To me it seems a personality trait of well informed people, that they are not as interested in searching or building capital.
Yes, there's a tradeoff between putting effort into research and putting it into "hustle", and usually people specialize in doing one. But it's not like "ability to partner with someone who searches for capital" is the real bottleneck. I'd say instead that there are certain people in the position to raise capital, but they have to believe in the technology and pitch it themselves, and they need to be on the same wavelength as people like Bill Gates and the moral maze masters, and the people in those positions who can communicate with investors are more likely to be delusional than to understand technology really well.
Also as an aside, what is your interpretation of the Bill Gates article? I see no particular evidence of a lack of physics knowledge, are you referring to the take about the water comments or? It's definitely not an in-depth description of the problems with PWRs or BWRs, but I think is an acceptable explanation of the advantages of using LMRs. Maybe there is some other comment I am missing, but it comes across as an easily accessible article written to persuade the layman of the benefits of his endeavor?
Sure, I can explain.
First, water isn’t very good at absorbing heat—it turns to steam and stops absorbing heat at just 100 degrees C
Water is actually rather good at absorbing heat. It has a much higher heat capacity than sodium, boiling absorbs a lot of heat if you boil it, and in a typical BWR design it boils at 285 C.
The Natrium plant uses liquid sodium, whose boiling point is more than 8 times higher than water’s
Gates is using unspecified temperature units and pressure, presumably Celcius at 1 bar. Divisions of temps in C aren't meaningful - does water have -3x the boiling point of ammonia?
Unlike water, the sodium doesn’t need to be pumped, because as it gets hot, it rises, and as it rises, it cools off
Water does that too. It's an almost universal property of liquids. You can do natural convection cooling with water.
Safety isn’t the only reason I’m excited about the Natrium design
The TerraPower Natrium design is much less safe than current reactors, and using sodium does nothing to improve safety. The sodium reduces reactivity so if the coolant boils off then reactivity increases. That's bad. The neutrons are fast so neutron lifetime is short so response time needs to be fast. That's bad. IIRC the design still involves robots moving fuel rods around during operation. That can fail.
It's just a really terrible design. Bad safety, and very expensive design decisions. Supposedly in the future they plan to use a "Pascal" heavy water moderated CO2 cooled reactor, which I always considered a better approach, but I have little faith in TerraPower doing a good job on it.
Like other power plant designs, it uses heat to turn water into steam, which moves a turbine, which generates electricity. ... It also includes an energy storage system that will allow it to control how much electricity it produces at any given time.
If you're using steam, the low-pressure steam turbines are big and have a lot of inertia compared to the low-pressure steam going through them, so they take a long time to spin up. That's a big reason why coal plants aren't load-following like gas turbines.
They're also expensive, so you really want to avoid them for cost reasons, and if you do have them you want to run them all the time. So with natural gas, the combined cycle plants with steam turbines also tend to run continuously.
Thinking about designs for new technology is something of a hobby of mine. For simple examples, you can see this battery design or some of my blog posts. Even if you can't come up with something useful (and you probably can't) having a problem in mind is a good way to guide your learning about a field.
Whether or not my designs are good isn't the point of this post. It's a general question about what LW members think that people outside major institutions should be working on, and who would deserve access to things if they were actually interested. (I'm just a generalist, as half-assed as Eratosthenes, but there are presumably people in some private communities as smart as me but specialized.)
It shouldn't be surprising that big companies and big university labs aren't that interested in pursuing outside ideas that they can't take credit for. Getting new ideas implemented requires specific conditions, which is why inventions don't usually get implemented until they're obvious enough that a bunch of people think of them. But before you start trying to find a way to get some institution to use your invention, you should probably figure out if you should be trying to give/sell it to that particular institution. What's the point of new technology if it just gives institutions more room to be corrupt, right? My view is that modern technology and weak competition have relaxed constraints on some institutions, and resulted in them being unusually bad by historical standards. For example:
This is a question I don't often see public debate about. Some people think of technological developments as natural events like rainstorms. Other people think of the progress of science as research in a Civilization game, where money and PhD-hours are used to fill up the requisite number of beakers with Science Fluid. But at least in my opinion, the limiting factor is usually "smart people trying to work on the problem", and smart people have some ability to decide what to work on.
Most of the time, when people suggest a topic to work on, one of the following applies:
Yes, forum-posters tend to suggest stupid stuff like "you should work on a nuclear reactor that uses thorium" or "try to find some single chemical that fixes aging". Most people don't understand the shape of the current technological frontier, let alone the shape of what's plausibly feasible, but let's be real: neither do the high-level officials and executives determining what programs to direct research money into. A vote to spend billions of dollars on something silly instead of hydrogen fuel research isn't really any worse, and at least it's democratic. And the people here are smart, right?
Anyway, I'm curious what technologies the people here think should get some more design work done, and what institutions they (you) think should get those designs if they were interested. Designing stuff is just a hobby of mine, but it's somehow more fun if it seems like somebody would deserve to have it. If you can't think of any technologies, here are some hypothetical examples: