Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy?

501,903 views ・ 2010-06-10

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
Chris Anderson: We're having a debate.
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The debate is over the proposition:
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"What the world needs now
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is nuclear energy." True or false?
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And before we have the debate,
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I'd like to actually take a show of hands --
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on balance, right now, are you for or against this?
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So those who are "yes," raise your hand. "For."
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Okay, hands down.
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Those who are against, raise your hands.
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Okay, I'm reading that at about
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75 to 25 in favor at the start.
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Which means we're going to take a vote at the end
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and see how that shifts, if at all.
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So here's the format: They're going to have six minutes each,
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and then after one little, quick exchange between them,
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I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience
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to have 30 seconds
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to make one short, crisp, pungent, powerful point.
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So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly,
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is one of, truly, the founders of the
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environmental movement,
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a long-standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog,
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01:15
someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand.
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01:18
Stewart Brand: Whoa.
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01:20
(Applause)
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The saying is that with climate, those who know the most
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are the most worried.
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With nuclear, those who know the most
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are the least worried.
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A classic example is James Hansen,
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a NASA climatologist
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pushing for 350 parts per million
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carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
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01:38
He came out with a wonderful book recently
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called "Storms of My Grandchildren."
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And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power,
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as are most climatologists
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who are engaging this issue seriously.
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This is the design situation:
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a planet that is facing climate change
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and is now half urban.
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Look at the client base for this.
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Five out of six of us
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live in the developing world.
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We are moving to cities. We are moving up in the world.
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And we are educating our kids,
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having fewer kids,
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basically good news all around.
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But we move to cities, toward the bright lights,
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and one of the things that is there that we want, besides jobs,
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is electricity.
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And if it isn't easily gotten, we'll go ahead and steal it.
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This is one of the most desired things
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by poor people all over the world,
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in the cities and in the countryside.
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Electricity for cities, at its best,
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is what's called baseload electricity.
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That's where it is on
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all the time.
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And so far there are only three major sources of that --
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coal and gas, hydro-electric,
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which in most places is maxed-out --
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and nuclear.
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I would love to have something in the fourth place here,
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but in terms of constant, clean,
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scalable energy,
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[solar] and wind and the other renewables
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aren't there yet because they're inconstant.
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Nuclear is and has been for 40 years.
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Now, from an environmental standpoint,
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the main thing you want to look at
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is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal,
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the two major sources of electricity.
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If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear,
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the waste from that lifetime of electricity
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would go in a Coke can --
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a pretty heavy Coke can, about two pounds.
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But one day of coal
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adds up to one hell of a lot
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of carbon dioxide
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in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant.
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Then what happens to the waste?
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The nuclear waste typically goes into
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a dry cask storage
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out back of the parking lot at the reactor site
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because most places don't have underground storage yet.
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It's just as well, because it can stay where it is.
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While the carbon dioxide,
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vast quantities of it, gigatons,
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goes into the atmosphere
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where we can't get it back -- yet --
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and where it is causing the problems that we're most concerned about.
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So when you add up the greenhouse gases
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in the lifetime of these various energy sources,
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nuclear is down there with wind and hydro,
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below solar and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels.
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Wind is wonderful; I love wind.
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I love being around these
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big wind generators.
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But one of the things we're discovering is that
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wind, like solar, is an actually relatively
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dilute source of energy.
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And so it takes a very large footprint on the land,
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a very large footprint in terms of materials,
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five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear,
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and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity
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is on the order of 250 square miles
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of wind farm.
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In places like Denmark and Germany,
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they've maxed out on wind already.
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They've run out of good sites.
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The power lines are getting overloaded.
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And you peak out.
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Likewise, with solar,
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especially here in California,
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we're discovering that the 80 solar farm
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schemes that are going forward
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want to basically bulldoze
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1,000 square miles of southern California desert.
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Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.
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It's okay on frapped-out agricultural land.
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Solar's wonderful on rooftops.
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But out in the landscape,
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one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles
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of bulldozed desert.
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When you add all these things up --
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Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out
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what would it take
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to get 13 clean
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terawatts of energy
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from wind, solar and biofuels,
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and that area would be roughly the size of the United States,
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an area he refers to as "Renewistan."
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A guy who's added it up all this very well is David Mackay,
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a physicist in England,
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and in his wonderful book, "Sustainable Energy," among other things,
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he says, "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic."
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(Laughter)
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In terms of weapons,
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the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy.
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We have been taking down
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the Russian warheads,
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turning it into electricity.
