Can We Trust Nuclear Power Again After Chernobyl? [4K] | Nuclear 2.0 | Spark

[Music] there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download veli today [Music] [Music] fossil fuels coal oil and gas helped create the modern industrial world energy generation is the backbone of modern civilization providing for industry heat and light and high living standards 200 years of combustion emissions in particular co2 are inducing high-speed climate change such as we have never seen to mitigate this climate emergency we must use all of the tools at our disposal one critical technology is nuclear energy the global gold standard for climate projections is amassed by the intergovernmental panel on climate change u.n body now they're not responsible for the climate modeling or even the observations of all the science behind climate climatology and climate science but they are the world authority for examining that's the uncertainties associated with the different projections and the trends and one thing we've noticed from the ipcc reports is that they come out sort of every five years um and every one is worse than the last one and the world is currently tracking pretty much at the worst case scenario or above for every time one of the reports comes out intensive observations have revealed consistent cryosphere reduction and global temperature rises right now we're averaging about 0.2 degrees per decade increase varying between 0.1 and 0.3 and if we continue at the current rate which we have been doing for some time now we will achieve 1.5 degrees by 2030 and at least three degrees by 2100 so most scientists in the field are pretty much of the opinion that keeping it to within two degrees by the end of the century is pretty much impossible by now [Music] moves to reduce carbon emissions to counteract climate change and its effects have been slow it's vitally important and it's getting more important with every passing day at the moment because we just aren't doing enough of it soon enough and it's been that way for quite a while so when i was setting the context for my energy research i went back to look at what our process has been over 30 years really of being alert to the challenge of climate change and you can really see that all of our major institutions governmental intergovernmental have been in a sense in a form of denial over just how big this challenge is which you can sort of sum up with needing to provide clean decarbonised economy for a 10 billion person planet with everyone at high living standards and we just have not gone about the challenge in appreciation of that at all and it shows because now we're at 415 parts per million co2 concentration when i changed my mind on nuclear power it was only about 390. uh this is really concerning so we are on track to change the nature of our climate in this century in ways that are really going to change the way we occupy this planet for the for the much harsher and the much worse so we have a big job in front of us and people are still realizing just how challenging that job is some obvious results the acidification of our oceans arise in ocean levels and it's becoming a runaway effect well oceans are probably going to increase anywhere between 0.2 and 0.5 meters by the end of the century although that's contingent on a model of gradual melt and as we're seeing now from arctic sea ice and greenland ice sheet that it's probably going to be more of a catastrophic shift also the paleo data from mass pulses of ice and fresh water through the different interglacials and glacial events over the last 200 000 years or so show that it wasn't gradual so we had these huge pulses especially coming out of the north atlantic that changed sea levels in terms of meters in in less than a few centuries so we could be seeing a lot more but unless we massively reduce our emissions and we haven't been able to do that at all up to date i mean yes we've increased renewable energy substantially but our demand and our production of fossil fuel-based energy in particular is keeping way ahead of what any gains we're making from clean energy sources another consequence of burning coal has been air pollution and its effects on populations have been dramatic estimates suggest that in india alone between 2011 and 2012 there were 111 coal-fired power stations as a result the country registered between 80 000 and 115 000 premature deaths and more than 20 million asthma cases humans aren't the only species threatened actually we these days we're getting a much better handle on the effect on life from plants to insects to big animals including us and that's partially from better predictions and also better observations of what's happening today but also looking into the past now what we do know at least over the last few glycial cycles so going back you know several hundred thousands of years that when the warming events came that's when we were seeing the big extinction pulses so losing the mammoths and the sabretooth tigers and the the protons in australia that actually was in most cases synonymous with a warming or in the case of australia drying event as well as humans coming in so it was kind of like a one-two punch so and that was sometimes over the course of thousands of years now we have a vastly increased rate of change and there is adaptation to a certain extent but in the areas where the thermal range is quite low for example in the tropics even though it's on average higher the variance is quite small sort of day to day or season the season that's where we're likely to get the biggest extinction rates now we've done some other modeling along those lines that makes it even scarier because most of the