Bill Gates Documentary: Nuclear Power 

POSITIVE 
 
Why does the US use about twice as much energy per person as Europe does? 
● Each person uses different kinds of energy: heating, materials, food, car engines, ship 
engines, jet engines, diet, fertilizer 
Energy is this miracle that’s core to the modern lifestyle  
 
THE PROBLEM:  
● The primary generation sources, which are coal, natural gas, and liquid gasoline, when 
you burn them, they release CO2 into the air, and this clearly causes heating 
 
THE SOLUTION: 
● Innovating across all the sectors of emissions 
 
However…  
● Technologies such as solar and wind will not singlehandedly shut off any pipes 
○ Since they’re intermittent, we must store everything that’s generated  
■ But we can’t build enough batteries to store power for the entire world  
 
[ According to NASA, the CO2 that’s being pumped into the atmosphere can linger for 
hundreds of years ] 
 
DIFFERENT APPROACHES: 
1. Developing porous material that could remove carbon from the air, soaking up CO2 like 
a sponge   
2. Converting CO2 into chemicals to make recyclable plastics and other products  
3. Using highly efficient 3D-printing, creating materials that produce far less carbon 
dioxide  
4. Building a longer-range, cheaper battery for electric vehicles 
 
It’s necessary that we start deploying a solution and we deploy it unnaturally fast 
 
NUCLEAR ENERGY 
- Requires hundreds of millions of dollars and assembling a team of over-qualified 
scientists  
- Problems include economics and public perception  
 
● When a neutron is shot into an atom, it creates a chain reaction and a massive amount 
of heat 
 ○ That heat can generate steam that powers a turbine and makes electricity, all 
without emitting CO2 
When you have a ​fission reaction​, you get ​radioactive materials 
The ​difficult part​ about nuclear power is to make sure that, no matter what, those ​nuclear 
materials are not escaping   
 
- CHERNOBYL​: the reactor relied too heavily on its operators 
● The fear of, “Is it safe?” Appropriately, the public questions, “Do we need this 
technology at all?” 
○ How many people have nuclear reactors killed as opposed to how many 
the effluent of coal plants? 
■ Nuclear power has caused less than a few thousand deaths total 
■ Coal kills 800,000 people every year 
 
There hasn’t been real innovation in nuclear technology for 25 years 
● How can we actually deploy enough energy to get off of fossil fuels? 
 
- Almost all nuclear power plants currently in existence were not designed with 
computers at all 
● They were literally slide-rule designed plants 
● The nuclear power plant that exploded at Chernobyl is based on a design from 
the late 1940s 
● Most modern nuclear plants in the US at the present time represent 1960s 
designs and 1970s implementation 
 
BREAKTHROUGH:  
Instead of using ​enriched uranium​, Teller and Lowell imagined a way to use ​depleted 
uranium​, which can’t be used for nuclear weapons  
  
- TerraPower: Could the reactor actually work? 
● After 5 years of extensive computer modeling, the idea showed promise  
○ The new design greatly reduced the chance of human error  
- Fueled by depleted uranium, the traveling wave reactor functions as a slow-burning 
candle and required refueling only once every decade 
Reactor = clean, efficient, and safe  
 
Fukushima was a slide-rule era plant 
● It’s of a type of plant that becomes unsafe if you ever shut the power off 
 
After you take fuel out of a nuclear reactor, it’s called spent fuel  
● It’s still hot and it continues to be hot for quite some period of time, so you have to 
put it in what’s called a cooling pond 
○ There’s only water to cool it if there’s power 
When the 9.0 earthquake shook the plant at Fukushima, the reactor shut off 
“No worries! We’ll use diesel generators.”  
- They were put at the lowest point (right behind the seawall) 
● As soon as the tsunami went over the seawall, it destroyed the generators 
 
As the internal temperature skyrocketed, the reactor turned into a pressure cooker and soon 
reached its breaking point 
 
Safety features: the reactor vessel stays at atmospheric pressure, no high pressure in the 
system 
● Result of the type of coolant  
 
Unlike the Fukushima-style reactor, the traveling wave reactor doesn’t use water to cool 
itself: 
 
{  
 
● Instead, ​liquid metal 
● Has a very ​high boiling point​, so high that there’s ​no chance our coolant will ever boil 
● Long ​before it reached a boiling point temperature​, the ​reactor itself shuts off 
● All of the ​heat​ that happens after you shut the reactor down, can be ​taken away 
through air circulation​ (passive heat removal)  
● Passive heat removal ​takes the heat directly from the reactor vessel without any 
electrical power or operator intervention  
● Reactors built to withstand disasters​ - tidal wave, earthquake, airline crash 
○ Worst case is that the ​reactor stops generating electricity, not that any of the 
radioactive materials are released 
 
}  
 
Still one unavoidable byproduct of nuclear power 
When uranium is enriched, only 10% of the material can be burned as fuel 
● The other 90% is unused byproduct which must be stored carefully 
○ Right now, there are ​700,000 metric tons​ just piling up  
 
TerraPower fuel testing pit: fuel bundles, stainless steel tubes wrapped in wire 
● Inside tubes = uranium sourced from existing waste will power the reactor 
● Waste that everyone is trying to get rid of can now be used to produce clean energy 
● In Paducah, Kentucky, there’s this ​huge government facility that has enough nuclear 
waste in it to run the United States for 125 years 
 
ISSUES:  
Funding to build a pilot reactor 
 
SOLUTION:  
Collaborating with China 
 
The world will have a new way of generating electricity that is zero greenhouse gas, very safe 
and very economic 
 
HOWEVER...  
The US government disapproved the contract 
 
 
 
 

Vox: The fight to rethink (and reinvent) 

nuclear power 
POSITIVE 
 
- Nuclear power plants supply 20% of the electricity on the US power grid  
 
- In the past 30 years, we have developed different types of fuel which cannot melt 
● Fuel pebble​ designed to be its own self-contained system  
● If a power failure does happen, the pebbles empty into a holding tank where 
they cool down on their own  
○ No need for backup generators or water  
 
- Right now solar and wind, are cheaper than nuclear power 
● Transporting the components overseas is difficult   
○ If a section of a reactor vessel breaks during transport, it needs 
to be fixed or a new one needs to be built and reshipped, which 
obviously takes more time and money   
 
- Small modular reactors​ could power data centers that use electricity around the clock 
- Nuclear power is a necessary piece of carbon-free energy production  
 
 

TedEd Video: Nuclear Energy Explained, 

How does it work? 1/3 
NEGATIVE 
 
Light water reactor: heats up water using an artificial chain reaction 
● A moderator is needed to control the neutrons’ energy 
○ Water does the job and it is used to drive the turbines away 
 
Nuclear Fuel:  
1. Heavy elements on the brink of stability, such as Uranium-235, are bombarded with 
neutrons  
2. The neutron is absorbed, but the result is unstable  
3. Most of the time, it immediately splits into fast-moving, lighter elements, some 
additional free neutrons, and energy in the form of radiation 
4. The radiation heats the surrounding water, while the neutrons repeat the process with 
other atoms, releasing more neutrons and radiation in a closely controlled chain 
reaction  
 
{ Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania } { Fukushima } { Chernobnyl} 
 
- Today, nuclear energy meets 10% of the world’s energy demand  
● There are ​450 nuclear reactors​ in 30 countries, ​80% of which are lightweight 
reactors  
 
The choice we must make:  
The ​expensive​ replacement of the aging reactors with more ​efficient​, but ​less tested​ models 
or a move away from nuclear power toward newer or older technology with different costs 
and environmental impacts