Bill Gates to Invest Billions in Wyoming Nuclear Power Project

TapTechNews on June 17, according to a report by Bloomberg, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said that he is preparing to invest billions of dollars in building a next-generation nuclear power plant project in Wyoming to meet the growing power demands in the United States.

In the CBS 'Face the Nation' program on Sunday, Gates said that the start-up company TerraPower LLC he founded broke ground in Wyoming last week to build its first commercial nuclear reactor, and this nuclear power plant is located near a soon-to-close coal-fired power plant. TerraPower has been exploring a simpler and cheaper nuclear reactor design since 2008 and expects the new reactor to be completed by 2030.

Gates said, 'I've invested over a billion dollars and I will invest billions of dollars more.'

TapTechNews noted that TerraPower's nuclear power plant project has the support of the US Department of Energy and was initially expected to be put into operation in 2028. The reactor design uses liquid sodium instead of water as the coolant and contains molten salt that can store heat to increase output power. Gates said that TerraPower plans to source nuclear reactor fuel from the United States and its allies.

Carbon-free nuclear power is increasingly regarded as a key means to deal with climate change, and more and more companies are promoting small nuclear reactors. Data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BloombergNEF) shows that at the COP28 climate change conference held in Dubai last year, 25 countries announced the ambitious goal of tripling the amount of nuclear power generation.