Интервью (стр. 7 )

Why were the first three generations of reactor designs so uneconomical?

They weren't uneconomical. If you take how much was spent on Gen 1 and Gen 2 reactors and look at how much power was turned out of those things, those are the deal of the century. You can only beat it with hydro. And for the guys like the French that wound up owning one of those things, the lifetimes were increased and are still being increased. They used to run them at like a 70 percent duty cycle. They have them up to around a 95 or 96 percent duty cycle. The price of uranium did not spike. Gen 1 and Gen 2 were the bargain of the century. Now Gen 3, because of all sorts of safety requirements and permit delays and various things, has proved very uneconomical, at least in Finland. But the statistic I love is that per atom you're almost a million times better off than with hydrocarbons.

TerraPower is far out.

It's very far out. It definitely needs to be categorized as a high-risk, wild thing, but the world only needs a few wild things to succeed to have two major benefits: cheaper energy, which the poor dearly need and would benefit everyone, and zero-emission energy. So it's great, but as I say, you've got to get the pilot plant built, which is hard. You've got to have all the science and economics work the way they work on paper. And then you've got to get the manufacturers involved. And the numbers are pretty daunting, even in the Chinese electricity picture. Even though they're building about half the nuclear plants and are going to move full speed ahead, they're at 3 percent nuclear right now. Unless something that's way better than they expect comes along, they won't get to more than 15 or 20 percent nuclear.

You've said that nuclear has the best chance of being an energy miracle.

Well, it's the one I've gotten involved in. I spend time at TerraPower. We've got a TerraPower phone call with partners today; I was over there on Monday. It's a neat group of people, so I've gotten more personally involved. I don't claim to be the person who's surveyed all the possibilities better than anyone else. But I think solar thermal has a lot of promise, whether it's [the California-based company] eSolar or dozens of other guys. Solar chemical: some people see the possibilities at the research level. The algae guys: I've actually got some money in some of those. That's energy farming. That's hard. But they're seeing some results. Then there are crazy things like these high-wind kite guys. There's a lot of energy out there. You really don't want to rule anything out. If you'd said to somebody in 1890, "How are you going to solve the manure problem?" I don't think they would have actually foreseen, "Well, we're going to do it by creating this CO2 problem."

Let's talk about poverty. What is the minimum amount of energy that a person in a developing country should have access to for a reasonable standard of living?

Well, a level that's about half of current European usage, which is a quarter of current U. S. usage. The room for efficiency--I'm saying it's probably a factor of four. And then I'm saying the rest of the world should be allowed to live at that energy level. Now, the aggregate energy therefore for nine billion people, which is about what the peak population is expected to be, is dramatically greater than what we have today, and that's why when you multiply that big E by the CO2 per E, that number better be pretty damn small, because you're not just trying to stay where you are today; you're trying to get 90 percent down from where you are today. So wow, that number has got to be approaching zero.

How much money should we spend to rebuild the social structures damaged by infectious diseases, by HIV and AIDS?

You know, we've got to stop the epidemic, and because we don't have a cure, we've got to treat as many people as we can. I think in general when you help these societies, it's not really specific to the AIDS epidemic. I mean, South Africa, they have made progress with their poor people. They still have so far to go. It's not clear that the pathologies of the AIDS epidemic make your agenda for the poor people in South Africa different. The South African school system's not very good. The electricity grid is really bad. They got dreamy thinking about some things coming on, they've got these huge power shortages, which is kind of ironic because they've got lots of coal. Now they have to raise power rates. That's very tricky. I'm a big believer in investing in getting poor countries to be self-sufficient in terms of health improvement, which leads to reduced population growth. I don't think there's anything that's unique to the AIDS-ravaged countries.

What has been the most important health-care innovation from the Gates Foundation? Of what are you most proud?

The biggest-impact thing we work on is vaccines--in particular, hepatitis B and Hib. [The Gates Foundation was instrumental in getting two vaccines into widespread use: one prevents hepatitis B, an infection that causes liver cancer in adults; the other prevents Haemophilus influenzae type B, a bacterial infection that causes meningitis and other life-threatening diseases during childhood.] In terms of saving lives, changing the rules, that's probably number one on the list.

How many people is that expected to save?

Well, every year you get to add about another 300,000 lives.

That's pretty cool.

