Bill Gates knows what worldwide problems to focus on and seems to have great people he takes advice from. I'm thinking he knows what he is talking about a heck of a lot more than the Luddite president and many other world leaders. Fusion is too far in the future and alternative energy isn't ready to take over significantly until we at least have a reasonable battery solution. We need nuclear.
Bill Gates urges the U.S. to take the lead in nuclear power, for the good of the planet
Short term? Just keep existing nuclear power plants online (something both Germany and Japan foolishly decided against). Medium term? Develop better, cheaper and safer nuclear power plants (what BillyG was trying to do). Most of current designs are over 50 years old, we can certainly do a lot better with the technology and knowledge we have now.
And, about the mining? Although there is more than in enough in Australia alone to supply the whole Earth a couple of centuries, we actually don't need to mine for Uranium at all. It's estimated that there is at least four billion tons of uranium in seawater, which should tide us over for a good fraction of, well, forever.
Unless or until there's a breakthrough in fusion reactors, nuclear power seems like a losing proposition, especially compared to wind and solar. Besides the well known accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima (plus other less severe ones in the UK, US, USSR, Japan and France) there is the still largely unsolved problem of waste management. It is much more expensive to build than other competing clean technologies:
Key point:
The levelized cost of nuclear power is
relatively high compared to other energy sources: the minimum cost per
megawatt hour to build a new nuclear plant is $112, compared to $40 for
utility-scale solar, $41 for combined cycle gas, and $29 for wind.
Nuclear power is only able to remain viable in power markets due to subsidiesRather than subsidizing nuclear power it makes more sense to spend money on improving and deploying wind and solar (and the associated battery technologies). The cost of renewables has declined far faster than anyone expected 20 years ago, and AFAIK, there's no reason to think that further progress can't be achieved.
Hmm, I didn’t know that the uranium in sea water was a billion year supply.
The science explained in your article is encouraging:
So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.
Here's the WSJ article it refers to:
