Why nuclear power will (and won't) stop climate change

thanks to curiositystream and nebula for making this video possible to support add free educational videos on the internet go to the link in the description let's learn more about nuclear energy shall we likes like many kids my age i grew up watching the simpsons a show that had at its core a nuclear power plant providing a job for homer and power for the town of springfield the plant was represented as a technological marvel capable of producing all the electricity you could ever need but also as immensely dangerous between inadequate safety features and the workers continued incompetence it felt as if the town was always on the verge of ecological catastrophe this feels representative of how many people out in the real world view nuclear power great at producing electricity but at a cost in years past opponents of nuclear power would point to safe reliable coal and oil and gas power plants and say they can produce the same amount of electricity but without the potential for environmental disaster yeah about that due in no small parts to coal and gas-fired power plants humanity to date has extracted so much carbon from the ground and put it in the atmosphere that our climate is changing at current rates we have just a decade or so to make sweeping changes to the global economy before the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere influences the climate in ways that could be extremely dangerous advocates for nuclear power say that now is the time to replace those fossil fuel power plants with nuclear ones nuclear being the only technology we need to cleanly power an ever more power hungry world at the same time though there is an extensive anti-nuclear movement with people claiming that solar and wind and hydroelectric power can accomplish the same end goal but without the risk of catastrophe in this video we're going to take a deep dive on this debate which is incredibly complicated it involves multiple academic disciplines and i imagine that no matter what i say i'm about to piss a lot of people off please understand though that i've tried to make this video as balanced as possible i've tried to be as thorough as i can and speak to as many academics as possible i would have loved to have interviewed more of them for this video but 2020 over the next couple of minutes though let's try and answer the following questions is nuclear power safe is it the best way to generate our low carbon electricity how do energy grids work in practice and lastly actually the last one will be a secret i'll tell you that at the end okay so firstly is nuclear power a safe way of generating electricity yes secondly is nuclear power the best no okay uh yeah i should say a bit more than that when the general public thinks of nuclear power they also immediately think of the big disasters chernobyl fukushima three mile island and it's undeniable that nuclear power plants can go wrong in ways that other power plants simply can't but that risk does need to be clarified you see there are multiple kinds of nuclear power plant currently in operation they all work on the same principle of nuclear fission splitting large nuclei apart with neutrons but using slightly different configurations the most popular are pressurized water reactors followed by boiling water reactors and then you work all the way down the list to fast breeder reactors these all work in slightly different ways and so any risk associated with a given reactor type varies for example the reactor that partially melted down at three mile island was a pressurized water reactor and it was a completely different kind of incident to the meltdown at chernobyl which was a high power channel reactor and the way that those two reactors work is completely different so most nuclear plants can't go the way of chernobyl the commonalities between the risks associated with each kind of reactor are leaks of radioactive material to the environment either spectacularly in the form of a meltdown or over long time scales and the need to safely store the waste products associated with the nuclear fission reaction which are themselves highly radioactive incidentally the 2014 american godzilla movie underrated godzilla isn't actually a risk of nuclear power just for the record the beta and gamma radiation given off by radioactive materials that come out in leaks or in nuclear waste are dangerous to life forms in that they can for example cause cancer now how dangerous is this radiation normally actually not very in fact where nuclear plants displace coal-fired power plants they actually save lives because they emit less radiation and emit fewer particulates which can go on to cause respiratory problems however when things go wrong they go very badly wrong as they did at chernobyl for example it's very difficult to get an accurate figure for how many people have died due to nuclear accidents and i am not getting into that debate but it is highly likely that nuclear accidents to date have led to the premature deaths of several thousand people all this being said considering the overall operational history record of nuclear power particularly when comparing it to fossil fuels i would contend that it is a safe way to generate power when managed responsibly and when done with modern technology it's not really what you see on the simpsons at all now obviously that's a personal judgment your opinion may differ but for the rest of this video i'm not going to talk about the safety aspect of nuclear power because frankly i think there are bigger issues to discuss in this debate and lord we're especially thankful for nuclear power the cleanest safest energy source there is except for solar which is just a pipe dream right now okay properly this time secondly is nuclear power the best way to generate our low carbon electricity now in order to have this discussion we kind of have to introduce a few definitions a given power source has lots of different characteristics associated with it but we can make sense of the three most important ones using a tap as an analogy the single most important characteristic is the capacity of a power source how many watts is associated with it in the context of a tap the wattage is the amount of water leaving the tap per second now if you were to collect an amount of water over a given time you're measuring how much water gets produced in a given time period like an hour we'd refer to that in power generation as watt hours or more frequently kilowatt hours or megawatt hours so your system needs to produce enough water but we're also interested in producing low carbon electricity so that is the carbon emissions associated with