This Environmentalist Says Only Nuclear Power Can Save Us Now

we are facing a national crisis and if we do not ascend to the levels in which we were threatened at the Great Depression we were threatened in World War two if we tell the American public that we are more willing to invest and bail out big banks than we are willing to invest in our farmers and our urban families then I don't know what we're here doing calling climate change an existential threat to humanity congressional Democrats introduced a policy proposal in February called the green new deal which would mandate that 100 percent of US energy production come from clean renewable and zero emission energy sources like wind and solar by the year 2050 but some environmentalists say green new dealers are neglecting one obvious source of abundant clean energy already available nuclear power would swim the conservation is begin environmentalists and everything like that because it stopped being about the environment ironically controlling society michael Shellenberger is a lifelong environmentalist and founder and president of environmental progress a pro nuclear research and advocacy nonprofit based in Berkeley California he believes that increasing our reliance on nuclear power is the only way to combat climate change and has become one of the leading pro-nuclear voices in the media in the effort to try to save the climate are we destroying the environment well I think nuclear is the best for inherent physical reasons with nuclear it means that a single can of coke provides enough uranium to provide all the energy that you need for your entire life and then after you're done after that's done splitting the atoms and releasing heat that becomes the waste Shellenberger started his career in energy advocating for more government subsidies for wind and solar he pushed for a new Apollo project modeled on the original Apollo moon mission and sought three hundred billion dollars in federal research and development funding to make renewable energy sources cheaper than coal within a decade well fund the Apollo projects of our time at the California Institute of Technology they're developing a way to turn sunlight of water into fuel for our cars from 2009 to 2015 the Obama administration took up that call and put billions of dollars into renewable energy subsidies which Shellenberger says opened his eyes to the reality that no amount of government funding can solve the inherent drawbacks of renewables during that time we started to see the various problems that a lot of people are familiar with already with solar and winds they require huge amounts of land and thus trigger a very significant local opposition as well as opposition from conservationists who are worried about the impacts on threatened and endangered species and then the other one is just the unreliability of solar and wind it means that when the Sun is not shining the winds not blowing you always have to have some backup California invested heavily in renewables which he says led to energy price increases at a rate about six times faster than the national average despite the falling cost of solar panels the point of renewables was always to create scarcity and high cost electricity that was the benefit that was view as the feature not the bug of renewables and and decentralized low energy living in the 60s it's only recently that it's been dressed up as a kind of form of abundant energy but everywhere we see that the consequences of doing renewables at significant scales is the same which is to make electricity expensive if you want to save the natural environment you just use nuclear you grow more food on less land and people live in cities it's not rocket science the idea that people need to stay poor that's just a reactionary social philosophy that they then dress up as a kind of environmentalism Shellenberger calls his pro-growth urbanist vision of environmentalism eco modernism congress member Alexandria Acacio Cortez and her allies on the other hand he associates with so-called dark green environmentalism it's very romantic view you know Ewok Society basically returning to kind of a small farm or agriculture tends to be very negative very apocalyptic very utopian very dogmatic how much of that do you attitude do you think persists today 100% I mean I think it's shot through the core motivations of all of the leadership of the environmental movement now what they do though because that's a minority view I think it's an unpopular view among most people what they then do is they go dress up their anti-nuclear stuff and all sorts of nonsense they go and tap into people's unconscious fears of the bomb that's really the main event the anti-nuclear energy movement was informed by the Cold War reaching a fever pitch around 1979 when the China Syndrome West release which explored the possibility of a nuclear plant meltdown leaking radiation deep into the earth and poisoning the groundwater still problem twelve days after its theatrical release the u.s. experienced its first nuclear plant meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island at about four o'clock this morning two water pumps that help cool reactor number two shut down officials say some 50 to 60,000 gallons of radioactive water escaped into the reactor building and that the radioactivity penetrated the plant's walls there were no casualties and has had no detectable