Tag Archives: bill gates

Business, Environment, News, Science

Bill Gates Considers the Nuclear Options

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Bill Gates in a screenshot from his video chat with Poneman (Source: Gates Notes)

“I’m an optimist,” Bill Gates says, on the subject of nuclear power. “I see materials advances, simulations, better understanding of the scientific phenomena.”

Two things hold up innovation in the nuclear sector: First, the enormous lead-time it takes to research new technology and deploy it. And secondly, a global potpourri of regulations that can constrain innovative technology in favor of tried-and-true reactor design.

U.S. Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman got Bill Gates on the video-chat line for the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation meeting in Warsaw, and the resulting interview is now posted on Gates Notes. The theme of the conversation is “Nuclear Energy after Fukushima,” and Gates finds two controversial lessons there.

While acknowledging that the Fukushima reactors’ failure post-earthquake-and-tsunami was a “tragedy,” Gates gingerly characterizes to the overall safety record of Fukushima as being commendable for a plant commissioned in 1971. This leads to his second point: that governmental regulation is biased toward the devil of known reactor design, rather than innovative solutions that take into account advances in software simulation (making it possible to assess virtual performance in a hurricane, earthquake, or tsunami).

“As I look at the energy sector I see that in some ways it’s more complicated than the IT sector where I spent most of my career,” says Gates. He lists the drawbacks of global regulatory complexity, the lead time before return on investment, the necessarily high bar for safety.

Though people may think of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as health-driven, its mission is to improve lives globally through innovation. As he considered the challenges the world’s poor face, says Gates, “I realized the very central role that energy plays in improving their livelihood. We need breakthroughs.”

His advice for governments? You’re under-funding investment in pure energy research by a factor of three or more. This wouldn’t require a gigantic tax on the energy sector, just a few percent, and certainly a lower number than a carbon tax would likely impose. Energy innovation is unlike other areas because of its lengthy time-to-market–if you try to offer incentives on the scale of other industries, you’ll fail.

“We need to have hundreds of companies trying out different things in each sector,” Gates argues, including solar, nuclear, wind, clean coal, and more. Cheap energy that doesn’t carry the greenhouse gas burden of today’s energy sources needs to come pretty quickly.

That preference for implementation seems to have established Gates’ primary bet on nuclear power (he namechecks TerraPower twice). “When you look at the numbers and you say, what could be significantly cheaper than what we have today, and located in every area, nuclear is one of the few that may be able to achieve that.”

He has invested in solar power, but is troubled by its disadvantages as a global solution: The “solar guys” still need to make solar power ten times as cheap, and solve storage and transmission challenges.

In nuclear, “I think you have to go for a big win, because you’re going to have your money tied up for decades.” It will be crucial to harmonize regulations globally, because you need a global market size to justify the size of private investment. Urges Gates: “We’re not gonna have a ton of nuclear start-ups, but we need more.”

Health, News

Bill Gates Reviews Polio: An American Story

“We sometimes take for granted the speed of scientific breakthroughs today,” writes Bill Gates in his review of Polio: An American Story. “Yet, Oshinky’s book reminded me of the painstaking efforts scientists often must undertake. Forty years after the polio virus was discovered, scientists still didn’t know what caused it.”

It was in 1921 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio, as it was diagnosed at the time, the disease being epidemic. (A more recent study suggests Roosevelt’s case may have been Guillain-Barré syndrome.) Within two days, he was paralyzed in both legs. He would spend the rest of his life disabled–as President, FDR was the co-founder of the March of Dimes–and die in 1945 with polio about to break new records: 1952 saw 57,000 cases in the U.S.

When I write about vaccines today, I often hear first from vaccine denialists, people who are under the impression that vaccination is more dangerous than the disease (either because the disease isn’t that bad, treated homeopathically, or because, they argue, vaccines are much more dangerous than we’re told). A subset also argue against vaccines that aren’t 100 percent effective.

The history of polio in the U.S. in particularly instructive then. In his review, Gates spends little time on the psychological impact, focusing on polio’s brutal, life-long after-effects: “For decades, no one knew why thousands of children would suddenly be stricken–usually in midsummer–with many dying or left permanently paralyzed.” For more on the emotional scarring, you’ll need to turn to Oshinsky’s book, which Gates says, “captures the mood of a country terrorized by an invisible and little-understood disease.”

In memory, it’s easy to imagine a bright line dividing no-cure from immunization. But as Gates emphasizes, unlocking the key to a vaccine took over half a century. And even then, the Salk vaccine was not 100 percent effective, its work was significant, but also gradual: “In 1956, the number of polio cases in the U.S. dropped by 50 percent compared to the year before, and by another 50 percent the following year.”

What a difference perspective makes in the choice of immunization. Today, polio has been restricted to “1,500 cases in just four countries—India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan,” writes Gates. It’s not an accidental grouping–these four represent the places where polio, for a variety of reasons, is hardest to eradicate.

But neither can it be left alone, points out Gates: “If not completely eliminated, polio will spread back into countries where it has previously been eradicated, killing and paralyzing perhaps hundreds of thousands of children.”

Health, News, Politics

Bill Gates ‘Tags’ Graffiti in Quest for Aid Dollars

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Bill Gates is a lefty

Local entrepreneur Bill Gates was in Paris today, tagging graffiti art by Artof Popof and Dag to publicize the launch of Living Proof, a site that advocates for the benefits of foreign aid.

“I’d love it if everyone in France could go to Africa and see the great things going on there,” Gates told AFP, adding: “It will take President (Nicolas) Sarkozy’s leadership and creativity to make sure that these issues that relate to the poorest countries stay on the agenda.” (See the full slideshow of Gates in tagger action.)

The Gates Foundation, in collaboration with ONE, an aid advocacy group, is going public with the success stories of providing support to developing countries as a way of keeping governmental aid levels up while even G8 countries struggle with deficits. On Tuesday, Gates will hit Berlin to make the same argument.

Living Proof (available in English, French, and German) makes a number of claims to dispel the notion that foreign aid simply flows into a bottomless bucket of need. “The use of antiretroviral treatment for HIV-positive pregnant women has averted an estimated 200,000 new HIV infections in children over the last 12 years, the vast majority since 2005,” says the site on its Facts & Figures page. In Africa, it points out, measles deaths dropped by 92 percent between 2000 and 2008, thanks to vaccines.

But advances are not just about biomedical technology. As Melinda Gates writes on the Foundation blog:

Take breastfeeding, for example. Simply put, breastfeeding is a lifesaving act. We know exclusive breastfeeding – when the newborn is fed only with breast milk and nothing else in the first six months – is one of the best ways to save baby’s lives.

When I was in Dowa, Malawi last yearI visited the Dowa District Hospital. Exclusive breastfeeding is a core project of the government, one supported by Save the Children’s Saving Newborn Lives Program. The initiative encourages women to give birth in a health clinic and then provides them with three home visits from healthcare workers, in the weeks following the birth. These visits help mothers learn about how to care for their children, including exclusively breastfeeding. Programs like these aren’t created in a laboratory, yet help mothers realize they can significantly improve the health of their newborns without any new technologies.

Of course, all the messaging in the world can’t address the ADHD nature of the internet. Commenters on the Twitpic of his tagging were more excited to note that Gates in left-handed and “your tie actually looks like a plate, nice!”