Bill Gates at TED: Innovating to Zero
Friday, February 19th, 2010
Bill Gates gives a well constructed and clear talk on how climate change and energy innovation fits into his work on global poverty and then goes further to discuss an idea he has for nuclear power. Fascinating, well worth watching.
India has benefited much from nuclear power. Its the right way to go and i would love to see the USA adopt it as well. I hope Obama can get his way through this one.
Dilip: Uh, are you forgetting that the US has had nuclear power plants longer than any country on earth, including India. We already have nuclear power plants and traditional nuclear power plants have problems.
What Gates is talking about is something entirely new that theoretically solves one of the biggest problems of traditional plants: what to do with waste.
@Richard: Wasn’t the last nuclear power plant in the USA built about a decade ago?
I do know what gates is talking about. I read his blog everyday.
Dilip: Yes it was but so what? Your comment implied that the US has not adopted nuclear power as India has. In fact, the US adopted nuclear power before any other country on earth, we invented the technology behind a cold water nuclear power plant and then sold it to various countries, including India. The point is, Gates is not talking about traditional nuclear reactors, he’s talking about a kind of reactor that has not been built or even fully invented yet.
well I think it might be time for the us to adopt nuclear because it is the best energy source as of now. it creates less wast then any other source out there currently. the US also needs to cut down on there energy use. the US needs to research new forms of energy for tomorrow. maybe they need to give a call to france to see how it is done.;)
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I agree Edward: even though we did nuclear first, the French have done more with it than we have in recent years. Of course, the minute there’s an accident over there (or in India Dilip) things might change.
@Richard: I did not mean that. My concern was countries like India and France have made much investment into R & D in nuclear power production and we have power plants that yield much more and are far safer. I think the USA is lagging behind on this front. Hopefully with Obama’s new venture into this arena things will get better in the near future.
Time will tell Dilip, both here and over in India and France. Even more modern plants are not without their risks and Gates’ idea is the only one I’ve heard yet that makes sense on what to do with the waste.
Richard I agree with you time will tell but but the verdict is out on fossil fuel, our planet is worming up and as of now the only viable solution is nuclear. I will agree with that one mister president. i just wish the US came to that conclusion 30 years ago. it is time to use less energy, and be more efficient.
Edward: If you remember (and you were in France and a child), we had a nuclear accident here at Three Mile Island. Between that and the Russian accident at Chernobyl it became both politically and socially impossible to do more nuclear. In those days there was no one (not even Al Gore) talking about climate change and we had no middle eastern terrorism like we have now. It was a totally different time.
You have to give this issue a historical perspective.
Had France or India had a big nuclear accident like Three Mile Island, my guess is things would look different in those countries too.
And, unlike other countries, we have an abundance of coal here. I’m not defending coal, but when these decisions were made CO2 was not an issue.