How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment | Michael Shellenberger

551,814 views ・ 2016-10-05

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Have you heard the news?
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We're in a clean energy revolution.
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And where I live in Berkeley, California,
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it seems like every day I see a new roof with new solar panels going up,
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electric car in the driveway.
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Germany sometimes gets half its power from solar,
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and India is now committed to building 10 times more solar
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than we have in California,
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by the year 2022.
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Even nuclear seems to be making a comeback.
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Bill Gates is in China working with engineers,
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there's 40 different companies that are working together
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to try to race to build the first reactor that runs on waste,
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that can't melt down
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and is cheaper than coal.
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And so you might start to ask:
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Is this whole global warming problem
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going to be a lot easier to solve than anybody imagined?
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That was the question we wanted to know,
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so my colleagues and I decided to take a deep dive into the data.
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We were a little skeptical of some parts
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of the clean energy revolution story,
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but what we found really surprised us.
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The first thing is that clean energy has been increasing.
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This is electricity from clean energy sources over the last 20 years.
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But when you look at the percentage of global electricity
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from clean energy sources,
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it's actually been in decline from 36 percent to 31 percent.
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And if you care about climate change,
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you've got to go in the opposite direction
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to 100 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources,
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as quickly as possible.
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Now, you might wonder,
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"Come on, how much could five percentage points of global electricity be?"
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Well, it turns out to be quite a bit.
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It's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants
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the size of Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant,
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or 900 solar farms the size of Topaz,
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which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world,
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and certainly our biggest in California.
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A big part of this is simply that fossil fuels are increasing
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faster than clean energy.
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And that's understandable.
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There's just a lot of poor countries
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that are still using wood and dung and charcoal
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as their main source of energy,
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and they need modern fuels.
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But there's something else going on,
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which is that one of those clean energy sources in particular
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has actually been on the decline in absolute terms,
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not just relatively.
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And that's nuclear.
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You can see its generation has declined seven percent
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over the last 10 years.
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Now, solar and wind have been making huge strides,
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so you hear a lot of talk about how it doesn't really matter,
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because solar and wind is going to make up the difference.
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But the data says something different.
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When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind,
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you see it actually barely makes up half of the decline from nuclear.
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Let's take a closer look in the United States.
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Over the last couple of years -- really 2013, 2014 --
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we prematurely retired four nuclear power plants.
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They were almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels,
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and so the consequence was that we wiped out
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almost as much clean energy electricity that we get from solar.
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And it's not unique to us.
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People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader,
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but when we looked at the data,
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what we found is that, in fact,
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California reduced emissions more slowly than the national average,
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between 2000 and 2015.
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What about Germany?
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They're doing a lot of clean energy.
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But when you look at the data,
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German emissions have actually been going up since 2009,
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and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you
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that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.
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The reason isn't hard to understand.
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Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time,
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which means that when the sun's not shining,
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the wind's not blowing,
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you still need power for your hospitals,
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your homes, your cities, your factories.
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And while batteries have made some really cool improvements lately,
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the truth is, they're just never going to be as efficient
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as the electrical grid.
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Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out,
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you lose about 20 to 40 percent of the power.
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That's why when, in California,
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we try to deal with all the solar we've brought online --
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we now get about 10 percent of electricity from solar --
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when the sun goes down, and people come home from work
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and turn on their air conditioners and their TV sets,
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and every other appliance in the house,
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we need a lot of natural gas backup.
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So what we've been doing
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is stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain.
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And that worked pretty well for a while,
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but then late last year, it sprung a leak.
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This is Aliso Canyon.
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So much methane gas was released,
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it was the equivalent of putting half a million cars on the road.
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It basically blew through all of our climate commitments for the year.
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Well, what about India?
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Sometimes you have to go places to really get the right data,
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so we traveled to India a few months ago.
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We met with all the top officials -- solar, nuclear, the rest --
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and what they told us is,
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"We're actually having more serious problems
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than both Germany and California.
