CNN:

The Microsoft-founder-turned-philanthropist said at a recent speech in California that, more than new vaccines for AIDS or malaria or presidential selection power, what he really wants is clean energy at half its current cost.
To do that, he said, we’ll need new technology.
Gates — a father of the personal computer and quite the tech powerhouse — said one of the brightest hopes for clean, cheap power is a new form of nuclear power plant that reuses waste uranium from existing nuclear reactors.
It’s kind of like radioactive recycling, and, on its face, can sound like a miracle.
Gates actually described energy innovation in those terms: To prevent famine, poverty and the hardship that will come with global climate change we need “energy miracles,” he said at the TED Conference in Long Beach.
Some nuclear scientists and critics say the nuclear technology Gates highlighted is misguided, naive and expensive.
Others, like Craig Smith, a nuclear engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said Gates is helping put the world on the verge of a “nuclear Renaissance” that could provide cheap power for everyone in the world — forever. . . .
How it works
Most nuclear power plants today use radioactive elements like uranium to create nuclear fission and then produce electricity.
One problem: That reaction leaves behind uranium waste. To make matters worse, the United States hasn’t identified a safe place to store the waste from the country’s 104 nuclear reactors in the long term.
That’s where the technology promoted by Gates comes in.
Gates has invested tens of millions of dollars in a Bellevue, Washington, company called TerraPower, according to TerraPower CEO John Gilleland.
TerraPower is working to create nuclear reactors that generate hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.