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  • Chris Anderson: We're having a debate.

  • The debate is over the proposition

  • What the world needs now

  • is nuclear energy" -- true or false?

  • And before we have the debate,

  • I'd like to actually take a show of hands --

  • on balance, right now, are you for or against this?

  • So those who are "yes," raise your hand. "For."

  • Okay, hands down.

  • Those who are "against," raise your hands.

  • Okay, I'm reading that at about

  • 75-25 in favor at the start.

  • Which means we're going to take a vote at the end

  • and see how that shifts, if at all.

  • So here's the format: They're going to have six minutes each,

  • and then after one little, quick exchange between them,

  • I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience

  • to have 30 seconds

  • to make one short, crisp, pungent, powerful point.

  • So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly,

  • is one of, truly, the founders of the

  • environmental movement,

  • a long-standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog,

  • someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand.

  • Stewart Brand: Whoa.

  • (Applause)

  • The saying is that with climate, those who know the most

  • are the most worried.

  • With nuclear, those who know the most

  • are the least worried.

  • A classic example is James Hansen,

  • a NASA climatologist

  • pushing for 350 parts per million

  • carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

  • He came out with a wonderful book recently

  • Storms of My Grandchildrencalled "Storms of My Grandchildren."

  • And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power,

  • as are most climatologists

  • who are engaging this issue seriously.

  • This is the design situation:

  • a planet that is facing climate change

  • and is now half urban.

  • Look at the client base for this.

  • Five out of six of us

  • live in the developing world.

  • We are moving to cities. We are moving up in the world.

  • And we are educating our kids,

  • having fewer kids,

  • basically good news all around.

  • But we move to cities, toward the bright lights,

  • and one of the things that is there that we want, besides jobs,

  • is electricity.

  • And if it isn't easily gotten, we'll go ahead and steal it.

  • This is one of the most desired things

  • by poor people all over the world,

  • in the cities and in the countryside.

  • Electricity for cities, at its best,

  • is what's called baseload electricity.

  • That's where it is on

  • all the time.

  • And so far there are only three major sources of that --

  • coal and gas, hydro-electric,

  • which in most places is maxed-out --

  • and nuclear.

  • I would love to have something in the fourth place here,

  • but in terms of constant, clean,

  • scalable energy,

  • solar and wind and the other renewables

  • aren't there yet because they're inconstant.

  • Nuclear is and has been for 40 years.

  • Now, from an environmental standpoint,

  • the main thing you want to look at

  • is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal,

  • the two major sources of electricity.

  • If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear,

  • the waste from that lifetime of electricity

  • would go in a Coke can --

  • a pretty heavy Coke can, about two pounds.

  • But one day of coal

  • adds up to one hell of a lot

  • of carbon dioxide

  • in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant.

  • Then what happens to the waste?

  • The nuclear waste typically goes into

  • a dry cask storage

  • out back of the parking lot at the reactor site

  • because most places don't have underground storage yet.

  • It's just as well, because it can stay where it is.

  • While the carbon dioxide,

  • vast quantities of it, gigatons,

  • goes into the atmosphere

  • where we can't get it back, yet,

  • and where it is causing the problems that we're most concerned about.

  • So when you add up the greenhouse gases

  • in the lifetime of these various energy sources,

  • nuclear is down there with wind and hydro,

  • below solar and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels.

  • Wind is wonderful; I love wind.

  • I love being around these

  • big wind generators.

  • But one of the things we're discovering is that

  • wind, like solar, is an actually relatively

  • dilute source of energy.

  • And so it takes a very large footprint on the land,

  • a very large footprint in terms of materials,

  • five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear,

  • and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity

  • is on the order of 250 sq. mi.

  • of wind farm.

  • In places like Denmark and Germany,

  • they've maxed out on wind already.

  • They've run out of good sites.

  • The power lines are getting overloaded.

  • And you peak out.

  • Likewise, with solar,

  • especially here in California,

  • we're discovering that the 80 solar farm

  • schemes that are going forward

  • want to basically bulldoze

  • 1,000 sq. mi. of southern California desert.

  • Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.

  • It's okay on frapped-out agricultural land.

  • Solar's wonderful on rooftops.

  • But out in the landscape,

  • one gigawatt is on the order of 50 sq. mi.

  • of bulldozed desert.

  • When you add all these things up --

  • Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out

  • what it would take

  • to get 13 clean

  • terawatts of energy

  • from wind, solar and biofuels,

  • and that area would be roughly the size the United States,

  • an area he refers to as "Renewistan."

  • A guy who's added all this up very well is David Mackay,

  • a physicist in England,

  • and in his wonderful book, "Sustainable Energy," among other things,

  • he says, "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic."

  • (Laughter)

  • In terms of weapons,

  • the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy.

  • We have been taking down

  • the Russian warheads,

  • turning it into electricity.

