There's someone who wants to meet you, he's a great fan of yours.
And I expected to turn around and see some young person, uh, and I turned around into
the face of Dr. Martin Luther King, and he said, yes, I'm a big fan of yours.
And I said thank you very much, and I'm of course I'm leaving the show after this first
year and he said- You cannot!
...And I was taken aback and- Uh, I- I beg your pardon?
He said- Don't you know who you are?
Don't you know what you have?
A character with dignity and beauty and intelligence?
He said- Your most important input is for everyone
who doesn't look like us, who sees us for the first time as we should be seen.
As equals.
As equals.
In peaceful exploration- Michelle, you cannot leave.
I've read some a Gene Roddenberry's writings and some of the other writers
and their feelings when they were doing the show.
Yeah, they were talking about dilithium crystals and warp drive for the starships,
but basically it was a nuclear-powered society.
And that's how we were able to become peaceful and live with each other
and be able to develop civilization.
First airing in 1966, it took the concept of abundant clean energy, and ran with it.
The thing I liked about Star Trek was that it gave you hope
that there was going to be a positive future.
Because it was taking place 300 years in the future.
I mean, at the time there were race riots that were going on in my town of Cleveland.
Strife and pollution.
And here you had this civilization that was really healthy.
It was exciting and they were pretty much at peace.
Do you inherently become a better society just because you have
access to a more advanced form of energy?
Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy
it has led to profound societal implications.
You know, the Industrial Revolution and the ability to use chemical fuels
was what finally did in slavery.
You know, people- human beings have had slaves for thousands and thousands of years.
And when we learned how to make carbon our slave, instead of other human beings,
we started to learn how to be able to be civilized people
And how to use machines to do what we need to do, instead of make other people do it.
Back on Earth, Star Trek features high density human population,
unspoiled nature, access to ridiculous amounts of energy-
And apparently, no resource constraints worth fighting over.
Give me a martini, straight-up, with two olives.
For the vitamins.
Gene Roddenberry had a vision of the future where mankind had overcome
many of its problems and desired nothing more than a peaceful quest for knowledge.
Must be kind of boring, ain't it?
A lot has changed in the past 300 years.
We've eliminated hunger, want.
Then what's the challenge?
The challenge is to improve yourself- to enrich yourself.
Based on a utopian future of the 60s, this was where some of us
were convinced we were headed.
Technical realizations we've made since then are pretty simple.
Fusion is hard.
Fission is easy- it can even happen in nature.
Nuclear fuel can be liquid.
Aye, the haggis is in the fire for sure.
It is hard to create a TV show about space exploration
without breaking the rules of physics- the stars are just spaced too far apart.
But manned exploration of our own solar system,
permanent outposts on the moon and mars, and sending a probe
under the ice of Europa, those are all doable
with everyday fission of a non-water-cooled variety.
Extract the water from the soils of Mars.
Separate the hydrogen and oxygen.
We now have a supply of rocket fuel on Mars!
A filling station.
So you don't have to carry all your fuel with you.
I've said this many times before, I want to go ice fishing on Europa.
It has had an ocean of liquid water that's been liquid for billions of years.
And every place on Earth we find liquid water, we have found life.
I want to go ice fishing on Europa.
Lower a submersible.
So is this doable?
Is an ecologically sound Earth compatible with 8 billion people
living healthy, dignified lives, chasing their full human potential?
Or is this just another fantasy component of Star Trek, like warp drive, and teleportation?
We're going to exhaust every option until we finally get clear
that actually what matters is making clean energy cheap.
So that we can live in a world where we mostly live in cities,
we have high intensive agriculture, we've got clean energy,
we've got clean water, we got recycling your materials-
that's a vision of a world where we can all live modern lives,
and it does not- it's not- It does not require any uh-
It does not require any science fiction.
Human beings have done amazingly well over the last half century.
In 1950 there were just 2.5 billion people on Earth.
Today there's more than 7 billion of us.
Everywhere infant mortality has been going down,
and almost everywhere people are living longer lives.
Unfortunately, all of our success has come at a high cost to the natural world.
The number of wild animals on planet Earth has declined by half since 1970.
It seems like we're always using nature in some ways, but,
humans save nature by not using it.
