Bill Gates on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" | full interview

so this is the first time as I understand it in four decades that a company has tried to get an advanced reactor up and running as part of commercial power in the United States so exactly what have you Broken Ground on in Wyoming well we have a new reactor design uh that achieves even better safety through uh simplifying uh uh by not using water cooling and uh that's an people have talked about uh that it would reduce the costs and and make a better product uh but it's it's new uh we picked a site in

Wyoming where a coal plant is closing down uh the community's been uh super supportive and uh so we we the preliminary construction uh started this week so what advantage do these new reactors have versus the you know thousands of reactors around the world most reactors uh are cooled by water and that means that it gets very hot and you get high pressure and so keeping the nuclear waste in the reactor is very difficult uh you need a lot of cement and a lot of complex systems particularly when the reactor shuts down it's still putting out

heat and that's led to some problems uh so as they went from first to second and second to third generation they dealt with that issue by making it a lot more complex now unfortunately that meant that the construction cost went up and so the cost of power from nuclear was not uh competitive even though it's a great energy source it's uh completely clean uh it's not weather dependent you can put it right where the demand is uh but the costs uh actually drove uh some of the companies in the industry out of business uh and

so we started way back in 2008 saying uh let's do something very different to simplify the reactor and make the electricity far less expensive so when you say clean you mean because it's not carbon emitting not the greenhouse gases that are linked to climate change exactly so a coal plant a natural gas plant they inherently Adit a lot of uh CO2 greenhouse gas so you are a big advocate of green energy obviously you're putting money to work through this company Terra power but it it's still expensive uh in this country Georgia just had those two

power plants um that the first two scratchbuilt US reactors in a generation is how they were build so how do you take something like that and what you're doing and make this commercially viable if it's expensive to start in the first place well you need uh investors who are willing to believe that you're going to build a lot of units and so you can take the cost of design and spread them over a lot of units uh you know the two big backers of this project are are the ter power investors of which I'm the

largest I put in over a billion and I'll put in uh billions more and then the federal government uh who is helping because of the Strategic benefits of having uh energy security and so we're not asking any of the utility customers to take any risk uh and have to pay high electricity prices all of that risk is on uh ter power and uh the the US government it was $35 billion do for those two plants in Georgia what is this one in Wyoming going to cost well if you count all the first of kind costs

you know where we've been working for many years designing this thing uh you could get a number close to 10 billion but the key number to look at is is You're Building more and more units and you're getting all the components or your suppliers are bringing their cost down um the payoff for the investors is if we build a lot nobody's ever built a lot of the same design uh so you've got to get it right uh you have to design a reactor that can coexist with renewable energy uh because we have a lot of

that uh so this reactor only makes electricity uh when the Renewables aren't aren't super cheap it just makes heat 24 hours a day and then electricity uh when it's needed and you can just look at the amount of cement the size of the reactor building it's you know dramatically less complicated um and so that's the belief is that nuclear can once again uh compete to provide uh lowcost electricity you talked about the federal government being essentially a partner in in some of this and the energy secretary said the US has to at least triple our

current nuclear capacity so that's a lot of work ahead how many more of these do you have planned um what that going to depend on we have discussions with utilities uh about building tens of these uh but you know we really only have huge impact and success if we get uh past 100 what Wyoming has to open before you do these or uh we can start four five in parallel um you know you the final final approval uh from the Regulatory Commission is out there in 2030 uh and so that then gives you the green

light to turn the others on but you can start the construction the demand for electricity in the United States for the first time in a long time is going to go up quite a bit it's electric cars buses uh some people use electric heat pumps and their homes uh and just in the last year with these artificial intelligence breakthroughs all the big AI companies are saying okay we need to build uh lots of data centers and so uh if we don't have uh nuclear to complement the wind and Sun uh the country will fall behind

the demand for electricity so this what you're arguing though is for America's leadership and Technology to continue you need more energy our demand for power is going up that's right we for a long time the total electricity in the use in the didn't go up a lot so this is kind of a new thing to remember a long time ago we we were raising our our electricity and here uh for a lot of reasons things are being electrified uh you know electric cars are getting cheaper uh electric buses are going to out compete uh other

buses uh even other forms of transportation will move to electricity and so uh you know it it takes a desire to build uh desire to invest in uh Innovative new approaches and uh you know the the cost requirement is is what lets us say if this can compete with natural gas electricity in the United States then it's very competitive around the world because most parts of the world don't have that very cheap natural gas which is the cheapest way uh to make electricity today right and President Biden has said even he with all of this