models are contingent on exceeding thermal thresholds so this thermal tolerance of species x once you surpass it the species goes extinct and then you look at the species specific thermal tolerances and you calculate how many you're going to lose if you do it that way you're looking at about a five to ten percent loss by the end of the century on current projections that's just from climate change that doesn't include anything like overexploitation or deforestation or invasive species or pollution or anything like that so this is just in addition [Music] but ecology doesn't work like that so what happens is you get one species that will depend on a whole host of others for example it's simply a specific pollinator to a specific type of a plant or tree or something like that or a flower when the pollinator goes extinct the plant does or the other way around or i think of a predator and a specializing in particular prey with the prey goes extinct the predator goes extinct we call these things extinction cascades and we just did some work last year that showed that not taking into consideration these extinction cascades underestimates the effect of climate change by up to 10 times in a warming scenario not only that that when you try to break the system and these are virtual earths really that we're creating when you try to make the worst case scenario to get the fastest extinction rate to total annihilation it pretty much mimics exactly what's happening with the heating scenario it's i mean even i who receive who receives uh terrible news every day was absolutely shocked by that kind of information we we have no idea how bad it's going to be [Music] but left unchecked climate change will have massive effect on us well there's there's quite a lot to that obviously because it affects human societies in so many different ways there's obviously the direct effects like heat waves in fact in australia the biggest mortality type from a natural disaster is not bush fires it's not cyclones it's actually heat waves more people die from heat waves in australia than any other natural event flooding doesn't matter so that's a direct effect but we also have so many indirect effects and one of those of course is food supply now a lot of people might be thinking we're sort of at that optimum yield kind of threshold for most major crops around the planet that's possibly true there could be more intensification but generally speaking if you look at some of the major crop types like wheat for every one degree of warming you get about a six percent reduction now that's considering a linear prediction which is unlikely to be but water is another issue i mean we have um already halved the water availability per person across the planet since the 1960s so that's of course a function also population growth but water is becoming scarcer and more restricted to particular areas so if we get major water emergencies happening in places like the himalayas or that entire region of the subcontinent you're looking at two and a half to three billion people that depend on that water source that will suddenly have to find water elsewhere it's already starting to happen in india uh australia is no stranger to water shortages we are the driest inhabited continent and yet we still choose to grow things like rice and we can't seem to manage our largest river very well so you know if we can't even do it it's unlikely that many other countries would be able to not only that the human population will grow by about 35 percent by 2050 so we're gonna we're gonna hit about 10 billion by 2050. we're likely to exceed 11 and a half 12 billion by the end of the century and because of the most of that growth is in developing nations we're going to actually have to double our food supply by 2050 just to keep pace because many of the developing nations are eating more meat which is more both water and food intensive and that brings about an associated lift in emissions so you know you think about emissions from electricity production only represent about one-third of the total emissions of a country agriculture is another third so we have to get the agricultural side of things from a climate change mitigation in addition to just electricity supply [Music] scientists and engineers have been growing more concerned every year the nuclear climate initiative that was an idea that was started by the american nuclear association with the french nuclear association sfe and it was a terrific idea that came to pass in 2015 at a conference called icap in nice where delegates from 36 countries around the world signed to commit their societies to pursuing nuclear for climate change reduction and that represented memberships about 50 000 scientists around the world and we all signed that agreement on behalf of our respective societies and it's proved to be a very good vehicle for getting on track with addressing the world's climate change problems there is not going to be a silver bullet in climate change mitigation we are going to need everything available to us the whole suite of solutions working and deployed in a fashion of some urgency but of the technologies we do have available to us nuclear technologies as a group by far and away we'll make the biggest difference and are able to make the biggest difference we already have living proof of nuclear technologies decarbonizing whole power sectors for developed economies this is crucial and that we would overlook that is is distressing almost as we have this challenge in front of us so we know they can provide the electricity they can provide the heat to decarbonize a lot of the industrial sector that largely runs on burning gas and coal solar panels