It's the part of the Earth that we don't use that we leave to wild nature.
Humans use about half of the Earth- half of the land surface of the Earth-
The part of the Earth that's not underwater or under glaciers.
Of that half, about half of the human impact is meat- or 24% of the Earth's surface.
Another 10% is crops.
Another 9% or so is for wood production.
And this is really amazing, 3% of the Earth's surface we use for cities and suburbs-
for the places that we live.
And what's important about that, is that now half of all humans
3.5 billion of us, live in cities and suburbs-
and this is going to prove to be a crucial part of
how negative impact will peak and decline in this century.
If we take the right actions today, the overall size of the human population,
and our overall negative impact on the natural world could peak and decline-
not by the end of the century, but within a few decades.
Many of you know that whaling was a huge industry in the early 1800s.
Mostly we hunted whales for their oil.
We used their oil as energy to light up our lamps.
Grand Ball given by the whales in honor of the discovery of oil wells in Pennsylvania.
We save nature by not using it, we save nature by not needing it.
We didn't need the whales anymore, we had a better substitute.
It was kerosene, made from abundant and cheap petroleum, and-
we didn't save the whales by using whales more sustainably,
we didn't save the whales by having more efficient lighting
to burn the whale oil more efficiently.
We saved the whales by not hunting them.
This is New England in 1880.
There was only 30% of it forested at that time.
Most of the rest was farmland.
This is New England today. 80% forested.
Martha's Vineyard was really a large sheep farm in 1900.
Today, it's mostly forested.
The forests are growing back, why?
Farms went bankrupt.
We mostly didn't need them for their land anymore.
We became more efficient at growing more food, we grew more food on less land.
We saved all of that nature,
allowing the forest to grow back because we didn't need it.
But what about poor countries?
What about developing countries?
What about all the slums?
And- We're talking about industrialization, about factories,
where the conditions are terrible and people are treated miserably.
That was certainly my view.
20 years ago I was involved in an effort to hold Nike and other corporations accountable
for their labor practices in other countries, particularly in Indonesia.
It was a successful effort, and Nike did make some improvements,
but 20 years later I wanted to go back.
I wanted to see what happened to the workers.
Had their lives really improved materially?
And I met this young woman, her name is Supartie.
She makes four times more money than the people back in the village, farming rice.
We're growing much more food on much smaller amounts of land,
it's one of humankind's most extraordinary achievements,
with great benefits to the natural world.
We use half as much the land, per person globally, to provide our food.
It's only possible for Supartie to live in the city,
as long as she doesn't need to make her own food
and we're making more food for more of us.
In the countryside, when you're a poor farmer you need a lot of kids
to help you work on the farm,
you need a lot of kids to help you in your in retirement.
In the city, you can invest more in fewer kids.
And that trend is consistent around the world-
As women become more powerful, more educated, as they have more income.
Her grandmother had 13 children, her mother had 6, and you can see it right here.
We don't know what's going to happen next.
There's one scenario that we keep going up, and another scenario we go down.
The high population estimate, where the world goes to 16 billion or more
by the end of the century, is a world of low energy,
wood energy, wood, dung and charcoal, and large families,
mostly in the countryside.
A world where the population peaks at 8.5 billion, and then declines
by the end of the century- is a world like Supartie is living.
Higher energy, smaller families, more development, and more opportunity.
This is Maiyishia.
She is one of the 900 remaining mountain gorillas left in the world.
She, as a baby, grew up in Africa's oldest national park in Congo, called Virunga.
In 2007, her parents and much of the rest of her group were killed-
by men making charcoal for energy.
Since then, there's been well-meaning efforts to plant trees,
to help people in the region burn wood more efficiently,
and the situation has only gotten worse.
When we visited it in December of last year,
this is an aerial photo that we took above the park.
You can see here, here, here, and here- illegal charcoal burning in the park.
Why? Because people need it.
Over 90% of the people depend on wood for fuel.
We didn't save the whales by using whales more sustainably,
by using whale oil more efficiently,
we saved the whales by using a different kind of energy, by using a substitute.
Supartie uses propane- what we use as camping fuel, similar to natural gas that we all enjoy;
it's an important substitute for the 3 billion people that still depend on wood and dung.
