oh thank you so bear with me we've never done an event this size before so I got this up the Internet stage for the keynote congratulations your event is going smoothly and the crowd is happy now it's time for your keynote speaker before your keynote speaker comes on stage it's important that the crowd is excited and ready to receive him or her there are many ways of warming up the crowd the most common is asking them a rhetorical question that forces them to rediscover their own high level of enthusiasm one example is asking them if they're ready to see the keynote are you all ready to see Bill Nye remember that when directing your question to the audience to sound enthusiastic nothing kills a crowd like monotone are you all ready to see Bill Nye I can't hear you my name is Adam bolts with I'm with the Columbia University Coalition for sustainable development and I have the honor of introducing Bill Nye Bill Nye graduated from Cornell University College of Engineering in 1977 with the bachelor science and mechanical engineering then he went to work for Boeing I work in the Aeronautics industry about 15 years and found himself too drawn to entertainment where most of us know him from from 1993 to 1998 he had a hit show that ran for 100 episodes and earned 18 Emmy Awards between 2001 and 2006 he went back to his alma mater Cornell well he was the Frank HT Rhodes class of 1956 professor he holds multiple patents six honorary Doctorate degrees is the author of three books including the most recent one undeniable the evolution of Ellucian and the science of creation was kind of interesting that uh you know as a kid I watched him and he kind of grew up with me as an went from teaching me science to being an avid warrior for scientific truth between evolution and global warming he is out there making sure people hear the truth so please join me in welcoming Bill Nye ladies and gentlemen boys and girls kids of all ages it's great to see you all I was I was really excited about this talk until just a couple minutes ago know somebody came up to me and said is Bill Nye your real name and I said Bobby at BOTS William Nye it's wait a minute what why did you change it well uh we're gonna be here for a while no greetings you guys I just I am I am going to try to give you some perspective on nuclear energy based on my own experiences and you will hear of course my own opinions which are correct the huge timesaver in describing this business but for me our story begins with my dad who wanted to my dad went to Johns Hopkins which is an OK school and he wanted to marry a woman that went to Goucher College now Goucher is a liberal arts school now in Towson Maryland used to be in the city of Baltimore and back when we had such things I guess we sort of still do it was the Goucher was the sister school to Hopkins not unlike Barnard and some other school in New York and so am I going too fast now when you get a degree from Barnard it says Columbia on it right yeah anyway her father would not let them get married until she was graduated from college so my dad had what seemed like a good idea he wanted to make a lot of money quickly wanted to get a nest egg up for his bride so he took a job on Wake Island now if you've ever heard of Wake Island you go to Hawaii and then you go about that far again another 5,000 nautical miles into the Pacific Ocean and there's this very small atoll coral reef thing and it's tactically very important you would feel if you were a business person doing business in Asia you would fly from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor refuel and Pearl Harbor and then fly from Pearl to wake refuel and wake and then fly on to Midway or shanghaiers one of these places and at that when the thing started the only way to get there was by seaplane the famous Boeing Clipper a very sexy Art Deco looking plane and my father and the crew were building an airstrip so he was a construction worker but he was the college kid he was the quartermaster he was he did the accounting or something so nobody thought really in the spring of 1941 nobody thought that Japanese military would attack that's ridiculous but there's no such thing as climate change that's crazy and so everything was cool in the summer of 1941 but I don't know a familiar I was December 8 on Wake Island because the International Dateline that was December 7th in Hawaii and so Pearl Pearl Harbor was bombed and wake was bombed the same morning wake Islands bombed and these guys fought back for two weeks but they were eventually captured by the Japanese Navy and most of them were taken to prisoner of war camp in China oh look if you guys get a chance to be a prisoner of war I just I don't do it that's uh that's what I got out of that so you guys this is that I think this is a straw Neri story and it's just stuff that happens my mom was the woman who became my mother was graduated from Goucher College in the spring of 1942 and her boyfriend her man friend had disappeared these guys on Wake Island nobody knew what happened to them for months they did not have any radio they did not have the Internet what yeah no Facebook or Twitter yeah no internet bill what did they do all day yeah so yeah yeah it's disturbing isn't it just thinking about it so the the Dean of Students at Goucher was a woman named Dorothy Stimson who happened to be the first cousin of the Secretary of War Henry Stimson by the way in those days it was called the department of war not the Department of Defense we're defending