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Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy? — Transcript

by TED · 3,756 words · 562 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:15Chris Anderson: We're having a debate.
0:17The debate is over the proposition:
0:19"What the world needs now
0:21is nuclear energy." True or false?
0:24And before we have the debate,
0:26I'd like to actually take a show of hands --
0:28on balance, right now, are you for or against this?
0:31So those who are "yes," raise your hand. "For."
0:35Okay, hands down.
0:37Those who are against, raise your hands.
0:40Okay, I'm reading that at about
0:4375 to 25 in favor at the start.
0:46Which means we're going to take a vote at the end
0:49and see how that shifts, if at all.
0:52So here's the format: They're going to have six minutes each,
0:54and then after one little, quick exchange between them,
0:57I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience
0:59to have 30 seconds
1:01to make one short, crisp, pungent, powerful point.
1:05So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly,
1:08is one of, truly, the founders of the
1:10environmental movement,
1:12a long-standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog,
1:15someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand.
1:18Stewart Brand: Whoa.
1:20(Applause)
1:22The saying is that with climate, those who know the most
1:24are the most worried.
1:26With nuclear, those who know the most
1:28are the least worried.
1:30A classic example is James Hansen,
1:32a NASA climatologist
1:34pushing for 350 parts per million
1:36carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
1:38He came out with a wonderful book recently
1:40called "Storms of My Grandchildren."
1:42And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power,
1:45as are most climatologists
1:47who are engaging this issue seriously.
1:50This is the design situation:
1:52a planet that is facing climate change
1:55and is now half urban.
1:58Look at the client base for this.
2:00Five out of six of us
2:02live in the developing world.
2:04We are moving to cities. We are moving up in the world.
2:07And we are educating our kids,
2:09having fewer kids,
2:11basically good news all around.
2:13But we move to cities, toward the bright lights,
2:15and one of the things that is there that we want, besides jobs,
2:17is electricity.
2:19And if it isn't easily gotten, we'll go ahead and steal it.
2:22This is one of the most desired things
2:24by poor people all over the world,
2:26in the cities and in the countryside.
2:30Electricity for cities, at its best,
2:32is what's called baseload electricity.
2:34That's where it is on
2:36all the time.
2:38And so far there are only three major sources of that --
2:41coal and gas, hydro-electric,
2:43which in most places is maxed-out --
2:45and nuclear.
2:47I would love to have something in the fourth place here,
2:50but in terms of constant, clean,
2:52scalable energy,
2:54[solar] and wind and the other renewables
2:56aren't there yet because they're inconstant.
2:58Nuclear is and has been for 40 years.
3:02Now, from an environmental standpoint,
3:04the main thing you want to look at
3:06is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal,
3:09the two major sources of electricity.
3:13If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear,
3:16the waste from that lifetime of electricity
3:18would go in a Coke can --
3:20a pretty heavy Coke can, about two pounds.
3:24But one day of coal
3:27adds up to one hell of a lot
3:29of carbon dioxide
3:31in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant.
3:36Then what happens to the waste?
3:38The nuclear waste typically goes into
3:40a dry cask storage
3:42out back of the parking lot at the reactor site
3:44because most places don't have underground storage yet.
3:46It's just as well, because it can stay where it is.
3:49While the carbon dioxide,
3:51vast quantities of it, gigatons,
3:54goes into the atmosphere
3:56where we can't get it back -- yet --
3:58and where it is causing the problems that we're most concerned about.
4:02So when you add up the greenhouse gases
4:05in the lifetime of these various energy sources,
4:08nuclear is down there with wind and hydro,
4:11below solar and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels.
4:16Wind is wonderful; I love wind.
4:18I love being around these
4:20big wind generators.
4:23But one of the things we're discovering is that
4:25wind, like solar, is an actually relatively
4:27dilute source of energy.
4:29And so it takes a very large footprint on the land,
4:32a very large footprint in terms of materials,
4:34five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear,
4:37and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity
4:40is on the order of 250 square miles
4:43of wind farm.
4:45In places like Denmark and Germany,
4:48they've maxed out on wind already.