money being invested in green energy that the United States still will need fossil fuels for some time I mean that that's the reality of what you're sketching out here it's not either or right well the growth will be in uh the clean sources Sun wind uh and nuclear uh but we won't get there to be 100% green you know uh you know the goal is to get rid of all emissions by 2050 uh even that's pretty ambitious uh yeah all of the clean sources will have to do a great job of getting their cost down

you you've got to get permits you've got to get transmission permission the nuclear plant we're building in Wyoming has an advantage that there's a coal plant right there that's being shut down and so the connection to the grid uh we're just using the connection that was already there uh for the the closed coal plant the energy supplies are there the the lines to take and transmit the power from that location where the coal plant was to the electricity customers we don't have to build new transmission we we just connect up to the lines that they

they've been using for decades and Wyoming is a huge coal producer as I understand it the plant you're talking about shuts down in 2026 if you don't have the permits to open until Poss possibly 2023 or 2030 what happens to those folks do you hire them do they lose their jobs and weight the uh the time that we create the most jobs is actually between now and 2030 you know during the construction phase we have a lot of jobs uh in fact we'll have to you know have temporary housing for people coming into the community

and certainly we can use all of those coal plant workers as part of the workforce the skills can transfer uh yeah we have training programs actually a lot of the skills already match pretty well then uh the workforce to operate the nuclear plant uh is just a little bit bigger than the workforce that was operating the coal plant so for Kemmer you know they know there's a 60e asset uh that's in their community and extremely valuable so when you're talking about Camera Wyoming where where you are planning to build this when the the public hears

about nuclear energy though they think of some of the worst cases that and mistakes Three Mile Island Pennsylvania Chernobyl and the former Soviet Union they think of Japan even just after Fukushima in 2011 and after that Japan's government reacted pretty strongly they shut down many of their plants they're starting to put them back online but there was a very sharp reaction then so how do you respond to people who say well I don't I don't really want this in my backyard well nuclear um you know they this after heat problem that when you shut a

Rector down it still has heat that's why Chernobyl was a problem in Fukushima um our design that goes away because since we use this sodium to cool everything it can absorb all that heat this is the natrium right and so those accidents were both first and generation second generation reactors the third generation reactors dealt with that with a lot of complexity so those reactors are quite safe but the cost overruns meant that the electricity will be very very expensive we solved the the safety problem with a much simpler approach but we had to start from

scratch and so we've used computer simulation and talked to the regulators and uh you know it Simplicity in this case is is very beneficial um but you know we're an innovation company you know we're the ones who are uh together with the government taking the risk here and you know we're uh quite confident uh that you know this will inaugurate a a new generation where you won't have these uh huge electricity costs so one of the things with your reactor as I understand understand it and and I'm learning this so correct me on the language

but for people at home to understand your reactor and most um Advanced reactors require this new high assay low enriched uranium so that Supply is really very much owned by Russia how does your company navigate that how does America get that fuel without putting money in the pocket of Vladimir Putin yeah so the uh US Congress recently passed a bill that we supported uh that says None of the fuel uh will come out of Russia and so the US won't be a customer of that any longer but that's not immediate right uh that's right but

the the money in the bill will get the supply base going in the United States uh we also have a supplier in the UK we've got a supplier in South Africa and so we can go to the Free World and meet our fuel requirements the the reason we have to delay our schedule from 2028 to 2030 was because of this fuel problem and we didn't anticipate a war in Ukraine that changed that completely and so now building up the alternate plan uh with the federal government helping us figure that out uh that's now completely in

place so you do have a supply of this fuel of non-russian fuel Noni fuel so how long before the US can rely on its own fuel for these nuclear reactors Can America become completely energy independent if it's actually switching to nuclear yeah so the uh the US is very lucky that between uh the US and Canada uh there's quite a bit of uranium even in Wyoming and specifically uh there are good uranium mines there but you have to mine for it and environmental and you have to have the manufacturers and that's uh the Congressional uh

2.8 billion uh that they just passed is to get a a North America supply chain going uh and it was great that the Congress took care of that problem because they're the ones who said we don't want you to buy fuel from Russia but they want to keep the you know nuclear industry which has a lot of you know plants still operating today that are very valuable they want to support the existing nuclear and the new nuclear so that's what the the bill provided the resources to to build in in the United States and as

an environmentalist you don't have concerns about this kind of mining within the United States well all mining you know is subject to uh in the case of the us a lot of environmental review to make sure that you know as you're pulling stuff out as the tailings or where are you putting those and how do those get used so you know I feel very comfortable that the us is going to make sure that uh that there's no environmental concerns about uh us and and Canadian mining so you have acknowledged you don't have all the permits

yet but you're on track uh to start producing Power by 2030 we may have a big political change in this country in the Congress uh and at the White House are you confident that you can continue this project regardless of who wins a majority or the White House yes I I'm quite confident I mean I'm you know I meet with lots of Republicans I meet with lots of Democrats I i' say that the their support for nuclear power is very impressive in both parties the reasons they support nuclear power may not be identical uh the