our oil fields in the other side of the world okay yeah I don't know oh you guys I'm serious I don't know if it would be better or worse I really don't but I think things would be different if we were to change the name of that organization back to the Department of War I just think it would give people real perspective what they're really what we're really up to what it really means so apparently Henry Stimson said to Dorothy Stimson do you have any women that can come work on this thing I can't tell you what it is did you guys see the imitation game very good-looking - Benjamin Cumberbatch very good-looking anyway my mom was recruited to work on the Enigma code my mom was in the Navy she was a lieutenant in the Navy she subscribed to cryptography magazine after 1992 when they were allowed to get it they were Declassified in 1992 50 freakin years after the they were recruited and you would they would be at parties I met several of the women over the years which you do during the war Dorothy I can't talk about it now it was a big deal so I mentioned this because according to my mom there was not really an ethical question when it was the atomic bomb was developed should we drop this bomb is this really ethnic drop it man I get it over with that people were just terrified of the Japanese military they were Japanese soldiers had a reputation to fighting to the death which apparently is very well deserved and people in the US were scared that this thing would go on for five more years and my dad hardly ever talked about his experiences but at that point in the war is Japanese influence shrank they were moved to the island of Japan southern island of Japan and he tells a story about this guard who was 15 years old at this point all the adult guys were gone they were Japanese guys were gone and he drew a circle in the dirt it was a big bomb it was really big and the Commandant of the prison camp killed himself you know seppuku order it was a big deal so nuclear weapons as you saw I'm sure in the film I hope you got this mark I've been tied very closely to nuclear energy for what ever since the whole thing was figured out and another story that I just think is just so amazing the most romantic story I know has to do with the atomic bomb as everybody has anybody ever heard of the Compton effect oh yeah bill what is there anybody who took physics one guy okay the Compton effect so Arthur Compton discovered that you can steer electrons just like waves just like waves of light and the Compton effect anyway he was a young guy University of Chicago and he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project to make these nuclear weapons as a mathematician I guess and he arranged for his wife to get security clearance and it's quite expensive I had security clearance for a while and the FBI comes to your name hood and they ask your neighbors you know has he been spending a lot of money and it's he do drugs is he a communist and so anyway so general Graves who was in charge the army guy in charge of that project took a parent according to legend took Arthur Compton aside you know dude I'm not sure he said dude it was 1942 Arthur you got to get to loss almost you got to work in this matter of national security let's go go go go go and besides dude why do you want security clearance for your wife we got work to do you know she is back in 1942 terms just your wife you know what does she know the Arthur Compton said I just want to be able to talk things over with my wife that gets me I just wanted that he didn't want to have to keep secrets from his wife but this tradition of secrecy has played havoc in my opinion with our perception of nuclear power and furthermore the way the nuclear industry presents itself to us on the outside now if you don't know the premise of the bit as we say in comedy writing the premise of the bit is you dig up this uranium you clean it up somehow then you fish in it it gets really hot crazy hot and then you run a steam generator just like you do with coal or natural gas or oil you just run a just you run a huge heat engine that spins turbines at very high speed and you make electricity big fun and then the premise of the bit was well when we're done we'll just put it back in the ground this will be great fabulous anyway when I was a kid we went to Hechinger hardware to look at a bomb shelter which we were going to build and we filled bleach bottles these are Clorox bottles with water or when the nuclear weapon was exploded we just go downstairs and wait it out everything you'll be fine anyway it turns out as you may know to be fantastically more complicated than that and then another just amazing story did have you guys ever heard the expression the cross-section so it's a cross-section you're familiar to cut a log and there's the tree rings but they use this physicists use this to describe how to get neutrons to bump into other atoms as though they have a cross-section as though they have a width you know we all think of atoms and neutrons and protons electrons as particles which is a really very good model but you know it's it's like nature and maybe they're not really particles and that's just how we think of them but at any rate they use the term cross-section it turns that only about 0.7% of the uranium has the right cross section and you may have heard this expression uranium-235 92 protons and all the rest are neutrons then most of the uranium the other 98.3% is 99.3% is uranium 238 has three more protons three more neutrons