Nathan Myhrvold Calls On the Wealthy to Help Fund New Innovation

By emeadows
September 20, 2012

Many successful tech innovators are putting their earned money into new start-ups.
“Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin, a company that builds spaceships. Elon Musk has Tesla, an electric-car company, and SpaceX, another rocket-ship company. Bill Gates took on big challenges in the developing world — combating malaria, HIV, and poverty,” according to Technology Review.
Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, explains why he’s involved with TerraPower — a company built to “commercialize a promising new kind of nuclear reactor.”
He writes that “in the next few decades, we need more technology leaders to reach for some very big advances. If 20 of us were to try to solve energy problems — with carbon capture and storage, or perhaps some other crazy idea — maybe one or two of us would actually succeed. If nobody tries, we’ll all certainly fail.”
He sees a focus on nuclear energy as imperative to the future.
“In the U.S., more than 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium — the by-product of enrichment — sits in storage. TerraPower’s technology is designed to use that depleted uranium as fuel, turning the cheap by-product of today’s reactors into enough electricity to power every home in America for 1,000 years,” Myhrvold explains.
Those with established money can likely help the cause. “Our challenge now, especially for those of us whose financial success is the greatest, is to think big,” he writes.

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