The Future of Energy (VICE on HBO: Season 4, Episode 9)

this week on bison the future of energy energy by far the biggest problem if human beings are going to profane our civilization long into the future we have to cut our addiction to fossil fuels it's a given how fast let's go 12:35 the end game is to have a future where we can look ahead and say it's going to be good confusion is perfect like an advantage it is definitely the energy source of the future you're going to explain how you can build a fusion reactor in your garage is it legal [Music] [Applause] [Music] and [Music] you [Music] for the past four seasons we've been reporting on the climate crisis that's threatening to destroy our planet it is about three feet of water on my street this rotates in New York City norm at Hackman's Indian water there goes there goes there goes tonight and now starting to realize and that daren't get melting the holy [Applause] the bad news is that climate change and global warming continue unabated but the good news is that humanity is finally waking up to this back and stirring the problem in the face our nation's share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about at the end of last year the UN climate change conference in Paris our world's leaders reached a landmark agreement the global effort to move away from fossil fuels and towards being energy the task before us now is to find the solutions that will make those goals a reality [Music] [Music] let's still one more so what did we just do there we released a heck of a lot of energy and yet again remember power is energy over time to release all that energy an incredibly short time pill and that's what power is coffee creamer turned into a ball out of that yeah so the coffee creamer is sugar sugar the fuel came from plants came from corn plants are sitting here photosynthesizing making sugars out of the energy from the Sun and we just released that energy from the Sun in form of a fireball that's the same reaction that same chemical reaction that a coal power plant uses natural gas power plant uses but it all originally came from that part of coal natural gas homemade bombs uranium yes everything it's all energy in 2009 when he was just 14 Kaler stunned the world when he built a nuclear reactor in his garage and became the youngest person ever to achieve nuclear fusion so this is your infamous garage yes I'm afraid and I have a unnatural fear of radioactivity so you're going to allay my fears and you're going to explain how you can build a fusion reactor in your garage the stars use all their gravity to combine hydrogen atoms I'm using very high-voltage electricity to do the same thing inside this reactor have you ever blown out the power grid oh yeah so this lift well so this lives at the University of Nevada for a very long time that's where I did a lot of experiments so when you went to the University how old were you yeah I was 14 yeah so you're Doogie Howser of the of the radio activator so how hot it was good I mean we're talking 400 or 500 million degrees is the temperature of the ions I feed on or something hotter than the Sun so this can go hotter than the Sun the ions that are fusing inside this yes yes and is this legal so you don't know well it is now if I started some rich uranium or produce weapons-grade plutonium then I think so let's talk about enriching uranium and weapons-grade plutonium you have some things here yellowcake or yeah I want to take a look yellowcake is a type of enriched uranium it's a precursor to the more concentrated fuel using reactors and ultimately nuclear weapons so this is what the President and Congress and Iran are all fighting about is exactly what you have in your garage yeah how did you get it so I make a lot of yellowcake from time to time you make your own yo yeah just you know crush up the more chemically process as a mess so you go out into the desert you get raw uranium yeah and make your own yell okay can you take us to where you get the uranium yeah I'm gonna see where the war comes from we're going to start our own arms program here [Music] as a deposit of thorium and rare earth so this is a rare earth mineral yeah and up in the hills of Mines and old deposits of uranium they originated them some far-off galactic Cataclysm and they were positive under earth so the uranium is energy from stars that it landed on the earth yeah we're out here in the high desert yeah and right there there's a power plan so let's talk about power let's talk about our insatiable thirst renergie yeah well energy by far is the biggest problem we face whether it's you know having clean water supplies fresh water supplies abundant food supplies geopolitical instability all these things come back to how we use energy how we get energy whether we dig it up from the ground or we use it you know from the heavens above us and this is the way we typically produce electricity now in this case natural gas we dig it all the ground or suck it out of the ground and burn it to produce a way how much longer do we have a burning thing not very long why our earth can't take it and we don't have very much of it left right if human beings are going to sustain our civilization long into the future we have to cut our addiction to fossil fuels it was it's a given and how do we do that well all this can be done by using a combination of technologies like renewable grid storage and nuclear power now to better understand the energy landscape has been a we met with Nobel Prize winner and former Secretary of Energy Professor Steven Chu the incumbent way we make electricity is still dominated by poverty and it's transitioning from coal which two decades ago was the dominant source of electricity to some mixture of natural gas and coal coal is about twice as bad as natural gas carbon emissions per unit of electricity we're swimming in natural gas but you also have to remember that is a transition if you own we still have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuel for climate change reasons the good news is many odd states we happen to be blessed with amazing renewable resources we could buy two or three decades now easily be 50% renewables now one of the people pushing forward with alternative energy is Elon Musk an entrepreneur who's leading the charge in solar energy and energy storage and the CEO of Tesla Motors makes the most popular all-electric car in America anybody how are you can see it good to see you how fast can let's go well pretty fast if the 0-60 of 3.2 seconds making electric cars cool is step one yeah exactly if you had a car that was long range but it didn't look good and it wasn't fun and didn't handled properly and I didn't have like great electronics and all these important attributes that people value we had to change the perception of an electric car we want an electric car to be something that was sort of fun and sexy not something