Gates goes nuclear in zero carbon vision

Bill Gates has called for a dramatic increase in R&D investment for low-carbon technologies, including his own new pet project into advanced nuclear reactors, warning that developed countries will need to completely decarbonise the energy they use by 2050 if they are to avert the worst effects of climate change.

Speaking at the annual TED Summit in California late last week, the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft chairman said the widely accepted goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50 to 80 per cent by mid-century was likely to prove insufficiently ambitious.

Outlining the so-called COPSEC equation, which states that carbon emissions are a factor of population, services, energy and carbon per unit of energy, Gates argued that with population and consumption of services set to rise and improvements in energy efficiency able to go only so far, the way to deliver deep cuts in carbon emissions is to reduce CO2 per unit of energy to zero.

"What we are going to have to do at a global scale is create a new system," he said. "We need energy miracles."

Gates called for a huge increase in R&D spending on innovative zero carbon technologies, observing his audience would be "stunned by the ridiculous low levels of spending on this innovation agenda".

He added that "when countries get together at places like Copenhagen they should not just discuss CO2, they should discuss this innovation agenda".

According to Gates, carbon capture and storage, nuclear, wind, solar photovoltaics and solar thermal currently represent the most promising zero carbon technology areas, although he admitted each faced major technical and economic barriers to adoption.

He also highlighted advances in nuclear technology as an area that is often neglected by clean tech investors and detailed his own investment in a project called TerraPower, which is working on a new Traveling Wave Reactor that promises to generate power from waste radioactive material produced by conventional reactors.

Gates said recent supercomputer modeling work had suggested the approach, which uses the 99 per cent of uranium discarded by conventional reactors, could provide safe and cheap nuclear power for over 60 years without any need for refueling.

He said existing radioactive waste could provide decades of clean power, but added that ultimately uranium could be extracted from sea water using a relatively simple filtration process.

Tens of millions of dollars have already been invested in bringing together the scientists and supercomputer technology needed for the project, Gates said, adding that hundreds of millions of dollars would be needed to test the materials before an even larger project could be undertaken to build the first pilot facility.

"A molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of coal, so if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation, the footprint and the cost, [then] the potential in termns of effect on land and so on is almost in a class of its own," he said.