How bad is it really? Nuclear technology -- facts and feelings: Sunniva Rose at TEDxOslo 2013

ever since I first saw that terrifying and amazing pictures of an atomic bomb exploding I've been extremely fascinated about nuclear physics and the power that lays deep behind the nucleus that was how I started my master thesis and nuclear physics and I think that it pretty much sums this up terrifying and amazing and I must admit when I first started to learn about nuclear power I was a bit frightened because I had learned that nuclear power that was almost evil this is Trinity this is the first ever man-made atomic bomb explosion this picture is taken one hundredth of a second after the donation and this fireball that you see here is 200 meters wide these little black dots inside my pink circles are trees so this is what can happen when you're unleash the nuclear power it's powerful and it's brutal so our civil nuclear power started as a military project during World War two and today I think that many people they still see nuclear power and nuclear weapons as almost exactly the same thing I think that conception is wrong and often based on a lack of knowledge so after the war a lot of countries they still chose to go for that nuclear option and they were quite happy and optimistic about this until 1986 the Chernobyl accident world's most or history's most ironic accident it was a safety test and then it took 20 25 years before people were starting again to accept nuclear power and before 2011 it was actually a lot of fun to be in the field of nuclear power because even here in Norway we were starting to talk about the nuclear Renaissance then in March 2011 this happened Japan was streaking by a devastating natural disaster an earthquake and a magnitude of nine on the Richter scale triggering an enormous tsunami that earthquake and that tsunami damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the east coast of Japan however I think that many of you here your view on this accident is wrong because if you think it's like something like it was presented in the media both Norwegian and national was something like oh my god nuclear atoms radiation meltdown helped mutation die well you're wrong you're definitely wrong 15,000 people died or went missing but it wasn't because of what happened and to fake it Fukushima nuclear power plant they died because of the earthquake and tsunami if on the other hand you think it was no problem whatsoever you're also wrong but actually I think that if you have the latter view is actually a little bit closer to the truth than a former anyway a reality check it's nice radiation is natural I am radioactive you are all radioactive or environment is radioactive and the dose level in Norway is actually higher than the world average and for example higher than it was in Tokyo even jira the Fukushima accident it was higher in Oslo at all times this is mainly because of the radioactive gas radon and just for the record it's not dangerous to live in Norway so as I said before this we were talking about a new to Renaissance and unfortunately after this accident it has been more difficult to talk positively about nuclear power because we all know this graph or well maybe you haven't seen it in pink and green but this is and you know you've seen this trend before this is the world population it has grown from less than a billion at the time of the Industrial Revolution to more than well or more than seven billions today seven billions two years ago and we know there's some I don't think we really understand because these numbers are so huge it's it's difficult to comprehend so if you take it down a little bit the world population grows but 10,000 every hour but a time that I have finished this talk 4,200 babies have been born and we will be in total 3,000 more people in the world every 18 minutes and these are numbers at least I can comprehend I think you can do because you can imagine 3,000 people gathering up in 18 minutes so these people more than seven billion in total in the world we need energy we want energy we want cheap energy because so important for a society or of course we could say that no but but those people are not entitled our standard of living that's not right is it so that's why we get back to my field nuclear energy well before I talk about nuclear energy I well I'm showing you this very nice picture here this is a pile of hydrocarbons in the form of coal and also in that picture is the equivalent amount of energy in uranium no you cannot see it but it's there I promise ok so I will now try to explain a little bit more in details and then I have to do this because if you take an atomic nucleus like uranium-235 you bombard it with nutrients it will fission and when efficient splits into two you get you get two fission products you get a couple free neutrons some gamma rays and you get energy and again a lot of energy actually per reaction if you look at her atomic nucleus efficient and compare that to her reaction of burning coal for example you get 50 million times more energy per reaction 50 million times more energy so if it take these numbers and you look at those those 3000 people I was talking about that the the the population growth during my talk if they were Aboriginal Norwegian families consisting of two adults and two children and we were going to look at the amount of electricity they would use in one year this would correspond to 750 Norwegian average families so if they were to get that energy from fish kneeing uranium nuclei they would need in total 790 grams less than a kilo but on the other hand if they were to burn coal they would have to burn 3000 tonnes and I don't think that we should forget there is also waste co2 waste for example coming from burning hydrocarbons so actually those 790 grams versus 3000 tonnes is also again a picture of how strong that nuclear forces or how little the protons really want to stay together since the force forcing them together is tens of million times stronger than any other force that we know of in the universe but we feel that nuclear power is very dangerous and it must be because we know the accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima well when I first started to be interested in this field field of science I was I was frightened and I was pretty sure that it was really really risky because that I mean I knew that but now as a scientist I think that we should be rational about it and I like to look at the numbers I like facts so we have a little more bit of Statistics here to look at how many people die per terawatt hour that we produce of electricity on comparative different sources so the first one is 161 people die per terawatts our produce and I don't think that's a big surprise is it that coal is bad then the next ones are oil and gas