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[Narrator] We've been trained from the very beginning
to fear nuclear power
and with it our terror of radiation.
It was in our subconsciousness.
There was the original sin of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It became a collective trauma.
With schoolchildren responding to nuclear alerts
and the need for fallout shelters.
Having been told more than once that civilization
could be destroyed in a few moments with little,
if any, warning.
There are movies in the 1950s
already picturing the doom of man
from radiated sea monsters,
and all kinds of genetically mutated
creatures.
No doubt, it was the outcome for us
who were severing Mother Nature from human nature
with our technology.
It was a horrible vision.
Bigger than any child's basic fear of death.
It was a death of everyone and everything.
The end of the world almost happened
in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But President Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev
of the Soviet Union mercifully backed down.
Young people began protesting the system
that produced cruel wars and nuclear weapons.
Along with various injustices and the destruction of nature.
A counterculture emerged offering a broad critique
of American society.
Industrial capitalism and corporate America
were seen as the enemy.
Earth Day 1970 marked a visible shift
in global consciousness,
drawing huge crowds who became a key rallying
point for environmentalism and the counterculture.
It created broad public support
for anti-pollution measures,
and within this atmosphere, the government's push
for nuclear energy was suddenly suspect.
Licensing and construction of nuclear reactors
was ramping up,
and the fear of nuclear energy plants
in your own backyard merged into an army
of other pollutions fouling the earth.
- We realize that when these multinational corporations,
we are going to have uranium mining
and uranium milling.
We're going to have possibly nuclear power plants,
we're going to possibly have high level
nuclear waste disposal.
[Speaker #1] No one in the world wants nuclear waste.
[Protester] We have to have either oil or coal
or whatever, but certainly not nuclear.
[Narrator] And as with all emerging technologies,
there were setbacks.
[Anchorman] It was the first step
in a nuclear nightmare.
As far as we know at this hour, no worse than that.
[Narrator] Three Mile Island was the only famous
nuclear accident in the United States ever.
[Anchorman] ...fifty thousand gallons of radioactive water
escaped into the reactor building...
[Narrator] Yet no one was harmed.
But the public was shaken.
And the breathless news coverage
with no acknowledgment of the lack of casualties.
[Anchorwoman] Officials of Metropolitan Edison
conceded some workers may have been contaminated.
[Narrator] Stoked their fears into a sense of urgency
and even panic.
[Narrator] But in a twist of history, it happened
just as a fictional nuclear power disaster movie
was in theaters.
[Jack] Barney, give me feedwater! Goddamn it!
[Kimberly] No please, let me ask a question.
[Reporter] Tell us what happened inside.
[Narrator] Misinformation about nuclear's true potential
and safety spread rampant.
[Unknown] If there's one accident,
it could just devastate an area like southern New York State
[Speaker #2] Nuclear power would produce
over 32,000 cancer deaths per year in the United States.
[Narrator] People don't think well
when they're scared.
Fear is a mind killer.
And all these fears traumatized young people.
And as momentum built towards anti-nuclear sentiment,
a second potentially avoidable disaster struck.
- [Speaking Russian]
[Translator] We were recently stricken by a disaster,
the Chernobyl nuclear power accident.
It deeply affected the Soviet people
and disturbed world opinion.
[Narrator] I too, once believed the environmentalists
were right and that nuclear power
was dangerous.
We were in our way terribly miseducated,
subconsciously cross-wiring nuclear war with nuclear power.
And then as nuclear energy was being quietly shunted
to the side as an aberration in our scientific development,
another physical revolution snowballed into
the public consciousness.
Completely eclipsing the nuclear controversy.
Climate change.
It was as bad or even worse to the imagination
as nuclear extinction had been.
Which in a way we had accustomed ourselves to.
But here now is a monster that could, in fact,
deliver the end of the world.
Climate scientists were now warning us that humans
were destabilizing the world's ecological systems.
In 1988, the congressional testimony
of Dr. James Hansen, a leading climate scientist,
rang the alarm loudly and clearly.
- We have already reached one tipping point,
and we are going to lose all of the sea ice
in the Arctic in the summer season.
[Narrator] Among others, he clarified they were burning
more and more fossil fuels and dumping too much carbon
into the atmosphere.
Mostly gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
These gases were raising global temperatures
and beginning to change the climate.
An outspoken minority reacted with sarcasm and anger.
- You know what this is? It's a snowball.
And that's just from outside here.
So it's very, very cold out, very unseasonal.
So, Mr. President, catch this.
[Narrator] They thought the notion highly exaggerated
and overblown, while on the other side,
many others reacted with alarm, demanding radical change.
[Greta Thunberg] Hope is taking action.
We can still turn this around.
It will take drastic annual emission cuts
unlike anything the world has ever seen.
[Narrator] In 2021, the IPCC stated
that if we didn't cut carbon emissions by nearly 100%
in less than 30 years, by 2050 the world would suffer
serious damage to ecosystems and economies
because we are still depending on fossil fuels for one
of our most basic needs.
Electricity.
Most of our power still comes from burning gas
and coal, and the amount is going up not down.
The resulting volume of carbon free electricity
needed over the next 30 years is almost unimaginable.
Realistic estimates range from two to four times
the electricity we currently use.
This is an even bigger problem than we thought.
How can we create even more electricity
and still cut down on carbon dioxide emissions
to halt the climate crisis?
We've run out of time to be afraid.
It's time to look again at a proven source of energy.
It's time to look again at nuclear.
Because this incredible power, the very thing that we fear
is what may save us.
An estimated five billion years ago,
our sun and solar system
were formed in the aftermath of an exploding star.
Scientists call this kind of explosion a supernova.
Light, x-rays and radio waves
pour out in every direction
and immense shock waves with unimaginable energy
fling matter across great distances.
A bit of that matter collided
and became Earth.
Hidden below the surface of this newly formed planet
are many elements that were created
in that supernova,
including those we extract from the earth like tin,
copper, gold and many others.
One of these elements is the element of uranium.
Packed with energy from its creation
in a supernova.
It's a natural energy source that has been there
connecting us to our galaxy for billions of years.
The presence of this star power throughout the planet,
radiating energy has kept the earth warm
since before life began, and still does.
In 1896, five thousand years into our recorded history,
the Polish born Marie Curie and her French scientist
husband, Pierre Curie, along with French engineer
Henri Becquerel,
discovered the energy releasing property
of certain elements like uranium.
[Marie] It's there.
[Narrator] They knew then that the whole conception
of matter would be changed.
That there indeed existed a unique form of matter
that was not inert, that was alive
with a superpower.
Marie Curie named it radioactivity.
They could only imagine what this volatile matter
could become or later achieve.
For this, one of the greatest gifts
nature has ever given us - energy in a new form -
they received the Nobel Prize.
Then, just a few years later, in 1905,
independently working in Zurich, Switzerland,
the theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein,
discovered the astounding truth that in its simplest form,
matter is energy waiting
to happen and that the earth contains more energy
than we ever imagined.
Liberating energy from matter was now the new challenge.
Scientists then discovered that particles colliding
with the uranium atoms sometimes split
the uranium into smaller fragments
with a large and rapid release of energy.
They named this process fission, which could access
the stored energy quickly instead of in a slow trickle,
as does radioactivity.
The physics of fission were first explained
by the Austrian, Lise Meitner, in 1938.
But unfortunately that year, through a coincidence
of history, came on the eve of the biggest war ever.
And the first thing people did with this scientific
breakthrough was make a bomb.
And use it.
America's Manhattan Project, born out of World War Two,
created the knowledge and fuel to build such a bomb.
