He brought us Microsoft. Now, he brings us nuclear energy

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The guy who helped construct the computer company in a garage-to-billionaire pipeline has put his money where his mouth is. Bill Gates, a proponent of competitive clean energy sources to combat climate change, broke ground on a next-gen nuclear power facility yesterday outside a small Wyoming town.

TerraPower, a company Gates co-founded in 2008 to boost private nuclear investment, is building a first-of-its-kind reactor that it thinks will usher in a new era of scalable clean energy.

What’s the big deal? TerraPower’s new reactor isn’t like old reactors—it’s smaller, cheaper, and may stand a shot at being finished…unlike new traditional reactors, whose death certificates are usually written before they even start running due to delays and cost overruns. The US has only built two reactors in the last 30 years, costing $35 billion, but TerraPower sees itself as #builtdifferent.

• The TerraPower design calls for liquid sodium rather than water to cool the reactor, meaning the power station won’t need extensive (and expensive) heavy piping.

• The reactor will also be able to adjust its output, making it easier to coexist with wind and solar sources and take advantage of selling energy to the grid.