each given unit of water each given unit of power we express that in the kilograms of co2 required to produce an amount of power lastly we also have the inertia of a power system this is a little tricky to understand but you can think of it in this context as if i turn the tap on how quickly does the water start flowing and how quickly does it stop flowing if i turn the tap off a system with a very high inertia would take a long time to respond to changes in the input changes in the tap but a system with very low inertia the water would start and stop flowing immediately i really need to do the washing now okay so if you want to generate electricity you have three broad options you've got the fossil fuels coal gas oil you've got nuclear power and you've got the loose collection of technologies known as renewables now if you want to generate electricity with a low carbon impact then fossil fuels are just out of the question so you're left with the choice between nuclear and renewables i've already met all the different kinds of nuclear plant but what are renewables i hear you ask we've got the classics solar photovoltaics turning sunshine into electricity wind turbines stealing power from the storm and hydroelectric it's water going downhill as well as these technologies you do have other options like geothermal power using the heat within the earth to create steam to drive turbines you've got wave power creating electricity from the motion of the ocean and you've got concentrated solar thermal power basically what you did as a kid to ants with a magnifying glass just on a bit of a bigger scale i've divided renewables into these two groups because solar wind and hydroelectric power have been implemented on a large scale to date whilst the other technologies mostly have not so for the remainder of this video when i'm talking about renewables really that means solar wind and hydro but we will come back to some of those other technologies if you're designing a future low-carbon energy grid then you have these two options renewables and nuclear but what are their relative advantages and disadvantages well let's consider a few key topics and keep it tally firstly and most importantly carbon both renewables and nuclear power have an incredibly low carbon cost for each kilowatt hour of power that gets produced but it's not quite as simple as just comparing those two numbers specifically we need to know the lifetime emissions associated with each source of power so that means accounting for the carbon emitted by producing electricity but also the carbon emitted in constructing the power plant and in the case of nuclear power decommissioning on this front renewables edge ahead but by small amount according to figures from the ipcc first of all wow they're both so much better than coal wind has the lowest carbon cost and solar and nuclear are about the same but there's a large spread solar costs have been coming down though as panels have got more and more efficient and so you could reasonably expect the carbon cost of solar to fall even further in the future as the panels get even more efficient the higher cost for nuclear is largely because it is very carbon intensive to both build and decommission you use lots of concrete meaning the nuclear is low carbon but only when considered on long time scales so both are fine options but renewables definitely have the slightly lower carbon footprint next capacity is it possible for nuclear or renewables to provide all the world's power absolutely yes currently about 440 nuclear reactors supply around 10 of the world's electricity and in france it's actually about 70 of the nation's electricity so yep nuclear definitely has the potential capacity a list of territories currently generate all their power from renewables mostly it's got to be said hydroelectric power but solar and wind dominate in for example to german states and plug the gap in the dry season in uruguay for example the difference of course is that nuclear is incredibly space efficient it generates a vast amount of power in a tiny area while to generate the world's electricity from solar alone you would need to cover an area roughly the size of new mexico with solar panels so both power sources definitely have the potential capacity but nuclear definitely does it in a smaller space cost per kilowatt hour simple enough what is the dollar cost of generating a kilowatt hour of energy using either of these sources again using data from the ipcc wind and nuclear are basically on level pegging with solar again being a bit more expensive now in many instances while the cost of producing the electricity from renewables has plummeted by some 90 percent in the last 20 years the cost to consumers over that same period has actually increased that's largely because you have to build new infrastructure because current grids current grids for example aren't designed for generation to take place in residential areas the electricity is supposed to flow the other way nuclear power on the other hand utilizes existing infrastructure so for as long as you will be needing to build new infrastructure for renewables which would probably be the case for the next decade or two nuclear is going to be a little bit cheaper it works out to be about the same as wind but let's say that nuclear is a little bit cheaper next up stability by their very nature wind and solar are variable sources solar panels don't produce electricity at night time wind turbines don't do anything useful when becomed we describe this as the stability of the system so how reliably you can generate power no matter what [Music] nuclear is absolutely the most stable option of the two when running normally power generation is guaranteed there are ways to provide stability to a grid based entirely on renewables notably storage meaning either batteries or pumped hydroelectric having reservoirs of two different heights though there are more esoteric options like using a fleet of electric vehicles as your grid storage but also hybridization hybridization is using multiple kinds of renewable energy in the same grid so for example combining wind and solar and tidal power when one source produces an output another one can take up the slack in theory in practice this works on large scales as it won't be cloudy or completely still across an entire continent and so areas enjoying a glut of power can supply those which have a shortfall this does however rely on grid interconnectors feeding energy from one grade or subgrid to another which means yet more infrastructure expense nuclear hands down provides greater stability and lastly probably most importantly construction nuclear power plants are