impact on the health of workers or nearby residents but it marked the beginning of the end for nuclear energy development in America no new nuclear plants have been built in the US since and 19 have been closed China Syndrome completely framed our perceptions then the no news festival which was an anti-nuclear energy rock concert but in it has a nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud in the background so there was always an effort to kind of make people think of nuclear war and nuclear weapons associated with nuclear power plants so it's basically been a huge concern troll for like 60 years you know misinformation propaganda really attacking nuclear because it's a source of abundant energy the connection isn't that the nuclear plants are going to suddenly blow up like bombs or create bombs but that you can take the nuclear materials from the plants you already have them sitting right there and develop them into bombs and right we've seen that to varying degrees what do you say to people who are worried about nuclear non-proliferation think nuclear energy runs counter to that I mean the first thing you have to realize is that nuclear weapons spread right there used to be one country with nuclear weapons now there's nine nothing we can do about that we try but if a country really needs a nuclear weapon like North Korea is scared that it could be invaded like the United States invaded Iraq it's gonna get a nuclear weapon if we had all these nuclear wars have they been used in wars have they made more wars no we see from 1945 to today radical declines in deaths and Wars and battles so I think that the underlying fear of nuclear energy is nuclear weapons and the underlying fear of nuclear weapons proved to be completely unfounded these have been weapons of peace not weapons of war this may HBO is dramatizing the worst nuclear meltdown in history Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 some of them will not stop firing for 50,000 years but Shellenberger says Chernobyl's implications are widely misunderstood when I started to change my mind about nuclear I just went and read the UN reports on Chernobyl yeah that's the worst nuclear accident I think it's fair to say it will be the worst nuclear accident that ever occurs why do I say that because there was no containment dome it was literally just the reactor caught on fire shot radiant material into the atmosphere threaded all over the world so it's inconceivable given the advances in the technology that we could have an accident like that again so you look at the worst accident and according to the best available science somewhere around 50 firefighters died immediately putting out the fire or a few years later and then about a hundred and fifty people will die from thyroid cancer there were several thousand increased cases of thyroid cancer yes so there were estimates that the number of thyroid cancers could reach something like 16,000 so the theme of thyroid cancer is that nobody should ever die from it it's easy to treat you just remove the thyroid gland and then you take a synthetic thyroid substitute and so the people that will die from thyroid cancer are people that don't get the health care that they need and so on the one hand you kind of go did they die from the thyroid cancer or do they die from lack of medical care I mean it's shockingly benign technology when you really look at it I mean when you consider the fact that killed on coal mine accidents 7 million died from air pollution fuel rods are now exposed and if they stay that way they could release radioactivity and a disaster of unknown proportions in 2011 three reactors in a nuclear plant in Fukushima Japan melted down after an earthquake and tsunami hit the country about 1,600 elderly Japanese nursing home residents died during a botched emergency evacuation and a financial settlement was reached with the family of one potentially radiation related cancer death and contaminated cooling water made its way into the Pacific Ocean with the Fukushima disaster one of the worries is that this stuff is gonna get into the ocean and have long ranging effects that we don't even know about yet is there Fukushima radiation in the ocean absolutely we can detect it we can detect it off the west coast of California the question is are those levels of radiation very high they're not they're very low the ocean is so huge the earth just you know the solution the pollution is dilution right that's the first thing you learn in your eco bio class in college and so radiation just ends up diluting over huge amounts of areas and that's why we know it doesn't have much impact radiation from nuclear plants basically never kills anybody it just attracts a lot of our fears for kind of historical and cultural reasons fear of nuclear power not only caused Americans to stop opening new plants but to decommission old ones Rancho Seco a nuclear plant constructed by the same firm that built Three Mile Island was shut down by a local referendum in 1989 after experiencing a cooling malfunction a few months before the Chernobyl meltdown though it's abandoned exhaust towers still loom over farmlands in the northern California town of Herald voters and citizens in Sacramento decided that the nuclear plant there was just too risky given its history in the 1980s Edie smell off was the sole member of the Sacramento Board of utilities who favored closing