By packing uranium together densely enough,
scientists learned to create a chain reaction.
Enrico Fermi and his team, in 1942, created the first
controlled nuclear chain reaction
in a squash court under the University of Chicago Stadium.
The stadium did not blow up, nor the university.
They had built a simple device in which a pile of graphite
and uranium was filled with cadmium rods
that slowed the chain reaction.
As the rods were removed one by one,
the uranium fission chain reaction began.
Remove more rods and the energy increased.
Put some rods back in place and it decreased.
Thus if a chain reaction could be sustained
and accelerated,
it would result in a powerful explosion.
The good news was that uranium's energy
could be controlled.
As Fermi had done in Chicago.
If controlled, the potential of this new discovery
for the benefit of society was beyond measure.
The first productive use of that energy was
to run submarines and ships.
Admiral Hyman Rickover was a poor Jewish immigrant
who once admitted to the Naval Academy, never left the Navy.
He had the mind of an engineer who seeing the goal clearer
than anyone, cut through time
and space to make it happen.
The idea of solving a problem, building something,
creating something drove him all his life.
[Hyman G. Rickover] This is the reactor or the atomic pile.
There's uranium in here.
[Narrator] Rickover built the first nuclear reactor
that fit into a submarine hull.
The USS Nautilus was inspired in part by Jules Verne's
classic 19th century fable
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Exploring our original home in the sea.
Nautilus was, in its own way, a fantasy underwater vehicle
designed and built by Rickover in just three years
between 1952 and '54.
It was a magnificent achievement
and over the next three decades, Rickover supervised
the building of hundreds of reactors
all quickly and successfully.
The Navy still has one hundred of them operating now.
More than sixty years later, the Navy has run this fleet
of small floating reactors for a combined six thousand
reactor years without a single major nuclear related incident.
An aircraft carrier is a 100,000 ton,
six thousand person city of steel moving
at 35 miles an hour.
It's an awesome piece of technology
that's being powered by supernova energy.
In other words,
a mere two reactors so compact
that they could fit into a large living room.
With just one of these reactors,
the submarine can stay submerged for months
and thousands of miles.
It doesn't need refueling for 25 years.
- A fuel pellet the size of my tip of my pinky
has as much energy as a ton of coal.
The uranium to make that pellet costs a buck or two.
A ton of coal costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100.
Huge difference.
And nuclear operates so cleanly you can do it underwater
with 150 people sealed up in a ship and having
their power plant running.
Now imagine trying to operate even just
a small gasoline engine
in a sealed building. It wouldn't take very long
before you'd kill everybody.
After I went on board submarines,
I recognized that all the things that excited me
were still there.
And technically it was so easy.
The secret that nobody wants to tell you,
from who serves in the Navy is, the easiest job in the Navy
Is being a reactor operator on a submarine.
[Narrator] Really?
- You don't have to do anything,
you're sitting there and everything works
and you just sit there.
[Narrator] In a major address at the United Nations in front
of 3500 delegates from most of the countries of the world,
President Eisenhower shared his vision
for nuclear technology.
[Dwight D. Eisenhower] This greatest of destructive forces
can be developed into a great boon
for the benefit of all mankind.
[Narrator] Eisenhower proposed that the only way to overcome
international conflict was to use nuclear power
to produce cheap and massive amounts
of electricity.
- Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy
to the needs of agriculture, medicine
and other peaceful activities.
A special purpose would be to provide abundant
electrical energy in the power starved areas
of the world.
Thus, the contributing powers would be dedicating
some of their strength to serve the needs
rather than the fears of mankind.
[Narrator] He went on to make probably the most
optimistic statement of his eight years in office.
[Eisenhower] The United States pledges before you to devote
its entire heart and mind to find the way
by which the miraculous inventiveness
of man shall not be dedicated to his death,
but consecrated to his life.
[Narrator] The entire assembly of delegates
from around the world, including the Soviet Union,
responded with warm and sustained applause.
Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program was born here.
This was a most promising moment for mankind.
Fulfilling his pledge to the world and turning
to his proven team, Eisenhower asked
Admiral Rickover and the Navy to build a nuclear reactor
that could generate civilian electricity.
Adapting his submarine design,
Rickover went at it in his usual way
and in Shippingport, Pennsylvania,
broke ground in 1954 and began generating in 1958.
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It's the Westinghouse Total Electric Home,
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[Narrator] The Cold War was a period of prosperity.
The plan was that by the 21st century,
the American economy would be mostly nuclear powered
with little, if any, air pollution.
No climate gases and grids of plentiful,
clean electricity criss- crossing the country.
New York City was going to be powered by nuclear
reactors, the first of which was being built upriver
at Indian Point.
Carbon emission would drop substantially.
You would be in the process of electrifying
our entire country.
Futurists imagine modern, all-electric cities
with electric heat, light and air conditioning
in our homes and buildings.
Electric trains would replace diesel
and new transportation systems would evolve.
Westinghouse and General Electric followed
in Rickover's tracks and from the late 1960s
to the '80s, built almost 100 large reactors.
Other countries followed.
France embracing the vision of its president,
Charles de Gaulle, opened its first
nuclear power plant in 1964, at Chinon.
And then from 1975 to '90, in response
to the escalating price of oil in the crisis of 1973,
built 56 reactors in 15 years.
Sweden built a dozen reactors on four sites
in the '70s and '80s.
Six of those plants continue to operate today,
producing 30% of Sweden's electricity and most
of the rest coming from hydro, wind and biofuels.
Sweden during this time cut its carbon emissions by 50%.
And contrary to what many critics claimed
would be a disaster for its economy,
electricity generation more than doubled and its economy
actually expanded by 50%.
The same is true for Canada, which built 19 reactors
of Canadian design,
mostly in the industrial heartland of Ontario province,
which in those years switched off coal
and reduced emissions by 90%.
West Germany launched its first commercial reactor
in 1969, and by 2010,
22% of the electricity
of a reunited Germany came from nuclear.
Japan, which imported its first commercial reactor
from England in 1966, had five operating reactors
going by 1973 and was expanding construction
with a major program.
By the end of the '70s Japan had become an expert
in standardized designs and exporting nuclear
to other countries in Asia.
But the world's first nuclear power plant
to ever produce clean electricity
was actually built back in 1954 by the Soviets.
[Speaker #3] The atomic power station has become one
of the operating industrial plants of the USSR.
[Narrator] The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant today stands
as a museum and a monument to clean energy
and the power of the atom.
[Speaker #3] The process of uranium nuclear fission
releasing atomic energy takes place in this reactor.
[Narrator] Many important world figures visited the plant
in operation,
including three high level American delegations
curious about its usages for industrial production,
as well as any signals for use in war.
They could find none.
But it was a signal from the Soviet Union
in the middle of the Cold War, a demonstration of their
peaceful intentions.
Especially after Eisenhower's speech asking
for a shared nuclear knowhow for the benefit of all mankind.
[Speaker #4] Atoms are working for peace.
[Narrator] This mid-century dream of a fuel efficient world
run by clean atomic energy, without fossil fuels.
It was all within our grasp.
So what happened to this promising moment?
Eisenhower's 1953 vision of Atoms for Peace
was a mortal threat to the rich and powerful coal
and oil industries,
and they were ready to challenge nuclear energy
from the beginning.
The giant oil companies nicknamed the Seven Sisters
straddling all the world's markets since early
in the century, spent a great deal of money
to present themselves as necessary to our prosperity.
America's iconic oil family, the Rockefellers,
through their foundation, set about promoting the idea
that low level radiation harms human health.
