We agree concerning LFTR technology and its ability to provide cheap plentiful and safe energy to serve the world's needs for hundreds of years. Why then is Gates supporting a less desirable, though no less plentiful option? Specifically, why does he support nuclear, which still has potential dangers and has disposal drawbacks? He'll have power plants, potential Three Mile Islands and Yucca Mountains everywhere, while supporting endless population growth. This doesn't fit within a Malthusian objective. You would need to believe that Gates is throwing away billions of his fortune on ideas that he hopes will be shot done. I can understand a Malthusian promoting solar and wind: they are dead-end wastes of time and money distractions which, like climate change, will economically debilitate us. Nuclear, however, is just feasible enough to provide lots of energy for population growth, yet saddled with intractable problems.
What's going on with Gates and energy and why wouldn't he support LFTRs?
Gates’ nuclear initiative—Terrapower. May be a positive aspect, but so far it hasn’t gone very far. The issue is the architecture of energy. You need both distributed generation for redundancy and reliability as well as a base load capacity for consistent availability. As such, the smaller, distributed reactor technology that Terrapower is promoting may be complementary to LFTR, which is an ideal solution for baseload capacity given current technology.
But he still wants a lot fewer people on the planet.