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Ten percent of American electricity
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comes from decommissioned warheads.
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We haven't even started the American stockpile.
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I think of most interest to a TED audience
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would be the new generation of reactors
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that are very small,
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down around 10
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to 125 megawatts.
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This is one from Toshiba.
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Here's one the Russians are already building that floats on a barge.
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And that would be very interesting in the developing world.
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Typically, these things are put in the ground.
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They're referred to as nuclear batteries.
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They're incredibly safe,
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weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it.
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Here is a commercial version from New Mexico
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called the Hyperion,
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and another one from Oregon called NuScale.
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Babcock & Wilcox that make nuclear reactors,
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here's an integral fast reactor.
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Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in.
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The governments of the world are going to have to decide
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that coals need to be made expensive, and these will go ahead.
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And here's the future.
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(Applause)
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CA: Okay. Okay.
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(Applause)
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So arguing against,
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a man who's been at the nitty, gritty heart
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of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years.
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In 2000, he discovered that soot
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was probably the second leading cause of global warming, after CO2.
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His team have been making detailed calculations
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of the relative impacts
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of different energy sources.
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His first time at TED, possibly a disadvantage -- we shall see --
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from Stanford,
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Professor Mark Jacobson. Good luck.
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Mark Jacobson: Thank you.
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(Applause)
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So my premise here is that nuclear energy
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puts out more carbon dioxide,
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puts out more air pollutants,
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enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up
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than real renewable energy systems,
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namely wind, solar,
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geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power.
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And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation.
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So let's start just by looking at the
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CO2 emissions from the life cycle.
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CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions
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of all the greenhouse gases and particles
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that cause warming
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and converted to CO2.
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And if you look, wind and concentrated solar
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have the lowest CO2 emissions, if you look at the graph.
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Nuclear -- there are two bars here.
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One is a low estimate, and one is a high estimate.
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The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry
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estimate of nuclear.
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The high is the average of 103
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scientific, peer-reviewed studies.
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And this is just the
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CO2 from the life cycle.
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If we look at the delays,
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it takes between 10 and 19 years
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to put up a nuclear power plant
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from planning to operation.
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This includes about three and a half to six years
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for a site permit.
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and another two and a half to four years
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for a construction permit and issue,
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and then four to nine years for actual construction.
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And in China, right now,
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they're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear.
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And the average, just for the construction time of these,
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is 7.1 years
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on top of any planning times.
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09:14
While you're waiting around for your nuclear,
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you have to run the regular electric power grid,
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which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world.
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And the chart here shows the difference between
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the emissions from the regular grid,
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resulting if you use nuclear, or anything else,
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versus wind, CSP or photovoltaics.
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Wind takes about two to five years on average,
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same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics.
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So the difference is the opportunity cost
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of using nuclear versus wind, or something else.
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So if you add these two together, alone,
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you can see a separation
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that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times
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more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy.
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And this doesn't even account
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for the footprint on the ground.
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If you look at the air pollution health effects,
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this is the number of deaths per year in 2020
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just from vehicle exhaust.
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Let's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States
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to battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles
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or flex fuel vehicles run on E85.
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Well, right now in the United States,
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50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution,
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and vehicles are about 25,000 of those.
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In 2020, the number will go down to 15,000
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due to improvements.
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And so, on the right, you see gasoline emissions,
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the death rates of 2020.
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If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol,
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you'd actually increase the death rate slightly.
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If you go to nuclear,
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you do get a big reduction,
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but it's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar.
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Now if you consider the fact
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that nuclear weapons proliferation
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is associated with nuclear energy proliferation,
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because we know for example,
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India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly
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by enriching uranium
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in nuclear energy facilities.
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North Korea did that to some extent.
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Iran is doing that right now.
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And Venezuela would be doing it
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if they started with their nuclear energy facilities.
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If you do a large scale expansion
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of nuclear energy across the world,
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and as a result there was just one
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nuclear bomb created
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that was used to destroy a city
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such as Mumbai or some other big city, megacity,
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the additional death rates due to this
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averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the U.S.
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would be this.
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So, do we need this?
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The next thing is: What about the footprint? Stewart mentioned the footprint.
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Actually, the footprint on the ground for wind
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is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world.
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That, because the footprint, as you can see,
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is just the pole touching the ground.
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And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet
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with 73,000 to 145,000
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five-megawatt wind turbines.
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That would take between one and three square kilometers
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of footprint on the ground, entirely.
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The spacing is something else.
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That's the footprint that is always being confused.