expensive if you want to build one at the moment you have to have a few billion dollars the idea being that by investing lots of money into one large centralized power source that you benefit from economies of scale and you just keep things simple this is a problem however if you don't happen to have a few billion dollars lying around or if you live somewhere with a very low population density such as in rural areas where the transmission costs the cost of getting the electricity from the power plants to the user can be very high renewable sources could not be more different they form a distributed network with each component contributing not as much capacity but being a lot cheaper this means that renewables are significantly more appealing in the developing world where finance is more difficult to come across but also where population densities can be very low particularly in rural areas it's estimated that there's around 1 billion people in the world who don't have access to electricity and the majority of those especially those in rural areas will only gain access to electricity through renewable micro grids so small numbers of renewable generators separate from the main electricity group it's not all rosy for renewables they have issues related to the extraction of rare earth materials like neodymium that they need for construction though mining for nuclear fuels i should point out isn't exactly great either and i should also point out that the environmental impact of both pale in comparison to the impacts of not decarbonizing our electricity supply but the major issue here is time nuclear power plants take a long time to build nuclear plants that were built in 2018 had an average construction time of nearly nine years and compare that to solar and wind which can be constructed in a matter of months considering again that we only have about a decade to cull our emissions we actually don't have time to plan and construct a whole new wave of nuclear power plants in summary neither technology delivers a true knockout punch renewables can be built maybe slightly cheaper they can definitely be built a lot faster and they are the only option for electrifying much of the developing world but that comes at a cost in infrastructure and in the stability of the system while hybrid energy networks paired with lots of storage can provide a certain amount of stability the system is inherently variable and the technology just isn't ready yet nuclear on the other hand is expensive to construct in terms of money time and carbon but delivers highly stable centralized power generation at a low cost so is nuclear the solution to generating all our low carbon electricity no definitely not there are plenty of cases where a hybrid renewables network makes a lot more sense particularly again in the developing world and plenty of people would argue that you don't need nuclear at all that you could generate all your electricity with renewables especially seeing as we have very little time to decarbonize and perhaps out of safety concerns is this possible well as far back as 2012 a study found that the usa could be reliably powered by between 80 and 90 renewables while a 2013 report indicated that australia could be reliably powered by a hundred 100 renewables and the technology has evolved significantly since those studies the current state of technology indicates that perhaps we don't actually need nuclear anywhere in the grid however how do energy grids work in practice what a lot of people are probably furiously typing into a comment section right now is something like baseload i can't believe he's not talking about baseload my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined give me ready gold base load is the concept of the minimum energy required by an electricity grid at all times so while demand may vary on annual and daily time scales there will always be a certain minimum amount of electricity that the grid will need so base load generation then needs to be entirely reliable and it doesn't need to change very much if at all historically this base load was provided by power plants with high inertia such as coal and also nuclear the extra stuff needed on top the variable demand was then supplied by flexible power plants such as gas turbines the flexibility is potentially needed on minute to minute time scales such as in the uk when a big tv program ends and the entire nation wants to boil the kettle to make some tea in case you're not from the uk i just want to be clear that's not a joke that that's a thing that actually happens however regardless of what we might want a future energy grid to look like that idea is kind of out of date because the ground is shifting under our feet in what's called the renewable energy transition you know we are moving to an energy system with the base we will not need the base load anymore so we're we're moving to a new energy system and this comes with a renewables especially with the distributed rig members this is professor arturos zervos the president of the renewable energy network and someone who has worked in the renewable energy industry for more than 30 years i would say all the way of looking the system with the base load and the rest is changing completely we don't need a base law we need we need the power we need every time but at each moment of the day but is it's a it's a new way of looking with and in that sense what is extremely important also is in your system to have flexible sources what professor zevos is saying is that as people continue to add lots of distributed small capacity variable sources to an energy grid you just can't think in terms of a base load anymore but why why would that be i'm not an expert in energy grid so i found one and asked her this is dr ellen webelen a research associate at ucl there are times when the base load will be lower than it was in the past because we have these generators that don't get switched off when demand goes down like local solar power for example when you're looking at national demand you um can sometimes see negative demand because of the way generation has become localized so if you've got solar panels on your roof and you're generating more than you're using you'll have negative demand so this concept of base load is quite outdated in the way it doesn't consider that people would ever have negative demand so because more and more distributed renewables are being added to the grid such as people putting solar panels on their houses now instead of having a graph of required capacity that looks like this you have one that looks a bit like this so if you're trying to meet the minimum requirement of this graph at any given time remember