[Adams] And so they set up a committee to study
the biological effects of atomic radiation and kind
of put their thumb on the scale for what the committee's results
would be.
And then they took one of the directors
from the Rockefeller Foundation, a guy named Warren Weaver,
was put in charge of this genetics committee.
And, not surprising to me, the report from
the Genetics Committee came out on June 12th, 1956,
and said radiation all the way down
to a single gamma ray was hazardous to your health.
The Rockefeller Foundation included the publisher
of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger.
So if they wanted to help sway public opinion,
they didn't need to buy ads necessarily.
They just helped get a particular point
of view published.
[Narrator] The resulting fear of low level radiation,
which has never garnered evidence to justify it,
began to erode the optimism around this new industry.
The Sierra Club promoted nuclear power
before it opposed it.
The club was an old organization founded in 1892,
primarily devoted to hiking, climbing and exploring nature.
Will Siri, a biophysicist from Berkeley,
an experienced mountaineer and a veteran of Oppenheimer's
Manhattan Project, had been influential
in conserving the California redwoods
and the Grand Canyon.
Like many early conservationists,
he strongly favored nuclear energy and arranged
for the club's blessing to the opening
of California's Diablo Canyon reactor in San Luis Obispo,
in 1966.
Twice the club membership voted to support the action.
Siri said at the time:
- Nuclear power is one of the chief long term
hopes for conservation.
[Narrator] Ansel Adams, the club's legendary
photographer and board member, said nuclear was
the only practical alternative that we have
to destroying the environment with oil and coal.
[Adams] They spent a lot of time in their early years fighting
against dams that would fill up valleys full of water.
The Sierra Club used to have a campaign
called Atoms, not Dams! under David Brower.
And then David Brower left the Sierra Club
in a huff and founded Friends of the Earth.
And I'd known Friends of the Earth was
a big anti-nuclear organization, but then I found out
where David Brower got his first check,
$200,000 from Robert Anderson, who was the CEO of Arco.
He wrote the first check to David Brower,
who was founding a environmentalist organization
specifically to fight nuclear energy.
So why would an oil guy fund Friends of the Earth?
Makes sense to me.
And it's not conspiracy, it's simply business.
[Narrator] Soon Brouwer's faction regained
power in the Sierra Club and switched its position.
Other groups sprang up as well, notably Greenpeace in 1971,
in Vancouver, Canada.
Along with issues like saving the whales,
it fuzed a peace position on nuclear disarmament
with an environmental position on opposing nuclear energy.
- We lumped nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons
as if all things nuclear were evil.
This was a mistake.
We got a lot of things right,
stop the bombs, save the whales, stop toxic waste, etcetera.
But we made that one serious error.
[Narrator] The new battleground was Ohio, where new reactors
were to be built instead of coal plants.
The environmental groups hired lobbyists
and filed lawsuits.
The young attorney, Ralph Nader, who gained
the public's trust in the mid '60s
with his criticism of the safety of American cars,
joined the cause and now helped turn the public
against nuclear power.
[Ralph Nader] If we stop nuclear power, or shall we say
when we stop nuclear power, we will usher in
throughout the United States and the world,
a new energy alternative. The sun.
The sun, which Exxon doesn't like because it's free,
it's abundant, it can bypass Exxon.
Stopping atomic energy is saving this country.
[Narrator] He wildly exaggerated the dangers from radioactivity,
saying a nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland
and the survivors would envy the dead.
Six of the eight Ohio reactors planned were closed,
including one canceled in 1975 when it was 97% complete.
It was then turned into a coal plant.
To this day, two thirds of Ohio electricity
is powered by dirty coal,
which alone kills about half a million people
worldwide per year and sickens millions more
with horrible effects such as cancer, emphysema
and heart disease.
- If you want to accuse us of having raised the cost
of building new nuclear plants by demanding more regulation,
I plead guilty.
[Narrator] In 1979, there were 72 commercial
reactors in the US.
[Anchorman] Early this morning at a nuclear power plant
in Pennsylvania...
[Narrator] But then came Three Mile Island.
The reactor overheated and partially melted down.
But the containment structure prevented radiation
from affecting the surroundings.
[Anchorman] There was no apparent serious contamination
of workers.
[Narrator] But the accident in 1979 was a gift
to the anti-nuclear movement
that would lead to a halt in the building
of any more nuclear reactors.
Later that year, a star studded cast
of musicians put on five nights of No Nukes concerts
at Madison Square Garden.
[Music]
Followed by a rally on Battery Park landfill
attended by 200,000 people.
[Music]
Along with Ralph Nader and other stars,
Jane Fonda spoke.
[Jane Fonda] The money that is being raised is going
to support all of the local anti-nuclear groups
around the country and I want to express my gratitude
and I know you feel the same way.
[Narrator] She followed up with a 32 day, 50 city tour
to spread the gospel and raise a good deal of money
For the environmental groups, stopping nuclear power
was now glamorous, virtuous and lucrative all at once.
And they had a friend in President Jimmy Carter,
who promoted energy conservation
and installed solar panels on the White House
while downgrading nuclear energy below coal
on his list of priorities.
[Anchorman] It does now seem likely that sometime
in the last couple of days there's been perhaps
the worst accident in the short history
of the world's nuclear power industry.
But the fact that they have had to reveal it and admit
that there are casualties suggests they're deeply
worried about the scale of it.
[Narrator] When Chernobyl in the Ukraine,
part of the Soviet Union, struck, it deeply shook
the public's faith in nuclear.
It was just what the environmentalists
had feared and predicted.
But what happened exactly?
There's no question the reactor was poorly designed
and lacked a containment structure
to keep radiation from leaking out into the environment.
The operators carried out a risky experiment that led
to a meltdown
which was very badly handled
by the bureaucracy of what was then an empire in decay,
the Soviet Union, which tried to keep it secret.
This allowed low level radiation to spread across
northern Europe
before the government finally admitted the problem.
They sent in first responders with inadequate protective gear
to get the fire under control.
These men were exposed to massive doses of radiation.
Vladimir Asmolov was a scientist in charge
of the investigation.
As he spoke, I saw he was haunted
by the event.
Yeah, it was a big responsibility,
but you're not responsible for the explosion.
You were in charge of the cleanup.
[Narrator] He thought the highly successful
HBO series was a fiction,
that the real scientists were professional
and that there was no conflict with the government
or the International Atomic Energy Agency.
[Narrator] According to the United Nations
and World Health Organization,
about 50 people died
from radiation at the reactor.
And possibly 4000 from cancers over the long term
in areas downwind.
That's a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands
of deaths every year from generating electricity
with coal.
Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear power
accident in history,
was far less deadly than many industrial tragedies.
In 1984, a Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India,
where a chemical gas leaked, killed 15 to 20 thousand people
and injured half a million more.
The 1975 collapse of a hydroelectric dam in China
killed roughly 200 thousand people.
Outdoor air pollution kills
an estimated four million people a year.
Industrial accidents and disease,
roughly two million.
Nuclear's death toll, all from Chernobyl is at most
in the low thousands, which is a very tiny fraction
of fossil fuel deaths.
[Narrator] By the early '90s, activist anti-nuclear groups
were on fire, calling for no compromise
on the bottom line that nuclear power
must be eliminated and that any amount
of radiation, even if below the normal background levels,
had to be treated as a risk to human health.
Every new nuclear related project,
from mining to transport to construction operation
and decommissioning, was now facing a series
of legal, political and economic obstacles
that would stall any further progress.
The supposed death knell for the industry finally
happened 25 years after Chernobyl
in Fukushima, Japan in 2011.
It was the second largest accident in nuclear history.
