How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment

Have you heard the news?

We're in a clean energy revolution.

And where I live in Berkley, California,

it seems like every day I see a new roof
with new solar panels going up,

electric car in the driveway.

Germany sometimes gets
half its power from solar,

and India is now committed

to building 10 times more solar
than we have in California

by the year 2022.

Even nuclear seems to be
making a comeback.

Bill Gates is in China
working with engineers,

there's 40 different companies
that are working together

to try and race to build the first
reactor that runs on waves,

that can't melt down

and is cheaper than coal.

And so you might start to ask:

is this whole global warming problem

going to be a lot easier to solve
than anybody imagined?

That was the question we wanted to know,

and so my colleagues and I decided
to take a deep dive into the data.

We were a little skeptical of some parts
of the clean energy revolution's story,

but what we found really surprised us.

So the first thing is that clean
energy has been increasing.

This is electricity from clean energy
sources over the last 20 years.

But when you look at the percentage

of global electricity
from clean energy sources,

it's actually been in decline
from 36 percent to 31 percent.

And if you care about climate change,

you've got to go in the opposite direction

to 100 percent of our electricity
from clean energy sources

as quickly as possible.

Now you might wonder,

"Come on, how much could five percentage
points of global electricity be?"

Well, it turns out to be quite a bit.

it's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants
the size of Diablo Canyon --

California's last nuclear plant --

or 900 solar farms,

the size of Topaz,

which is one of the biggest
solar farms in the world

and certainly our biggest in California.

The big part of this

is just simply that fossil fuels
are increasing faster than clean energy.

And that's understandable.

There's just a lot of poor countries

that are using wood and dung and charcoal
as their main source of energy,

and they need modern fuels.

But there's something else going on,

which is that one of those clean
energy sources in particular

has actually been on the decline
in absolute terms ...

not just relatively.

And that's nuclear.

You can see it's generation
has declined seven percent

over the last 10 years.

Now solar and wind have been
making huge strides,

and so you hear a lot of talk
about how it doesn't really matter

because solar and wind is going
to make up the difference,

but the data says something different.

When you combine all the electricty
from solar and wind,

you see it actually barely makes up
half of the decline from nuclear.

Let's take a closer look
in the United States.

Over the last couple of years --

really 2013, 2014 --

we prematurely retired
four nuclear power plants.

They were almost entirely
replaced with fossil fuels,

and so the consequence
was that we wiped out

almost as much clean energy
electricity that we get from solar.

And it's not unique to us.

People think of California as a clean
energy and climate leader,

but when we looked at the data

what we found is that in fact

California reduced emissions more slowly
than the national average

between 2000 and 2015.

What about Germany?

They're doing a lot of clean energy.

But when you look at the data,

German emissions have actually
been going up since 2009,

and there's really not anybody
who's going to tell you

that they're going to meet
their climate comittments in 2020.

The reason isn't hard to understand.

Solar and wind provide power
about 10 to 20 percent of the time,

which means that when
the sun's not shining,

the wind's not blowing,

you still need power for your hospitals,

your homes,

your cities,

your factories.

And while batteries have made some
really cool improvements lately,

the truth is that they're just never going
to be as efficient as the electrical grid.

Every time you put electricity
into a battery,

you take it out,

you use about 20 to 40
percent of the power.

That's why when in California,

we tried to deal with all
of the solar we brought on line --

we now get about 10 percent
of electricity from solar --

when the sun goes down
and people come home from work

and turn on their air conditioners

and their TV sets

and every other appliance in the house,

we need a lot of natural gas backup.

So what we've been doing

is stuffing a lot of natural gas
into the side of a mountain.

And that worked pretty well for a while,

but then late last year,

it sprung a leak.

This is Aliso Canyon,

and so much methane gas was released,

it was the equivalent of putting
half a million cars on the road.

It basically blew through all of our
climate commitments for the year.

Well, what about India?

