This is Hornsea Project One, a wind farm currently
under construction off the coast of Yorkshire. When it is completed in 2020 it will be the
largest wind farm in the world. It will power 1 million homes. But this project will collectively cost consumers
in the UK an additional £4.2 billion on their energy bills. That’s fine, I guess if it’s going to
save the planet. But is it, really? It turns out that renewable energy isn’t
as rosy as we have all been sold. 97% of scientists believe that climate change
is real and it’s an issue we need to face today. It’s estimated that the effects of climate
change will kill at least 150 million people this century. All of these premature deaths could be avoided
if the average global temperature could be reduced by just 1.5 degrees. Professional hippies spend their lives doing
two things, dying their hair and getting angry at governments for their apparent lack of
action on climate change. There are a very small number of countries,
however, that have heard the message loud and clear and are leading the way on fixing
the planet’s thermostat by investing billions into Renewable Energy. The most prominent is Germany. Today between 40 to 50 percent of Germany’s
energy comes from renewables such as wind, solar and hydro. Germany is making an exemplary move in the
right direction, aren’t they? Well, let’s take a closer look at Germany’s
most popular renewable choice, wind power. Wind turbines are fantastic for reducing CO2
emissions, we all know that. Building wind turbines, on the other hand,
does actually produce a huge amount of CO2, to smelt and manufacture the humongous steel
bodies and aluminium blades. But once it’s up and running a wind turbine
pays off its CO2 debt within 5 months, so it’s not really an issue. No, the issue is that a low carbon footprint
is just about the only benefit of Wind Turbines. They kill endangered species of birds quicker
than the Duke of Wellington on New Year’s Day. Hundreds of thousands of birds are killed
by wind turbines every year and thousands of those are rare species of large birds like
eagles. Over a million bats are also killed each year
by wind turbine blades. And solar has its own unique issues, mainly
toxic waste. Well-made solar panels have a lifespan of
20 to 25 years. But with their huge and growing popularity
cheaply made Chinese solar panels are flooding global markets. These can break down in as little as five
years. And many of them contain highly toxic chemicals
that are harmful to human health and can cause cancer such as lead, cadmium and chromium,
unlike nuclear waste the toxicity of these elements never decays. All solar panels can break and do with some
degree of regularity; when the glass is smashed, toxic chemicals can leach into the soil and
thus public water supplies. Also we have no plan to dispose of them safely,
the vast majority of solar panels will be shipped off to countries that have no safe
way of dealing with their toxicity, countries where we already send millions of tonnes of
our tech waste to such as Africa and other developing regions. These are teething issues that will hopefully
be fixed by better-decommissioning protocols and pipelines and improved solar technology. Both solar and wind, however, have an inescapable
issue that no amount of technology can fix: they only produce energy when the wind blows
or the sun shines. In some locations thats as little as 10% of
the time. Even the most efficient wind and solar farms
only work optimally 30% of the time. Although to be clear most solar and wind farms
produce some amount of energy around 75% of the time, even if just a little. This means we will always need a more consistent
energy source, such as fossil or nuclear to cover renewable’s downtimes. Perhaps in the future battery technology will
reach a point where it becomes feasible to store copious amounts of excess power from
renewable sources and the grid can be fed off those whilst the wind isn’t blowing
and the sun isn’t shining. But currently, the technology isn’t even
close, as it stands, no battery array in the world can hold even a fraction of the power
needed to sustain a city for more than a few minutes. The current largest, built by Tesla in Australia,
is a 100-megawatt array that can sustain 30,000 homes for an hour. In fact without having huge and expensive
battery arrays dotted around every country, which would be an eyesore, solar and wind
have seemingly insurmountable redundancy issues. Fossil and Nuclear power plants both work
within a similar framework, the fuel produces heat which is used to create steam which turns
a large turbine, which turns a generator which creates electricity. When I say large turbine I mean stupidly large
- these goliaths usually weigh in at over 100 tonnes of solid steel. Its immense mass has some benefits. Primarily, redundancy. Nuclear power plants produce energy 24/7,
365 days of the year, they are only shut down once every two years to refuel. But what if it has to shut down in an emergency,
what if it fails and stops producing steam to turn the turbine. Actually, what if every single fossil fuel
and nuclear power plant in the country all shut down at the same time. The power would go out, right? Well not quite. You see, because of the immense inertial mass
of a spinning turbine, there is enough centrifugal force to maintain its rotation and continue
to generate power as normal, for a couple of minutes without any steam input. This gives the national grid a small but crucial
time to restart the power plant and get it back online. Because of this crucial redundancy window,
unplanned power outages due to hiccups at power plants are extremely rare, most power
cuts happen due to weather affecting other parts of the infrastructure such as overhead
cables. Wind turbines don’t have a large turbine
to rely on if it fails, it stops producing power instantaneously, so does a solar farm. Although there is currently hype surrounding
