Nuclear waste is not a reason avoid nuclear energy

Nuclear waste is not a reason to avoid using nuclear energy, according to Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist who more recently founded a next-generation nuclear energy startup, TerraPower.

One common criticism of nuclear power is that nuclear reactors generate waste that stays radioactive for thousands of years.

“The waste problems should not be a reason to not do nuclear,” Gates said in an interview with the German business publication, Handelsblatt, published on Thursday. “The amount of waste involved, the ability to do geological sequestration — that’s not a reason not to do nuclear.”

The volume of nuclear waste is very small, especially when compared to the energy generated, Gates said.

“Say the US was completely nuclear-powered, it’s a few rooms worth of total waste. So not, it’s not a gigantic thing,” Gates said. The cost of storing and sequestering nuclear waste underground is “not a huge problem,” as it can be put into deep boreholes underground “where it stays geologically for hundreds of millions of years,” he said.

In contrast, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions generated from burning fossil fuels for energy is “something gigantic” and sequestering that underground is a very hard problem, which Gates said “may not be possible.”

Nuclear power is classified as a “zero-emission clean energy source” by the U.S. Department of Energy, because generating electricity with nuclear fission does not release any greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, 19 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from nuclear power plants, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That represents about half of the carbon-free electricity generation in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

But after a boom of nuclear power reactor construction in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the construction of new nuclear power generation came to a virtual standstill.

“The best hope for nuclear is if we could get a completely new generation — and I’m biased, because I’m involved in that — where the countries that are committed to nuclear prove it out and show that the economic safety, waste management is handled,” Gates said.

“And then the other countries who are less engaged can look at that and see what they think, give it a fresh evaluation. And you know, that data on that won’t be in for almost another eight years or so,” Gates said.

After decades of nuclear power generation, there is still no permanent repository for nuclear waste in the US. The closest the US nuclear industry got to a permanent nuclear waste…