Bill Gates in October 2018, at the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium to promote health and clean-energy Initiatives. Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images
One of Bill Gates’ causes is to replace power plants fueled by coal and natural gas with climate-friendly alternatives. That has led the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder to embrace nuclear power, and building nuclear power plants to combat climate change is a prospect worth discussing. But Gates has been persuaded to back a costly reactor design fueled by nuclear-weapon-usable plutonium and shown, through decades of experience, to be expensive, quick to break down, and difficult to repair.
In fact, Gates and his company, Terrapower, are promoting a reactor type that the US and most other countries abandoned four decades ago because of concerns about both nuclear weapons proliferation and cost.
The approximately 400 power reactors that provide about 10 percent of the world’s electric power today are almost all water-cooled and fueled by low-enriched uranium, which is not weapon usable. Half a century ago, however, nuclear engineers were convinced—wrongly, it turned out—that the global resource of low-cost uranium would not be sufficient to support such reactors beyond the year 2000.
Work therefore began on liquid-sodium-cooled “breeder” reactors that would be fueled by plutonium, which, when it undergoes a fission chain reaction, produces neutrons that can transmute the abundant but non-chain-reacting isotope of natural uranium, u-238, into more plutonium than the reactor consumes.
But mining companies and governments found a lot more low-cost uranium than originally projected. The Nuclear Energy Agency recently concluded that the world has uranium reserves more than adequate to support water-cooled reactors for another century.
And while technologically elegant, sodium-cooled reactors proved unable to compete economically with water-cooled reactors, on several levels. Admiral Rickover, who developed the US Navy’s water-cooled propulsion reactors from which today’s power reactors descend, tried sodium-cooled reactors in the 1950s. His conclusion was that they are “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” That captures the experience of all efforts to commercialize breeder reactors. The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan all abandoned their breeder-reactor efforts after spending the equivalent of $10 billion or more each on the effort.
Today, despite about $100 billion spent on efforts to commercialize them, only two sodium-cooled breeder reactor prototypes are operating—both in Russia. India is building one, and China is building two with Russian help. But it is not clear India and China are looking only to generate electricity with their breeders; they may also be motivated in part by the fact that breeder reactors produce copious amounts of the weapon-grade plutonium desired by their militaries to expand their nuclear-weapon stockpiles.
The proliferation risks of breeder-reactor programs were dramatically demonstrated in 1974, when India carried out its first explosive test of a nuclear-weapon design with plutonium that had been produced with US Atoms for Peace Program assistance for India’s ostensibly peaceful breeder reactor program. The United States, thus alerted, was able to stop four more countries, governed at the time by military juntas (Brazil, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan), from going down the same track—although Pakistan found another route to the bomb via uranium enrichment.
It was India’s 1974 nuclear test that got me involved with this issue as an advisor to the Carter administration. I have been involved ever since, contributing to the plutonium policy debates in the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries.
In 1977, after a policy review, the Carter administration concluded that plutonium breeder reactors would not be economic for the foreseeable future and called for termination of the US development program. After the estimated cost of the Energy Department’s proposed demonstration breeder reactor increased five-fold, Congress finally agreed in 1983.
But the dream of plutonium breeder reactors lived on in the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory, and, during the Trump administration, the department agreed to back the construction at INL of a plutonium-fueled, sodium-cooled reactor, deceptively called the “Versatile Test Reactor.” The VTR is a bigger version of INL’s Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which I helped shut down in 1994 because the reactor no longer had a mission, when I worked in the Clinton administration’s White House.
The consortium that is to build the Versatile Test Reactor, at an estimated cost of up to $5.6 billion, includes Bill Gates’ Terrapower.
Gates is obviously not in it for the money. But his reputation for seriousness may have helped recruit Democratic Senators Cory Booker, Dick Durbin, and Sheldon Whitehouse to join the two Republican senators from Idaho in a bipartisan coalition to co-sponsor the Nuclear Energy Innovations Capabilities Act of 2017, which called for the VTR.
I wonder if any of those five Senators knows that the VTR is to be fueled annually by enough plutonium for more than 50 Nagasaki bombs. Or that it is a failed technology. Or that the Idaho National Laboratory is collaborating on plutonium separation technology with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute at a time when about half of South Korea’s population wants nuclear weapons to deter North Korea.
Fortunately, it is not too late for the Biden administration and Congress to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to zero out the Versatile Test Reactor in the Department of Energy’s next budget appropriations cycle. The money could be spent more effectively on upgrading the safety of our existing reactor fleet and on other climate-friendly energy technologies.
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Dr. Von Hippel seems to be stuck in 1950s with this comment which mashes together two very different projects. Terrapower, which is the company Mr. Gates has investments, is developing multiple reactor types, one of which is the traveling wave reactor which was specifically developed in the late 1980s to address the proliferation issues with breeder reactors. It is designed to burn in-situ what it breeds. Terrapower is also looking at other designs, including molten salt reactors. Dr. Von Hippel then conflates this effort with the Versatile Test Reactor which is not a bigger version of an experimental breeder reactor but a materials test reactor designed to test materials for advanced reactors of many different designs including molten salt, sodium cooled, and gas cooled, many of which are have very desirable non- proliferation characteristics. The VTRs closest counterparts are the now closed Fast Flux Test Facility at Hanford, another materials test reactor, or the proposed MYRRAH facility in Belgium not the BN-600. The Bulletin did not increase their credibility by publishing this letter without a technical review of its claims.
