Bill Gates, head of charity, is every bit as brilliant and hyperrational as Bill Gates, head of Microsoft, ever was. The cochair of the world’s biggest foundation can hold forth on the impact of polio in India, the challenges of fixing American high schools, and the necessity of distributing better seeds to small farms in Africa. But he really gets amped up about the future of energy. “If you gave me the choice between picking the next 10 presidents or ensuring that energy is environmentally friendly and a quarter as costly, I’d pick the energy thing,” he told the audience at the Wired Business Conference in May. Gates fielded questions from Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson (and some audience members), geeking out on energy technology, policy, and economics. In these highlights from the hourlong session, Gates argues that nuclear power is still safer than all other energy options, rich countries aren’t spending enough on R&D, and installing solar panels on your roof is not helping to reduce CO₂ emissions. It’s merely “cute.”

Chris Anderson: How has Fukushima changed your perspective on nuclear power?

Bill Gates: What happened in Japan is terrible, and there are many reasons it should have been avoided. It’s a 1960s plant design, generation two, put into service in the early 1970s. Emergency planning and execution were quite weak. The environmental and human damage is clearly very negative, but if you compare that to the number of people that coal or natural gas have killed per kilowatt-hour generated, it’s way, way less. The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events—Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima—so it’s more visible. Coal and natural gas have much lower capital costs, and they tend to kill only a few at a time, which is highly preferred by politicians.

Anderson: Do you think that it’s possible for a leader to overcome the political opposition to nuclear, post-Fukushima?

Gates: Energy sources are highly regulated, as they should be, and many of them require government involvement in the early stages to get the technologies going and work out rights of way—they inescapably involve politics. Politicians have to deal with deaths, whether they’re from coal mines or particulate. But voters seem to want energy that lets them drive around and heat their homes.

The good news about nuclear is that there’s hardly been any innovation in the past three decades, so the room to do things differently is quite dramatic. The difference between today’s designs and one from the 1960s is night and day. We understand heat pipes a lot better today. We understand what the decay of heat looks like. There’s this company, TerraPower, which former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold and I have spun out of his invention group, Intellectual Ventures. We’ve got a new nuclear design, a generation four. On paper it’s quite amazing.

And when I say on paper, I really mean in a supercomputer where we simulate everything. In almost every realm, software simulation changes the game. With those generation-one and -two designs, they never could simulate the disasters. We can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We can simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. It’s very cool. And we basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side.

The problem is that plant design doesn’t move at the speed of computers, so the best case is that by 2020 one of these will get built and that by 2030 you could have hundreds of them. And then, if it’s really as economical as we say, it starts to make a big impact.

Anderson: When you look at the big picture, where should we be focusing besides nuclear? On massive solar plants in the desert? On middle-size stuff for office roofs? Or is there a reinvention that could be done right in the home?

Gates: If you’re going for cuteness, the stuff in the home is the place to go. It’s really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof. But if you’re really interested in the energy problem, it’s those big things in the desert.

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things. We can afford to overpay for medicine, we can overpay for energy, we can rig our food prices and overpay for cotton. But in the world where 80 percent of Earth’s population lives, energy is going to be bought where it’s economical. People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price to get anywhere. It’s great to have the rich world, because we’re there to think about long-term problems and fund the R&D. But we get sloppy, because we’re rich. For example, despite often-heard claims to the contrary, ethanol has nothing to do with reducing CO₂; it’s just a form of farm subsidy. If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture. For rich people, this is OK. For poor people, this is a real problem, because their food budget is an extremely high percentage of their income. As we’re pushing these things, poor people are driven from having adequate food to not having adequate food.

The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that’s expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren’t used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.

Anderson: What’s intercropping?

Gates: Intercropping means you’re exploiting holes in the calendar year, making use of periods when farmers have chosen to leave the land fallow. It can actually be beneficial, particularly if the crop is leguminous. Like, you grow alfalfa or soybeans in those periods, and it restores nitrogenous compounds to the soil.

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