It happened when the biggest earthquake
Japan ever suffered
created a tsunami one hundred feet tall.
The earthquake and the tsunami killed about
18,000 people, but it had nothing to do
with nuclear power.
All the nuclear plants in the tsunami's path,
with one exception, avoided serious damage.
But the plant at Fukushima, like Chernobyl's,
was poorly designed.
Not the reactor but the site design.
It had too low a seawall, less than twenty feet
and all back up generators were located on low ground
where they flooded.
The plant lost electricity. The core melted down.
Hydrogen gas built up and exploded inside
the building and radiation was released into the air.
But the authorities, unlike at Chernobyl,
did not send in unprotected people to fight
the highly radioactive fire,
and the public never received more than low level
harmless radiation.
Fukushima might be the only disaster
in history widely called a nuclear disaster
by almost everyone with a death toll of zero
from nuclear.
More than six hundred died from the badly managed
forced evacuation
such as when patients were abruptly yanked
out of hospitals.
But the actual disaster was the tsunami
with its 18,000 victims.
[Speaking Japanese]
[Narrator] Nonetheless, Japan reacted in panic,
closing down all its nuclear plants,
whether affected by the earthquake or not
and the country remained frozen with doubt.
In 2021, ten years after the accident,
only ten of Japan's 33 operable reactors were in use.
Imported fossil fuels replaced the rest.
The negativity of world opinion resulting from both Chernobyl
and Fukushima now reached a critical mass.
Germany took the most severe course
and under significant political pressure
from the Green Party
began phasing out all 17 of its nuclear reactors.
While continuing to rely on coal plants.
Even in Sweden, winds were blowing
against nuclear.
The new government that included the Green Party
dramatically raised anti-nuclear taxes,
which led to the premature retirement
of four reactors.
South Korea had a well trained generation of engineers
and scientists and a standardized design
and had been generating electricity at a very low price
when it decided to pull back.
The heavily publicized 2016 feature, Pandora,
which pictured an accident far worse
than the actual Fukushima,
grabbed and swayed public opinion against nuclear
and the government stopped construction on new plants.
The trend of politicians around most
developed countries of shutting down
well working nuclear reactors met little political
opposition.
And it became far easier to approve a new methane gas
power plant
or a new coal plant.
And without forward movement, the US nuclear industry
was slowly declining as well.
With existing plants being shut down early,
including Indian Point, which supplied 25%
of New York City's electricity for many years.
And the planned closing of Diablo Canyon,
California's last remaining nuclear power plant.
Although in 2022, this was reversed
after a fierce battle.
- I now believe that nuclear is vital
to our future on this planet,
and I've helped start a group called Mothers for Nuclear
to help explain why.
[Narrator] These reactors have operated safely
and reliably for decades,
producing about 9% of California's electricity
in recent years.
There are still a number of nuclear reactors working
in the United States today.
These legacy reactors, more than 30 or 40 years later,
still supply 20% of US electricity.
Working 24/7 without oil spills,
gas leaks or coal pollution.
They have become so uneventful,
it's easy to forget they even exist.
Many people to this day still think that these plants
are capable of blowing up like a nuclear bomb.
But that's physically impossible because
their uranium is not sufficiently enriched
in any way close to the necessary amount.
The idea that low levels of radiation are dangerous
right down to near zero is a contamination phobia.
Which when you think it through,
is kind of ridiculous.
We've evolved, after all, on a planet filled
with uranium and bombarded by both sunlight and cosmic rays.
Our bodies are built by nature and evolution to handle
small amounts of radiation.
Medical procedures such as dentistry
account for about one third of the radiation
from which humans are exposed.
The other two thirds being natural background radiation.
This low level background radiation doubles
if you live at altitude in Denver, Colorado.
Or triples if you work on a long distance airline crew
or if you smoke a pack of cigarettes each day.
The FDA sets a radiation dose limit
for diagnostic procedures.
Radioactive iodine treatment of thyroid cancer
delivers one hundred thousand millisieverts to the thyroid
and 200 millisieverts as a whole body dose.
Granite contains some uranium and you get extra radiation
if you live near a mountain or work in a building
like the US Capitol.
And it's far higher in Ramsar, Iran
with its radium hot springs
or the black sand beaches of Brazil
where people bury themselves in the sand to get
what they consider a healthy dose.
High levels of radiation are dangerous for sure.
People died and got very sick from exposure in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, and at Chernobyl.
But there is no basis for the public perception
that the offspring from these survivors
had an increased rate of genetic defects.
Massive and careful long term studies do not
support these conceptions.
Fears of passing down horrible mutations
like the three eyed fish in The Simpsons
are without foundation.
[Music]
[Narrator] So what kind of audience do you get
and what kind of feedback?
- On Tik Tok it's mostly 18 to 25 year old females,
which is unheard of for science communicators.
A single one of my videos can get something like
500,000 views, and that's 500,000 people
that didn't know anything about nuclear power,
but now do and might have changed their minds.
- What are some of the things young girls say?
- Some things like, I used to think that millions
of people died when Chernobyl happened,
so there are a lot of people changing their minds around that
and nuclear waste as well.
The nuclear industry is the only energy generating
industry that's actually responsible for its waste
because it is radioactive,
and so as soon as it comes out of the plant,
it's handled by the industry.
- We have a highly rigorous process
to manage the waste coming from a nuclear plant,
and we can tell you exactly where every bit of waste
is from every nuclear plant that is operated.
It's contained, it's located on sites that are protected.
We can't say the same for many other energy resources
where waste goes up in the air or we have piles of tailings
from those materials.
And I hesitate to call it waste a lot of times
because it's really just used fuel.
- Not a single person anywhere in the world
has ever been harmed by used nuclear fuel.
[Narrator] What many don't know is that if we brought together
all of America's spent fuel from sixty years
of powering 20% of our electricity,
it would be the size of a Walmart.
Sixty years, 20% of our electricity
would be the size of a Walmart.
There is nothing uniquely dangerous
about radioactive materials.
They're just one of many industrial materials
that can be toxic and must be handled carefully.
The US solution for now is dry cask cylinders 18ft high
made of concrete and steel that keep radiation contained
and are not damaged by things like earthquakes.
Concrete absorbs radiation.
The government hopes to use the spent fuel someday
to power new reactor types.
Or it can, like their military
has been doing for years,
safely bury the waste underground
because radioactive materials actually lose potency
over time.
Finland is already building a permanent storage site
for spent fuel in bedrock deep underground,
sealed in copper canisters and backfilled with clay.
Sweden plans to use the same design.
[Boemeke] Two billion years ago in Gabon, in Africa,
there were natural nuclear reactors,
meaning in these uranium mines in Africa,
water would pull around the uranium
and that would create a chain reaction.
And so these reactors operated for hundreds
of thousands of years, and they left behind
what we call nuclear waste fission products.
And just by analyzing where these fission products are
in the area, scientists actually know that nuclear waste
doesn't move very far, even in a scale of hundreds
of thousands of years, or in this case,
two billion years.
Hey guys, so a lot of you have been asking
about my makeup routine. The most important thing
is to make sure you wash your face really well,
because we want those pores as clean as we want
our electricity.
And the best way to get that is to use this cleanser
called Stop Shutting Down Nuclear Plants,
for Christ's Sake.
It's carbon free, emission free, pollution free electricity.
The answer to solving climate change
is very straightforward.
We have the solutions.
We just have to implement them.
You know, the first question is,
But isn't it too dangerous? What about the waste?
Nuclear waste is nothing compared to climate change.
[Narrator] In 2006, the film An Inconvenient Truth,
produced by former Vice President Al Gore,
dramatized vividly the dangers of carbon emissions
and overheating the planet.