that was kind of dull and boring like a goal time so you're known as a very smart guy you're known as an inventor industrialist capitalist how did you get there yeah when I was a teenager and going through clinica college I thought about what are the important things that we have to solve as a species in order for the future to be good and sustainable energy is one of those things obviously the time is taking ik more from the standpoint of we'll run out of oil to take out the ground and if we don't find a replacement than the civilization would collapse the end game is to have a sustainable energy future a future where we you know we can look ahead and say it's going to be good now a key ingredient to Tesla success in the car market is their cutting-edge battery technology and the company is using this technology to solve one of sustainable energies biggest problems the actual storage of the energy once it's been harvested this is a product we call the tesla powerwall it's designed to work very well with solar systems right out of the box you can actually go if you want completely off grid you can take your solar panels charge the battery pack and that's all you use now power wall batteries are already being installed in homes across the US and stack together these batteries have the potential to replace power plants and eventually take entire countries off the grid you need about 2 billion of those to solve global energy from a story standpoint which is a lot but it's roughly comparable to the number of cars and trucks on the road you open-source your technology a lot of your patents yeah all about all of your patterns why if the future is bad because you know we're generating too much co2 and not transition sustainable energy then I'm part of that future yeah why would you want to be last man alive on a sinking ship right and musk isn't just pioneering how renewable energy is stored he's also helping to change how its generated he and his cousins founded Solar City a leading manufacturer of solar panels what happened in the last five years of solar power I mean it's just sort of grown leaps and bounds and what where did it come from well really what's happened with solar power is actually relatively steady advances where things have gotten better by five to ten percent a year but you add that up over a decade or dekha didn't happen it becomes very significant and the key threshold for Sol is to try to get below the cost of fossil fuel energy today solar panels are half the price they were just six years ago and dropping fast and even though solar is just beginning to take hold here in America Solar City CTO Pete arrived told us that it's already undercutting the traditional fossil fuel driven utility system in you know about 16 states across the country right now you can buy solar power directly rooftop at a rate that is lower than what you're buying power from the utility for so we're already there customers can sign up with no money down and start saving money we found out the new customer but once every two minutes right now and our goal is to try to get to a million questions by 2019 so there's still a lot of work to do so unit Sol city are just kind of dedicated to the course we see this as a multi-decade problem and we just can't slow down solar and wind are going great they're gonna have at least a couple decades more of progress where the prices will plunge wind is now about 5% of the total electricity generated in the odd States hydro is six and a half percent I think wind will pass hydro in the next couple of years and some countries have already made renewables the centerpiece of their energy strategy Denmark has 14 offshore wind farms and in 2014 broke a world record powering an average of 40% of the country on wind alone close Polson heads operations at the Anholt wind farm one of the largest in the world he has 88 square kilometers of sea bed covered with 111 wind turbines each with the capacity of 3.6 megawatts so that actually makes 400 megawatts in total a 400 megawatts is enough to power about 360,000 home and it's only a fraction of the wind power that's being harvested from Denmark and on the windiest day these turbines have generated enough electricity to power the country's entire grid I think it was around Christmas where actually the whole energy consumption in Denmark was covered by wind energy that shows that it actually works now this business is so matured that you can start to compare it with fossil fuels and so on but you don't see any like smoke or anything it's just beautiful green energy [Music] it isn't though we can go instantly to 100% renewables or even 80% there are going to be days weeks where the wind is blowing or the Sun isn't shining we will still need backup power and so right now almost 20% of our electricity is generated by nuclear our fleet of nuclear power plants both of them built in the 60s and 70s unless we replace them they will disappear nuclear power is the largest single source of carbon free electricity today and there are two ways to produce it the current method of harvesting energy is to nuclear fission which involves splitting atoms apart now this type of reaction not only fuels conventional nuclear power plants but also is what powered our early atomic weapons but the downside of fission is that the fuel is highly radioactive and the reaction can be hard to control as we have seen just recently in 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan how does nuclear energy enter into that debate on the environmental side because there have been environmental problems Three Mile Island Chernobyl I looked at fission as the technology is you know something we came up with in the 1950s to produce electricity on the grid and how can we fundamentally reinvent that right how do you do that you design a reactor that are these still compact modular units that produces power from vision from the splitting of uranium whether it's decommission weapons that nuclear fuel a variety of solution all this stuff we don't know what to do with all this stuff we don't know what to do take it take it and produce electricity from it in the United States alone there around 67,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants and 3 billion metric tons of uranium waste which is extremely difficult to dispose of safely what are we doing with all the tips of those nuclear weapons well we're securing them and it would be great if we could burn them keep them up and this reactor loves the stuff so it's a molten salt reactor one of the things when I set off the design of power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe in the event of an accident you can actually just drain the core and the reaction stop these reactors run for 30 years without refueling how big is it um very small I mean you're talking for a few tens of megawatts something's no bigger than three meters