4:50They've run out of good sites.
4:52The power lines are getting overloaded.
4:55And you peak out.
4:57Likewise, with solar,
4:59especially here in California,
5:01we're discovering that the 80 solar farm
5:03schemes that are going forward
5:05want to basically bulldoze
5:071,000 square miles of southern California desert.
5:10Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.
5:13It's okay on frapped-out agricultural land.
5:16Solar's wonderful on rooftops.
5:19But out in the landscape,
5:21one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles
5:24of bulldozed desert.
5:26When you add all these things up --
5:28Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out
5:30what would it take
5:32to get 13 clean
5:34terawatts of energy
5:37from wind, solar and biofuels,
5:40and that area would be roughly the size of the United States,
5:43an area he refers to as "Renewistan."
5:47A guy who's added it up all this very well is David Mackay,
5:50a physicist in England,
5:52and in his wonderful book, "Sustainable Energy," among other things,
5:55he says, "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic."
5:58(Laughter)
6:02In terms of weapons,
6:04the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy.
6:07We have been taking down
6:09the Russian warheads,
6:11turning it into electricity.
6:13Ten percent of American electricity
6:15comes from decommissioned warheads.
6:17We haven't even started the American stockpile.
6:21I think of most interest to a TED audience
6:24would be the new generation of reactors
6:26that are very small,
6:28down around 10
6:30to 125 megawatts.
6:32This is one from Toshiba.
6:34Here's one the Russians are already building that floats on a barge.
6:37And that would be very interesting in the developing world.
6:40Typically, these things are put in the ground.
6:42They're referred to as nuclear batteries.
6:44They're incredibly safe,
6:46weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it.
6:48Here is a commercial version from New Mexico
6:51called the Hyperion,
6:53and another one from Oregon called NuScale.
6:56Babcock & Wilcox that make nuclear reactors,
6:58here's an integral fast reactor.
7:01Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in.
7:04The governments of the world are going to have to decide
7:06that coals need to be made expensive, and these will go ahead.
7:09And here's the future.
7:12(Applause)
7:17CA: Okay. Okay.
7:19(Applause)
7:23So arguing against,
7:25a man who's been at the nitty, gritty heart
7:28of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years.
7:30In 2000, he discovered that soot
7:33was probably the second leading cause of global warming, after CO2.
7:36His team have been making detailed calculations
7:39of the relative impacts
7:41of different energy sources.
7:43His first time at TED, possibly a disadvantage -- we shall see --
7:46from Stanford,
7:48Professor Mark Jacobson. Good luck.
7:50Mark Jacobson: Thank you.
7:52(Applause)
7:54So my premise here is that nuclear energy
7:56puts out more carbon dioxide,
7:58puts out more air pollutants,
8:00enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up
8:02than real renewable energy systems,
8:04namely wind, solar,
8:06geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power.
8:09And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation.
8:12So let's start just by looking at the
8:14CO2 emissions from the life cycle.
8:16CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions
8:18of all the greenhouse gases and particles
8:20that cause warming
8:22and converted to CO2.
8:24And if you look, wind and concentrated solar
8:26have the lowest CO2 emissions, if you look at the graph.
8:28Nuclear -- there are two bars here.
8:30One is a low estimate, and one is a high estimate.
8:32The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry
8:34estimate of nuclear.
8:36The high is the average of 103
8:38scientific, peer-reviewed studies.
8:40And this is just the
8:42CO2 from the life cycle.
8:44If we look at the delays,
8:46it takes between 10 and 19 years
8:48to put up a nuclear power plant
8:50from planning to operation.
8:52This includes about three and a half to six years
8:54for a site permit.
8:56and another two and a half to four years
8:58for a construction permit and issue,
9:00and then four to nine years for actual construction.
9:03And in China, right now,
9:05they're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear.
9:07And the average, just for the construction time of these,
9:10is 7.1 years
9:12on top of any planning times.
9:14While you're waiting around for your nuclear,
9:16you have to run the regular electric power grid,
9:19which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world.