As more of us move to the cities, we're going to consume more energy.
For everybody to live at a moderate living standard,
a basic material-needs-met, the world is going to need to triple
perhaps quadruple the amount of energy it produces from today.
Propane is a fossil fuel.
What are the clean energy options?
There's not many.
There's solar, there's wind, there's a little bit of geothermal,
there's hydro-electric dams, and there's nuclear power plants.
And- Solar and wind are wonderful; I've spent much of my professional career advocating
for more solar, for more wind, including a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod.
But solar and wind alone cannot power Shanghai at night,
and there's a lot of exciting development in batteries,
but we're so far away from being able to power cities on batteries.
Geothermal is great where it's available, and it's not available in many places.
Hydro-electric dams have mostly been built in the rich world.
We've mostly dammed the rivers, and even in places like China,
many of the rivers have already been dammed.
That means we have to take a second look at nuclear power.
When I was boy, my aunt took me every August to Bittersweet Park,
where we would remember the Hiroshima bombings.
We would light candles, and put them on paper boats.
I saw a television movie about the aftermath of nuclear war.
I was anti-nuclear my entire life.
A million people dying right now, or have died, because of Chernobyl.
You know, I found myself quite disappointed in myself.
And, honestly quite angry at others who were propagating that myth.
More people have died from Chernobyl, than in the black plague.
Fear is a really important emotion, but if we allow fear to drive us,
we can end up making up decisions that actually put us at greater risk.
What's so striking is just to go read the original World Health Organization documents,
and read the public health reports.
It was a complete shock to me.
I mean, I'm reading all the Chernobyl stuff and I'm- I'm- I'm kind of not believing it.
Because it was so out of sync with what I had come to believe.
The biggest medical conspiracy and coverup in the history of medicine, George!
In order to believe that a million people were killed by Chernobyl,
which is what Greenpeace and Helen Caldicott, a number of other people claim-
You have to believe there was a cover-up of just massive proportions
by the World Health Organization, by the United Nations,
by literally hundreds of the world's top public health experts.
Close down all those reactors, now!
With solar and wind and geothermal-
Forget about all of the data and the figures and stuff.
Listen to your intuition, and you'll know what you've got to do.
And then I confronted this data, and the challenge of meeting global energy and development needs,
and also dealing with one of our most serious environmental problems,
and I've changed my mind.
On top of that rock there must be 500 sea lions on top of that rock right now.
This is a nuclear plant in California.
You can see here all around it, natural life, sea life exists,
because nuclear power is zero-pollution.
And- One of the things we've learnt about energy production
is that what you want from an environmental perspective,
you want the least natural resource in, the least amount of fuel in,
the most amount of energy out, and the least amount of pollution and waste.
You can't walk alongside a coal plant and not be affected by the smoke.
You can with nuclear.
How do humans save nature?
Moving people out of their dependence on wood and agrarian poverty;
Moving away from large families to medium-sized families
Access to the modern energy so that the forests are spared,
so that forests can grow back from agriculture; the final step, moving toward small families,
universal prosperity, and nuclear energy.
Today we leave half of the Earth for nature.
Can we leave 75% for nature?
We're going to need more lands for cities, but given current trends,
higher energy, smaller families, more development, more opportunity,
we can drastically reduce much of the Earth used for wood, crops, and meat production.
Can we do it? I think we can.
Why am I so confident?
Because we've done it before.
Today, the case for nuclear is being made by environmentalists, engineers, scientists
and specifically- climatologists.
I thought nuclear power was dumb.
And I was an anti-nuclear campaigner.
I found out that it is a zero-carbon power source.
I thought the opposite.
I was wrong.
I used to be strongly opposed to nuclear power.
I was appalled by it.
Well, nuclear power was evil.
I didn't want to go there.
I do have empathy for the people who disagree with me, because I was that person.
As James Hansen says at NASA, the godfather of global warming,
we've got to stop burning coal- Now!
Germany's now decided that 80% of its energy is going to come from renewables- Shortly.
The people who argue for all renewables think- If we can go from 0% to 10% to 20% renewable
then we're on the way and then it will get easier and we'll get 100%.
Well it's actually, if you look at the engineering, it's actually the opposite.
When you to 20 or 30%, then it gets harder! Not easier!