wind turbines just don't get into that sector at all with that heat and power we can desalinate water we can manufacture fuels we can power food production and we can do all of these things from a very small amount of land with a very discreet amount of fuel with a waste product that stays fully in our control that's a remarkably powerful solution it's probably our biggest single lever and so while i am absolutely across and supportive of all the technologies we have in front of us i believe the potential behind nuclear technologies is second to none it is going to need to be a big part of a decarbonised future [Music] the world needs energy and fossil fuels have to be replaced with renewable clean energy it's not just about coal we have the need to replace petroleum fuels in our light vehicle car fleet and in a heavy vehicle car fleet we need to be putting more electricity into our train systems not diesel we need to be replacing uh metal smelting with hydrogen reduction as opposed to carbon reduction so there are a whole suite of industrial processes and transport processes which will take more reactors in the future and there will be different reactors there will be high temperature reactors which are able to address these industrial processes one for example such as the terrestrial energy reactor being developed which is a molten fuel type of reactor molten salt type of reactor they've got terrific advantages because those reactors do not operate at elevated pressures and they operate at elevated temperatures able to take part in industrial processes which need elevated heat yeah i mean one of the major limitations of uh non-nuclear clean sources of energy like solar and geothermal and and wind is that you have to put them where the solar where the sunshine is and where the wind is and where the geothermal is which means that you need a kind of vast transmission network and it's usually not in the places that have the highest demands whereas something like a small modular reactor you can stick next to the highest demand source of electricity or industrial heat that i mean that's another thing that nuclear does provide is the really really high temperatures we need for industrial processes that we can't achieve yet at least with renewable energies so you could reduce your costs in terms of transmission by placing these anywhere you needed them and really get rid of the uh the transmission requirements and the loss of elect of energy that you get from transporting it over long distances frankly it's there's often a bit of a trade-off we look at wind farms and if there was an overriding societal benefit in putting them up and down the great dividing range then i would be convinced that that would be a good way to go but unfortunately what we're really doing is industrializing our landscapes putting in a whole bunch of or excessive pump storage a whole bunch of hydro onto dams and i've been involved in some of the world's largest hydro power projects in the mekong system in vietnam has a tremendous environmental toll on those local environments and so part of getting involved in this issue was looking at the true ecological benefit of different power systems when we come back to the environmental footprint if you like of nuclear versus virtually every other power system nuclear uses very few materials it can last up to a century the systems when deployed we have wind which uses around about 13 times more materials than nuclear power stations pv similarly about 10-13 times more materials than in a nuclear power reactor but that doesn't even account for this promise that people are talking about of using battery storage and when we start going down the route of using very expensive batteries with all the chemical processes involved and they're low life because most batteries are flat out lasting for more than five to ten years and need replacement we're going to see tremendous pollution issues with the industrialism around the replace from the battery systems and we're going to see those sorts of systems have around 20 or 30 fold the materials use of nuclear power plants there's nothing cheaper in australia than coal we've got to be clear about that what we are seeing however is that as people try to put renewables intermittent sources of wind and solar out into the network we're seeing and as that expands or should it expand we are going to see a steadily growing system of backup systems to enable wind and solar to work that will include as we've discussed earlier things like gas turbines with all of their problems so we're going to have a whole suite of under utilized equipment the grid that's created around this will have the same capacity factors as the generators so it'll be down around 20 or 30 percent we're going to have the same problems with whatever storage devices we're having and it will be the low use the low average use of all of these bits of kit which will increase the cost and so the future with an increasingly renewable system will be more and more bits of gear that are not operating at their commercial efficiency what we get with nuclear is we get a compact system we can maximize the use of our existing grid we can maximize the use of our existing curling water resources of our transport systems of our rail all of this equipment that we've currently got we can take the greatest benefit from and of course the reactors will operate at 90 percent of the time so they'll be very continuous so while the individual cost is high it's it's reduced in a system effect by their continuous availability without requiring all of the underutilized gear so just about all of the nuclear power that's in operation in the world today runs