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We don't have backup; we don't have all the natural gas.
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And that's just the start of it.
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Say we want to get to 100 gigawatts by 2022.
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But last year we did just five,
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and the year before that, we did five."
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So, let's just take a closer look at nuclear.
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The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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has looked at the carbon content of all these different fuels,
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and nuclear comes out really low -- it's actually lower even than solar.
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And nuclear obviously provides a lot of power --
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24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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During a year, a single plant can provide power 92 percent of the time.
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What's interesting is that when you look at countries
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that have deployed different kinds of clean energies,
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there's only a few that have done so
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at a pace consistent with dealing with the climate crisis.
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So nuclear seems like a pretty good option,
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but there's this big problem with it,
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which all of you, I'm sure, are aware of,
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which is that people really don't like it.
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There was a study, a survey done of people around the world,
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not just in the United States or Europe,
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about a year and a half ago.
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And what they found
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is that nuclear is actually one of the least popular forms of energy.
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Even oil is more popular than nuclear.
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And while nuclear kind of edges out coal, the thing is,
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people don't really fear coal in the same way they fear nuclear,
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which really operates on our unconscious.
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So what is it that we fear?
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There's really three things.
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There's the safety of the plants themselves --
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the fears that they're going to melt down and cause damage;
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there's the waste from them;
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and there's the association with weapons.
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And I think, understandably,
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engineers look at those concerns and look for technological fixes.
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That's why Bill Gates is in China developing advanced reactors.
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That's why 40 different entrepreneurs are working on this problem.
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And I, myself, have been very excited about it.
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We did a report: "How to Make Nuclear Cheap."
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In particular, the thorium reactor shows a lot of promise.
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So when the climate scientist, James Hansen,
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asked if I wanted to go to China with him
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and look at the Chinese advanced nuclear program,
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I jumped at the chance.
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We were there with MIT and UC Berkeley engineers.
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And I had in my mind
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that the Chinese would be able to do with nuclear
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what they did with so many other things --
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start to crank out small nuclear reactors on assembly lines,
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ship them up like iPhones or MacBooks and send them around the world.
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I would get one at home in Berkeley.
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But what I found was somewhat different.
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The presentations were all very exciting and very promising;
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they have multiple reactors that they're working on.
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The time came for the thorium reactor, and a bunch of us were excited.
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They went through the whole presentation, they got to the timeline,
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and they said,
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"We're going to have a thorium molten salt reactor
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ready for sale to the world
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by 2040."
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And I was like, "What?"
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(Laughter)
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I looked at my colleagues and I was like,
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"Excuse me --
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can you guys speed that up a little bit?
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Because we're in a little bit of a climate crisis right now.
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And your cities are really polluted, by the way."
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And they responded back, they were like,
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"I'm not sure what you've heard about our thorium program,
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but we don't have a third of our budget,
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and your department of energy hasn't been particularly forthcoming
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with all that data you guys have on testing reactors."
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And I said, "Well, I've got an idea.
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You know how you've got 10 years where you're demonstrating that reactor?
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Let's just skip that part,
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and let's just go right to commercializing it.
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That will save money and time."
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And the engineer just looked at me and said,
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"Let me ask you a question:
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Would you buy a car that had never been demonstrated before?"
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So what about the other reactors?
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There's a reactor that's coming online now, they're starting to sell it.
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It's a high-temperature gas reactor.
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It can't melt down.
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But it's really big and bulky, that's part of the safety,
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and nobody thinks it's going to ever get cheaper
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than the reactors that we have.
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The ones that use waste as fuel are really cool ideas, but the truth is,
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we don't actually know how to do that yet.
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There's some risk that you'll actually make more waste,
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and most people think that if you're including
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that waste part of the process,
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it's just going to make the whole machine a lot more expensive,
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it's just adding another complicated step.
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The truth is,
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there's real questions about how much of that we're going to do.
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I mean, we went to India and asked about the nuclear program.