in diameter for the reactor module so 3 meters so this this big around sample and have a reactor yes that can power under thousands at home now these small modular reactors are not only safe and compact but they actually eat up the radioactive waste from weapons and old reactors and they leave behind only a tiny fraction of the new ways created by today's plants and all of these factors would make them easy to deploy to power communities around the country five years we could have a prototype of proof of concept of that reactor that we could go and manufacture and that's what we need to make a difference that's what this technology represents for me my holy girl is nuclear fusion fusion is the nuclear reaction that has powered our Sun for billions of years the fuel is virtually limitless and produces no carbon or toxic waste with a fusion nuclear reaction energy is actually created during a high-speed collision of atoms combining the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the premier fusion facility in the United States Fusion is where we're going to Fusion is the energy source we need if we're going to exist thousands of years of a society in the future we're looking at making a star or a Sun in a very contained way here on earth now isn't that dangerous it's actually not dangerous it only happens for brief to what second there's no chain reaction and so there's no run away there's no meltdown nothing like that the problem is it's really hard to do and that's why we built this facility the largest laser facility ever built to find out exactly how humans are actually making miniature stars on earth we talked to mark Berman the director of the facility so this is literally the future so much so that they actually shot start right here because it's the most event facility of a kind in the world so they're so well it'll look something like this going forward maybe you could explain to us where we are and what we're actually saying sir no we're in the world's largest laser the laser Bay itself is actually the size of a football field and we use all that space to concentrate the energy to heat up this tiny target to the conditions found in nuclear weapons and in order to try and achieve fusion so this whole facility is all about getting that energy in the right place with the right intensity to squeeze on that fusion capsule and implode it into your fusion condition can you make a fusion reaction we do make fusion reactions all the time right we don't make fusion reactions that give us out more energy than we invested - you don't really initial we don't have ignition right that's that's the research program we're doing right now so that's the goal that's the goal get to ignition there you get a more energy out and you're putting in exactly right now once ignition is achieved we will be on the first step of generating virtually unlimited emissions free electricity and the hope there is if you can do it once if you can demonstrate how to make it work right we can get more efficient right the analogy is the Wright brothers right with the Wright brothers have flight sixty-seven years later were in space so the very rapid what was the war flying moment for fusion it would be you know the first thermonuclear weapons back in the 1930s if an atomic bomb was the glider this is the first engine yes and now what we're looking to do is get to Apollo exactly now because it's the holy grail of energy countries all over the world are working together and the race to get us up to Apollo level and ground zero for that effort is a massive construction project in southern France so we're here in Provence the South of France and that massive project over there is called eater which is going to be the largest and most expensive science project ever made now instead of using laser technologies this 16 billion dollar project uses magnetic fields in a giant doughnut shaped structure called a tokamak we spoke with the director-general of the eater organization Barnard we go now basically this sort of developed world is all together to fund this how many countries seven either members Japan Korea China India Russia Europe and the United States and so this is the future of energy right here what we're standing in the future yes green technology may be the only one that we provide save massive solar when's it ready to go if we take maybe 10 years from now ok to be ready to start experiment now eater is essentially a larger version of a working fusion generator in Great Britain that's called jet and it holds the current record for fusion energy produced the operations are Jed are overseen by dr. Stephen Cowley we're here inside the practice facility this is a mock-up of the real machine and the plasma which is the hot fuel in the form of an ionized gas will be sitting basically here filling up this space an each fusion reaction will add heat to the plasma and if you get enough of that it will start to burn and that will be the fusion burn that we've wanted for so many years [Music] [Applause] right here you can see the exhaust system of the plasma here I'm touching at the top here the plasma is right inside here there's going to be a day that you're sitting in the control and the plasma the fusion fuel inside the magnetic cage begins to burn it begins to do so much fusion that it sustains itself essentially no energy going in half a gigawatt coming in at moment will be one of the great historic moments of science ever Fusion is the perfect way to make energy it's clean it's safe it doesn't produce co2 it is definitely the energy source of the future world is firmly committed to a low-carbon future and that has the potential to unleash investment and innovation in clean energy at a scale we have never seen before so I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world eventually we are going to have to move to sustainable energy question is really between now and then how much carbon do we put in the environment how much damage will we do exact this is the time we start acting and start really pushing really saying this is an issue it's got to be problem fundamentally we can take all the uses of energy today and do them without using fossil teams whether it's development of renewables or developmental storage development of fusion it's potentially a big crisis that is also essentially a big opportunity throwing it what we learned in making this documentary is that humanity already has technology to make clean and virtually limitless energy and with enough effort we can actually meet the goals that are laid out in the Paris agreement but what we have to do now is keep pushing our politicians and our energy providers as well as using our purchasing power to make sure that we speed up the adoption of renewables and speed up the process towards fusion so that we can actually implement these solutions before it's too late [Music] [Music] you