9:22And the chart here shows the difference between
9:25the emissions from the regular grid,
9:27resulting if you use nuclear, or anything else,
9:30versus wind, CSP or photovoltaics.
9:33Wind takes about two to five years on average,
9:36same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics.
9:38So the difference is the opportunity cost
9:41of using nuclear versus wind, or something else.
9:44So if you add these two together, alone,
9:46you can see a separation
9:48that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times
9:51more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy.
9:54And this doesn't even account
9:56for the footprint on the ground.
9:58If you look at the air pollution health effects,
10:01this is the number of deaths per year in 2020
10:03just from vehicle exhaust.
10:05Let's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States
10:08to battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles
10:11or flex fuel vehicles run on E85.
10:13Well, right now in the United States,
10:1550 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution,
10:18and vehicles are about 25,000 of those.
10:21In 2020, the number will go down to 15,000
10:23due to improvements.
10:25And so, on the right, you see gasoline emissions,
10:27the death rates of 2020.
10:29If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol,
10:31you'd actually increase the death rate slightly.
10:33If you go to nuclear,
10:35you do get a big reduction,
10:37but it's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar.
10:40Now if you consider the fact
10:42that nuclear weapons proliferation
10:45is associated with nuclear energy proliferation,
10:47because we know for example,
10:49India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly
10:52by enriching uranium
10:54in nuclear energy facilities.
10:56North Korea did that to some extent.
10:58Iran is doing that right now.
11:00And Venezuela would be doing it
11:02if they started with their nuclear energy facilities.
11:05If you do a large scale expansion
11:08of nuclear energy across the world,
11:11and as a result there was just one
11:13nuclear bomb created
11:17that was used to destroy a city
11:19such as Mumbai or some other big city, megacity,
11:22the additional death rates due to this
11:24averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the U.S.
11:27would be this.
11:29So, do we need this?
11:31The next thing is: What about the footprint? Stewart mentioned the footprint.
11:34Actually, the footprint on the ground for wind
11:36is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world.
11:39That, because the footprint, as you can see,
11:41is just the pole touching the ground.
11:43And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet
11:45with 73,000 to 145,000
11:48five-megawatt wind turbines.
11:50That would take between one and three square kilometers
11:53of footprint on the ground, entirely.
11:55The spacing is something else.
11:57That's the footprint that is always being confused.
11:59People confuse footprint with spacing.
12:01As you can see from these pictures,
12:03the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes
12:06including agricultural land,
12:08range land or open space.
12:10Over the ocean, it's not even land.
12:12Now if we look at nuclear -- (Laughter)
12:15With nuclear, what do we have?
12:17We have facilities around there. You also have a buffer zone
12:19that's 17 square kilometers.
12:21And you have the uranium mining
12:23that you have to deal with.
12:25Now if we go to the area,
12:27lots is worse than nuclear or wind.
12:30For example, cellulosic ethanol, to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet,
12:33this is how much land you would need.
12:35That's cellulosic, second generation
12:37biofuels from prairie grass.
12:39Here's corn ethanol. It's smaller.
12:41This is based on ranges from data,
12:44but if you look at nuclear,
12:46it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet.
12:49For wind, there's a larger area,
12:51but much smaller footprint.
12:53And of course, with wind,
12:55you could put it all over the East Coast,
12:57offshore theoretically, or you can split it up.
12:59And now, if you go back to
13:01looking at geothermal, it's even smaller than both,
13:04and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing,
13:07but it's still pretty small.
13:09And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet.
13:11To power the entire world with 50 percent wind,
13:14you would need about one percent of world land.
13:17Matching the reliability, base load is actually irrelevant.
13:19We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply.
13:22You can do that by combining renewables.
13:24This is from real data in California,
13:26looking at wind data and solar data.
13:29And it considers just using existing hydro
13:32to match the hour-by-hour power demand.
13:34Here are the world wind resources.
13:36There's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide
13:38than we need for all the world.
13:40So then here's the final ranking.
13:42And one last slide I just want to show. This is the choice:
13:45You can either have wind or nuclear.
13:47If you use wind,
13:49you guarantee ice will last.