new hybrid wind turbines that have a backup battery in the base of the tower which will
help overcome this issue. But then there’s an issue of land usage
and the environment. To build these huge arrays of wind turbines
and solar panels an area of over 5,000 square metres usually has to be cleared of all vegetation
and wildlife. This is disastrous for the ecosystem, the
local environment and the various species that may call it home. To power a country such as the United Kingdom
using exclusively wind and solar power it is estimated that up to 25% of the country’s
land surface would need to be cleared and transformed into wind or solar farms. Wind farms only return 2.5 Watts per square
metre. Compare that to nuclear which produces 1,000
Watts per square metre and it’s clear how inefficient renewables are when it comes to
land usage. We could mitigate some of this disastrous
loss of nature by building all these wind farms offshore, although we still don’t
fully understand the long term effects of offshore wind farms on marine species. But this isn’t the plan. The UK currently has 271 wind farms planned
over the next decade, about half of them are currently under construction. But only 25 of these will be offshore, although
the offshore arrays do tend to be far larger than their land counterparts. There’s an important philosophical question
to be answered here - by destroying huge swathes of nature to build renewables aren’t we
destroying the very natural world the renewables are intended to save? But, what about the cost of human life caused
by direct accidents, such as reactor meltdowns? Surely this is one area in which renewables
can win hands down. Well, the figures may shock you, as they shocked
me. The most dangerous are, as to be expected,
the fossil fuels. Coal tops the figures with 100,000 deaths
per Petawatt Hour, then oil at 36,000, then biomass with 24,000 deaths, natural gas at
4,000, and that’s not factoring in the millions of deaths each year as a result of the air
pollution from all these sources. But it’s the carbon-neutral energy sources
that have the most interesting figures. Hydro 1,400 (also, hydro secretly produces
quite a large amount of CO2), solar 440 deaths and wind 150 (although there are no completely
reliable data sources for wind turbine deaths, more data is needed here). It’s what’s at the very bottom of the
list, however, that may surprise you. Nuclear is just 90 deaths per Petawatt Hour,
and that includes Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Nuclear energy has a really bad public image. It’s no surprise, with its association with
nuclear warheads and Chernobyl. But you can’t ignore statistics and it is
statistically the safest form of reliable power production we have today. Nuclear energy and negative press go together
like Greenpeace and propaganda, and so many countries have been decommissioning nuclear
reactors in favour of renewable sources, but in an ironic twist of fate, nuclear may just
be the energy source that could save our planet. Nuclear fission is big and scary, but it has
so many benefits that cannot simply be ignored. Nuclear power plants produce zero carbon emissions. Their only byproduct is nuclear waste, but
unlike byproducts of all other forms of energy production, this is 100% contained and doesn’t
leak out into the environment, nuclear waste can also be recycled and reused in reactors
multiple times. It’s important to note however that the
Uranium mining and enrichment processes do use fossil fuels and this does produce CO2. But when we average it out over a power plant’s
life cycle a single nuclear reactor and all its related industries produce a median of
65g of CO2 per kWh - that’s roughly the same amount of CO2 produced by wind farms
over their life cycle, taking their manufacturing and regular maintenance into consideration
too. But nuclear’s carbon footprint could be
even lower than wind. Allow me to expand. Since 1987, Russia and the US have been mutually
decommissioning their nuclear weapons, even if recent political hiccups have put a spanner
in this process, every year old nuclear warheads are still regularly retired and decommissioned. This creates a steady influx of already highly-enriched
Uranium fuel that can be used by nuclear power plants to create energy, completely bypassing
uranium mining and enrichment and thus bypassing CO2 emissions. Sceptics believe that nuclear power plants
lead to nuclear weapon proliferation, but in fact, it’s the complete opposite - the
absolute best way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world is by building
more nuclear reactors. In 2013, 19% of the world’s nuclear energy
needs were fueled by Uranium 235 from decommissioned nuclear warheads. Take a look at two real-life countries that
have taken completely opposite paths. Germany has invested heavily into renewables
and decommissioned 17 of their nuclear reactors and Merkel’s government pledged to remove
all of their nuclear reactors by 2022. Today only 6% of Germany’s power comes from
nuclear. At the opposite end of the scale, France has
invested heavily in nuclear as its primary source of power - they currently have 58 active
reactors and more than 80% of France’s energy needs are met by nuclear, by far the highest
per capita in the world. The result? Germany’s CO2 emissions per capita are more
than double that of France. And French households enjoy a much lower energy
cost, they pay only 0.1799 EUR per kWh, Germans pay almost double that for their electricity,
0.3 EUR per kWh, the second-highest in Europe. Notably, Germany’s energy costs have increased
by 50% since starting their big push towards renewables. I’m not trying to disparage renewables,
I think they have an important part to play in saving the planet, but I believe it should
be a far smaller part than what we are currently aiming for. If for no other reason than to not see our