Channel: VICE

Views: 464,686

Rating: 4.8793397 out of 5

Keywords: documentary, documentaries, interview, interviews, culture, wild, lifestyle, world, exclusive, independent, underground, videos, journalism, vice guide, vice presents, vice news, vbs.tv, vice.com, vice, vice magazine, vice mag, vice videos, Investigative Journalism, hbo, vice on hbo, UN, climate change, paris, energy, carbon, emissions, donald trump, politics, environment

Id: Zd8O5YE8Uak

Length: 25min 40sec (1540 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/esoa]

When did Reddit become so toxic? Too many people in the comments section here saying random things like "Fuck Vice" and "Elon Musk OMG blah blah"

I'm glad a few people actually began conversations about the technology and such.

Another thought, it would be nice if people could back up their claims that "renewable energy will never compete with fossil fuels" with some additional sources.

OK /end rant

[u/Glemt]

This small documentary was excellent - it makes such a important and information-heavy subject seem very interesting.

[u/4-Vektor]

featuring Elon Musk!

Never forget the exclamation mark after mentioning Elon! Musk!

Or better, use Elon Musk™

Ermagherd! Elon!!! Muuuuusk!!!!!!

[u/betterthangodinbed]

Does anyone else find the constant right to left panning of the intro annoying? I'm so relieved when the docu actually starts and the panning stops.

[u/lilyium]

Such a POWERFUL message.

[u/ahayd]

What's the status of Taylor Wilson's nuclear waste-fired small reactor?

[u/AjaxFC1900]

Elon Musk infiltrates every media content even remotely related to future , space or technology , guy is a fucking attention whore and the daily tweet to pump the Tesla stock is something the SEC should look into ; on the plus side everything he says is becoming redundant ; he might have just jumped the shark with his recent Hyperloop stunt , PR offices of mayors and basically every thinking individual is calling him out on his bullshit.

[u/rawzone]

Sad they didn't talk more about Thorium (The only mention was in the desert when talking about a found rock containing rare earth metals and Thorium).

[u/Gladdus]

Fascinating, thank you for sharing..