Bill Gates is a co-founder of Microsoft and thinks that neither renewable energy nor nuclear fusion is the future of power supply. He is investing in a completely different project that relies on a metal you might know from chemistry class.
What kind of metal is that? Bill Gates has been investing in a specific project for many years. It involves a nuclear reactor that uses sodium.
Sodium is a so-called alkali metal and is mostly used in combination with other substances. Most commonly, you find it as part of the table salt sodium chloride or in detergents.
What does the project look like? In conventional nuclear power plants, water is used to cool the reactor. However, Gates believes that sodium is the better coolant. An initial facility currently being built in the U.S. state of Wyoming is scheduled to be operational by 2030.
It is expected to provide around 400,000 households with power at a capacity of 345 megawatts. The company behind the project, TerraPower, wants to increase the capacity to 500 MW, which can be produced in five and a half hours.
Sodium offers several advantages in energy generation
What are the advantages of sodium? Sodium has several advantages compared to water:
- It can absorb up to eight times more heat, allowing for higher energy production
- It is the sixth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust at 2.6%, making it plentiful (via Statista)
- Sodium protects better against radioactive leaks, thereby reducing the risk of accidents
- Surplus power can be stored for several hours, compensating for fluctuations like those from renewable energies that rely on wind and sun
The costs are also an important factor that makes this energy source so attractive. A conventional nuclear reactor is expected to cost around 25 billion US dollars in the U.S. A sodium reactor, on the other hand, comes in at “only” 1 billion US dollars.
What does Gates say about it? Bill Gates believes that sodium is the “most advanced nuclear energy in the world.” It solves all cost and safety issues. He hopes that public perception of nuclear energy would change.
Major accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima have visibly altered the perception of nuclear energy in the world. The public may fear that similar incidents could occur with sodium-cooled reactors.
Bill Gates is mainly known for his work at Microsoft. Among other things, he programmed what he describes as the worst PC game of all time: Bill Gates and Microsoft secretly had to program a video game for IBM – Apple said: “The most embarrassing game of all times”