13:51Nuclear, the time lag alone
13:53will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more.
13:56And we can guarantee a clean, blue sky
13:59or an uncertain future with nuclear power.
14:02(Applause)
14:10CA: All right.
14:12So while they're having their comebacks on each other --
14:14and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran --
14:16I need two people from either side.
14:18So if you're for this,
14:20if you're for nuclear power, put up two hands.
14:23If you're against, put up one.
14:25And I want two of each for the mics.
14:27Now then, you guys have --
14:29you have a minute comeback on him
14:32to pick up a point he said, challenge it,
14:34whatever.
14:38SB: I think a point of difference we're having, Mark,
14:40has to do with weapons
14:43and energy.
14:45These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow
14:47putting out a lot of greenhouse gases --
14:49a lot of those studies include, "Well of course war will be inevitable
14:52and therefore we'll have cities burning and stuff like that,"
14:54which is kind of finessing it
14:56a little bit, I think.
14:59The reality is that there's, what,
15:0121 nations that have nuclear power?
15:04Of those, seven have nuclear weapons.
15:06In every case, they got the weapons
15:08before they got the nuclear power.
15:11There are two nations, North Korea and Israel,
15:13that have nuclear weapons
15:15and don't have nuclear power at all.
15:17The places that we would most like to have
15:20really clean energy occur
15:22are China, India, Europe, North America,
15:25all of which have sorted out their situation
15:28in relation to nuclear weapons.
15:30So that leaves a couple of places like Iran,
15:32maybe Venezuela,
15:34that you would like to have very close
15:37surveillance of anything
15:39that goes on with fissile stuff.
15:41Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we
15:43really know where all of the fissile material is,
15:45and we can move toward
15:47zero weapons left, once we know all that.
15:50CA: Mark,
15:5230 seconds, either on that or on anything Stewart said.
15:55MJ: Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first,
15:58and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories.
16:01So the other thing is, we don't need nuclear energy.
16:04There's plenty of solar and wind.
16:06You can make it reliable, as I showed with that diagram.
16:08That's from real data.
16:10And this is an ongoing research. This is not rocket science.
16:12Solving the world's problems can be done,
16:15if you really put your mind to it and use clean, renewable energy.
16:18There's absolutely no need for nuclear power.
16:21(Applause)
16:24CA: We need someone for.
16:26Rod Beckstrom: Thank you Chris. I'm Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.
16:29I've been involved in global warming policy
16:31since 1994,
16:33when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund
16:35that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol.
16:38And I want to support Stewart Brand's position.
16:40I've come around in the last 10 years.
16:42I used to be against nuclear power.
16:44I'm now supporting Stewart's position,
16:46softly, from a risk-management standpoint,
16:48agreeing that
16:50the risks of overheating the planet
16:52outweigh the risk of nuclear incident,
16:55which certainly is possible and is a very real problem.
16:58However, I think there may be a win-win solution here
17:00where both parties can win this debate,
17:03and that is, we face a situation
17:05where it's carbon caps on this planet
17:07or die.
17:09And in the United States Senate,
17:11we need bipartisan support --
17:13only one or two votes are needed --
17:15to move global warming through the Senate,
17:17and this room can help.
17:19So if we get that through, then Mark will solve these problems. Thanks Chris.
17:22CA: Thank you Rod Beckstrom. Against.
17:24David Fanton: Hi, I'm David Fanton. I just want to say a couple quick things.
17:27The first is: be aware of the propaganda.
17:30The propaganda from the industry
17:32has been very, very strong.
17:34And we have not had
17:36the other side of the argument fully aired
17:39so that people can draw their own conclusions.
17:41Be very aware of the propaganda.
17:43Secondly, think about this.
17:45If we build all these nuclear power plants,
17:47all that waste
17:49is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands,
17:51of trucks and trains,
17:53moving through this country every day.
17:55Tell me they're not going to have accidents.
17:58Tell me that those accidents aren't going to
18:01put material into the environment
18:04that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years.
18:06And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains
18:09isn't a potential terrorist target.
18:11CA: Thank you.
18:14For.