Rancho Seco today he's an advocate with the lobbying group vote solar I met up with him at an old Ford manufacturing plant across the bay from San Francisco that's been partially converted into a solar power plant where smell off once worked did you sense any fear in the community of nuclear yeah there was an element of the community that were worried about a nuclear accident particularly because this was the same plant it's Three Mile Island it was a big demonstration there in 1979 after the meltdown at Three Mile Island so I would say maybe a third of the voters there this is the regular alert for contra Costa County it's not the kind of sound I want to hear what I'm talking about nuclear yeah Rancho Seco closed 30 years ago and only now is Sacramento's Utility Board close to reaching an agreement with another firm to store its nuclear waste which currently sits under guard in a storage tower at a cost of about five million dollars per year you have a source of contamination radioactive spent fuel that needs to be cared for for a hundred thousand years and how we pass that on from generation the generation without damaging the environment or damaging damaging future generations is not known so nuclear waste is the best kind of waste that we produce from electricity production why do I say that well the first reason is that they're so little of it all of the waste from nuclear energy production the United States can fit on a single football field stacked about 50 feet high it's in canisters we've looked really hard we haven't found a single person that's ever died from it if you were to fantasize how would you want human waste to be you would want it to be contained you'd want to be small compact you would want to not pose any harm to anybody basically that's what only nuclear has achieved nothing else really has achieved that smell off says she favored shutting down Rancho Seco less because of safety concerns than the economics of plant operations Rancho Seco experienced more than a hundred unplanned shutdowns in its 15 years of operation beginning in the 1980s with the passage of some federal legislation it opened up a wholesale market so it created market alternatives to nuclear power what you're implying there is that there can be no real market in nuclear that it assesses a monopoly is that accurate I think it's generally right there's the risks associated with nuclear power require that the entities that own it have really deep pockets and the way these plants operate sometimes with extended outages can have really significant impact on the financial returns nuclear energy does not in very well with the market approach to the extent that other countries that were nuclear have transitioned away from nuclear towards renewables the energy price have gone up and in California we've seen our energy prices spiked significantly since there's been investment in renewables so from a consumer perspective is an investment in renewables versus nuclear going to hit us hard in our pocketbooks so I think the fact that Germany and to a certain extent California were early adopters that is they took the initiative to say we're going to promote wind and solar even though it's more expensive than the alternatives is now paid at all paid off 15 years hence Germany shifted energy production from nuclear to renewables and energy prices shot up to nearly double that of neighboring France which stuck with nuclear France continues to source ninety-three percent of its energy from low-carbon sources the majority being nuclear while now only 38 percent of Germany's energy sources are low-carbon the German publication Der Spiegel recently published a cover story critical of the country shift to renewables featuring a drawing of a broken windmill the unreliability is the main event solar and wind are producing a lot of electricity when you don't need it and not enough electricity when you do so on the issue of it producing too much electricity you have to literally pay people to use it it's called negative electricity pricing because the grid has to be perfectly balanced between supply and demand so Germany's been paying its neighbors to use electricity just like California's been paying Arizona to use electricity or paying big industrial consumers to use it and then when you don't have electricity then you have to pay us basically a second time for some backup power that problem is not going to be solved by having Cheaper solar and wind and you can even argue that cheaper solar and wind allowed them to make electricity so expensive because it created this illusion that they were super cheap but as soon as you put them on the grid you had the high cost of managing their own very little land is needed to get rid of old fossil fuel electricity generation in the United States that flew square there is land area that's needed to transition the United States to a zero carbon electricity situation it's really not much most that area is gonna be in rooftops Solar advocates say that it's really all about the batteries and Elon Musk is gonna create super batteries that allow solar to work if you just take all of the batteries in California including all the batteries in our cars and you were to use them to backup electricity you would still have less than 30 minutes of electricity backed up but when you're talking about powering the entire economy on solar and wind you would need