit in China and then deploy commercial versions of this new reactor to global markets within 15 years.
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