https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-climate-change-60-minutes-2021-02-14/
Stuff in double parenthesis like ((this)) are Progree's additions, as is all emphasis.
But of all his green investments, Gates has spent the most time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear energy -- arguing it's key to a zero carbon future.
He says he's a big believer in wind and solar and thinks it can one day provide up to 80% of the country's electricity, but Gates insists unless we discover an effective way to store and ship wind and solar energy, nuclear power will likely have to do the rest. Energy from nuclear plants can be stored so it's available when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
... In 2008 he founded TerraPower, a company that has re-designed a nuclear reactor.
Anderson Cooper: This is your prototype?
Bill Gates: Exactly. TerraPower's Natrium Reactor. This is a rendering, we haven't built it yet. But here's the nuclear island right here.
Anderson Cooper: This is the reactor?
Bill Gates: Exactly.
((there's a picture of it, and it's sitting on a table the size of a ping pong table, covering about 1/3 of the table's area. It looks like a fuel rod assembly, it's not the whole reactor))
... In October, the Department of Energy awarded TerraPower $80 million to build one of the first advanced nuclear reactors in the U.S.
... ((then while discussing how he has and flies a private plane))
You know, I switched to an electric car ((Gasp!)). I use solar panels ((Gasp!)). I'm paying a company that actually at a very high price, can pull a bit of carbon out of the air and stick it underground. And so I'm offsetting my personal emissions.
Anderson Cooper: Those are called carbon offsets?
Bill Gates: Right. So you know, it's costing like $400 a ton. It's like $7 million.
Anderson Cooper: So you're paying $7 million a year to offset your carbon footprint?
Bill Gates: Yup.
Obviously the above isn't the entire transcript. There's several other green technologies discussed, I just included the nuclear and "so-called" renewable energy stuff in the above, as well as the carbon offset stuff which was kind of interesting -- actually pulling CO2 out of the air and sticking it in the ground, as opposed to airy-fairy tree-planting stuff that Bolsonaro or lightning or Trump types will just burn or cut down.
In 2016, the U.S. per capita emissions was 15.50 metric tons. So if we each did this, it would cost $400 X 15.50 = $6200 per person per year on average.
As for the reactor, I left out the stuff about how it is inherently safe, cooled by liquid sodium, is not high pressure, all assembled in a factory etc. Stuff you can read all the bubbly boo at
https://www.terrapower.com/
A competitor in futuristic advanced nuclear concepts is
https://www.nuscale.com/
By the way, they both say they are being developed to work well with heavily solar and wind systems. So it's not true that only fossil fuel plants can back up solar and wind.
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