  • 10 percent of American electricity

  • comes from decommissioned warheads.

  • We haven't even started the American stockpile.

  • I think of most interest to a TED audience

  • would be the new generation of reactors

  • that are very small,

  • down around 10

  • to 125 megawatts.

  • This is one from Toshiba.

  • Here's one that the Russians are already building that floats on a barge.

  • And that would be very interesting in the developing world.

  • Typically, these things are put in the ground.

  • They're referred to as nuclear batteries.

  • They're incredibly safe,

  • weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it.

  • Here is a commercial version from New Mexico

  • called the Hyperion,

  • and another one from Oregon called NuScale.

  • Babcock & Wilcox that make nuclear reactors ...

  • here's an integral fast reactor.

  • Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in.

  • The governments of the world are going to have to decide

  • that coal needs to be made expensive, and these will go ahead.

  • And here's the future.

  • (Applause)

  • CA: Okay. Okay.

  • (Applause)

  • So arguing against,

  • a man who's been at the nitty-gritty heart

  • of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years.

  • In 2000, he discovered that soot

  • was probably the second leading cause of global warming, after CO2.

  • His team have been making detailed calculations

  • of the relative impacts

  • of different energy sources.

  • His first time at TED, possibly a disadvantage -- we shall see --

  • from Stanford,

  • Professor Mark Jacobson. Good luck.

  • Mark Jacobson: Thank you.

  • (Applause)

  • So my premise here is that nuclear energy

  • puts out more carbon dioxide,

  • puts out more air pollutants,

  • enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up

  • than real renewable energy systems,

  • namely wind, solar,

  • geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power.

  • And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation.

  • So let's just start by looking at the

  • CO2 emissions from the life cycle.

  • CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions

  • of all the greenhouse gases and particles

  • that cause warming,

  • and converted to CO2.

  • And if you look, wind and concentrated solar

  • have the lowest CO2 emissions, if you look at the graph.

  • Nuclear -- there are two bars here.

  • One is a low estimate, and one is a high estimate.

  • The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry

  • estimate of nuclear.

  • The high is the average of 103

  • scientific, peer-reviewed studies.

  • And this is just the

  • CO2 from the life cycle.

  • If we look at the delays,

  • it takes between 10 and 19 years

  • to put up a nuclear power plant

  • from planning to operation.

  • This includes about three and a half to six years

  • for a site permit.

  • and another two and a half to four years

  • for a construction permit and issue,

  • and then four to nine years for actual construction.

  • And in China, right now,

  • they're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear.

  • And the average, just for the construction time of these,

  • is 7.1 years

  • on top of any planning times.

  • While you're waiting around for your nuclear,

  • you have to run the regular electric power grid,

  • which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world.

  • And the chart here shows the difference between

  • the emissions from the regular grid,

  • resulting if you use nuclear, or anything else,

  • versus wind, CSP or photovoltaics.

  • Wind takes about two to five years on average,

  • same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics.

  • So the difference is the opportunity cost

  • of using nuclear versus wind, or something else.

  • So if you add these two together, alone,

  • you can see a separation

  • that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times

  • more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy.

  • And this doesn't even account

  • for the footprint on the ground.

  • If you look at the air pollution health effects,

  • this is the number of deaths per year in 2020

  • just from vehicle exhaust.

  • Let's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States

  • to battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles

  • or flex fuel vehicles run on E85.

  • Well, right now in the United States,

  • 50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution,

  • and vehicles are about 25,000 of those.

  • In 2020, the number will go down to 15,000

  • due to improvements.

  • And so, on the right, you see gasoline emissions,

  • the death rates of 2020.

  • If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol,

  • you'd actually increase the death rate slightly.

  • If you go to nuclear,

  • you do get a big reduction,

  • but it's not as much as with wind and/or concentrated solar.

  • Now if you consider the fact

  • that nuclear weapons proliferation

  • is associated with nuclear energy proliferation,

  • because we know for example,

  • India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly

  • by enriching uranium

  • in nuclear energy facilities.

  • North Korea did that to some extent.

  • Iran is doing that right now.

  • And Venezuela would be doing it

  • if they started with their nuclear energy facilities.

  • If you do a large scale expansion

  • of nuclear energy across the world,

  • and as a result there was just one

  • nuclear bomb created

  • that was used to destroy a city

  • such as Mumbai or some other big city, megacity,

  • the additional death rates due to this

  • averaged over 30 years and scaled to the population of the U.S.

  • would be this.

  • So, do we need this?

  • The next thing is: What about the footprint? Stewart mentioned the footprint.

  • Actually, the footprint on the ground for wind

  • is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world.

  • That, because the footprint, as you can see,

  • is just the pole touching the ground.

  • And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet

  • with 73,000 to 145,000

  • five-megawatt wind turbines.

