This is a van filled with Thorium advocates,
Kirk Sorensen, Kirk Dorius, Baroness Bryony Worthington and myself. Who wants to tell us what it is we're doing
here? We're on our way to Oak Ridge National Labs
right now to tour the facility, particularly the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, HFIR and
SNS. Along the way, we pass by many sources of
electricity. All the ash that builds up from the burning
of coal, they put it in big pile. It's called a tailings pile. No break this week for crews in Tennessee
trying to clean that mess of potentially toxic sludge that oozed across hundreds of acres
of land just west of Knoxville. Crews are using heavy equipment to clear away sludge
that inundated a neighborhood near Harriman, Tennessee. 5.4 million cubic yards coal ash
residue that comes from burning coal to create electricity at the power plant that is run
by the Tennessee Valley Authority. That ash is now entered into the neighborhood,
entered into the land, and most importantly, into two rivers here in the Tennessee River
watershed. In that ash are heavy metals, like lead, mercury,
cadmium and arsenic. You can see the ash. See they're still digging.
Oh, man, look at that. Four years later, still working on it. What did it spill from? It absorbs a lot of moisture, Gordon. When
we had that big rainstorm, it actually took on a lot of water and held it, to where the
piles just collapsed and flowed downhill. You're saying an ash pile washed down? I don't
see an ash pile big enough where something like that pushed it down. That's because it's already washed down. It used to be a mountain, and now it's just
a big wash. Pretty much every coal plant has a huge ash
tailings pile. This is not unique. They've all got them. This is the waste of coal. We're at TVA's Bull Run Steam Plant. This
is a coal-fired power plant. This is what provides the power to the City of Oakridge,
and also to Oakridge National Labs. I've often found it ironic that one of the nation's premier
nuclear labs, and one of the ones that had the very first nuclear reactors, has never
been powered by a nuclear reactor. It's always been powered by coal, and particularly this. I did some analysis of UK coal stations. This
one probably emits more, but it's about a ton of CO2 every five seconds. That was for me, when I started working on
climate change, the biggest thing that I could see. The biggest contributing element of climate
change was coal use for electricity Exactly. The single biggest contributor. I'm a little bit of a data geek, I'm afraid.
I like spreadsheets and numbers. I feel safe knowing the numbers tell you something, and
you can rely on them, hopefully. I looked at what was going on in the UK's
emissions history. We were really at the mercy of global commodity prices. If coal was particularly
cheap and gas was very expensive, you'd see these sudden spikes in emissions where everyone
switched back to coal. Even if you convince a billion people to reduce
their emissions, what it does is reduce the demand for the fuel, lowers its price, and
somebody else will burn it. As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, then we're
going to keep burning them. Four of the world's top environmentalists
have written an open letter calling for more nuclear power. They say it's the only way
to reverse climate change, that there's no credible path to climate stabilization that
doesn't include nuclear. Instead of putting our technological prowess
into building advanced nuclear power plants, we're putting it into finding more and more
fossil fuels. We keep finding more and more of it and the price keeps going down. You and I are religious fanatics or have been
about being anti-nuclear, nuclear is bad, fear of nuclear war, and we are the ones then
who should lead the discussion. We come from that position. We don't take this lightly. I'm not not supportive of solar. I agree with
you. We should try it, everything and anything. But, still, we all know that there isn't four
hours of sun here in Michigan every day and so, on those days there's no sun, how am I
warming up my pizza? I never discussed nuclear power with my colleagues
or my student peer group except in anything other than fairly disparaging terms about
why it wasn't required. Went to anti-nuclear rallies throughout our
childhoods. We're anti-nuclear until a few years ago. Then something happened which is
that we were forced to actually understand the low carbon technological options we have.
The harder we looked at it, the more that we discovered that the alternatives to fossil
fuels are very expensive. In the suite of options that I was looking
at, being renewable energies, energy efficiencies, and carbon offsetting, without some extra
major additional force to come in and help the effort, these solutions were not going
to so much as touch the sides of meeting this problem. I needed to come back and look at
an option that I hadn't permitted myself to see up to that point. He has opposed nuclear power in the past.
George Monbiot says he now supports nuclear power. We're talking about renewables replacing fossil
fuel and electricity production, replacing liquid transport fuel, and replacing heating
fuels, gas and oil, in people's homes. That's certainly what we're calling for right across
Europe as an environmental movement. If they're also the replace nuclear power and planned
nuclear power, that makes it a very tall order and it makes our task a lot tougher. I think our priority has got to be to kick
fossil fuels out of the picture and only then do we start to look at whether renewables
can also remove the need for nuclear power. I used to be against nuclear power kind of
in a knee-jerk mode. As I look through all of the details of the alternatives with coal,
how nuclear actually works, the prospects of the next generation reactors that are coming
along, it looks to me like, in terms of climate and in terms of everything else, nuclear's
a good thing to expand. It's obviously going to be just part of what we do about energy. I found out, first of all, that it is a zero
carbon power source at least to the exact same extent that we regard renewable energy
sources as a zero carbon power source. This has been repeatedly assessed and demonstrated.