Look how far above the natural cycle this is,
and we've done that.
[Jerry Seinfeld] And the Oscar goes to An Inconvenient Truth.
[Narrator] It opened with a worldwide impact
and won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.
In the years that followed, the issue of climate change
became even more polarized, with conservatives holding
on to their position that this was not
an extraordinary event created by mankind.
- Climate change is not science.
It's religion.
[Narrator] In 2017, President Trump,
despising tree huggers and liberals,
pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord
and called climate change a hoax.
At the other extreme, environmentalists and activists
were folding the issue of climate change
into a wider agenda of ending capitalism and globalization,
bringing to the forefront inequality.
[Thunberg] We are in the beginning
of a mass extinction and all you can talk about
is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you?
[Narrator] But most people were in the middle,
confused by the claims but scared by the changes
they were seeing so vividly in the weather, oceans
and animal kingdom.
People wanted not partizan or ideological solutions,
but practical ones.
One solution that gained momentum
during this time was clean energy
in the form of renewables.
Global investment in renewables reached close
to three trillion dollars.
Costs dropped by 80% for solar and 50% for wind.
A giant step.
Together wind and solar grew from about 2% to 10%
of world electricity generation.
Hydroelectric power, the biggest of the renewables,
expanded across Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
But despite the massive effort and the optimism,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC,
stated in 2018 and again more strongly in 2021
that if we didn't cut carbon emissions by nearly 100%
in less than 30 years,
by 2050, the world would suffer
serious damage to ecosystems and economies.
There'd be mega changes like the melting
of polar ice sheets, the sea level rise.
Coastal cities might become uninhabitable.
There'd be an increase in frequency and size
of extreme weather events, forest fires, droughts,
terrible heat waves, and unusually strong
hurricanes.
Ominously, the predictions from the 1980s
are proving to be accurate because we're still depending
on fossil fuels and we're in the same place we were
at the turn of the century.
How can that be?
We have put such effort and money into renewables,
yet we burn more fossil fuels than ever.
To understand how this happened,
Germany is a good case in point.
No nation has done more to promote green power
in the last 20 years and received a great deal
of favorable publicity.
Germany made the fateful decision
to phase out nuclear power by 2022.
[Speaking German]
[Translator] We won't support even a one second extension
for an energy form that we can't fully control.
[Narrator] Replacing it with roughly the same amount
of electricity using renewable power instead.
How did that work out?
Germany's largest solar plant with 465 thousand panels,
was built on 500 acres.
The nuclear plant, which was recently closed,
was built on about 100 acres.
It operated around the clock, all seasons,
all weather, on average, producing at near 90%
of its peak.
The average for the solar plant has been about 11%
of its peak because most of the time it's either night,
winter or cloudy.
So the reality is that a nuclear plant produces
almost 100 times the electricity per year
as a solar plant and can do so
on one fifth the land.
Germany also built about thirty thousand
wind turbines, some of the newer ones
almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower.
Wind has worked for Germany, producing twice
as much electricity as solar.
But it still averages less than a quarter
of its peak capacity.
To equal the same amount of nuclear power
would require four thousand giant turbines spread
over many square kilometers
and would still depend on the weather.
One way to make wind and solar more efficient
when weather is a factor is to store some of their power
in batteries.
Their prices are dropping quickly and there's
an intense race going on.
China at this point is far in a lead, producing more
than 70% of all battery cells.
Still, despite the promise of bigger and better batteries,
Bill Gates, who's invested one billion dollars
in renewables, has said there's no battery technology
that's even close to allowing us to take all
of our energy from renewables.
[Bill Gates] It'll be a lot of renewables.
And either a storage miracle or are quite a bit of nuclear.
[Narrator] The problem is scale.
What works for a phone or a car doesn't work
for a city or a continent.
Germany doesn't have the natural hydroelectric
potential like Norway or New Zealand,
and most of the great hydro sites in the world
are already dammed,
leaving little upside in development.
And geothermal energy, such as it exists in Iceland
is unproven outside of limited volcanic locations.
Which leaves biomass
the burning of organic material.
Germany cuts down and burns forests in Europe
and North America with a similar result
as fossil fuel pollution.
And yet it's called renewable energy,
because in theory,
new trees grow back when you cut the old ones down.
But it takes decades for the new trees to grow back.
The mathematics simply do not add up.
All of these renewables combined are not enough
to provide Germany's demand for energy,
so it still has to burn coal.
A more economical solution is natural gas,
also known as methane gas.
Which is widely available, especially since
the fracking revolution.
Is this a solution?
- Methane gas is less polluting than coal, that's true.
Half the CO2.
But that's still putting CO2 in
and every time you light a methane fire,
you're putting CO2 into the atmosphere,
and then the dirty secret of it is it leaks out
all along the line.
[Narrator] Although it's invisible to the eye,
methane can be seen by infrared cameras,
which reveal that it severely pollutes the atmosphere
when it leaks and escapes unburned.
- If you take a methane gas detector and go around,
you'll find that there's gas pipelines everywhere
under our streets, your gas stove,
you turn it on goes, click, click, click
and then it lights. That's unburned methane.
And when that stuff gets into the atmosphere,
it's 80 times worse for global warming than CO2.
And it doesn't last as long as CO2
but in the immediate, the next few decades,
it's a major problem.
Methane levels are going way up
in the atmosphere and it's definitely contributing
a lot to climate change.
[Narrator] It's no wonder that publicly oil
and gas companies fully support renewables
and lobby for subsidies.
They tell us natural gas is the perfect partner
for renewables, but it's a false solution.
In the last 30 years, renewables have been going
in on top of fossil fuels, not replacing them.
And that's why the overall proportion
of clean, renewable energy hasn't changed.
Sadly, more than 80% of energy use
is still fossil fuel.
Altogether Germany has spent over $200 billion on renewables
since 2013.
But within Europe, Germany has the highest
electricity prices and their carbon emissions
are among the highest.
This energy indecision is not just
a European phenomenon, but is something
that is affecting many countries on a global scale.
India with well over a billion people,
represents another crucial participant
in our world community.
Demand for air conditioning alone in India
and other hot countries is projected to triple
by 2050 worldwide.
India has made tremendous gains in solar power
and is planning to build at large scale very cheaply.
It is a new technology trained workforce.
Its solar power has become cheaper than coal,
and wind has become cost competitive.
Both energies are still weather dependent.
India has ventured into nuclear power
with 23 reactors on line
seven under construction and more planned.
And Indian consumers sick of the deadly pollution
in their cities may well push the government
to accelerate these kinds of clean energy initiatives.
But India is a democracy, and if you don't give people
what they want, which is cheap electricity,
you'll be voted out of office.
So the Indian government
says that for the foreseeable future,
75% of their electricity will be from coal.
In Russia, there is also some indecision
about their energy future.
It has a lot of cheap methane gas,
which can supply electricity and can be exported
successfully to other countries,
though at the cost of accelerating climate change.
But Russia has a significant nuclear program
as their government agency, Rosatom, employs some
quarter million engineers, researchers and employees.
[Speaking Russian]
[Translator] Global warming, which is caused by CO2 emission,
is something which is very painfully felt here
in Russia because a big chunk of Russia's territory
is located closer to the north.
This is why we actually feel all these variations
in temperature.
So I'll give you an example, Mr. Stone.
Currently in the world there is 490 gigawatts
of installed nuclear capacity.
If we replace this with gas or oil power generation,
that would cause emission of more than two billion tons
of CO2 into the atmosphere.
So nuclear industry is in fact an extra lung
that our world has.