  • That would take between one and three sq. km.

  • of footprint on the ground, entirely.

  • The spacing is something else.

  • That's the footprint that's always being confused.

  • People confuse footprint with spacing.

  • As you can see from these pictures,

  • the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes

  • including agricultural land,

  • range land or open space.

  • Over the ocean, it's not even land.

  • Now if we look at nuclear -- (Laughter)

  • With nuclear, what do we have?

  • We have facilities around there. You also have a buffer zone

  • that's 17 sq. km.

  • And you have the uranium mining

  • that you have to deal with.

  • Now if we go to the area,

  • lots is worse than nuclear or wind.

  • For example, cellulosic ethanol, to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet,

  • this is how much land you would need.

  • That's cellulosic, second generation

  • biofuels from prairie grass.

  • Here's corn ethanol. It's smaller.

  • This is based on ranges from data,

  • but if you look at nuclear,

  • it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet.

  • For wind, there's a larger area,

  • but much smaller footprint.

  • And of course, with wind,

  • you could put it all over the east coast,

  • offshore theoretically, or you can split it up.

  • And now, if you go back to

  • looking at geothermal, it's even smaller than both,

  • and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing,

  • but it's still pretty small.

  • And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet.

  • To power the entire world with 50 percent wind,

  • you would need about one percent of world land.

  • Matching the reliability, base load is actually irrelevant.

  • We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply.

  • You can do that by combining renewables.

  • This is from real data in California,

  • looking at wind data and solar data.

  • And it considers just using existing hydro

  • to match the hour-by-hour power demand.

  • Here are the world wind resources.

  • There's 5 to 10 times more wind available worldwide

  • than we need for all the world.

  • So then the finally ranking.

  • And one last slide I just want to show: this is the choice.

  • You can either have wind or nuclear.

  • If you use wind,

  • you guarantee ice will last.

  • Nuclear, the time lag alone

  • will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more.

  • And we can guarantee a clean, blue sky

  • or an uncertain future with nuclear power.

  • (Applause)

  • CA: All right.

  • So while they're having their comebacks on each other --

  • and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran --

  • I need two people from either side.

  • So if you're for this,

  • if you're for nuclear power, put up two hands.

  • If you're against, put up one.

  • And I want two of each for the mics.

  • Now then, you guys have --

  • you have a minute comeback on him

  • to pick up a point he said, challenge it,

  • whatever.

  • SB: I think a point of difference we're having, Mark,

  • has to do with weapons

  • and energy.

  • These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow

  • putting out a lot of greenhouse gases --

  • a lot of those studies will include, "Well of course war will be inevitable

  • and therefore we'll have cities burning and stuff like that,"

  • which is kind of finessing it

  • a little bit, I think.

  • The reality is that there's, what,

  • 21 nations that have nuclear power?

  • Of those, seven have nuclear weapons.

  • In every case, they got the weapons

  • before they got the nuclear power.

  • There are two nations, North Korea and Israel,

  • that have nuclear weapons

  • and don't have nuclear power at all.

  • The places that we would most like to have

  • really clean energy occur

  • are China, India, Europe, North America,

  • all of which have sorted out their situation

  • in relation to nuclear weapons.

  • So that leaves a couple of places like Iran,

  • maybe Venezuela,

  • that you would like to have very close

  • surveillance of anything

  • that goes on with fissile stuff.

  • Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we

  • really know where all of the fissile material is,

  • and we can move toward

  • zero weapons left, once we know all that.

  • CA: Mark,

  • 30 seconds, either on that or on anything Stewart said.

  • MJ: Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first,

  • and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories.

  • So the other thing is, we don't need nuclear energy.

  • There's plenty of solar and wind.

  • You can make it reliable, as I showed with that diagram.

  • That's from real data.

  • And this is an ongoing research. This is not rocket science.

  • Solving the world's problems can be done,

  • if you're really put your mind to it and use clean, renewable energy.

  • There's absolutely no need for nuclear power.

  • (Applause)

  • CA: We need someone for.

  • Rod Beckstrom: Thank you Chris. I'm Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.

  • I've been involved in global warming policy

  • since 1994,

  • when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund

  • that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol.

  • And I want to support Stewart Brand's position.

  • I've come around in the last 10 years.

  • I used to be against nuclear power.

  • I'm now supporting Stewart's position,

  • softly, from a risk-management standpoint,

  • agreeing that

  • the risks of overheating the planet

  • outweigh the risk of nuclear incident,

  • which certainly is possible and is a very real problem.

  • However, I think there may be a win-win solution here

  • where both parties can win this debate,

  • and that is, we face a situation

  • where it's carbon caps on this planet

  • or die.

  • And in the United States Senate,

  • we need bipartisan support --

  • only one or two votes are needed --

  • to move global warming through the Senate,

  • and this room can help.