both much better then you have the two renewables wind and hydro and now we're getting close to zero then you might have guessed Nucor 0.04 deaths per tire what's our electricity produced I know it's morbid I also know that this statistics is not telling us the entire truth and I'm not saying that it is but I think there are some very interesting numbers and I think these these numbers come as a surprise to many people when they first see them because you think at that the nuclear should well at least be there next to coal maybe even worse and it's not it's not that risky dangerous so but it's the problem then okay now I getting into the real nuclear stuff this is my field okay so I think that even most pronucleus they will admit that the generation of this long-lived radioactive waste is a problem it's I will say it's the major issue but there are things to be done with this and we can solve this problem and now we we have to go more in details okay so will you see here this is what's called the chart of nuclides and it's very sexy and this is for a nuclear scientist this is sort of like the periodic table of elements but instead of just looking at the elements we need a total or review over all known isotopes you know different versions of an element so this is not of course you see this is not 3000 boxes here it's just a little piece of it so for example here you see uranium and there in the green you have uranium-235 and in red uranium 238 and those are the constituents of normal nuclear fuel so what do you put in this fuel there that is a mixture of uranium 235 and 238 what we want to happen we want uranium-235 to be hit by neutrons and fishing and producing energy and that's nice but that's not the only thing that goes on unfortunately because you have that uranium 238 that I put a little red circle around and the uranium 238 will not fish in when it's hit by nutrients it eats the nutrients and what eats the neutrons it is transformed into plutonium we don't like plutonium it's not as nasty as you say thing but I would say it's is rather nasty and and then again the plutonium is also eating neutrons and then a plutonium get to turn into this M americium and C M curium and then those are the main constituents of this long live radioactive waste that we don't know we don't like that so and and and this is sort of the sad thing because the few that we put in to the reactor actually 95% of it is that uranium 238 that does not fish and does not produce energy it's just there as an original but that's when we get to my favorite element yes I had a favorite element that's normal isn't it in pink there that's thorium the thorium this element was discovered in Norway actually in 1828 and it's named after our Norse god of thunder Thor last why's thorium and it for me as a Norwegian it's especially interesting because Norway actually has one of the largest reserves in the world of thorium yes we have oil and we have thorium also quite not so fair maybe but we may have the third largest reserve in the world of thorium so that's kind of interesting okay so I love thorium and I've been working with this forgotten element since I started my master's degree and I said it's forgotten because it has never really had any commercial use besides in gas Mantle's but recently there has been more talk about thorium again and a reason is that this is an element that may be used as a nuclear fuel you see when thorium is hit by nutrients it also eats the nutrients like uranium 238 does but instead of being transformed into plutonium it will be transformed into and haha it's being transformed into a third uranium isotope a version of uranium uranium 233 and uranium 233 is an excellent fissile material so thorium will not fish indirectly but it will first be transformed into some uranium and the uranium will fishing and as you can see from this chart of nuclides you start up much further down so you don't get all the way up to the plutonium and all those long-lived radioactive isotopes there that's a very nice thing about thorium no plutonium none of that long-lived radioactive waste of course that's again not the entire truth it's part of it but if you use thorium Asif you you will produce substantial less of radioactive waste there will be some small parts if you treat the spent thorium fuel in the right in the right way and also another very nice thing about thorium is that since you turn it into something fissile you can actually produce more fissile fuel than what you're consuming so you put in some fuel and again energy and that and you have more fuel than you had when you started that sounds too good to be true and very often then if it's good sounds too good to be true is not true but it is it's not easy it's difficult but it is physically possible and it is called breeding also thorium is more abundant than uranium so actually the energy that is possible to get from the thorium is probably more than what yet from all the uranium and the fossil fuel combined and if you manage to do this breathing that I was talking about you will get more than hundred times more energy out of the fuel than what you do with how you use your fuel and nuclear reactors today so thorium may definitely play a very important role in the energy mix of this century and further on so is it right that a natural disaster should put an end to nuclear power to research into new fuels like thorium new reactors that are safer more economical more proliferation resistant use of this fuel in a much better way I think not however I'll be the first admit that there are challenges with nuclear power definitely and there are challenges with thorium as a few it's not just straightforward it isn't but the world is not black and white and I think that we have to open our eyes and we have to communicate even though reality is not exactly how we want it to be and we need facts we can't just base our decisions on feelings because we feel that it's such-and-such we need the facts and the polarized debate which is very typical polarized black and white debate is very typical for the nuclear industry you are either 100% against you won't listen to reason are you so for that you can't see any problems whatsoever that's not constructive of course if you want to try to solve these big problems getting enough energy to all these people well we have to open your eyes and to end last thing I must say I have a question something I don't understand how is it possible to worry about global warming and not be pro-nuclear thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 416,931

Rating: 4.6264033 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxOslo, ted talk, TEDx, ted x, tedx talk, ted, ted talks, tedx, Thorium, Nuclear power, tedx talks

Id: oTKl5X72NIc

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2013