what i said about those base load generators they have very high inertia meaning they're very stable but they don't change very easily and that kind of generator just isn't appropriate for generating the minimum energy required for the grid anymore and bear in mind this isn't anything to do with whether we want to generate our power in the future from nuclear or renewables this is people in the background adding solar panels to their houses because it's cheap and it saves them money in the long run so many people are now doing that because the technology is so cheap that it's actually starting to cause a few infrastructure problems so for example in ireland certainly a few years ago they were having to limit the amount of renewable power on the system because it didn't provide enough inertia and they wanted to make sure that the system was going to be reliable and secure enough so they were capping the amount of renewables they would allow to be on the system even though there was more wind that could be provided they said we can't allow this anymore we haven't tested it enough instead of base load generators then you need what professor jesse jenkins at princeton refers to as firm low carbon sources of energy these are sources of energy that are very reliable you can turn them on any time of year and they will work but crucially they have the flexibility to ramp up and down as required by the load so if the old picture of base load plus x regeneration is now out of date how do we design a new future energy grid well it needs to have three major characteristics capacity flexibility and inertia we're back here at the tap so your system needs to have the capacity to supply as much power as you need that's basically how much water can the tap produce as we've already seen renewables and nuclear both easily have the capacity to supply our needs however as demand on the energy grid is going to be changing on long and short time scales you need the flexibility to change how much capacity your grid can offer now renewables can offer fantastic flexibility because they are lots of small power sources that you can connect and disconnect from the grid as you see fit nuclear by contrast does not offer very much flexibility at all historically i'm aware that modern plants can load follow to a certain degree this is what happens in france for example but generally speaking nuclear can't offer the flexibility required for a modern grid on its own but we come back to the inertia so inertia is something that provides reliability and stability it comes from when you have big turbines with large mass that are turning round so it's much harder to slow them down if something happens whereas wind and solar at the moment don't provide any inertia to the system so it becomes less stable basically okay but if flexibility and inertia are kind of opposites of each other how can a system have both flexibility and inertia well you can have more than one source of power a hybrid solution is always going to have to be the way because nothing can provide everything you need without some downsides so having a mix because they can provide different services to the system whether it's being able to switch them off really quickly or providing inertia for stability nuclear renewables offer quite different things so having a mix of them can be a good option if you want to get rid of fossil fuels so just to restate what dr webbing said there nuclear and solar and wind offer very different things to an energy grid while they both have the potential capacity solar and wind offer fantastic flexibility while nuclear offers much greater we've got more than zero inertia to the system so why not combine them and get the best of both worlds just in terms of the logistics of having a system that's wholly renewable is a huge is a huge endeavor and something the public would have to be fully on board with in order to commit the kind of space requirements to the renewable energy so i don't think it's a question of do we want renewables or nuclear or fossil fuels there's got to be some kind of mix and if you want to cut down on fossil fuels then nuclear is one option for doing that because it provides stability it provides a huge amount of power in a fairly small location notice that dr webb said one option because while nuclear is just an example of firm low carbon power arguably the most important certainly the most feasible to roll out given current technology on a large scale it remains just one option other ways to generate power year round without a carbon footprint include geothermal power and next generation geothermal tech is really exciting large reservoir hydroelectric power though obviously that's very geography dependent biomass and even natural gas power plants with carbon capture and storage although that one's almost certainly best avoided even without using those other sources of renewable energy inertia can be provided in a system with 100 renewables using storage such as batteries or pumped hydroelectric but a that technology just isn't feasible on scale yet and b well b actually brings me on to my final question why do people think they have to choose between nuclear and renewables because you don't let's say that you didn't want to build any nuclear plants and want to go 100 renewables is that feasible oh short answer yes with an f long answer no with a but i asked dr webb if you could construct a grid with 100 renewables and this was her answer so having worked at national grid the idea that something could run on 100 maneuverable was kind of kind of a crazy idea because there isn't any inertia coming from renewables and yet when i asked professor xervos someone with decades of experience in the energy industry whether we needed nuclear energy in our future energy mix so do you think there's a place for nuclear in in the future energy mix or is it a source that we should leave behind i think that is the source of the 20th century it just doesn't have any place in the renewables i don't think that we need it so what's going on here this is a behavior that you see on both sides of the debate nuclear advocates saying you need nothing but nuclear no renewables and renewables advocates saying you only need renewables and no nuclear analysis by professor jesse jenkins shows that 100 renewable generation is entirely technically possible however as the proportion of renewables meaning solar and wind in an energy grid approaches 100 the average cost of electricity at the dollar cost per kilowatt hour increases exponentially yet if you allow for firm low carbon resources of which nuclear is arguably the most important the cost still rises but by nowhere near as