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People confuse footprint with spacing.
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As you can see from these pictures,
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the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes
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including agricultural land,
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range land or open space.
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Over the ocean, it's not even land.
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Now if we look at nuclear -- (Laughter)
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With nuclear, what do we have?
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We have facilities around there. You also have a buffer zone
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that's 17 square kilometers.
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And you have the uranium mining
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that you have to deal with.
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Now if we go to the area,
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lots is worse than nuclear or wind.
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For example, cellulosic ethanol, to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet,
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this is how much land you would need.
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That's cellulosic, second generation
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biofuels from prairie grass.
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Here's corn ethanol. It's smaller.
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This is based on ranges from data,
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but if you look at nuclear,
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it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet.
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For wind, there's a larger area,
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but much smaller footprint.
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And of course, with wind,
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you could put it all over the East Coast,
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offshore theoretically, or you can split it up.
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And now, if you go back to
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looking at geothermal, it's even smaller than both,
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and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing,
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but it's still pretty small.
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And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet.
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To power the entire world with 50 percent wind,
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you would need about one percent of world land.
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Matching the reliability, base load is actually irrelevant.
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We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply.
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You can do that by combining renewables.
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This is from real data in California,
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looking at wind data and solar data.
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And it considers just using existing hydro
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to match the hour-by-hour power demand.
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Here are the world wind resources.
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There's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide
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than we need for all the world.
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So then here's the final ranking.
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And one last slide I just want to show. This is the choice:
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You can either have wind or nuclear.
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If you use wind,
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you guarantee ice will last.
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Nuclear, the time lag alone
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will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more.
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And we can guarantee a clean, blue sky
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or an uncertain future with nuclear power.
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(Applause)
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CA: All right.
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So while they're having their comebacks on each other --
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and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran --
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I need two people from either side.
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So if you're for this,
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if you're for nuclear power, put up two hands.
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If you're against, put up one.
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And I want two of each for the mics.
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Now then, you guys have --
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you have a minute comeback on him
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to pick up a point he said, challenge it,
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whatever.
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SB: I think a point of difference we're having, Mark,
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has to do with weapons
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and energy.
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These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow
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putting out a lot of greenhouse gases --
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a lot of those studies include, "Well of course war will be inevitable
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and therefore we'll have cities burning and stuff like that,"
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which is kind of finessing it
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a little bit, I think.
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The reality is that there's, what,
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21 nations that have nuclear power?
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Of those, seven have nuclear weapons.
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In every case, they got the weapons
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before they got the nuclear power.
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There are two nations, North Korea and Israel,
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that have nuclear weapons
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and don't have nuclear power at all.
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The places that we would most like to have
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really clean energy occur
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are China, India, Europe, North America,
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all of which have sorted out their situation
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in relation to nuclear weapons.
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So that leaves a couple of places like Iran,
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maybe Venezuela,
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that you would like to have very close
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surveillance of anything
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that goes on with fissile stuff.
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Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we
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really know where all of the fissile material is,
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and we can move toward
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zero weapons left, once we know all that.
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CA: Mark,
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30 seconds, either on that or on anything Stewart said.
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MJ: Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first,
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and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories.
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So the other thing is, we don't need nuclear energy.
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There's plenty of solar and wind.
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You can make it reliable, as I showed with that diagram.
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That's from real data.
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And this is an ongoing research. This is not rocket science.
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Solving the world's problems can be done,
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if you really put your mind to it and use clean, renewable energy.
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There's absolutely no need for nuclear power.
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(Applause)
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CA: We need someone for.
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Rod Beckstrom: Thank you Chris. I'm Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.
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I've been involved in global warming policy
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since 1994,
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when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund
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that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol.
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And I want to support Stewart Brand's position.
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I've come around in the last 10 years.
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I used to be against nuclear power.
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I'm now supporting Stewart's position,
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softly, from a risk-management standpoint,
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agreeing that
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the risks of overheating the planet
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outweigh the risk of nuclear incident,
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which certainly is possible and is a very real problem.
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However, I think there may be a win-win solution here
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where both parties can win this debate,
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and that is, we face a situation
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where it's carbon caps on this planet
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or die.
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And in the United States Senate,
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we need bipartisan support --
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only one or two votes are needed --
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to move global warming through the Senate,
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and this room can help.
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So if we get that through, then Mark will solve these problems. Thanks Chris.
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CA: Thank you Rod Beckstrom. Against.
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David Fanton: Hi, I'm David Fanton. I just want to say a couple quick things.