world’s beautiful landscape littered with gigantic, obnoxious windmills, not if there
is no overwhelming benefit over the alternative. Humanity’s cleanest, cheapest form of energy
has been right in front of us since the 40s. And until nuclear fusion comes along, we should
be investing more in nuclear fission to reduce greenhouse gasses without needing to destroy
thousands of square miles of our beautiful planet to litter it with bird blenders. But what if nuclear energy can be improved
even more. What if it could produce little to no waste
and be completely safe and meltdown proof? Well, maybe it can. In 1950 Indian Physicist Homi Bhabha postulated
that perhaps another fuel from the typical Uranium 235 and Plutonium 239 could be used
for nuclear fission, Thorium. Thorium is a naturally-occurring radioactive
metal that is four times as abundant on Earth as Uranium. After World War II a reactor design that used
Thorium as its fuel, a Molten Salt Reactor was created by the US government and the first
experimental reactor of its kind was built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and it successfully
generated electricity between 1965 and 1969. But the US government decided the future of
nuclear energy was in Uranium not Thorium and so pretty much every reactor in the world
since the 60s has used Uranium fuel. There were many reasons for Uranium being
chosen as the de facto fission fuel over Thorium, but one of the most prominent was that Uranium
makes much better bombs. Uranium enrichment plants produce highly enriched
Uranium that can either be used in nuclear warheads or power peoples homes. Thorium on the other hand can be used to make
nuclear weapons but it’s a lot more difficult and inefficient. But that’s not the only benefit of Thorium-based
power over Uranium. Thorium reactors produce much less nuclear
waste. One chinese scientist claims that there will
be a thousand times less nuclear waste from Thorium reactors. Also, since natural Thorium can be used as
fuel it does not need to be enriched. And it gets better, another Thorium reactor
design known as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor or LFTR has a unique design that its proponents
claim is meltdown-proof. The most common cause of reactor meltdowns
in current Uranium plants is excessively high and runaway temperatures, usually due to power
failures which can lead to insufficient cooling. But LFTRs contains a plug at the bottom of
the reactor that is designed to melt if the temperature gets too high, this causes all
the fuel to drain into an underground safe-storage tank which in theory should completely avert
a catastrophic meltdown. It all seems too good to believe. Science writer Richard Martin writes: ‘Thorium
could provide a clean and effectively limitless source of power while allaying all public
concern—weapons proliferation, radioactive pollution, toxic waste, and fuel that is both
costly and complicated to process’ But like everything in life, Thorium isn’t short
of its detractors. There are some who argue that because Thorium
is still highly experimental and it hasn’t been operational on a large scale like Uranium
reactors, it can’t yet be trusted and it may not be all it’s made out to be. But I guess the only way we can find out for
certain whether Thorium is the golden goose of clean energy is by putting it into use,
producing energy for consumers. And that’s exactly what India is doing right
now. India has one of the largest natural supplies
of Thorium and they have pledged to meet 30% of their energy demands with Thorium reactors
by 2050. Britain, France, Canada, America, China and
a few others are currently looking into Thorium as a potential energy source but India is
currently the only country that has a well thought out, government approved and funded
plan to ramp up Thorium-based energy production. India plans to have over 60 functional Thorium
reactors by 2025. And since India is the world’s third largest
polluter it seems like a necessary step that could help preserve the planet for a little
while longer. But it’s going to require action from more
than just one country to save it. To be completely honest, the world needs to
look to China to stop burning dinosaurs for fun. Just under 30% of the world’s carbon emissions
come from China. It’s not surprising since a staggering 55%
of power production in China is coal based. A tiny 4% of China’s power comes from Nuclear,
as of 2018. I’m not saying we should abandon all forms
of energy except nuclear, wind and solar renewables have a huge and beneficial part to play in
saving the planet. But all nations should be looking to eradicating
coal-based energy production, it’s horrendously inefficient, you have to burn a lot of coal
and release a ton of CO2 for a pathetic amount of energy, it kills millions of people each
year from pollution and it’s quickly killing the planet too. But perhaps as most developed nations are
looking to replace coal power, nuclear shouldn’t simply be swept aside for renewables. Renewables may be the fashionable and popular
option, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the better option. Thanks for watching.
thorium nuclear has so many technical challenges that are not yet able to be overcome while making a profit, for example molten thorium salts are highly corrosive, meaning that parts that interact with them need to be regularly checked and replaced, but its also extremely radioactive meaning that checking and replacing those parts means extensive and expensive shut-downs
They had a thorium reactor back in the 40s that ran for like 5 years as a experiment. It would have powered Boston at the time. They did not want thorium because it did not make things that when boom.
Me thinks youre on to something https://imgflip.com/i/2vwe38
And why, exactly, do you think thorium is better than uranium?