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up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. So, instead of
worrying about them, you just take that. It's a great thing. It breathes this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of
like a candle. You can see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this
really solves the problem. I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the leftover, the 99 percent,
where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. That would power the U.S. for
hundreds of years. And, simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the
entire lifetime of the rest of the planet.
So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds
of ideas that we need to move forward. So let's think: How should we measure ourselves? What should our
report card look like? Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. For
2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. That really is very important, that we get
there. And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries, still some agriculture, hopefully
we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including
countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. So, the other grade is: Are we
deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and we're in the
process of getting it elsewhere? That's super important. That's a key element of making that report card.
So, backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? Well, again, it should have the
two elements. We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions: The less we emit, the
less that sum will be of CO2, and, therefore, the less the temperature. But in some ways, the grade we get there,
doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less,
important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs.
These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of
companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. There's a lot of great books that have been
written about this. The Al Gore book, "Our Choice" and the David McKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without
the Hot Air." They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we
need broad backing for this. There's a lot that has to come together.
So this is a wish. It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. If you gave me only one wish
for the next 50 years -- I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could
pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented -- this is the wish I would pick. This is the one
with the greatest impact. If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long
term will be terrible, between the U.S. and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all the lives of
those two billion will be far worse.
So, what do we have to do? What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? We need to go for
more research funding. When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the
CO2. They should discuss this innovation agenda, and you'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of
spending on these innovative approaches. We do need the market incentives -- CO2 tax, cap and trade --
something that gets that price signal out there. We need to get the message out. We need to have this dialogue be
a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. This is an
important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.

Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So to understand more about
TerraPower, right -- I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is?
Bill Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've
done, that's only tens of millions, and even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure that
our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions. The tough thing is building the
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