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 Grandchildren） called "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