Speech: Why I invest in nuclear innovation

Source: · WORLD NUCLEAR NEWS · | June 10, 2021

It's hard to imagine a future where we can decarbonise our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power, Bill Gates told participants in the Nuclear Energy Assembly, held this week as a virtual event by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). The text of his keynote speech on 9 June is as follows.

Source: WNN

"Obviously as the fact that we're not all in a room together right now attests, we have faced an historic global public health crisis over the past year-and-a-half. COVID-19 has killed millions, devastated economies and disrupted the lives of everyone on the planet.

We still have a long way to go before we can say that we've contained the pandemic, especially in the countries around the world that don’t have full access to vaccines. But the fact that we have these vaccines, and they were invented within a year of the first COVID diagnosis, is a testament to humankind's ability to solve global problems through innovation. Because scientists worked together on vaccines by sharing data online and working together on critical trials, we now have the tools to bring the pandemic to an end.

As you know, the world faces another historic global crisis in climate change, one that threatens to be devastating to all life on Earth if we don’t act now to mitigate it.

Currently the world emits roughly 51 billion tonnes a year in greenhouse gases. We need to get that number to net zero within the next 30 years. That is no small task. It's going to take every tool that we have in our arsenal and some we don’t have yet. This is especially true because, as with vaccines, many low and middle income countries don't yet have the same access to energy as wealthy nations. This inequality is holding back their development. So while getting to net-zero emissions we also have to provide more energy availability.