on the same general fuel cycle and principles which is ceramic uranium oxide fuel pellets generally in a metal sheath using water as a moderator and coolant to create steam to create electricity now the very first generation of those power plants generation one were you could think of them as somewhat upscaled versions of what was on submarines previously for the navy brought on land introduced into power production they were smallish in size and they ran for for some small number of decades but not all that long the second generations where they really upscaled those designs made them a lot bigger built a lot of them and that's actually the vast bulk of the nuclear power in operation today's is generation two same basic fuel cycle but they were turned into a commercial proposition and they have been very successful so around the world where they have been deployed we generally see very reliable stable power which is operating at a very good price in the economies that are using it so effectively the workhorse is the global nuclear sector today in generation three reactors is the same basic fuel cycle principles but the engineering is being simplified a bit so few active systems more passive systems for safety slightly simpler design there aren't actually many of those reactors operating in the world today but the ones that were constructed particularly in japan were built very quickly were built on show drawn again operate really successfully and then we get into generation four reactors and that's where the palette really opens up into a lot of new and exciting technology choices okay the world view what we're seeing internationally if we look at reactor supplies that are doing quite well we've got the russian industry it's growing and we're seeing for example six new reactors going into egypt we're seeing reactors being built in uh chile by um the chinese we've got new reactors going into pakistan by the china if we've got new reactors going into bangladesh by the russians so around the world in parts of the old eastern bloc as we used to call it and in these other smaller nations we've got chinese and russian industries are serving those markets quite well in the united states we have the older fleet that existed and that's coming under increasing pressure by cheap gas within that nation and so nuclear has to compete under a regulatory regime it's expensive with cheap gas entering the marketplace but the new administration over there and actually the old obama administration were looking at putting programs in place to encourage the development of new reactors and so we have terrific new reactors like new scale which is a small modular reactor which can be built in modules up to 600 megawatts that is a light water reactor it's using the same fundamental technology in fuel cycle but a very shrunk down size a small array of up to 12 small reactors making it very nimble and able to load follow with very high outlet temperatures and that is in licensing right now with a with a customer ready at the end of that that's very exciting if you look at the terrestrial energy integral molten salt reactor from that canadian outfit it is going through the canadian regulator it is in stage two of its pre-pre-licensing review it is moving toward build in the 2020s so i think we need to track these things one milestone at a time and treat them in that way but now i think we can say with confidence that it is a 2020s outcome that we're heading towards that is going to offer particularly advanced economies that aren't building massive power plants anymore an extremely good option for swapping out uh their existing fossil fuels and incrementally but swiftly changing over and transitioning to clean energy sources the real powerhouse we're seeing in reactor development is in north asia particularly south korea where we've seen the recent the nearing completion of 5.6 gigawatts in four reactors in the united arab emirates and they've done that in the harshest climate in the world for any form of construction and they've proceeded with discipline and they're getting that project over the line so while we're seeing some political pushback and we saw president moon of korea for example he got elected on the basis that he was going to wind back the program we're now seeing polls in south korea of 70 of the people in favour of nuclear after his election we saw a citizen's in south korea that the reactors at shin corey 5 and 6 should continue to be constructed there is what i would call pushback because the political processes we often see that a politician will take policies polarized opposites to the previous administration to carry fader that's unfortunately the nature of politics we saw that happen also with president macron in france where he was initially elected on the basis of tampering back the french nuclear fleet and now we've seen a report come out about two weeks ago where they're advocating the building of six new reactors and also the resignation of their energy and environment minister over that sort of issue and so the the president of france has now realized for example what a tremendous benefit low carbon nuclear energy is in europe and he's contrasting that with the appalling situation you've got in germany where they're winding back their carbon their their nuclear fleet their emissions are plateaued in fact they may be slightly rising they're certainly not going to meet their targets they've got lignite mines now being developed and their emissions are up around the 500 grams per kilowatt hour compared to the french emissions down around 40 or about a 12 of the german emissions and so around the world we do get reassessment by people