-
Have you heard the news?
-
We're in a clean energy revolution.
-
And where I live in Berkeley, 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 to race to build the first
reactor that runs on waste,
-
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,
-
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 story,
-
but what we found really surprised us.
-
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.
-
A big part of this is simply
that fossil fuels are increasing
-
faster than clean energy.
-
And that's understandable.
-
There's just a lot of poor countries
-
that are still 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 its generation
has declined seven percent
-
over the last 10 years.
-
Now, solar and wind have been
making huge strides,
-
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 electricity
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 commitments 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, they're just never
going to be as efficient
-
as the electrical grid.
-
Every time you put electricity
into a battery and take it out,
-
you lose about 20 to 40
percent of the power.
-
That's why when, in California,
-
we try to deal with all the solar
we've brought online --
-
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.
-
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 traveled to India a few months ago.
-
We met with all the top officials --
solar, nuclear, the rest --
-
and what they told us is,
-
"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 Intergovernmental
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.
-
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 actually 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 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 there's the association with weapons.
-
And I think, understandably,
-
engineers look at those concerns
and look for technological fixes.
-
That's why Bill Gates is in China
developing advanced reactors.
-
That's why 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.
-
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 Berkeley 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 --
-
start to crank out small nuclear
reactors on assembly lines,
-
ship them up like iPhones or MacBooks
and send them around the world.
-
I would get one at home in Berkeley.
-
But what I found was somewhat different.
-
The presentations were all
very exciting and very promising;
-
they have multiple 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 responded back, they were like,
-
"I'm not sure what you've heard
about our 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 me 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 online
now, they're 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 ever 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'll
actually 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.
-
The truth is,
-
there's real questions about how much
of that we're going to do.
-
I mean, we went to India and asked
about the nuclear program.
-
The government said
before the Paris climate talks
-
that they were going to do something
like 30 new nuclear plants.
-
But when we got there
and interviewed people
-
and 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.
-
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 at risk
-
of losing four times more clean energy
than we lost over 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:
-
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 of 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 --
-
the 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.
-
That means there's always going to be
people that think it's a big problem
-
for reasons that maybe don't have
as much 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 go get a weapon.
-
In fact, it works the opposite.
-
What we find is, the only way we know
-
how to get rid 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)