[Narrator] Well said. An extra lung.
When it joined the World Trade Organization
on favorable terms in 2001,
China became the world's workshop.
Incomes rose for hundreds of millions of people.
And with agricultural and computer progress,
the expectations of people in general brightened.
But the worm in the apple was that as the West moved
much of its manufacturing to China,
more and more coal was burned.
Half of the world's coal is now burned in China.
The poster child of this shift was
the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge built by China.
Its pieces then shipped over and put together
in the Bay Area in 2013.
California brags that it doesn't burn coal.
It's a nice and clean state,
when China burns the coal for California.
China has a major decision to make which will impact
all our futures.
Does it modernize or does it continue
down the path of coal?
China's emissions combined with the United States
make up almost half of the world's total.
The key to decarbonization lies in these two countries
who ideally should be partners in this global issue.
[Goldstein] What's scary is not the same as what's dangerous.
Coal is dangerous.
It kills millions of people every year.
More people die from coal in a couple of weeks
than have ever died from nuclear,
which is all from the one accident in Chernobyl.
People are scared of flying because it's dramatic.
If a plane crashes, you know you're going to die.
[Whip] I'd say severe turbulence,
definitely severe turbulence.
[Goldstein] And they can't get that image out of their mind,
But actually, driving is far more dangerous
than flying.
And in the same way, a nuclear accident
because of all this hype around nuclear power
scares people.
But actually it's orders of magnitude safer
than fossil fuel, especially coal.
It's as though you're on a bridge and a train
is coming onto the bridge.
[Gordie] Train!
[Goldstein] And the train coming at you is climate change.
[Vern] Oh, shit.
[Goldstein] And what we're doing is trying to run off the bridge
away from the train, but we don't have time
to get off the bridge.
That's our renewables,
that's our personal carbon footprint,
all the little things that we're supposed to do.
But it's not working and the thing that we have
that we know works is to jump off the bridge
into the water below, and that's nuclear power.
The jump is scary, but it's the train that's going
to kill you.
[Narrator] Many in the West's post-industrial lifestyle
feel they're taking steps in the right direction.
And they are.
People preach the green gospel.
They recycle, they install solar panels
and look for sustainability in their consumer brands.
Turn out the lights, drive more efficient cars,
reduce your carbon footprint.
We do things that are politically doable,
affordable, convenient, and make us feel good
about being virtuous, better citizens.
And we all hope somewhat blindly
that these things will add up.
But they don't.
So what do we need to do?
How do we solve this problem in a better way
than just trying to add up things that don't get
to a solution?
The answer is to think objectively,
top down from the future,
Back to now and be very honest.
Where do we actually need to be in 2050
to solve carbon emissions?
And working backwards from there,
what steps can we take to get to that solution?
One place to start is to include everyone
in our thinking, not only the billion people
living in the richer parts of the world
but the 7 billion who don't.
And are now producing two thirds of carbon emissions.
Seven hundred million of whom don't have any access
to electricity.
Did the West think the populations of China,
Africa, India, South America and the Middle East
wouldn't want what we have?
Electricity in their homes, cars, computers,
air conditioners, modernized agriculture?
Or at a more basic level, if your destiny is
to grind sugarcane by hand in India,
that destiny can be hugely transformed
by an electric grinder.
That's why poorer countries are building electricity
generation as fast as they can, and they're using the cheapest,
fastest, simplest technology they can find.
Coal.
Can the West now seriously tell billions of people
they can't enjoy a life changing event
like electricity?
Because we've already burned up most of the carbon
the planet can afford?
Did we think these populations would use
less energy than we did?
And the truth be fully known,
it's not just electricity we need.
That's only a third of the total,
because two thirds of the energy related
carbon dioxide emissions come from non-electric sources.
That is most transportation, including cars, trucks,
trains, ships and planes.
Secondly, industries such as steel,
cement and fertilizer.
And thirdly, the heating of homes, offices
and all buildings which are not yet electrified.
And just to get these sectors off the coal, oil and gas
they depend on, they need to be electrified,
which will enormously multiply demand for clean electricity.
The resulting volume of carbon free electricity
needed over the next thirty years
is almost unimaginable.
It depends on several factors, but realistic estimates
range from two to four times the electricity
we currently use.
The world is not standing still as this is going on.
All these economies are growing fast month by month,
year by year.
We're going to need a gigantic amount
of clean electricity by 2050. Two, three, maybe four times
all the electricity we use now.
And it has to be cheap enough to outcompete coal and gas
and also scalable, able to be built
in large quantities and at quicker speed.
Realism dictates that renewables aren't going
to be able to bridge this energy gap.
And we don't have much time till 2050 to switch
over an extremely large system.
So it becomes apparent for the sake of humanity
that we must seriously reconsider nuclear energy.
At present, more than four hundred reactors
are producing over 10% of the world's electricity.
Dozens of countries are building more right now,
about fifty reactors in 16 countries,
notably in China India and Russia.
And another hundred are on order.
Most of these in Eurasia, with its rapidly
rising electricity demand.
Turkey, Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates
are newcomers to the game.
President Xi Jinping surprisingly suddenly announced
in 2020 to the United Nations that China intended
to drop its carbon emissions to zero by 2060.
This is a huge commitment.
But can China deliver?
They have 37 nuclear reactors and are building 19 more,
which is faster than anyone else.
They hook a new reactor to the grid every two
to three months.
Having adapted American, Russian, Canadian
and French designs over the years,
the Chinese now have their own design.
The Hualong One, which took about five years
to build and is now in operation.
These are inexpensive, heavy workhorse reactors
that can be built by the tens, maybe by the hundreds.
China also is building the Linglong One,
a low cost small modular reactor called an SMR,
a technology first deployed by the Russians.
It's about one third the size of the Hualong One
and can be built in a factory and either sited on land
or barged to locations around the world and plugged in.
Whether China's standardizes
and replicates its big reactors or small ones,
we will be investing deeply in the future of this century.
These reactors are going to last fifty to eighty years
or more.
There's no question the cost of building nuclear plants,
though dropping, is still huge.
The positive side is they're inexpensive to operate.
And once the pattern of building is established
successfully, reactors could conceivably
be built like airliners or giant turbines
on a factory scale at a central location.
The first fully functional SMR has already been successfully
deployed in Russia in a remote but important Arctic port town,
Pevek.
Built in the Saint Petersburg shipyards,
the plant was barged to the Arctic.
Greenpeace called it a nuclear Titanic.
But it dodged the icebergs, arrived in a new home,
plugged into both the grid and the district heating system
for the town's buildings, and in 2020 was powering
the town without a problem.
Similar to the United States,
Russia is operating 35 reactors
accounting for almost 20% of its electricity.
But unlike the United States, Russia is building
a new reactor each year to replace retirements
and raise the nuclear share of electricity
to what they plan, if they stick to it,
50% by mid-century and 75% by century's end.
Russia with 60% of the market is the world's leader
in exporting larger reactors
specializing in turnkey plants that it designs, builds
and operates.
Dozens of projects are under way
in India, China, Bangladesh, Turkey and elsewhere.
The most ambitious development in Russia is its fast
breeder reactors, which we visited close
to the foot of the Ural Mountains.
[Likhachev - Speaking Russian]
[Translator] Beloyarsk is a unique facility.
It's the only industrial scale fast reactor in the world.
In a conventional reactor, uranium fuel gradually degrades,
whereas in fast neutron reactor it becomes higher
and higher grade.
Then you have a capability to recycle the same fuel
multiple times.
[Translator] So we operate using the waste
from other reactor types.
We don't extract resources from the earth.