Although Terrapower designs (both molten salt and sodium-cooled ones) primarily fission plutonium, they do NOT rely on either reprocessing of spent fuel or initial uranium enrichment. This is precisely in order to eliminate the proliferation risks, which are primarily a result of fuel cycle operations. Sodium-cooled reactors had their teething problems, but these have largely been resolved by continuous operation of BN-family reactors in Russia over the past several decades. VTR is an important step in reviving the US capabilities and filling a worldwide gap in testing fuels and other materials for advanced reactors.
It seems Bill Gates is insane. If this plan of his became a reality there would be all the more nuclear waste that nobody knows how to contain for 10000 years. This stuff will be dangerous for longer than recorded history. Think of Fukashima, 10 years after a tidal wave damaged the shorefront reactors (who would have guessed?) it is still an out of control melted down highly radioactive mess. Every day thousands of gallons of highly radioactive water is spilling into the Pacific with no end in sight. Humans do not have the knowledge to control nuclear waste and accidents.
The molten salt fast reactor that Gates is funding development is able to consume nuclear waste as fuel. The net effect would be a continuous reduction in the amount of nuclear waste we need to store. Elysium Industries is also working in a similar design. Check it out.
The author has no knowledge about the Bill Gates TerraPower Traveling Wave Reactor. If he did, he would know that the goal is a once-through fuel cycle where once the reactor is started up, depleted uranium in and spent nuclear fuel for disposal. It is designed to minimize the risks of proliferation.
Frank, Excellent article. Crisply written and convincing (not that I needed convincing!). Some bad ideas just won’t die. Hope you are keeping well. Best, Bruce MacDonald
I think this article needs to be read by Bill Gates.
Dooms day proponents like Frank von Hippel have dealt the US economy and the world several serious setbacks for their irrational fear. They have existed since before the days when we were encouraged to get under our desks and hide from the world. The Clinton administration along with Jim Kerry, who promoted Iran having nuclear weapons, shut down the EBRII reactor program when it had demonstrated the ability to produce power for very long periods of time with the same fuel set, successfully deal with and minimize hazardous waist, provide much safer reactor technology, a better method of storing waist products, and an abundance of reliable power. What Frank does not talk about are the issues resulting from massive stockpiles of spent fuel from water cooled reactors and the inability to appropriately manage and protect them. They are a considerable security risk as well. The major roadblocks to advance reactor technology are those that would implement so many regulatory restrictions that the cost of developing this technology becomes insurmountable.
Nuclear power is here to stay and if we don't continue our support of sustainable and safe nuclear power others in the world will and we will simply be left behind on a technology we paid to create. We talk about nonproliferation and then pick and choose who can have the ability to produce the material. This seems inconsistent from a security prospective and is now far out of control without the benefits we could have gained from developing better technology. The UN has done a simply pathetic job of protecting the planet on this front.
I am not a big fan of Mr. Gates but I hope that he, and other, are successful at bringing this technology to fruition so that it can benefit our energy needs, our climate, and our desire for space exploration. Solar, wind, and fossil fuels are not going to satisfy our energy needs and are not going to get us off this rock!
You're missing one main point: the Plutonium needed to fuel the VTR already exists in weapons stock piles. The VTR burns up the weapons-grade material rendering it unusable for weapons, and reduces the weapons stockpile. It doesn't increase proliferation risk, it reduces it.
In addition, INL’s Experimental Breeder Reactor II was operated successfully from the 1960's all the way to 1994. That doesn't sound like a failed technology to me.
Let's be honest here.
There is no reactor technology that BAS supports. The only reason it is less critical of LWR reactors is because they are too inefficient to be competitive with other forms of energy generation and are therefore likely to be eventually phased out altogether. Has the BAS in recent history ever supported expansion of LWR's for carbon-free power generation? I think not.
Sodium cooled fast reactors are not a "failed technology," Just look at EBR-I and II, and the BN-800 reactor. Clinch River was cancelled as much for the fact that its design was out of date as for cost overruns and proliferation concerns. The IFR solved the proliferation concerns but was cancelled by the Clinton administration. Recent (and in the case of EBR-II, past) experience has showed that the chief technical issue, sodium leaks, is solvable. The only reason they are more expensive is because up until now, they have never been commercially produced. They have all been prototypes.
Rickover is a terrible example to use in support of liquid sodium cooled designs being a failed technology. Rickover's goal was to have a LWR design and a sodium cooled design compete, with an emphasis on which could be deployed more quickly. The effort put into making the sodium design work was minimal as Rickover needed quick results. Once LWR's were chosen, the Navy gave up completely on any other type of reactor and built an infrastructure to support only pressurized LWR's. If anything, Rickover stifled innovation in reactor design going forward by exerting virtual totalitarian control over Naval Reactors. ( Normal Polmar, Cold War Submarines).
I would have thought that the bad experience with the Enrico Fermi #1 reactor (Not the current Fermi 2 which is a BWR)would have been enough to scare everyone including Mr. Gates away from Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors(LMFBRs).