alright so his Niels Bohr who was at lunch and apparently he figured it out and he got up from lunch and he ran into the or walked quickly to the blackboard and he drew that what they needed to do to realize all you got to do is take the uranium ore and put it in fuming nitric acid and some I guess a hydrofluoric acid and then you can make uranium hexafluoride simple the most deadly freakin stuff there is and you may have heard people talk about the centrifuge and all the controversy about having centrifuges in the Middle East and so on so the cool thing about fluorine is it only has one isotope it doesn't it only exists with it always has the same number of neutrons so you can spin this stuff in a centrifuge really fast and the heavier stuff goes to the outside and then if you're really skilled and careful you can get the lighter weight stuff literally lighter weight lower mass stuff closer to the middle and then there's several other processes and you enrich it from point seven percent good stuff to up into the 80s 84 percent good stuff and that's the stuff that fishes that that gets hot on its own and so it's extraordinarily complicated and I was the I was the emcee of the of the Department of Energy Science Bowl for a couple years as it's the coolest job because what you get to say over and over this may only appear to some of the people my age over and over you get to save here's the toss up and oh here's the toss up it's just the Grizz and I'll just tell you the people the kids the high school kids from Oak Ridge Tennessee are just butt kickers they're so smart because all their parents are a bunch of physicists and chemical engineers and I was like here's the toss-up what meet rubidium is right it's just a notion anyway that it's so complicated to get uranium to where it's fissionable that makes it different really from other types of heat fired turbines like coal you burn it it gets hot I got it I'm where I got it and I don't know if you've ever heard of a fluidized bed which we use in coal plants you turn coal into like flour it's so fine and then they spray it out into a furnace that's all on fire all the time and this greatly increases the efficiency of Coal Fired plants but it's still just burning coal there's no uranium hexafluoride and fuming nitric acid and all the stuff so the complexity of it has really been troublesome and the secrecy that was required to develop these processes that allowed the United States especially to develop the first nuclear weapons this stuff is still with the nuclear industry this secrecy now with that said the US Navy has a lot of nuclear reactors in fact I'm not sure exactly how many there are if they told me they may have to kill me and so on but they're very good with it they fishing the stuff in the conventional way get it hot and they run steam turbines they run submarines and aircraft carriers all over the ocean and it was Admiral rickover that realized that nuclear power was the way to do this you wouldn't have to continually refuel ships which was a cool idea but they have the luxury when the reactor is old they just take it out of the ship and bury it usually in Idaho our beloved Idaho and and that's good I mean you can bury it you know for a long time and there any Idaho nians here it's lovely but there are a lot fewer people there than there are in other parts of the world so leaving it there is ok no no really I mean it's ok people if you're a terrorist and you're willing to drive to Idaho with a bulldozer and think you're not going to be detected I mean you know knock yourself out I mean it's just probably won't happen but I have been to Hanford Washington now I know people back east haven't really heard of Hanford but you've heard of Los Alamos right that's where they built the first nuclear weapon well Hanford Washington which is in the south eastern part of the state is where they develop plutonium and are invented or created the first plutonium and that's where they made the hydrogen bomb which relies on fusion instead of fishing like we have in the Sun and have when all the stars and so it's a it was a secret place and they have been just for me as a former I lived in Washington State for 26 years they have been really bad at handling their waste not stuff from the wash room stuff from nuclear activities and so it's not the men's room or something it's more it's extraordinary and the problem has been the waste itself is trouble I mean the radioactive stuff is trouble but there's all these rubber gloves and booties and coveralls and all the stuff and all these solvents we're used to wash things and get impure enough and stuff that are just buried in these tasks in these oil drums and it seemed like when I lived there seemed like every week there was another news story out of Hanford then you probably heard about Three Mile Island and Three Mile Island almost was a big problem can I use a term big problem I don't think it's appropriate to drop some other words here but it was a big mess up and it almost it almost you know created enormous trouble trouble it's Harrison Harrisonburg Pennsylvania right the end of the runway it's right there it's not hidden it's right there it almost blew up then Chernobyl did blow up and then Fukushima is still trouble I mean the film mentions that the things in a containment vessel the thing the nuclear mass of molten metal goo it's in a containment vessel but it's still unusable and it's fantastically radioactive and they're trying to set up this muon detector