I thought the opposite. I was wrong. I can't say this is an enormous road to Damask
thing because I never put much thought into it initially. It was just if you're involved
in a movement, you don't question all of the tenets of the movement. Why would you bother? I'd been instinctively anti-nuclear. Only
about four years, I heard about an alternative form of nuclear that was safer and more sustainable.
Nuclear has no emissions. If we could have some of the other problems solved, then that's
a potentially big part of the solution to climate change. I'm just wondering if you're aware of the
"Wind and Solar" Mark Jacobson article that the global plan of $100 trillion? And that
assumes dramatic reductions in global energy use over the next few years, massive ramping
up of hydroelectric power, massive ramping of a lot of things that environmentalists
would disapprove of, plus a total rebuild of the electric grid. It's not that this would not be possible,
and I'm not disputing that, but it's just not going to happen. The whole point about why you arrive at nuclear
is because all of the alternatives have problems attached to them. In and of itself, it's got
a purity and it's really exciting but it's expensive and it's difficult. Why we haven't
done as we might have done in the past is because we've always had alternatives that
have been cheaper or easier to do. Are easier to externalize. Yeah, exactly. With the coal, it's only cheap
and easy insofar as the burden it creates is being borne by the atmosphere. It's sort
of socialized amongst everybody. If we actually took that into account, it wouldn't be cheap.
The way the economics at the moment are set up, why would you do anything differently? The idea that the invisible hand of the market
can efficiently allocate resources is flawed if the invisible hand is blind. What blinds
the invisible hand so that it cannot see the consequences of its own action? It is the
externalities. It is the fact that the prices are not honest prices. Does a price of a barrel
of oil reflect its cost? Of course not. $100 a barrel if it's a penny and you throw
in the occasional Gulf War. If the invisible hand is guided by dishonest prices, it cannot
reach honest conclusions. How do you get the prices right? The legitimate role for government is to control
and check externalities. Your best procedure is to try to impose a charge on the disposition
of the garbage rather than to try to regulate the details of how the garbage is disposed
of. We come to the idea of tax shifts as the available
mechanism that an enlightened government could exercise. It could exercise its power of taxation
and redress the dishonesty in the marketplace. You have a market now in pollution abatement. The way the situation works in Europe at the
moment is that we have made an intervention and we've placed a cap on CO2 emissions and
that's created a price for those emissions. We started to internalize that price but,
of course, as soon as you do that, it damages coal and, to a lesser degree, gas but it benefits
nuclear and anything that's zero emissions, which is what it's intended to do. But then there are some environmentalists
and green groups who really don't like the fact that nuclear therefore gets a sort of
implicit subsidy. In Germany, for example, the Green movement has been successful in
winning the argument that we shouldn't do nuclear in response to climate change. They've
now shut down their existing reactors and canceled any plans for rebuild. They're trying to hit their climate targets
just on renewables and energy efficiency, with some gases and bridging technology. It's an enormous achievement, what they've
done. They get five percent of their electricity from solar, now, 27 gigawatts. There's an
enormous amount of solar power they put in. If they'd spent that money on nuclear, they'd
have a zero-carbon economy, by now. I believe that climate change is sufficiently serious,
that we have to have a pragmatic approach to it, not an ideological one. I think most people's commitment to renewables
is ideological, not pragmatic. It's because they believe there's something good about
renewables. No president is going to turn out the lights.