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The government said before the Paris climate talks
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that they were going to do something like 30 new nuclear plants.
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But when we got there and interviewed people
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and even looked at the internal documents,
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they're now saying they're going to do about five.
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And in most of the world, especially the rich world,
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they're not talking about building new reactors.
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We're actually talking about taking reactors down
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before their lifetimes are over.
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Germany's actually pressuring its neighbors to do that.
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I mentioned the United States --
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we could lose half of our reactors over the next 15 years,
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which would wipe out 40 percent of the emissions reductions
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we're supposed to get under the Clean Power Plan.
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Of course, in Japan, they took all their nuclear plants offline,
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replaced them with coal, natural gas, oil burning,
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and they're only expected to bring online about a third to two-thirds.
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So when we went through the numbers,
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and just added that up --
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how much nuclear do we see China and India bringing online
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over the next 15 years,
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how much do we see at risk of being taken offline --
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this was the most startling finding.
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What we found is that the world is actually at risk
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of losing four times more clean energy than we lost over the last 10 years.
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In other words: we're not in a clean energy revolution;
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we're in a clean energy crisis.
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So it's understandable that engineers would look for a technical fix
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to the fears that people have of nuclear.
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But when you consider that these are big challenges to do,
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that they're going to take a long time to solve,
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there's this other issue, which is:
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Are those technical fixes really going to solve people's fears?
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Let's take safety.
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You know, despite what people think,
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it's hard to figure out how to make nuclear power much safer.
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I mean, every medical journal that looks at it --
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this is the most recent study from the British journal, "Lancet,"
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one of the most respected journals in the world --
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nuclear is the safest way to make reliable power.
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Everybody's scared of the accidents.
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So you go look at the accident data --
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Fukushima, Chernobyl --
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the World Health Organization finds the same thing:
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the vast majority of harm is caused by people panicking,
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and they're panicking because they're afraid.
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In other words,
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the harm that's caused isn't actually caused by the machines
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or the radiation.
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It's caused by our fears.
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And what about the waste?
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Everyone worries about the waste.
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Well, the interesting thing about the waste
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is how little of it there is.
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This is just from one plant.
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If you take all the nuclear waste we've ever made in the United States,
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put it on a football field, stacked it up,
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it would only reach 20 feet high.
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And people say it's poisoning people or doing something --
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it's not, it's just sitting there, it's just being monitored.
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There's not very much of it.
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By contrast, the waste that we don't control from energy production --
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we call it "pollution," and it kills seven million people a year,
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and it's threatening very serious levels of global warming.
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And the truth is that even if we get good at using that waste as fuel,
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there's always going to be some fuel left over.
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That means there's always going to be people that think it's a big problem
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for reasons that maybe don't have as much to do with the actual waste
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as we think.
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Well, what about the weapons?
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Maybe the most surprising thing is that we can't find any examples
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of countries that have nuclear power
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and then, "Oh!" decide to go get a weapon.
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In fact, it works the opposite.
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What we find is the only way we know
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how to get rid large numbers of nuclear weapons
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is by using the plutonium in the warheads
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as fuel in our nuclear power plants.
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And so, if you are wanting to get the world rid of nuclear weapons,
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then we're going to need a lot more nuclear power.
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(Applause)
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As I was leaving China,
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the engineer that brought Bill Gates there kind of pulled me aside,
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and he said, "You know, Michael, I appreciate your interest
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in all the different nuclear supply technologies,
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but there's this more basic issue,
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which is that there's just not enough global demand.
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I mean, we can crank out these machines on assembly lines,
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we do know how to make things cheap,
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but there's just not enough people that want them."
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And so, let's do solar and wind and efficiency and conservation.
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Let's accelerate the advanced nuclear programs.
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I think we should triple the amount of money we're spending on it.
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But I just think the most important thing,
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if we're going to overcome the climate crisis,
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is to keep in mind that the cause of the clean energy crisis
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isn't from within our machines,
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it's from within ourselves.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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