It starts to add up. In vaccines, the effect is pretty incredible. The one that I hope to be able to add to that list which isn't there yet is polio eradication. We've gotten very involved, we've put a lot of money in, and we're fairly close. The last part is absolutely the hardest part. But the benefit to the world of that second disease eradication after smallpox, and the kind of energy that would create--it would free up money, it would energize the whole global health initiative. That's a big one. There's a couple of new vaccines that we didn't invent, but we're working on getting them to be low-cost and distribute them, get the culture right: the rotavirus and pneumococcus. Those together are about another 400,000 lives. Then you've got malaria, which is probably further down. There's various interventions to help reduce the AIDs epidemic, but those aren't there yet.

You were a visionary in software and a highly effective software company executive. The two aren't always the same, God knows. Have you had to adapt your management style to the exigencies of the nonprofit world and international development, and is energy funding different again? How has your experience as a software executive and visionary translated into your post-Microsoft career?

Well, I've had to learn a lot of new things, which I enjoy. I didn't understand much about vaccines or immunology or how they got delivered, or how they got funded. So I've gotten to meet a lot of people. There's a more political aspect to this in terms of the money that rich-world governments give and in terms of how well governed the recipient countries are and how they make things either easy or hard. We didn't have that complexity at Microsoft. The one thing we have that's great is that everybody has the same goal: saving the children's lives or improving their health. So you really don't have competitors in a sense. You get a level of cooperation when you can get everybody in the malaria community together and have them share their best ideas when there isn't a market for the vaccine. Same for TB. It's different from Microsoft. In some ways it's more like when Microsoft was 400 to 500 people. The foundation's about 700 people.

You and Charles Simonyi created a software factory, this multigenerational software enterprise, where nothing like that had ever really existed before. It was a place where big programs could be developed and launched and maintained and managed over many decades. You were a kind of meta program manager at the center of Microsoft. But now you have to work with enormous numbers of people over whom you have no direct authority. You have to convince people, you have to work by persuasion, by a whole variety of different techniques. How many of the management techniques you learned at Microsoft are still useful to you?

I think it's all useful. As Microsoft got larger, I couldn't threaten to code things over the weekend. I had to convince people and take the scenario I wanted them to do something with and articulate it in a very clear way, so I had to get good at doing that. I think over time I've gotten better at working with large groups and not being as impatient about cases where people only see part of the picture, and yet they're an important part of things. But it's very similar. It's working with smart people. Now, when I go up to northern Nigeria and meet with the Emir of Kano and enlist him in getting the religious authorities to promote the polio vaccine--now that's a different thing. At Microsoft, I didn't happen to go see the Emir of Kano for any software products. I view it as great preparation. If you said to me I could have any current advance that would expose me to a lot of things--failures, successes--I don't think I'd pick anything else.

How has being a philanthropist broadened you in a way that your career as a software engineer did not?

Well, I'm not trying to make any moral judgment about one versus the other. Believe me, when somebody's in their entrepreneurial mode--being fanatical, inventing new things--the value they're adding to the world is phenomenal. If they invent new technologies, that is an amazing thing. And they don't even have to know how it's going to help people. But it will: in education, medical research, you name it. So I was one of those fanatics in my 20s where I didn't know about poor people or even government budgets much at all. I worked night and day on software. I thought a lot about software. I said, "Hey, I'm a software fanatic. What is that about?" Even some of the marketing and sales things that I eventually learned, I said, "Hey, if the software's good enough, how far do you have to go?" Well, we certainly didn't build an IBM-style sales force; most of our customers we never met. We didn't duplicate the old model, but the truth of what we had to do was not quite as pure as I started out thinking. It wasn't "Hey, here's the software."

So that's a great mode to be in, but throughout the Microsoft experience, whether it was piracy or privacy, policy, or whatever would come up, I got down the learning curve because Microsoft was in a position to hire incredible people. I got to see how they did things. They wanted me along because they thought I would be paid attention to and could be articulate about the software. So in my 20s I was almost just a developer and a fanatic; in my 30s, I got exposure to management, although I was still writing some of the code; then in my 40s, the majority of what I was doing was large-organization management and picking some strategies, but I didn't write any code that shipped in products. Now, in my 50s, I'm in a role that's kind of like that. I like that my relationship to some of these development teams is like a smaller Microsoft, because for better or for worse, when you have all the TB experts in the world in the room, the room is not very full. That's about 10 or 12 people that you're sitting and talking to about the TB vaccine.