There has to be energy. If renewables aren't providing it, then it's been fossil fuels. Nuclear can be done anywhere, any time. It
operates 24/7, it pushes submarines around. This is not Jules Verne science fiction, this
is real. Nuclear is a very flexible power source. Is it going to be the number one power
source, the only power source? No, that's zealotry. I've lived in Kansas. I can picture wind turbines
being in Kansas. I've lived in D.C., I can't see that being a good market for wind energy,
because our greatest demand is when we have the least wind. There are going to be places where wind is
more effective than not, there are going to be places where solar is more effective than
not, and there are going to be places that are going to need a lot nuclear. My point
is that the environmentalists, those who care about climate change, need to engage, and
open their minds, and accept nuclear energy, and actually support it as part of our panoply
of zero-carbon energy sources. At the moment, the leadership of environmental
organizations is emphatically against it. When you have decent discussions, people are
generally open to it. The hardest part is the organizations. When you try to talk to
NEI or the Union of Concerned Scientists, their members might like what you're saying,
but the management...The management, their jobs depend on funding their core message. Sierra Club members are trying to get the
club to just evaluate and re-evaluate their existing nuclear policy. If they admit that
they made a mistake in 1986, in going anti-nuclear, they kind of risk their own continuing as
directors. The United States has reduced its greenhouse
gas emissions more than any other country in the last five years. In fact, we've reduced
our greenhouse gas pollution to levels not seen since 1992. The reason for that is that
we're accumulating huge inventories of clean energy. That's absolutely not true. What's displacing
coal is natural gas, not renewables. It would be nice if wind and solar were displacing
coal. It's simply not true. This is Sizewell B. It produces four-tenths
of a light bulb of power, for every person in Britain. That's more than all the wind
farms in Britain, today. if you don't like nuclear, every Sizewell you want to get rid
of, you need an extra 2,000 wind turbines. It makes me pretty angry if people are anti-wind
and anti-nuclear and anti-coal. It just doesn't make sense. What do they want to have happen
when they switch the light switch on? Britain's got impressive wave and tidal resources,
but if you covered the entire coastline of Britain with wave machines, you would only
get four light bulbs of power per person from wave power. At the moment, we get 90 percent of our energy
from fossil fuels, and we've become used to that. Obviously, if we stop using fossil fuels,
then everything else we do has to roughly increase tenfold, to make up for the loss
of the fossil fuels. Obviously, audacious things have to happen. We need to be talking
about a tenfold increase in nuclear, a tenfold increase in wind, a tenfold increase in everything
that we do. Bill Gates, President Obama, Jeffrey Sachs,
Richard Branson, Paul Allen, Nathan Nathan Myhrvold, the world's leading climate scientists,
all saying we need nuclear energy because we can't bet the planet on solar, which provides
one-tenth of one percent, and on wind, which is totally dependent on federal subsidies.
That is a very dangerous bet. The response that they have gotten is just rejection, out
of hand. We know that the solutions to the climate
crisis lie not in nuclear power, but in renewable energy, in energy efficiency, in solar, in
geothermal, and wind, and all those things that are already invented, but which the status
quo, powers that be want us to think are too difficult to obtain. I know that our policy is very simple to understand
-- no nuclear. Is there more nuances demanded there? Because great concerns about nuclear
energy can be addressed. We only have a limited amount of money. you
want to reduce greenhouse gases, so you want to apply the dollars in ways that reduce greenhouse
gases the most, while creating the most employment possible for that investment. A promotional piece from one of the big windmill
producers that's bragging about how much material goes into each windmill, "Oh, look at how
many people will need to create this huge amount of concrete, and this huge amount of
steel, and this huge amount of carbon composite with petrochemical sealants and plasticizers." People have to change the oil out of the gearboxes.
So these things will require constant maintenance. These are essentially jobs producers. Some days, you may be doing oil changes, maybe
changing filters. And other days, you may just be testing the bolts, to make sure that
none of them have shaken loose. A typical one-gigawatt nuclear plant is maybe
a third of a square mile, and a one-gigawatt solar power plant is about 25 square miles
of bulldozed desert. I'm all for solar on the rooftops, but to imagine that there are
no hard trade-offs is an illusion. Wind, like solar, is an actually relatively
dilute source of energy. Typically, to get one gigawatt of electricity, is on the order
of 250 square miles of wind farm. We've been here, before. Back in the '50s
and '60s, when, again in California, we had a lot of hydroelectric dams coming in, and
the Sierra Club said this is unacceptable. The Sierra Club said nuclear power is better
than dams. Then they changed their mind about that, but actually, I think they were right
the first time. It's very capital-intensive, it takes a long
time to build a reactor, and for the dollar invested, you reduce very little carbon, compared
to things like a dollar invested in energy productivity improvements, energy conservation... There's this idea that, through energy efficiency,
we can reduce the amount of energy. It's all about scaling back. There are going to be
nine billion of us, pretty soon. We're not going anywhere. We're not going to be retreating.
The reality is, we're going to keep encroaching... Start with energy efficiency. Put aside everything
else. Yeah. We've become more energy efficiency
over the last 200 years, Ralph. If you look at the energy studies over 200 years, energy
intensity has declined, meaning we get more units of GDP per unit of energy lost. 200
years. That's a long-term trend, and over that same period of time, our energy consumption
increases. Now, what are you going to do? Tell the 1.3 billion people in the world who
burn wood and dung for their energy that they need to become more energy efficient? They
need electricity, Ralph. They need baseload grid electricity. And it's either going to
come from fossil fuels, or it's going to come from nuclear. Do you realize what the national security
aspects of nuclear power are? Absolutely. Do you have any idea how tempting a target... There was an attack, actually, on a nuclear
power plant, with a bazooka. It was by Greens in Germany. Improve technology. Don't say no nuclear power.