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The first is: be aware of the propaganda.
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17:30
The propaganda from the industry
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has been very, very strong.
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And we have not had
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the other side of the argument fully aired
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so that people can draw their own conclusions.
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17:41
Be very aware of the propaganda.
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Secondly, think about this.
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If we build all these nuclear power plants,
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all that waste
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is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands,
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17:51
of trucks and trains,
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17:53
moving through this country every day.
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Tell me they're not going to have accidents.
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Tell me that those accidents aren't going to
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put material into the environment
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that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years.
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And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains
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isn't a potential terrorist target.
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CA: Thank you.
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For.
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Anyone else for? Go.
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18:19
Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I just wanted to say,
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I'm, first of all, renewable energy's biggest fan.
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18:23
I've got solar PV on my roof.
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18:25
I've got a hydro conversion
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18:27
at a watermill that I own.
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18:29
And I'm, you know, very much "pro" that kind of stuff.
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18:32
However, there's a basic arithmetic problem here.
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18:35
The capability of
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the sun shining, the wind blowing and the rain falling,
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18:40
simply isn't enough to add up.
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18:42
So if we want to keep the lights on,
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we actually need a solution
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which is going to keep generating all of the time.
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18:49
I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the '80s,
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and I continue to do so now.
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But we've got an opportunity
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to recycle them into something more useful
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that enables us to get energy all of the time.
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And, ultimately, the arithmetic problem isn't going to go away.
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We're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone.
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We need a solution that generates all of the time.
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If we're going to keep the lights on,
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nuclear is that solution.
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CA: Thank you.
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Anyone else against?
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Man: The last person who was in favor made the premise
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that we don't have enough
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alternative renewable resources.
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19:25
And our "against" proponent up here
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made it very clear that we actually do.
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And so the fallacy
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that we need this resource
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19:33
and we can actually make it in a time frame
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that is meaningful is not possible.
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I will also add one other thing.
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Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks --
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we know that the stick is going up exponentially.
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So you can't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables
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19:46
and say, "That's all we have."
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Because five years from now, it will blow you away
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what we'll actually have as alternatives
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to this horrible, disastrous nuclear power.
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CA: Point well made. Thank you.
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(Applause)
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19:59
So each of you has really just a couple sentences --
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30 seconds each
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to sum up.
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Your final pitch, Stewart.
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SB: I loved your "It all balances out" chart
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that you had there.
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It was a sunny day and a windy night.
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20:16
And just now in England
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they had a cold spell.
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20:20
All of the wind in the entire country
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20:22
shut down for a week.
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20:24
None of those things were stirring.
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20:26
And as usual, they had to buy nuclear power from France.
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20:28
Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel.
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This keeps happening.
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I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor.
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And the fact is, we're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel
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20:39
in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along.
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20:42
And especially the small reactors need to go forward.
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I heard from Nathan Myhrvold -- and I think here's the action point --
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it'll take an act of Congress
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20:50
to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
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20:52
start moving quickly on these small reactors,
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which we need very much, here and in the world.
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20:58
(Applause)
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21:04
MJ: So we've analyzed the hour-by-hour
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power demand and supply,
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21:08
looking at solar, wind, using data for California.
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21:11
And you can match that demand, hour-by-hour,
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21:14
for the whole year almost.
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21:16
Now, with regard to the resources,
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we've developed the first wind map of the world,
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21:20
from data alone, at 80 meters.
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21:22
We know what the wind resources are. You can cover 15 percent.
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21:25
Fifteen percent of the entire U.S.
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21:27
has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive.
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21:30
And there's much more solar than there is wind.
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21:32
There's plenty of resource. You can make it reliable.
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CA: Okay. So, thank you, Mark.
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(Applause)
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So if you were in Palm Springs ...
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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Shameless. Shameless. Shameless.
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21:55
(Applause)
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So, people of the TED community,
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I put it to you that what the world needs now
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22:02
is nuclear energy.
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All those in favor, raise your hands.
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(Shouts)
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And all those against.
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Ooooh.
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Now that is -- my take on that ...
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Just put up ... Hands up, people who changed their minds during the debate,
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22:20
who voted differently.
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22:22
Those of you who changed your mind
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22:25
in favor of "for"
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22:27
put your hands up.
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Okay. So here's the read on it.
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Both people won supporters,
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but on my count,
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22:37
the mood of the TED community shifted
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from about 75 to 25
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22:41
to about 65 to 35
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22:43
in favor, in favor.
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You both won. I congratulate both of you.
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Thank you for that.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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