and it's just not working but the longest journey starts with a single step the problem in each of these three accidents is not to me is not really inherent in nuclear energy the problem is if I may it's Homer Simpson the kind of people you'll hear it from the nuclear industry all these guys will say well they shouldn't have been doing that it's her Nobel I was graphite they said no but they did well they should have built that Fukushima plant run that well they did so when it comes to trust us I am you know mister skeptical man now there are right at any time in the world there are about 800,000 oil wells if you want to reckon it in offshore oil rigs it's a little over 3,000 3,100 3400 offshore oil rigs when one of those messed up a couple years ago in the Gulf of Mexico people in deepwater horizons people like totally freaked and demanded that something be done right away well right now there are 432 commercial nuclear power plants there were 433 to Fukushima anyway just wait till they're 43,000 or 14,000 nuclear power plants there's gonna be another accident there just will be because it's humans it's not it's not this idealized bunch of people running the things there will be another accident so we just have to say to ourselves is that worth the risk can we manage the risks and that's where I want you as voters and taxpayers to kind of figure that out now I've been to Yucca Mountain in Nevada and you guys look you don't have this is not rocket surgery okay you're at Yucca Mountain it's a tunnel in a ridge way up hill a big mountain and you go over on the parking lot to the railing and there's a stream down there a couple a couple hundred meters like it's way way above the water table so you're telling me that in the next thousand years that no nuclear stuff is going to get in the stream and go to hospitai mean kids dude do and Yucca Mountain was largely a political thing too just trying to get something done to keep the nuclear industry going but if nothing else everybody nobody in Nevada wants it nobody in Nevada wants nuclear waste put there because of all the experiences they've had with trust us where we know what we're doing with the nuclear industry we're going to do this at Yucca Mountain and then you go out there you go dude dude this is never going to work if you heard of alloy a 22 alloy 22 the key it's going to be the stainless steel that's it that you can buy it it's hostile Lloyd thing it was supposed to be corrosion resistant for ten thousand years dude dude now in the movie you saw them point out that conventional nuclear plants light water reactors as they're often called have produced waste that's danger like the Navy produces waste and stain Juris for ten thousand years hey wait we've got a new one that's only dangerous for 800 years okay what 800 years the Roman Empire which was pretty much a butt-kicking government all right it did not make it 800 years what I mean just everybody just get it in perspective when people are talking about having dozens and dozens of nuclear plants that are going to do something safely for 800 years just do you think the United States is going to be here in 800 years I mean will it be the Federation with Captain Kirk flying around you know I don't know but it is it is a haughty thing to imagine - it is hubris to imagine that a society can do that with that said maybe maybe we can maybe we can produce a power in a way that's good enough now by the way when it comes to nuclear waste as I say there's a lot of trouble with the the ancillary or secondary waste but also you know in Paducah Kentucky where they did the human uranium hexafluoride and stuff they had all kinds of solvents you know PCBs poly chlorinated beutel's and trichloroethylene and uranium dust on stuff uranium dust you know it's just not your first choice so you have to have something really hot to make something spin but you have to have something cold and the expression is a cold reservoir so the way I describe this if you had a tea kettle and you boiled water and then you had a pinwheel or something a turbine like that and spinning and then you connect it to a generator somehow you make electricity cool or hot and then you're out of water you're out of water so you add more water and it blows again okay well then you go again I'm tired of adding water in fact you have to shut it down to add water because it's under pressure right you can't just put a funnel on it because the steam would come out of the funnel what so you have to shut it down to a door so okay I got an idea we're going to make a duct a tube that goes around the turbine and comes back over here back into the tea kettle cool it's me great so it works for a few moments the boiling steam goes the spins the turbine goes up to the thing back in but after a while it's a thought thing thought experiment the kettle gets really hot the duct gets really hot your little pinwheel gets hot everything gets hot and under pressure and the pinwheel stops if you follow me without a difference in temperature between hot and cold it won't spin and when you next time you're in a cab you'll notice that the outside is colder than the engine which is about well typically thousand Fahrenheit 600 Celsius and so you'll find actually if you design a fuel injection systems cars are more efficient on cold days strangely none so these power plants in Washington state were built on the Columbia River now if you guys live back east and stuff I got to tell you it's a whole nother thing the Columbia