Because of the intermittency of the renewables.
On the best day they're doing pretty well, midday, right?
But on the worst day, in January, you've got nothing.
But this is what everybody forgets.
As if the planet stops rotating, the clouds part, and Germany is baking in the Sun.
You know, 'cause the Sun shines on Germany 24 hours a day!
Tom Friedman, the other day, The New York Times, brought up Germany an example-
saying that Germany is 30% wind and solar.
Most self-described environmentalists believe that chunk is entirely wind and solar.
Wind and solar.
When the media brands Germany's renewable program as one of solar and wind,
omitting biomass- that's not clarity.
This is not the fault of solar and wind technology.
They are very useful, so long as we recognize, and plan, for their limitations.
To fully harness intermittent power, we need both a smart grid,
and inexpensive energy storage.
Today we have neither.
And I think it is very risky to presume we will get both.
As we deploy renewables, increasingly,
wind ends up losing to wind, and solar ends up losing to solar.
They deliver energy, or fail to, at the same time.
Germany still has to burn stuff to replace nuclear.
In fact, the single largest energy source in the German renewable portfolio is biomass.
This Biomass is called a renewable resource because it's not a fossil fuel,
and ultimately comes from plants which can be regrown.
However, it is not an environmentally friendly source of power, and it causes air pollution.
It's called Global Preventive Medicine.
The Earth is the patient now and we're all physicians to the patient.
We're here to serve.
And we can save the world.
Close down all those reactors now!
With solar and wind and geothermal-
forget about all of the data and the figures and stuff.
Listen to your intuition, and you'll know what you've got to do.
Dr. Helen Caldicott has been featured by CNN, The New York Times, CBC,
Democracy Now, 60 Minutes, and C-Span.
When Helen speaks many people make contributions large and small to the organization.
The last two chapters of this book are very exciting!
Because they give you the prescription for survival!
$5, $25, $100,000 to the institute to support Helen
and the work that she does of ending the nuclear age.
I don't say things that are inaccurate otherwise I would be deregistered,
I mean, doctors can't lie.
The doctors have been told by their superiors not tell patients
that their symptoms are related to radiation.
This is the biggest medical conspiracy in the history of medicine, George!
I don't you could dismiss the UN Scientific Committee as being part of the nuclear industry.
I don't think you can dismiss the very large amount of data-
Yes I could.
-on the...
I'm sorry you're saying you would dismiss the UN Scientific Committee
as being part of the nuclear industry?
Yes, let me tell you George. Wow.
Well then the mind boggles.
Where does this end?
The mind does boggle.
The UN, and the Scientific Committee, and the IAEA.
I mean who else is involved in this conspiracy?
We need to know!
I'm testifying at your Darlington hearing soon.
What am I gonna say?
You're all fools.
What do you think you're doing?
I mean you will need psychoanalysis.
These are all the elements in a reactor.
She's testified before multiple government panels on the safety of nuclear power.
If we move to renewables in a big way- Yeah.
But you would not be able to have the kind of power, um-
Yes you would. -we have now.
Oh, yes you would.
I do think that we would- Yes you would.
To smelt aluminum or to make aluminum that requires huge amounts of energy.
We've got to stop using aluminium cans, that's just crazy.
And all this frozen food is just obscene too!
We shouldn't be freezing feed, when I was a kid there was no frozen food we did alright.
You know in that winter, it's so hot inside you have to strip!
The thermostat should be lowered.
How many use paper towels in the kitchen?
Yeah, you're allowed to use paper to wipe your bottoms!
That's all!
I like living the way I live, and I live fairly modestly.
We live in a small house, I drive an 18 year old Saturn.
Heh.
So we're fairly frugal, but I'm still an American.
So that means I use vast amounts of resources, no matter how frugal I am.
When you're in the plane,
the hostess hands you a drink with a bloody bit of tree beside it!
I don't need that paper serviette!
It just becomes more and more increasingly difficult to cut out the real big things,
to be honest with you.
As you walk from room to room, turn off your lights!
Uh, uh, uh, uh.
It's easy to turn off the lights and to turn down the heat
and don't use the air-conditioning at all.
But then you quickly run into the idea that- Am I not going to fly to that conference?