Sometimes you have to go places
to really get the right data,

so we travelled to India
a few months ago.

We met with all the top officials --

solar, nuclear, the rest --

and what they told us
is they said,

"we're actually having
more serious problems

than both Germany and California.

We don't have backup,

we don't have all the natural gas

and that's just the start of it.

Say we want to get to
100 gigawatts by 2022,

but last year we did just five

and the year before that we did five."

So let's just take
a closer look at nuclear.

The United Nations and our governmental
panel on climate change

has looked at the carbon content
of all these different fuels,

and nuclear comes out really low.

it's actually lower even than solar.

And nuclear obviously
provides a lot of power --

24 hours a day,

seven days a week.

During a year a single plant can
provide power 92 percent of the time.

And what's interesting is that when
you look at countries

that have deployed different
kinds of clean energies,

there's only a few that have done so

at a pace consistent with dealing
with the climate crisis.

So nuclear seems like
a pretty good option,

but there's this big problem with it,

which all of you I'm sure are aware of,

which is that people really don't like it.

There was a study --

a survey done of people
around the world --

not just in the United States or Europe --

about a year and a half ago,

and what they found

is that nuclear is one of the least
popular forms of energy.

Even oil is more popular than nuclear.

And while nuclear kind of edges out coal,

the thing is,

people don't really fear coal in the same
way that they fear nuclear,

which really operates on our unconscious.

So what is it that we fear?

There's really three things.

There's the safety
of the plants themselves --

the fears that they're going to melt
down and cause damage.

There's the waste from them.

And then there's
the association with weapons.

And I think understandably,

engineers look at those concerns

and they want to look
for technological fixes.

That's why Bill Gates is in China
developing advanced reactors --

40 different entrepreneurs
are working on this problem,

and I myself have been
very excited about it.

We did a report:

how to make nuclear cheap.

In particular the Thorium reactor
shows a lot of promise.

And so when the climate scientist
James Hansen asked

if I wanted to go to China with him

and look at the Chinese
advanced nuclear program,

I jumped at the chance.

We were there with MIT

and UC Berkley engineers.

And I had in my mind

that the Chinese would be able

to do with nuclear what they did
with so many other things.

Just start to crank out small
nuclear reactors on assembly lines,

[ship] them up like iPhones
of MacBooks

and send them around the world --

I would get one at home in Berkley.

But what I found was somewhat different.

The presentations were all
very exciting and very promising,

and they have mutiple reactors
that they're working on.

The time came for the Thorium reactor
and a bunch of us were excited.

They went through the whole presentation,

they got to the timeline,

and they said,

"We're going to have a Thorium
molten salt reactor

ready for sale to the world by 2040."

And I was like, "What?"

(Laughter)

I looked at my colleagues and I was like,

"Excuse me,

can you guys speed that up a little bit?"

Because we're in a little bit
of a climate crisis right now --

and your cities are really
polluted by the way.

And they kind of responded back,

they were like,

"I'm not sure what you've
heard about or thorium program,

but we don't have a third of our budget

and your department of energy
hasn't been particularly forthcoming

with all that data you guys
have on testing reactors."

And I said, "Well I've got an idea.

You know how you've got 10 years
where you're demonstrating that reactor?

Let's just skip that part

and let's just go right
to commercializing it.

That will save money and time."

And the engineer just looked at and said,

"Let me ask you a question.

Would you buy a car that had
never been demonstrated before?"

So what about the other reactors?

There's a reactor that's
coming on line now,

there's starting to sell it.

It's a high temperature gas reactor.

It can't melt down.

But it's really big and bulky.

That's part of the safety

and nobody thinks it's going to get
cheaper than the reactors that we have.

The ones that use waste as fuel
are really cool ideas,

but the truth is

we don't actually know how to do that yet.

There's some risk that you actually
will make more waste,

and most people think

that if you're including that waste
part of the process,

it's just going to make the whole
machine a lot more expensive --

it's just adding another complicated step.