River is a huge freaking River I mean it's just an enormous thing that we really don't have anything quite that big back east Mississippi is pretty big but anyway they were going to build six power plants along here and the idea is you have this nuclear fuel element getting hot and then you cool it with the Columbia River anyway because of the controversy of nuclear waste and all the trouble people have had at Hanford with all the secrecy in the low-level waste they only built one of only finished one of them Columbia generating station is Washington Public Power Supply number two and it's cool I've been there it works great you know these guys running stuff there it goes and they have security there's people with machine guns standing around but if you really wanted to break in I mean I'm not an expert you know I'm not Bruce Willis or somebody but you could do it and if you had a Confederate inside who was really wanted to get nuclear material out of there given a couple years you guys could set up a raid and um really it's you could do it it's I mean there's guys with a r16 machine guns but you could you get in you'd have a I don't want to tell you how but I'd recommend a personnel carrier that can go across the prayer it's a prairie in Eastern Washington and you just plow right in and you know pick the guy up with his suitcase full of stuff and cause trouble but the casks that were described in a movie there there I mean they're there and there you could hold a Geiger counter right up next to them cool it's good but you know they're casks above-ground full of nuclear waste and nobody really has a plan exactly what exactly to do with them they just keep piling them up now it may be that this traveling wave reactor this fourth generation will do it but a given example at the Washington State Public Power Supply number two at Columbia River Station Humber Columbia generating station they've estimated the earthquake risk now I lived in Seattle for many years and in 2002 we had a pretty good earthquake and my chimney broke loose on my house and this you know the expression a ton of bricks this was about three tons of bricks and it was just teetering that the it was just it was just like like that I went up on the roof on a ladder as a whoa whoa dude dude and so I tied it to the another side of the roof and then is anybody here a bricklayer how do you guys it's just so there's an earthquake all these brick buildings in Seattle break 4,000 bricklayers show up hey I'm here hey cool and then they knock the whole thing apart anyway in Washington state it's in the West it's geologically young there earthquakes that's all they estimate the chance of an earthquake at Columbia Power Station it to be one in one hundred forty-seven thousand six hundred nineteen now I don't know if you guys have ever heard of significant digits but that's crap I'm sorry you can't give me five or six significant digits and make me believe it I'm sorry you guys I love you all but it's part of the nuke the tradition the nuclear industry of just telling you everything is OK and I'm skeptical so finally about the next-generation nuclear reactor you know the premise is to have efficient Abal stuff like uranium-235 in the middle and then you would have this other stuff that's left over uranium 238 people in India in places where there is more thorium in the ground for mining people propose using thorium which is another radioactive material that's not as powerful as uranium but you could set it up and the idea is instead of having the stuff fishin like this you'd have it fishin like this and then you'd have this gizmo or these robotic arms conveyor belt that would continually move the fuel to the proper place but the premise is to get plutonium in the middle plutonium 239 that's the stuff now no matter how you feel about plutonium I will tell you this story I was at the California Science Teachers Association in 1994 and I had lunch with Glenn Seaborg if you've ever heard of Glenn Seaborg atomic number atomic element number 168 is now called seaborgium does anybody here have a Nobel Prize anybody so did he so did he and he was the guy or one of the guys that invented or created plutonium and I was having lunch with him and he's just a charming guy well in his 80s his wife isn't just cool you could tell they had a good thing was really good and he says bill bill they wanted me to call it pluton them but come on plutonium that sounds a lot cooler yeah Glenn yeah it does and then he told me they wanted by long tradition they wanted the Akama symbol to be PT for polluting them but he insisted Glenn Seaborg told me this to my face it's hearsay when you hear it to my face is how we talk in junior high to my face he said I insisted that the atomic symbol be PU because this stuff stinks it has some of it has a half-life well over 10,000 years and substantial fraction million years and he said at lunch it's it's the heaviest of heavy metals embarr mined uranium is a metal authority of these are metals you know they're like gray if you see it in pictures anyway he said if you breathe just a few micrograms breathe micrograms of plutonium it'll kill you like arsenic it will replace the phosphorus in your DNA and kill you so it really is dangerous stuff and the premise is to have a robotic machine that moves this stuff around without any failures for 60 years with plutonium in the middle it may work it may work but as voters and taxpayers I just want to give you that perspective thank you very much
