A legendary nuclear whistleblower’s open letter to Bill Gates over his new love of nuclear power.
Dear Mr. Gates,
I am writing this letter to you because I believe you have crossed the line by leveraging your fortune to maneuver state governments and, indeed, the U.S. Government to siphon precious taxpayer funds supporting your latest atomic contrivance in Wyoming. Of course, how you spend your fortune is your decision.
Recently, the media and governors in western states have become enthralled by you and your team at Natrium to build a 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a so-called molten salt-based energy storage system. As a result, you are now asking state and national governments for billions of dollars to bankroll a “fast reactor” concept cooled by liquid sodium.
Your latest “brainchild” ignores 70 years of liquid-sodium-based nuclear failure.
I question your zeal to leverage that fortune by securing additional public funds for an unproductive techno-solution that claims to solve the climate crisis! Your latest technofix will not mitigate the climate crisis.
The fuel is made only in Russia
On the contrary, Mr. Gates, the marketing hype associated with your latest “brainchild” ignores more than 70 years of failures using liquid-sodium-based atomic reactor coolant. It may also unleash a new era of unproductive nuclear spending, increase the risk of nuclear proliferation and put America at risk of becoming dependent on Russia to fuel the reactor. Currently, Russia is the only country in the world that can fabricate this odd high-enrichment fuel. Therefore, your design, if ever built, would make these reactors beholding to Russia for their peculiar fuel unless taxpayers subsidize another massive investment in fuel fabrication facilities. More significantly, the special fuel the Natrium reactor uses is only one-half of one percent below bomb-grade and is called High-Assay Low-Enrichment Uranium, or HALEU…
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