to have backup battery power that would last weeks and probably months so you're talking thousands of hours it's just beyond the realm of possibility the cost would be in the trillions the vision that I think I'm seeing from solar people is a more decentralized approach way up the battery walls on your home right then I guess there would be a grid but much less strain being put on the grid it's basically propaganda and I actually did focus groups in our office and as soon as you introduced the idea that everybody would have batteries and solar and will be off the grid people just fell in love with that idea and like literally there's nothing we could say that would change their minds it's just something about it I think it appeals to libertarian you know it appeals to it's very American I you know I find people like on Twitter and social media who will say things like well we don't need nuclear because you know I have solar panels you know at my house and it's really cheap and it's like well did you know that we were that all of your neighbors are subsidizing your solar panels and that in fact your solar panels depend on the grid I mean it's a fantasy and I blame you on musk for actually promoting it it's just clearly in his business interest to do so but it's just incredibly expensive Shellenberger concedes that nuclear for the time being requires subsidies though he says that the unnecessary shutdowns of operational plants across the country have contributed to the high costs but he is skeptical that the mark alone can provide a clean energy future if nuclear necessitates government-run program or a very monopolistic program are you all all worried about just that kind of concentration of power and control especially over something like nuclear material so my my friends that really are libertarian they really love their freedom or whatever is that hey you know if you want to go off-grid go off-grid like there's nobody preventing you from going off grid but then don't go make demands on the rest of the society to subsidize your lifestyle choice right that would contradict the whole idea if you want to achieve these social and environmental benefits of clean cheap electricity then the society is gonna have to make a choice to do that I mean there's no alternative to it's not going to be done in this kind of distributed way because it's not that's just not how electricity works it is the best kinds of electricity are centrally produced but distributed broadly if nuclear is not really attracting private investment and other types of energy such as natural gas which does have fewer co2 emissions than coal or other fossil fuels why not just let the market play itself out and move towards natural gas I'm a huge fan of the fracking revolution that we've had it's just opened up abundant natural gas natural gas is better than coal unlike every metric to build pipelines and move that gas across lands you have to get the society's permission you have to cross public lands a lot of the gas and oil drilling is on public lands what about the oil and gas revolution itself it's always been supported by public investment I mean there's just a million ways in which the public is always involved in energy production the neoliberal approach would probably be you know a carbon tax if we're worried about co2 emissions and then kind of let it all play out from there do you think nuclear would thrive under that kind of system I mean for sure nuclear would do better if there was a price on carbon and so in that sense I'm fine I'm in favor of it I mean the problem is is that I've been doing this work now for 15 20 years and every time people propose that it just ends up being really unpopular I think once people understand that the technology is good not bad then we'll end up accommodating all these different things that you would need to do in order to move to it in the same way that we did when we figured out the natural gas was good or at least better than coal nuclear power provides about 8% of the world's energy down from seventeen and a half percent at its peak in the 1990s though countries like India and China have begun to invest heavily in the technology and states like New York Ohio and Georgia continue to support nuclear investment with significant subsidies while energy secretary Rick Perry has promised to make nuclear cool again presumably through a combination of deregulation and federal subsidies California continues to invest in renewable energy and plans to shut down its last nuclear reactor in Diablo Canyon by 2025 meanwhile thanks to the fracking boom the Energy Department forecasts increased US oil and gas production well into the coming decades people are dying this is serious Iowa Nebraska broad swaths of the Midwest are drowning right now underwater farms towns that will never be recovered and never come back the real reason they hate nuclear is because it means we don't need renewables [Music]

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 346,652

Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv, nuclear energy, nuclear power, nukes, Chernobyl, Green New Deal, HBO, green energy, clean energy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michael Shellenberger, Environmental Progress, ecomodernism, CO2 emissions, greenhouse gases, global warming, climate change

Id: K9AGx2q_F_0

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019