[Narrator] And why do you call it Fast Breeder?
- Because we breed,
we produce more fuel than we burn.
This is the most advanced nuclear reactor in the world.
[Narrator] With breeder reactors,
no one yet knows if this technology
will be cheap enough to standardize
and be the complete breakthrough technology.
Or perhaps it'll be the model for the next stage
and so on.
Like any science, nuclear keeps adapting
and renewing itself.
In 2021, Europe split into pro and anti nuclear camps.
The United Kingdom has begun to build again
with multiple reactors planned.
The Netherlands, Poland and much
of Eastern Europe all intend to build new plants
in the coming decades.
But with its 56 nuclear reactors and more promised,
France continues to be the true world leader
in clean energy.
[Engineer - Speaking French]
And when they look at it, they see that the end price
for corporations and for households
is significantly less in France than it is
in all the neighboring countries.
We believe that in 2050 mankind has the ability
to be a net zero planet or very close to net zero
in order for global warming to stop.
We need global warming to stop.
We believe electricity is the key success factor
in managing global warming issues,
and we believe there is, there are a lot of solutions
and nuclear is a key part of these solutions.
[Engineer - Speaking French]
Voila.
Welcome to the swimming pool.
The water is hot, clear
[Speaking French]
[Narrator] France still to this day, runs a clean grid
with one third of the carbon emissions
per person of the United States.
Truly a major accomplishment.
This brings us around to the United States
still dependent on fossil fuels. 40% gas, 20% coal.
Despite tripling output in the last decade,
wind power only supplies 8% of the nation's electricity.
And solar power, despite its highly publicized
fast growth generates only 2 to 3%.
But public support for nuclear energy has grown,
in fact, to 60% in 2021.
I was reading the book about the Wright brothers.
You know, they started this as bicycle mechanics,
but they wanted to fly and they kept doing it
and doing it and doing it. It took forever.
They flew twenty feet, thirty feet a minute.
It was a long haul, eight, nine years,
but they did it and they were the best fliers.
Well, it just shows you that tenacity
in scientific matters is crucial.
[Goldstein] And certainly the nuclear industry
in the United States has done that as it keeps
being counted out.
- Counted out for debt in the United States.
Never in the world.
- That's right.
Too good to let it die off. - Yeah.
It's too good to let it die off.
- Yeah.
[Narrator] The spirit of innovation has always defined
America's character.
And now 50 or more new companies
have entered the energy field
with creative new designs for nuclear reactors
with a focus on SMRs.
These new reactors are small, taking up a fraction
of the footprint needed for traditional nuclear power
reactors.
They're modular, making it possible
for these designs to be scaled up
and factory assembled, and their reactors utilizing
the same reliable nuclear fission technology
to generate heat to produce electricity.
[Adams] There's two fairly significant projects
that are going to be built by the end of 2028.
First of all, the partnership
between Bill Gates' TerraPower and General Hitachi.
It's called the Natrium Facility,
and it's going to heat a set of molten salt tanks.
The other one of these advanced reactor demonstration
projects is by a company called X-energy,
initially funded by an entrepreneur
from the space program.
So we're actually building stuff.
[Narrator] And bigger American companies
like General Electric are also building new reactors
in partnership with Hitachi of Japan.
They've designed a most promising,
low cost, workhorse, boiling water reactor
built in a factory and dropped into a hole
on site.
The SMR is scheduled for completion by 2028
and then it can be built as a fleet.
There are high hopes and demand from the utilities
for this potentially breakthrough reactor.
China and Russia seem to be the leading explorers
in this field.
[Adams] Absolutely.
[Narrator] If General Electric's got this kind of thing
with a Japanese company called Hitachi,
why are we not going all out on this?
- Part of the problem is that General Electric
has a, it's a very large company with a very small
nuclear division.
General Electric has a huge business
in wind turbines, gas turbines and natural gas
drilling equipment.
Their priority is a little low in the nuclear range.
[Narrator] So perhaps there's an advantage to these new,
smaller energy companies.
They comprise a whole new generation of young people
who are focused primarily on nuclear.
And the Department of Energy is working with several
of these startups to build prototypes
at America's first nuclear test lab,
the Idaho National Laboratory.
Located on the outskirts of Atomic City, Idaho,
and established in 1949,
this facility, known as The Site,
has provided the space for several organizations
to build over 50 reactors to date,
including Admiral Rickover's groundbreaking engine
for the USS Nautilus.
Today, the lab is the epicenter for the next generation
of reactors.
And you work for the government, right?
- So I'm the director of the National Reactor
Innovation Center,
and that's also called NRIC for short.
Enric is charged with accelerating
the demonstration of advanced reactor
technologies in partnership with private industry.
[Narrator] So what are we going to do about the climate?
What's the best solution in your mind?
- I think that it's straightforward to get
to the first 30% renewables and then probably 50
and even greater.
But when we get to higher levels of
deep decarbonization,
we really find that we need firm,
low carbon resources to have the most affordable
decarbonization.
- And that would be? - Largely nuclear.
Where the United States excels most is in innovation.
And the Department of Energy has made an enormous investment
in advanced reactor demonstration projects.
And my organization is working closely
with the companies who are pursuing those designs.
Our vision is that we help
demonstrate at least two advanced reactors
by the end of 2025.
We need nuclear energy to address climate change,
and nuclear energy is one of the safest forms
of energy that we have.
- On Capitol Hill, do they care about that?
- There is growing bipartisan support
for advanced nuclear.
More so than there has been for the traditional technologies.
But there's a large audience that we haven't reached yet.
And my view is that we need advanced technologies
because if we're going to have nuclear meaningfully
addressing climate change, it needs to scale globally
in a really big way.
I mean, in the United States, our electricity demand
is fairly stagnant, but that is not true globally.
Globally, it's skyrocketing
and we have to provide clean, affordable energy
to the world.
- That's a good point. India, China.
- Africa and the Middle East. - Africa.
- Yeah. All growing very rapidly.
The other thing that we can look at is
what is the alternative?
And if the alternative is climate change,
that is a much more serious risk.
- We need to do nuclear differently.
And this is where we're going
to build our first reactor.
[Narrator] You're going to build the reactor here?
- We're going to build the reactor here.
- Do you know where? - Yeah.
Basically out in there. Pretty neat, right?
Because this is the first advanced reactor that's going
to be a commercial plant that gets built
in the United States.
And it's a micro reactor, which is different.
You know, it's a lot smaller than what we have today.
It starts at one and a half megawatts electric.
- So that's going to light up how many homes?
- It's like a thousand homes.
- A thousand homes? - Yeah.
Really well suited for, you know, small towns,
small communities.
- But you're going to build a micro reactor and it's going
to give you 1.5MW?
That's nothing compared to some of the SMRs.
- Exactly.
- You know, if we start with something so small,
then we can really meet the regulations,
but do it efficiently and quickly.
A big problem with nuclear is maybe it takes a decade
and billions of dollars.
We want to show that it can take a couple
of years and less money while still meeting
the same regulations.
- Is it your money or how does that work?
- We're a privately funded company.
It is our money.
- Can I ask you roughly how much you've spent?
- Yeah, less than ten million dollars to date.
- So you've raised ten million, less than ten million?
It's like Shark Tank. [Laughter] - Yeah, kind of.
- We've talked a lot about how we're starting small,
and so that's where the aurora comes in
at one and one half megawatts.
And that provides a platform on which we can scale,
because what's next for us is something that's on the order
of about 15 megawatts
And from that we can go all the way up,
potentially up to a hundred or more.
[Narrator] And you would run the plant?