And the truth is

that there's real questions about
how much of that we're going to do.

We went to India and asked
about the nuclear program,

the government said before Paris,

the climate talks,

that they were going to do something
like 30 new nuclear plants.

But when we got there

and we interviewed people

and we even looked
at the internal documents,

they're now saying they're
going to do about five.

And in most of the world,

especially the rich world,

they're not talking
about building new reactors.

We're actually talking
about taking reactors down

before their lifetimes are over.

Germany's actually pressuring
its neighbors to do that.

I mentioned the United States --

we could lose half of our reactors
over the next 15 years,

which would wipe out 40 percent
of the emissions reductions

we're supposed to get under
the clean power plan.

And of course in Japan,

they took all their
nuclear plants offline,

replaced them with coal,
natural gas, oil-burning,

and they're only expected to bring online
about a third to two-thirds.

So when we went through the numbers,

and just added that up:

how much nuclear do we see China
and India bringing online

over the next 15 years,

how much do we see at risk
of being taken offline.

This was the most startling finding.

What we found is that the world
is actually as risk

of losing four times more clean energy
than we lost of the last 10 years.

In other words,

we're not in a clean energy revolution,

We're in a clean energy crisis.

So it's understandable that engineers
would look for a technical fix

to the fears that people have of nuclear.

But when you consider that these
are big challenges to do,

that they're going to take
a long time to solve,

there's this other issue,

which is that

are those technical fixes really
going to solve people's fears?

Let's take safety.

You know, despite what people think,

it's hard to figure out how
to make nuclear power much safer.

I mean every medical
journal that looks at it --

this is the most recent study
from the British journal Lancet,

one the the most respected
journals in the world --

nuclear is the safest way
to make reliable power.

Everybody's scared of the accidents.

So you go look at the accident data --

Fukushima,

Chernobyl --

World Health Organization
finds the same thing:

the vast majority of harm
is caused by people panicking --

and they're panicking
because they're afraid.

In other words,

the harm that's caused isn't
actually caused by the machines

or the radiation.

It's caused by our fears.

And what about the waste?

Everyone worries about the waste.

Well the interesting thing about the waste
is how little of it there is.

This is just from one plant.

If you take all the nuclear waste
we've ever made in the United States,

put it on a football field,

stacked it up,

it would only reach 20 feet high.

And people say it's poisoning people
or doing something --

it's not, it's just sitting there,

it's just being monitored.

There's not very much of it.

By contrast,

the waste that we don't control
from energy production --

we call it pollution

and it kills seven million people a year

and it's threatening very serious
levels of global warming.

And the truth is that even if we get
good at using that waste as fuel,

there's always going to be
some fuel left over,

and that means there's always going to be
those people that think it's a big problem

for reasons that maybe don't have to do
with the actual waste as we think.

Well, what about the weapons?

Maybe the most surprising thing
is that we can't find any examples

of countries that have nuclear power

and then, "Oh," decide to get a weapon.

In fact it works the opposite.

What we find is that

the only way we know how to get rid
of large numbers of nuclear weapons

is by using the plutonium in the warheads
as fuel in our nuclear power plants.

And so if you are wanting to get
the world rid of nuclear weapons,

then we're going to need
a lot more nuclear power.

(Applause)

As I was leaving China,

the engineer that brought Bill Gates there
kind of pulled me aside

and he said,

"You know, Michael,
I appreciate you interest

in all the different nuclear
supply technologies,

but there's this more basic issue,

which is that there's just not
enough global demand.

I mean we can crank out
these machines on assembly lines,

we do know how to make things cheap,

but there's just not enough
people that want them."

And so let's do solar and wind
and efficiency and conservation.

Let's accelerate the advanced
nuclear programs.

I think we should triple the amount
of money we're spending on it.

But I just think the most important thing,

if we're going to overcome
the climate crisis,

is to keep in mind that the cause
of the clean energy crisis

isn't from within our machines,

it's from within ourselves.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)