much and with far less uncertainty so renewables advocates are entirely correct to say that you don't need nuclear but what you're doing by saying that is that you want to make your life a little bit more difficult and by that i mean quite a bit more expensive and by the same token people who say that you can entirely power the world with nuclear no renewables required have an element of truth to their argument but are ignoring the issues of upfront costs particularly in time and the issue of flexibility in the system so why do people continue to make these purest arguments when the data and frankly common sense indicate that you get the best of both worlds by combining the two ways of generating power well i think these arguments are so popular for two reasons firstly people like simple solutions to alcohol the cause of and solution to all of life's problems climate change is incredibly complicated some people refer to it even as a perfect storm kind of problem because it's so complex it's so uniquely not what our brains evolved to deal with that any form of simplicity that can be introduced is seized upon both by people who are looking for a solution that they can understand and read in a reddit headline and also by the people who are looking to market a given solution nuclear power will save the world is a much easier sell than nuclear power will likely form an important method of electricity generation in conjunction with renewables where centralized grids coincide with a low renewables percentage secondly though because nuclear power is a proxy and this debate on its most fundamental level isn't about nuclear power versus renewable it's consciously or not about how different people view the world nature started the fight for survival and now she wants to quit because she's losing well i say hard cheese but nature's not our enemy well surely you agree we can do without her no i don't agree no and in this video up until now i've been framing this as renewables versus nuclear and i'm pretty sure that everybody watching this video will have felt a certain gut affinity to one solution or the other i'm going to massively oversimplify here but you can broadly divide people who advocate climate action into two groups the first of which says that we should carry on as we have done for the past several centuries just with new technology that stop carbon emissions the other group says that we should use this as an opportunity to restructure how we interact with energy and how we interact with the environment that former group says that we have a tried and tested way of producing energy it just unfortunately happens to have a high carbon footprint that if left unchecked will cause disastrous consequences so apply technology to fix the problem you replace coal with nuclear and we're good to go and we can carry on as we always have done it is a tech-centric approach that sees humans as separate from superior to nature by dint of our scientific prowess we just need to wait for the right technology to come along and then we can carry on with business as usual nuclear power in particular is seen by this group as the bright technological hope of the future especially if we could just get it to the next generation of nuclear power to quote naomi klein in this changes everything nuclear is a heavy industrial technology based on extraction run in a corporatist manner with long ties to the military industrial complex and as renowned psychiatrist and author robert j lifton has noted no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature and the ability to split the atom by contrast that second group sees humanity as in partnership with if not at the mercy of nature and as such argues that we should reconsider how we generate and use energy firstly not standing obstinately tall in the face of nature's processes but more bending with the wind and secondly accepting that we need to live lifestyles which require less energy if we are to live in equilibrium with nature moreover instead of continuing with the current highly centralized method of generating electricity and large power plants owned by corporations this group argues that electricity generation should be decentralized and in some cases owned by the public this transfers capital and well power away from a small number of elites and towards the general public with this transference acting as a catalyst for broader social change and what's the best way to accomplish all of this well with cheap and easy to install renewable energy again oversimplifying but these two groups are politically on the right and on the left respectively and as with all things in the 21st century how you the viewer identify politically almost certainly significantly influences where your opinion lies between these two groups but there will be a large number of people watching this who don't identify as particularly right-wing or particularly left-wing and yet have a very strong opinion on this issue probably towards the pro-nuclear side if that's you then i'm not going to tell you why you think that i think there are lots of reasons why people like nuclear power but i will say that i think one of the biggest reasons that people are so into the idea of nuclear power is because it represents technology specifically i think the crucial point here is what naomi klein describes as our culture's most intoxicating narrative the belief that technology is going to save us from the effects of our actions our faith in techno wizardry persists embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster arguing that we should delay widespread action on climate change until a technological fix becomes available is so intoxicating and so widespread because well it means that we don't have to change our lifestyles right now we don't need to take action immediately and also because it appeals to this internalized idea of humans being special we're all part of this big story and will be saved at the last minute like in all good stories but also and most importantly i think it's because it allows the people with the most power to retain their control think about it it's not surprising that claiming a technological miracle can be achieved with just a few years and a few million dollars of funding from an eco billionaire is so widely heard from those same billionaires and the news media that they own because people are currently in a position of power are motivated to retain their control and if a technological fix does become available they are the people best positioned to capitalize on it [Music] by contrast if the other viewpoint came to dominance then those people currently at the top of wealth mountain would face challenges