particularly as a result of fukushima but when then we see changes in resolve and we've seen that now going on in taiwan when they're now reassessing their decisions and in favor of keeping nuclear well germany is the classic case of what not to do the energy vendor was was a massive failure i mean they're currently spending about half a trillion euros to increase the renewable energy transition without actually cutting any of their emissions because they chose to shut down nuclear and opted for lignite as as as uh base or the primary source of that electricity so we absolutely don't want to do what what um germany is doing i mean even even there's a lot of pressure in places like japan and south korea to do the same thing when you've got demonstrable successes like france and sweden and ontario and canada and ontario is um really the kind of the pie in the sky example of what we want to be able to achieve yes they have lots of hydro as well but they have some of the lowest emissions on the planet you know very wealthy and um functioning well-functioning society in in in the com in the developed world that is really i think the icon we need to be striving for france for example is another one i mean the one thing you think about when you think about france is gastronomy and wine well not one thing several things but it we generally don't think that that image has been ruined by the fact that they are some of the most nuclearized countries on the planet so i think that having that kind of demonstration that it works is exactly the reason why we shouldn't be shutting them down we should be putting more in if you look at places like china india much of the middle east they're putting in nuclear at a rate that just boggles our minds and and they're doing it because they need to you can't breathe the air in some of these countries so that's one impetus massive burgeoning development and consumption means that they need lots of electricity so you know if if if these countries are going down that route we should be considering it as well in total there are 450 nuclear reactors in use supplying only 10 percent of the world's electricity 50 reactors are currently under construction in 15 countries most are of the advanced passive design one of the tremendous virtues of the apr series of reactors that the koreans have developed is that the ap ap stands for advanced passive and what we have seen through what we call generation three and generation three plus reactors is for the ability of these reactors if they come under a critical departure from proper operations is for them to be able to shut themselves down passively without human intervention and we also have other benefits in those reactors such as pressurized core injection so water can be driven into the reactor or the entire reactor zone can be flooded and that would prevent issues such as that which happened at fukushima for example so there are a significant suite of new advances that are going into the ap series of reactors that did not exist in the earlier ones and would be incorporated into the types of reactors that would be used in australia [Music] the existing generation two and three actors working in the world today do the job do the job really well and they've done it well for decades but why would we want generation four reactors well there are some real advantages that are coming with some of the advanced fuel cycles they become what's known as walk away safe or inherently safe meaning it literally by dint of physics cannot have a run-up runaway overpower event so they are effectively meltdown proof even if you were to simply switch everything off and walk away they will sit stable and calm that offers a few advantages it de-risks the projects hugely in terms of their sighting they require smaller emergency planning zones they can be more comfortably embedded in industrial settings they can be more easily connected onto grids the materials become a lot lighter many of these designs will operate at atmospheric pressure so rather than pressurizing water very very hard as its coolant because they're using advanced coolants they have a much lighter build there's no pressure containing energy so they become simpler designs where i really believe all of that is heading is we need them cheaper it is absolutely essential that we are able to make nuclear power plants cheap scalable swiftly deport deployable really high quality control so moving from a construction paradigm more to a manufacturing paradigm much in the manner of solar panels that can be turned out from a factory in quality control we do need more of that paradigm for nuclear power now that is not to say that large reactor build projects can't be successful they can but these generation iv reactors are going to be able to i believe turn out at the scale we need to get at that huge climate change mitigation challenge in the way we are going to have to now one type of generation four reactors i'm particularly excited about recycles use nuclear fuel that is quite game changing for me that was a huge part of my journey from anti-nuclear pro is understanding that the thing i had thought was the biggest problem for nuclear technology fundamentally didn't need to be a problem at all so there is a way of using nuclear power reactors to turn all of the existing nuclear waste into a form of new fuel so we get about 20 times more energy out of the same existing mined fuel rods that we already have sitting in canisters today i find that incredibly powerful in the process of doing that the waste that we are left with is much smaller in volume and dramatically shorter in half-life only about a 30-year half-life and so that changes the