Say better nuclear power. The climate scientists who wrote that letter
or myself, nobody is advocating building 1970s era nuclear reactors. We are excited about
the next generation reactors that can be produced in factories on assembly lines. All technology,
an iPhone and wind turbine, solar panels, pocket calculators, the cost comes down dramatically.
The reason nuclear power is expensive right now is we haven't been building it. It would unleash a lot of human potential
that's currently not being fully fulfilled. Standard of living does correlate quite well
with access to energy. Throughout her life, she had been heating
water with firewood and she had hand washed laundry for seven children. Now, she was going
to watch electricity do that work. There's a great talk on TED by Hans Rosling
of how women in the 50s, when they started to have washing machines, became suddenly
hugely more productive. To my grandmother, the washing machine was
a miracle. Washing clothes is a really unproductive task.
It's just repetitive. You have to keep doing it. You're not creating anything that's sustaining
anyone really. It's just time wasted. Two billion have access to washing machine
and the remaining five billion, how do they wash? Or, to be more precise, how do most
of the women in the world wash? They wash like this, by hand. It's a hard, time-consuming
labor which they have to do for hours every week. Sometimes they also have to bring water
from faraway or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off. They want the washing
machine! There's nothing different in their wish than
it was for my grandma. Look two generations ago in Sweden. Picking water from the stream,
heating with firewood, and washing like that. They want the washing machine in exactly the
same way. But when I lecture to environmentally concerned
students, they tell me, "No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines."
How many of you doesn't use a car? Some of them probably raised their hand and say, "I
don't use a car." Then I put the really tough question. How many of you hand wash your jeans
and your bed sheet? And no one raised their hand. As soon as you could get a machine to do that
for you, that time became time for the family. He said that was when he sat down with his
mom and started to read with her. That would happen multiplied over. All these women suddenly
have much more capacity for being more nurturing or being more productive. It's a great empowerer
to have energy and have machine do things for us that are just routine, rote tasks. Huge fractions of the developing world, women
spend all day looking for sources of water. When they get to the water, it is typically
filthy -- parasites, disease, et cetera. If you could have clean water, disease- and parasite-free
water, to homes, you would liberate an enormous amount of time and you'd increase the health
of the people. There are a lot of things we just throw away
because the energy to reuse them is more expensive than virgin material. Dig it out of the ground, you turn it into
something, then you use it, you smash it, and then you throw it back in a pit in the
ground. Ultimately, it just means you leave one big hole in the ground over here and then
start filling up another hole over there. Is that a sustainable practice or is there
more of a closed loop system that could be employed? That's the dream but that does require
energy. That was one of the things that always attracted
me about the notion of exploring was that you had to implement that simply to survive.
If you were going to live on the moon or Mars, there was no pit over here and pit over there.
You better figure out how to make it all stay. Every atom of nitrogen or oxygen or hydrogen
became precious to you. When I would tell people why are we doing
NASA, that was the most effective thing was the whole idea of recycling and what we would
learn from exploring space. What prevents us from doing that right now
on Earth? Why do we have to go to space to learn how to be really, really good recyclers?
Why can't we just decide to recycle? More importantly, why don't we recycle like that
on Earth? Really quickly I realized it was energy. Energy
has to be really, really cheap or the penalty has to be really, really bad. In space, the
penalty was really, really bad. If you didn't recycle, you ran out of air and water. But,
on the ground, to go achieve that dream of a closed loop, you need to have really, really
cheap energy.
For anyone wanting to watch the full Nader vs Shellenberger on CNN i found them to be pretty compelling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbWVfxRG8zA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6fVeuHTx0w
...I don't think Nader is the best anti-nuke spokesperson... CNN also had Van Jones on... he's a guy I respect more than Nader, but he didn't do much better.
I posted Thorium Fight because I find pro-nuke people debating various technical approaches is far more enlightening than listening to anti-nukes.
Also, it has been asked previously, "this has nothing to do with thorium, why is thorium in the title?"
The overall Th doc is about thorium. But not every chapter is. There are broader generic nuclear issues to cover when one discusses thorium.
If I can segregate Th-specific from nuke-generic that allows folks not currently focused on promoting thorium to still share the video and educate the public about these issues.