and face calls for them to redistribute their assets so this stuff really works certainly does oh well lots of luck i don't mean to go full bread tube here and i certainly don't want to give you the impression that i'm a banner waving advocate for that latter perspective it's certainly the way that i lean but i see it's flaws i'm somewhere in the middle between the two what i'm trying to say here is that this belief in the supreme power of technology is misplaced and dangerous we don't have the time to wait for some technological superhero to swoop down and save us and nor do we need such a hero the technology to fix our problem is here it is cheap and it is perfectly feasible to roll out on scale it's renewable energy it's wind and solar that will need to be where it's appropriate supported by nuclear power this debate has become an ideological partisan one and it doesn't need to be carbon is our common enemy it's the reason that we're doing all this in the first place what i'm trying to say in this video is that while nuclear has plenty of positive points it has been kind of fetishized by its proponents and equally demonized by its opponents partly because it represents a particular world view that places humanity's command of technology at its heart but also because the narrative nuclear represents very much favors the interests of people currently in positions of power so they have a reason to promote it however you identify politically and whatever you make of this sociological analysis i implore you consider this technology on its merits not how it fits in with your worldview or your politics but what it can and can't do and based on that information and that information alone decide on its role in a future low carbon power system this video has been quite a journey and if you came into it expecting a nice binary easy to digest conclusion then surprise to summarize as neatly as i can is nuclear power the solution to climate change no should we forget about nuclear and just focus on renewable energy also no is nuclear power a useful tool to lower our carbon emissions as part of a future hybrid energy grid absolutely yes nuclear power has advantages and disadvantages that neatly mesh with renewable sources like solar and wind it's certainly a very useful string to have to our energy bow but it is neither a silver bullet nor even the star player as i said before we have around 10 years to accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy and cut our emissions and with such a tight deadline the heavy lifting of electricity generation will need to be done by solar and wind nuclear just can't be built quickly enough with modern designs renewable technologies on the other hand have advanced significantly in the last few decades and are now cheap easy to deploy and appropriate for widespread construction they will be the star players especially in rural areas the important thing to stress is that this needs to happen now there simply isn't time for any delays we meaning voters and energy shareholders and campaigners around the world need to start removing fossil fuels from our energy mix in my opinion the best way of doing that the fastest cheapest way of doing that is using wind and solar on a large scale but we also need to have other sources of energy in the mix to account for the shortcomings of variable renewables i hope that this video demonstrated that nuclear is a really valuable tool in accomplishing that but it's not a silver bullet it's not even the only option it's just a very good one i also hope it showed you that this problem is really complicated frankly we have bigger issues to deal with than endlessly debating renewables versus nuclear and time is short so let's focus on what is important and let's get to work i was referring to lowering global carbon emissions but um i did also need to do this this next bit of the video is about putting this debate in context and the surprising percentage of energy that has nothing to do with electricity it's available as part of the extended cut of this video over on nebula nebula is an educational streaming service that i helped to create with other creators like tiazu aliabdal lindsey ellis and a ton of others and we all share in the decision making and the revenue of the site making content on youtube puts you at the mercy of the algorithm and means that a lot of the time i can't make the content i want to make as i know it just won't get views on youtube nebula allows us to experiment with new kinds of content that can add value to the world aside from adsense revenue for google on the site there are no adverts at all this whole section of the video is replaced with extra content and we've created whole new experimental shows like tom scott's money and the mega collaboration working titles we've partnered up with curiosity stream the go-to source for the best documentaries on the internet and worked out a deal where if you sign up for curiosity stream with the link in the description not only will you get curiosity stream but you'll also get a nebula subscription for free and that's not a trash subscription it's free as long as you're a curiosity stream member and for a limited time curiosity stream is offering 26 off all their annual plans that's less than 15 a year for both curiosity stream and nebula and since we've got to stay inside you may as well learn about the history of food tonight or bioluminescence or the latest dinosaur science incidentally i know what i'm doing tonight so if you go to curiositystream.com forward slash simon clark link in the description you'll get both curiosity stream and nebula for 26 off it's a great way to support this channel and the work i do and educational video more broadly for just 14.79 a year thanks to curiositystream and nebula for making this video possible thank you so much for watching this video this one has been gestating for quite some time and i have tried my best to be as comprehensive as possible in how i researched and wrote it however i'm sure there'll be plenty of people who think that i have missed something important in this debate and so bearing in mind that i may have cut it in the interest of time if you think i've missed something important then do let me know down in the comments shout out to the people who kept pushing me to make this video hi zeuf i certainly learned a lot in the research process and i hope that it has resulted in something worthwhile and if you found this video worthwhile then please do pop it a like and share it with your friends who you think may be interested in this information thank you again for watching and i'll see you in the next one do you like the new set by the way