18:16Anyone else for? Go.
18:19Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I just wanted to say,
18:21I'm, first of all, renewable energy's biggest fan.
18:23I've got solar PV on my roof.
18:25I've got a hydro conversion
18:27at a watermill that I own.
18:29And I'm, you know, very much "pro" that kind of stuff.
18:32However, there's a basic arithmetic problem here.
18:35The capability of
18:37the sun shining, the wind blowing and the rain falling,
18:40simply isn't enough to add up.
18:42So if we want to keep the lights on,
18:44we actually need a solution
18:46which is going to keep generating all of the time.
18:49I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the '80s,
18:52and I continue to do so now.
18:54But we've got an opportunity
18:56to recycle them into something more useful
18:58that enables us to get energy all of the time.
19:01And, ultimately, the arithmetic problem isn't going to go away.
19:04We're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone.
19:07We need a solution that generates all of the time.
19:09If we're going to keep the lights on,
19:11nuclear is that solution.
19:13CA: Thank you.
19:16Anyone else against?
19:18Man: The last person who was in favor made the premise
19:20that we don't have enough
19:22alternative renewable resources.
19:25And our "against" proponent up here
19:27made it very clear that we actually do.
19:29And so the fallacy
19:31that we need this resource
19:33and we can actually make it in a time frame
19:35that is meaningful is not possible.
19:37I will also add one other thing.
19:39Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks --
19:41we know that the stick is going up exponentially.
19:43So you can't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables
19:46and say, "That's all we have."
19:48Because five years from now, it will blow you away
19:50what we'll actually have as alternatives
19:52to this horrible, disastrous nuclear power.
19:54CA: Point well made. Thank you.
19:56(Applause)
19:59So each of you has really just a couple sentences --
20:0130 seconds each
20:03to sum up.
20:06Your final pitch, Stewart.
20:08SB: I loved your "It all balances out" chart
20:11that you had there.
20:13It was a sunny day and a windy night.
20:16And just now in England
20:18they had a cold spell.
20:20All of the wind in the entire country
20:22shut down for a week.
20:24None of those things were stirring.
20:26And as usual, they had to buy nuclear power from France.
20:28Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel.
20:30This keeps happening.
20:32I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor.
20:36And the fact is, we're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel
20:39in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along.
20:42And especially the small reactors need to go forward.
20:45I heard from Nathan Myhrvold -- and I think here's the action point --
20:48it'll take an act of Congress
20:50to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
20:52start moving quickly on these small reactors,
20:54which we need very much, here and in the world.
20:58(Applause)
21:04MJ: So we've analyzed the hour-by-hour
21:06power demand and supply,
21:08looking at solar, wind, using data for California.
21:11And you can match that demand, hour-by-hour,
21:14for the whole year almost.
21:16Now, with regard to the resources,
21:18we've developed the first wind map of the world,
21:20from data alone, at 80 meters.
21:22We know what the wind resources are. You can cover 15 percent.
21:25Fifteen percent of the entire U.S.
21:27has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive.
21:30And there's much more solar than there is wind.
21:32There's plenty of resource. You can make it reliable.
21:35CA: Okay. So, thank you, Mark.
21:38(Applause)
21:42So if you were in Palm Springs ...
21:45(Laughter)
21:50(Applause)
21:52Shameless. Shameless. Shameless.
21:55(Applause)
21:57So, people of the TED community,
22:00I put it to you that what the world needs now
22:02is nuclear energy.
22:04All those in favor, raise your hands.
22:07(Shouts)
22:10And all those against.
22:13Ooooh.
22:15Now that is -- my take on that ...
22:17Just put up ... Hands up, people who changed their minds during the debate,
22:20who voted differently.
22:22Those of you who changed your mind
22:25in favor of "for"
22:27put your hands up.
22:29Okay. So here's the read on it.
22:32Both people won supporters,
22:34but on my count,
22:37the mood of the TED community shifted
22:39from about 75 to 25
22:41to about 65 to 35
22:43in favor, in favor.
22:45You both won. I congratulate both of you.
22:47Thank you for that.
22:49(Applause)

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