- We'll run it. By making it sort
of a simpler process where we're selling the power
and the heat and not the reactors,
that makes it easier to buy.
- So the utility company you'd cut out?
How does that work?
- We see the utilities mostly evolving
to wanting to run distribution and transmission.
We act as an independent power producer
and we just sell the power to the local utilities
or into the market, and then they can then
distribute it to the customers.
- Yeah, we're excited about how that could
allow communities to basically opt in
instead of feeling like a huge plant
is being stuck in their backyard.
- Do you sometimes feel frustrated
that, you know all this, it just goes so slow
and you're getting older?
- Yeah. - Absolutely.
- Timescales are just so long in nuclear and too slow.
We're doing everything we can to change that.
I think another way of looking at it,
if nuclear was just discovered, like in the last 15 years,
people would have become a lot more familiar with
and comfortable with the technology
because then once you understand it,
people have a better sense of not being afraid
and they see the benefits.
We would probably have a thousand nuclear power plants
built around the world.
[Narrator] That's a good point.
- One of the last public speeches JFK even gave
was saying we need to use fission
to help with conservation and for clean power
for various reasons. And it was overshadowed
by the weapons.
And I think we're looking at it anew
because of the imperative climate change.
- Younger people seem more open to it.
- I think so, yeah. - They're smarter.
- I think for the younger generations,
climate change is more of an imperative
than worrying about nuclear war. [Narrator] Exactly, yeah.
Well Jake, Caroline, I wish you all the freaking luck
in the world, I really do. [Laughter]
Really, and the wind at your back.
- Thank you so much. - Thank you.
- Thank you, appreciate that.
[Narrator] If micro reactors work the way Jake
and Caroline say,
the industry would gather momentum quickly in the 2030s.
And it's not hard to imagine micro reactors
in the future having the high end cachet of a nuclear battery
buried away in the basement of a smart home.
Putting out the power to run lights, heat,
water purification, as well as perhaps
a small hydroponic indoor farm, all with zero emission.
And not much maintenance required for twenty years,
after which the reactor is replaced
with a fresh battery.
- When you have nuclear fission,
the primary output is heat.
Thermal energy. [Narrator] Right.
- We typically convert that to electricity.
We could use that heat for water purification.
We might look at desalination producing clean potable water
from seawater or brackish groundwater.
Metals, refining, fertilizer production,
cement production.
Those require a lot of heat.
[DeWitte] And that heat comes off our reactors, for example,
almost for free because it's heat that we can't
convert into electricity.
So instead of just dumping it to the air,
we could use that in district heating
or industrial heating or different things like,
for example, heating a campus, right, or heating a hospital
or heating a big commercial district.
You could have reactors heating the district heating
that we have in New York City and it'd be completely clean.
[Bragg-Sitton] This is where we're using high temperature
steam electrolysis.
That means simply breaking down water molecules.
Hydrogen is a highly versatile energy carrier
that can also be used to produce synthetic fuels.
We take that hydrogen from a clean process,
and we combine that with carbon dioxide
that maybe has been captured from a fossil plant,
an ethanol plant, or even directly from the air.
And we can combine that carbon dioxide
with the hydrogen to produce liquid transportation fuels
that are clean burning.
[Narrator] To fly a plane? - Yes.
So now we have a pathway of using clean non emitting
nuclear energy to produce hydrogen
that goes all the way to liquid fuels for your car,
for heavy transport vehicles or even aviation.
- Wow.
[Narrator] Shannon went on to explain how hydrogen is
the beginning pathway to many other solutions.
Scientists at the Idaho lab are also working
on fusion energy, an even more powerful way
of harnessing energy from matter.
Fusion, which is created when two lightweight atoms
are forced together,
can produce immense amounts of energy.
It is the same process that powers our sun.
Its fuel source, hydrogen and lithium
are plentiful,
and after decades of research, the goal is closer
but still elusive.
Several start ups think they can reach commercial scale
fusion faster and smaller within a decade,
and they've raised billions of dollars in investment
in 2021.
If humanity ever makes fusion practical
and economical, it could power the world
of the future,
maybe even in the second half of this century.
[Bragg-Sitton] Now, we've done some really fantastic
development here at this site.
[Narrator] Are you moving fast enough?
- Oh, I think that energy in general,
we need to move faster.
Why do we do this? We do this for our families.
We do this for our kids and those generations.
It's so important that we look to our energy resources
and use them wisely.
We're leaving a legacy, and I hope it's a positive one.
[Narrator] As I left the lab, it became clearer than ever
to me that to hit the needed levels
of clean energy, we need to think big.
Among other things, we will shortly need
to stamp nuclear reactors off assembly lines on the scale
of world jetliner production.
This would mean creating a significant new worldwide
industry, redeploying hundreds of thousands
of people of all skills.
It would mean in the first years, 2020 to 2030,
building factories around the world, then scaling up
in the middle years 2030 to 2040 as electrification
takes over across the world and multiplies the demand
for electricity. And then going all out
with everything we have in the remaining years
of 2040 to 2050.
To do that, we need to rekindle the spirit
of Hyman Rickover with the urgency he had
to quickly build new things.
How much faster could it go if we also imagine
a world where countries cooperate to do this?
One partnership here on Earth.
A United Nations of clean energy.
No question the world is changing and far faster
than I ever imagined.
The future is coming.
And I thought, wow, as little as I know,
I know there's no real limit to where clean energy
can take us.
[John F. Kennedy] But the other part of conservation
is the newer part.
And that is to use science and technology
to achieve significant breakthroughs
as we are doing today, and in that way,
to conserve the resources which ten or 20 or 30 years ago
may have been wholly unknown.
So we use nuclear power for peaceful purposes and power.
[Narrator] A formidable energy gave birth to our planet
and that energy, through centuries of war,
peace cataclysms, the price of potatoes and stocks.
All the history, blunders, tragic comedies,
and the occasional triumphs.
That energy E equals MC squared was always there for us
all along.
And it's still there, like an inner voice.
Our most faithful companion.
Why are we not using that power?
If this buildout were to occur, can we imagine a world
in which human beings are not terrified
by climate change but are smart and confident enough
to solve it?
Together, collectively, we're combating viruses.
Exploring inner worlds, oceans and fellow travelers.
We're traveling through space and for that matter,
just building bullet trains, housing,
deep underground tunnels and giant aeropolises.
We can do most anything with our mind.
Human ingenuity, the workings of the mind
can get us out of our climate predicament.
Unless we dull it with fear,
the mind is the most powerful tool we know.
It is more imaginative than any computer will ever be.
There is no force, no energy that can contain
or stop human consciousness.
We may have come to a point in time when Earth
is asking us,
do you know what you're doing?
And there's no going back or forward from this moment.
Time stops now.
Or maybe I'm being melodramatic,
but I think as a race,
we're more informed and conscious
than we've ever been.
And many of us are thinking the same thing.
We're thinking not just about ourselves,
but of the entire world as we know it
and how we can fix it.
And that's a hell of a lot of consciousness for many,
many people.
And for that reason, let's make something of it.
If we human beings can get this right,
if we can create clean electricity fast enough
to decarbonize the world and we can.
The effects would be incredible.
People would know.
They would sense the changes right away and it would
energize the world anew.
Imagine that.
Imagine that there is a tomorrow and it can be better.
If we overcome our fears and embrace
the primordial star power in the nucleus of the atom,
and in doing so,
give us all, all living beings what is our birthright.
A future that we can look forward to.
[Stephen Hawking] We are all time travelers.
Turning together into the future.
But let us work together to make that future
a place we want to visit.
Be brave, Be determined. Overcome the odds.
It can be done.