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 134,791

Rating: 4.8240976 out of 5

Keywords: drsimonclark, dr simon clark, nuclear power, nuclear energy, nuclear, energy, climate change, global warming, renewables, solar power, wind power, chernobyl

Id: k13jZ9qHJ5U

Length: 41min 5sec (2465 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

Please remember we are here as a representation of Andrew Yang. Do your part by being kind, respectful, and considerate of the humanity of your fellow users.

If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them or tag the mods.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/djk29a_]

I keep saying it but nobody seems to get it but the agreement to get everyone in the general public to the bargaining table isn't to keep talking about energy diversification in the same terms as financial diversification and to make it clear that fossil fuels are actually our junk bonds we really need to get off of ASAP. While nothing beats needing to consume less electricity overall, telling billions of people that they need to save on energy for the planet while developed countries continue to chew up massive amounts of energy per capita will look pretty awkward. So the only realistic plan given we have a cooperation problem that is unlikely to be solved globally in even 100 years energy diversification is the policy message that makes sense where we get to a place where nobody ever needs to put a penny into the junk bonds of energy.

[u/Darnit97]

First of all, I get it; we come from across the political spectrum and a lot of us hold some strong opinions about nuclear energy. But like all things in life, everything in moderation. It is important not to, quoting Simon, " fetishize or demonize nuclear." Unfortunately, we are usually asked to take a stance on the issue, and overly simplify it into pro/anti nuclear.

There is no doubt that climate change is a pressing issue... already coastal communities in the Pacific and American South are evacuating. We only have a decade to curb our emissions before we ruin this planet beyond what we have already done.

All I can say is... invest the sh*t out of both renewable (solar, wind) and nuclear technologies instead of bickering about which is better. Just get the best of both worlds... time is ticking.

[u/hedonisticaltruism]

It's a good vid but there is one flaw, IMO - the vast majority of pro-nuclear are not anti-renewables, as is somewhat framed in the video.