entire paradigm of waste management for nuclear technology as well so the promise of that technology which is well established is exists in a commercial form but is not yet licensed and being built for me offers tremendous confidence that we can go forward with this technology and understand that we're doing truly a very sustainable thing for the future so we can use a process known as pyro processing where we essentially snip up those fuel rods reduce them into a into a liquid electrolyte uh run electricity through them separate the elements into a form of adequate adequate purity we put aside the true waste product which is only about two or three percent of the fuel rod and the remaining balance can be refabricated into new fuel rods and using a metallic fuel alloy and an advanced fast reactor those fuel rods can breed and create more fuel on every occasion and we put it in to that closed loop and progressively recycle all of that fuel rod and that waste product that comes off the side known as fission products only has a half-life of about 30 years so suddenly my mind was a little bit blown when a when a challenge went from things with 24 000 year half lives so 250 000 years to something with 30 30 year half lives or 300 years of management suddenly that's a completely different paradigm that opens up a huge range of options for responsible waste disposal not least of which getting 20 times more zero carbon energy from the same fuel we already have and the power of this can't be understated it really means that if you take all of the existing used nuclear nuclear fuel around the world if you also add the depleted uranium uranium that came from the enrichment process there's enough existing fuel to power that 10 billion person world at high standards for several hundred years right now [Music] it's an effective argument to take to the politicians [Music] well i'm a little bit jaded being a scientist and having interacted with politicians for many years if anything uh politicians listening to scientists is getting less likely and then then more so in in by itself even the climate emergency and more and more scientists backing these kinds of technological solutions or at least contributions isn't going to be enough i think we really have to get better at marketing the message and understanding the the pros and cons a little bit more and trying to take the emotions out of the rational decisions because when you when you come down to looking at everything including not just the costs but the safety and the economics of the long-term effect and the obviously the reduction rates and emissions they speak for themselves and we have to get over a long-term negative association with the n-word and try to show people that you know really we don't have a choice i i often say to people i said look even if we were implementing gen 2 kind of technology so going back to the fukushima's and the chernobyls or even before that and even if that was all that was available to us the magnitude and the emergency of what's happening today in terms of climate alone means that we could even if we had meltdowns it would still be worth it because on average we would still be ahead so of course we don't need to rely on that technology so it's much much better but i'd be willing i mean i i have a small bit of land in in the adelaide hills you know someone said to me um we've got a small modular reactor and we need some space to put it i put my hand up right away and i run a farm so you know that's it's to that extent that we need this kind of technology and there have been other precedents for that type of thing around the world in the 70s to the 90s 1970s to the 1990s france built 58 reactors over a 22-year period and they did that before the advent of the personal computer in the workplace so they were really ahead of their time we would replace the coal-fired power plants that are going to retire between now and 2042. that's 20 gigawatts of energy will be departing the system and we would replace that with 20 gigawatts or roughly 20 power reactors across australia so that would be an ongoing program of construction making a concerted effort to disassociate the n-word for nuclear weaponry from the n-word that is nuclear energy is is a really important part of that and convincing people that it's safe people don't process uh risk in a probabilistic sense we're not you know robots most people have to train to do probability theory and to think about the probability of there being a problem uh for a particular technology or not implementing a particular technology it's hard for people to fathom without really good metaphor and analogy and a lot of information available to them i am heartened that it appears to be possible if we look at places like the united kingdom if we look at places like finland we do see pretty good strong growing political consensus around climate change and energy that have become technologically inclusive so there are models and templates out there for this type of de-politicization of nuclear power it will be hard it takes people to speak up and set a good example i try to set the example from the point of view of one of those people who is so concerned about climate change trying to build bridges trying to provide i think particular for other people to see that i can be a supporter of these technologies and that doesn't mean saying goodbye to these environmental values that i hold dear because it doesn't it's actually remarkably incredibly consistent with those environmental values and i think once people can feel that they feel a lot more confident about getting on board and having a de-politicized discussion about nuclear it's a big