Please type down (easy for me to copy and paste) your thoughts and viewpoints af
ID: 154409 • Letter: P
Question
Please type down (easy for me to copy and paste) your thoughts and viewpoints after reading the following paragraph. (Mini 2 paragraphs, at least 5 sentences for each paragraph. about 250 words - 350 words)
Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.
What are your thoughts on nuclear power, current renewable energy, and climate change in general.
Do you agree with Bill Gates' proposed solution for the climate change problem? Why/why not?
Points from Bill Gates:
Let's look first at burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. What you need to do there seems like it might be simple, but it's not. And that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. Now, we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level. But getting up to that full percentage -- that will be very tricky. And agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue: Who's going to be sure? Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? This is a lot of volume. So that's a tough one. Next would be nuclear. It also has three big problems: cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, the fuel doesn't get used for weapons.And then what do you do with the waste? Although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. People need to feel good about it. So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. And, finally, this storage problem. To dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries made -- for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything -- and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses. What I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium -- the one percent, which is the U235 -- we decided, "Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238." It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right materials approach, this looks like it would work. And because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. So instead of worrying about them, you just take that, it's a great thing.It breeds this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of like a candle. You see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor.In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. That would power the US for hundreds of years. And simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet.
Explanation / Answer
I do agree partially with Gates, As of know most of our focus is on carbon in the atmosphere and its greenhouse effect, the history of carbon emission is tracked back to the dawn of the industrialization with the rapid development of industries in the 18th century and liberation of carbon started from there. Before the dawn of industrialization, humans were not realizing much of carbon in the atmosphere. Coal or the fossil fuel is being used in our present time to power our industries. Till now we don’t have any proper define which eliminates out carbon or it’s byproducts to enter into the atmosphere, An alternative for nuclear energy is strongly advocated but the time will tell how does this technology will be helpful for human beings, As the operation of any such nuclear power plant will require to incorporate humans and we all know humans are bound to do mistake, and what about if any such mistake happen in nuclear power plant, we have numerous such examples in our recent past, and converting such site into an inhabitable place. Well regarding the partial burning of U-235 sounds to be a great idea but the same question remains there about any mistake including human beings during any operational activity.
I would suggest going with solar or wind energy as we have enormous potential to harness it and we all know sun itself gives a 13 MW/m2 of energy and we are not able to fully tap this huge resource, and moreover it’s safer to handle this energy, this energy does not produce any harmful byproduct so we’ll not be going to disturb the environment another great place to explore is with the wind energy we too have huge amount of wind blowing in the atmosphere we can to tape it to meet our requirement. Well, this might sound at the present time the recommended alternatives are not fully developed and a lot of research is required to be done to harness this natural resources for a better tomorrow.