Republicans May emphasize the security issues you know energy security exporting these uh Power things uh to the entire world uh the Democrats value those things but they also value that it's a clean source of energy uh and that it's because it's not weather dependent it can fill in in the periods where the Renewables are are not producing and so of all the climate related work I'm doing I'd say the one that uh has the most bipartisan energy ped is actually this this nuclear work that's interesting I read in an interview you said Republicans for climate

change action are gold that's got to be a number that somehow we manage to increase over time you're saying at least with this issue you've increased it but can you well nuclear has benefits Beyond climate uh so if you have another technology say you know Green hydrogen or something or direct air capture the main benefits of that are climate related and you know so if we have a new Administration the you know tax benefits and the project financing for some of these climate projects could change you know that's in the hands of uh the Congress

um what they did they they did several bills that were bipartisan one called the infrastructure act one called the chips act and then there was one called the inflation reduction act yes that was uh purely passed on Democrat party votes and so the the first two are probably secure anything that relates to those the third one depending on how the election comes out there could be changes uh to those uh those tax benefits well Donald Trump talks about renewable energy quite a lot on the campaign Trail but when he was president uh he did sign

bills that encourage nuclear nuclear nuclear really is special it's its own category of green energyc because not because it's green uh there are people who don't value that part of it although I wish they would they value it because of the US leadership and you really don't want the nuclear reactors around the world made by adversaries because uh it's economically a huge job Creator and because the materials involved in these reactors possibly could be diverted you want your eye on you know making sure that it's not feeding into to some military related activity and so

the US leadership in this space uh has a lot of strategic benefits that's an interesting connection and it connects you're saying to staying competitive in technology because we're just our demands going up job creation uh where the US you know likes to stay in the lead but but you do take it seriously though I hear you saying when on the campaign Trail Mr Trump has talked about repealing the inflation reduction act the IRA he said that's one of the first things he wants to do yeah I mean it takes both houses of Congress uh and

you know I think a lot of the provisions uh in there would be preserved you know a lot of projects have started they're creating jobs a lot of those jobs are in you know red States and so it'll be interesting why why doesn't the administration talk more about that well a lot of those jobs are in red State yeah because those States um you know move faster they have a lighter regulatory load um you know West Virginia Wyoming Texas a lot of them uh are where the pilot plants are being built and the more that

happens the more that you'll probably see bipartisan support I'm not a good predictor of of uh uh elections but I think a lot of those credits probably will survive uh it's possible some of them won't um and you know we'll just have to make the case again as we did when the bill first got passed uh that uh this is is good for the country the US created right the nuclear space really with the Manhattan Project do you think we can get back as a country to really leading on the Innovation on this front well

there is competition you know the country that's building the most nuclear reactors today uh is China uh and you know they're serious about diversifying their energy sources and and getting rid of their Greenhouse emissions the US just tends to be more Innovative whether it's artificial intelligence or new medicines you know if we unleash the The Innovation power of this country we tend to lead and I feel great about the support we're getting from the federal government in nuclear space to take our history of excellence and solve the problem that our current reactors are just way

too expensive and so let's make the changes uh you know be willing to innovate out innovate our foreign competitors uh to maintain that lead on China um people know you because of your work with Microsoft and you're founding of that company you remain one of the top shareholders there and you know um the company's under Federal scrutiny now because of some of the hacking that was discovered particularly last year when the Commerce secretaries accounts were hacked and the ambassador to China's account was hacked and President Biden U mandated the Cyber review board and they mentioned

something you said in it as a recommendation it said Microsoft should overhaul security and heed Bill Gates's past advice to hold off on new features until it fixes the security issues do you agree with that have you urged Microsoft's leaders now to follow the advice you gave when you were in there running that company you know I'm an adviser to the company I'm very proud uh that the leadership people like Sai Nella and Brad Smith are just doing a great job there you know security is constantly a challenge that's I think a quote from a

memo of about 25 years ago yes uh the first time that back when you at you know I was saying hey these security issues uh are going to have to be fundament Al to how we do the design and you know sadly the principle but in the security area you're always innovating uh you know then the the bad guys try and catch up uh you know Microsoft's got a a great record of working with the government on these issues you we have some amazing security products so you know that dialogue of how even as the

bad guys get smarter how do we stay ahead is a important dialogue