challenge and we're challenged every time we speak and open our mouths on this topic to try to move it forward and not fall back into old patterns and old habits well i think if we're looking for leadership in this kind of technology we won't be finding it from our politicians but we need the politics to be on side because currently nuclear is illegal for electricity production in australia and that's in a number of acts so it's in the environmental protection biodiversity conservation act it's in a number of other acts that we'd have to re-jig a bit of our legislation that's not that difficult as it turns out but we would need to deal with the legislation and the politics just to make it legal but if we're waiting for politicians to do that for us it's not going to happen i see obviously the younger generation as being the key to almost every issue that we have environmentally or otherwise today but it has to be across society i think that if we are going to get acceptance of implementing nuclear for example in australia we need to have that across the board yes more educational material more training more promotion and certainly more discussion a lot of people including myself have tried to make awareness a bit more about these issues and there have been more and more bits of information that are helpful obviously something like this particular film is going to be useful for people and getting the message out and it's happening it's happening slowly i mean you don't get a culture shift in you know a few years often it takes a generation or two but the more material we have and the more evidence we have are great things and that's i guess that's the first step [Music] what of new fuels being developed like hydrogen i mean hydrogen has certain advantages and disadvantages for example it's very difficult to move so it's kind of hard to bring the energy to where it's needed and electricity transport and transmission are some of the key limitations of feasibility for rollouts of all sorts of types of alternative electricity production that includes solar and geothermal and and wind so in certain regions the right mix of fuels including hydrogen would be different and that's the other thing too is that all the sort of optimal mixes of nuclear hydrogen solar geothermal that really depend on the region and they're never the same so would we have a hydrogen economy probably not could we include a much higher proportion of hydrogen in our economy absolutely [Music] [Music] and the promise of fusion power ether is an experiment to try and demonstrate that you can operate and maintain that plasma for periods of time necessary to produce fusion power so the so there's various concept designs uh that would generate fusion electricity there's a european demonstration power plant design china has one that i've talked about japan also has one as does as does the us and korea also has a k-demo concept so the idea of et is to generate the science information that's necessary to operate and control in a steady state fashion a fusion power plant so either when i say operate and control what i mean by is that we haven't run a machine in a burning plasma configuration before so we really need to explore and understand whether or not the machine will run in steady state whether or not the the alphas will remain sufficiently confined to extract to produce a self-heating plasma whether or not the plasma will be stable over a long enough period of time to produce power so we need to answer all of these science questions first but in parallel to that there are concept plans to build demonstration power plants and the time scale for that evolution if you look at various different roadmaps eta will be sort of operational producing high performance plasmas mid-2030s there's concepts to develop or deploy uh demonstration power plants in the mid 2040s or 2040 or thereabouts those sorts of time frames mean we need to keep developing our renewable energy resources we need to keep deploying wind power and solar power we need to keep using the existing commercial nuclear technologies we have we need to keep open and operating the existing nuclear power plants we have we need to extend their lives we need to maintain our existing fleet of clean energy to keep those carbon emissions down as low as possible the time for waiting for the thing to come and save us all is long gone we need to be using everything that we have right now the designs that have been commercialized today based on advanced nuclear fuel cycles but not fusion promise really material important improvements on what is already an excellent solution we should be implementing and let's remember that it is actually through that healthy strong nuclear power sector through that food chain if you like is more supportive of advanced nuclear research in every respect if we want to see fusion in future great well let's have a healthy nuclear sector today as we decarbonize but particularly let's not put our climate at risk waiting for a perfect solution we have what we need right now and it's time to put it into practice

Channel: Spark

Views: 139,432

Keywords: Spark, nuclear engineers, nuclear plants, nuclear power advantages, nuclear power alternatives, nuclear power challenges, nuclear power cons, nuclear power controversies, nuclear power debate, nuclear power disadvantages, nuclear power future outlook, nuclear power generation, nuclear power progress, nuclear power pros, nuclear power risks, nuclear power updates, nuclear power video, nuclear reactors, nuclear waste, radioactive materials, reactor explosions

Id: J03aUZR2eBY

Length: 48min 0sec (2880 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022