  • So if we get that through, then Mark will solve these problems. Thanks Chris.

  • CA: Thank you Rod Beckstrom. Against.

  • David Fanton: Hi, I'm David Fanton. I just want to say a couple quick things.

  • The first is: be aware of the propaganda.

  • The propaganda from the industry

  • has been very, very strong.

  • And we have not had

  • the other side of the argument fully aired

  • so that people can draw their own conclusions.

  • Be very aware of the propaganda.

  • Secondly, think about this.

  • If we build all these nuclear power plants,

  • all that waste

  • is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands,

  • of trucks and trains,

  • moving through this country every day.

  • Tell me they're not going to have accidents.

  • Tell me that those accidents aren't going to

  • put material into the environment

  • that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years

  • And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains

  • isn't a potential terrorist target.

  • CA: Thank you.

  • For.

  • Anyone else for? Go.

  • Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I just wanted to say,

  • I'm, first of all, renewable energy's biggest fan.

  • I've got solar PV on my roof.

  • I've got a hydro conversion

  • at a watermill that I own.

  • And I'm, you know, very much "pro" that kind of stuff.

  • However, there's a basic arithmetic problem here.

  • The capability of

  • the sun shining, the wind blowing and the rain falling,

  • simply isn't enough to add up.

  • So if we want to keep the lights on,

  • we actually need a solution

  • which is going to keep generating all of the time.

  • I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the 80s,

  • and I continue to do so now.

  • But we've got an opportunity

  • to recycle them into something more useful

  • that enables us to get energy all of the time.

  • And, ultimately, the arithmetic problem isn't going to go away.

  • We're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone.

  • We need a solution that generates all of the time.

  • If we're going to keep the lights on,

  • nuclear is that solution.

  • CA: Thank you.

  • Anyone else against?

  • Man: The last person who was in favor made the premise

  • that we don't have enough

  • alternative renewable resources.

  • And our "against" proponent up here

  • made it clear that we actually do.

  • And so the fallacy

  • that we need this resource

  • and we can actually make it in a time frame

  • that is meaningful is not possible.

  • I will also add one other thing.

  • Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks --

  • we know that the stick is going up exponentially.

  • So you can't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables

  • and say, "That's all we have."

  • Because five years from now, it will blow you away

  • what we'll actually have as alternatives

  • to this horrible, disastrous nuclear power.

  • CA: Point well made. Thank you.

  • (Applause)

  • So each of you has really just a couple sentences --

  • 30 seconds each

  • to sum up.

  • Your final pitch, Stewart.

  • SB: I loved your "It all balances out" chart

  • that you had there.

  • It was a sunny day and a windy night.

  • And just now in England

  • they had a cold spell.

  • All of the wind in the entire country

  • shut down for a week.

  • None of those things were stirring.

  • And as usual, they had to buy nuclear power from France.

  • Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel.

  • This keeps happening.

  • I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor.

  • And the fact is, we're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel

  • in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along.

  • And especially the small reactors need to go forward.

  • I heard from Nathan Myhrvold -- and I think here's the action point --

  • it'll take an act of Congress

  • to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

  • start moving quickly on these small reactors,

  • which we need very much, here and in the world.

  • (Applause)

  • MJ: So we've analyzed the hour-by-hour

  • power demand and supply,

  • looking at solar, wind, using data for California.

  • And you can match that demand, hour-by-hour,

  • for the whole year almost.

  • Now, with regard to the resources,

  • we've developed the first wind map of the world,

  • from data alone, at 80 meters.

  • We know what the resources are. You can cover 15 percent.

  • 15 percent of the entire U.S.

  • has wind at fast-enough speeds to be cost-competitive.

  • And there's much more solar than there is wind.

  • There's plenty of resource. You can make it reliable.

  • CA: Okay. So, thank you, Mark.

  • (Applause)

  • So if you were in Palm Springs ...

  • (Laughter)

  • (Applause)

  • Shameless. Shameless. Shameless.

  • (Applause)

  • So, people of the TED community,

  • I put it to you that what the world needs now

  • is nuclear energy.

  • All those in favor, raise your hands.

  • (Shouts)

  • And all those against.

  • Ooooh.

  • Now that is -- my take on that ...

  • Just put up ... Hands up, people who changed their minds during the debate,

  • who voted differently.

  • Those of you who changed your mind

  • in favor of "for"

  • put your hands up.

  • Okay. So here's the read on it.

  • Both people won supporters,

  • but on my count,

  • the mood of the TED community shifted

  • from about 75-25

  • to about 65-35

  • in favor, in favor.

  • You both won. I congratulate both of you.

  • Thank you for that.

  • (Applause)

Chris Anderson: We're having a debate.

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TED 2000 Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy? !

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    VoiceTube に公開 2013 年 03 月 01 日
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