Am I going to ride a bike to the grocery store?
We got to stop!- Do not!- Never!- Never use a!- You don't need a electrical gadgetry!
Turn them all off!
Every time you walk into one of those doors and goes "pshhhew" in front of you-
That's powered by electricity!
Cover the place with windmills.
It's what we got to do, if we want to keep using electricity!
Otherwise, we have to stop using electricity.
And think about it, Mozart wrote candlelight and so did Shakespeare,
so the human race has lived for a very long time without electricity.
We have lived and survived for 3 million years without electricity!
Well, what's wrong with candlelight?
That's right!
Dr. Helen Caldicott's prescription of a candle-lit future,
and how it resonates with her audience,
brings to mind a classic Penn and Teller demonstration,
of how receptive people can be to fearmongering.
Can I get you guys to sign a petition?
What for?
For banning dihydrogen-monoxide.
Oh yeah, I'll sign that.
Thank you very much.
Our petition woman was getting signatures left and right.
We're talking, hundreds.
It causes a lot of urination.
Vomiting.
Can even cause- I'm familiar with it.
Oh, ok.
That's- Di.
Hydrogen.
Monoxide.
Water.
This is a petition for dihydrogen-monoxide.
What it is, is it's a chemical that is found now in reservoirs, and in lakes.
Pesticides, different kinds of companies are using this.
And she's not going to lie, or even stretch the truth. Not at all.
She's just going to talk about what water is, and what it does,
using the vocabulary and tone of environmental hysteria.
-styrofoam companies, nuclear companies.
And now, when they use it in pesticides, when we're washing our fruit and things like that,
it's not coming out.
It causes excessive sweating.
Excessive urination.
And it's in the grocery stores, and in our baby's food.
Stuff like that.
We don't know if they thought, but, they signed.
If you saw a petition being circulated warning the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide,
how would you alert the signees to its utter stupidity?
Of course, you'd just say, dihydrogen monoxide is water.
That would end it, right there.
But what if you couldn't say that?
This is crazy!
You are sitting on top of a nuclear weapon!
Because there is no common sense about what nuclear power is or isn't.
You can have the word "nuclear", without the word "bomb".
There's only decades of fearmongering.
Whatever they put this waste in, it's so hot- -will start to disintegrate within 10 years.
You could cite some health studies, and statements made by experts
in the lucrative field of dihydrogen-monoxide...
You want us to put water on the crops?
Yes.
Water?
...but you would be considered suspect.
Just a shill for "Big Dihydrogen-monoxide".
I think this might be Gatorade or something, I was just looking for some regular water.
You mean like in the toilet?
What for?
Just to- to drink.
Everyone knows-
The safe alternative to dihydrogen- monoxide is Brawndo Energy Drink.
Good for your body.
Great for growing crops.
Today's discussion around nuclear power, is a lot like trying to debunk such a petition...
Without using the word, "water".
Water.
Like, out the toilet?
Well, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but yeah, that's the idea.
People are accustomed to decades of barely competitive nuclear power.
Accustomed to the message that nuclear waste is a lurking danger.
And people have been convinced that a nuclear accident will kill more people
than a single day's worth of fossil fuel air pollution.
Solar!
Not nuclear!
Sponsored by the Oil Heat Institute.
Yeah, no problem!
Yeah, you don't need a furnace have solar panels.
This is the cynicism of the fossil fuel industry.
When I've spoken to women's groups, none of them knew how bad coal was.
They didn't know it killed people.
If you add up all fossil fuel combustion in the United States- Just from power plants,
the find particulates alone kill 13,000 people a year.
W.H.O. says only 56 people died at Chernobyl. However!
The New York Academy of Science has translated 5,000 papers from Russian!
The Chernobyl study done by the New York Academy of Sciences-
A book called Chernobyl by the National Academy of Science-
Produced by the New York Academy of Sciences-
According to the New York Academy of Science-
In no sense did the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work;
nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate claims made.
The translated volume has NOT been peer-reviewed
by the New York Academy of Sciences, OR BY ANYONE ELSE.
Now, when the National Academy of Sciences put it out
there were pro-nuclear people who were very strong, probably sociopaths.
They discredited it.
George Monbiot once deferred to Caldicott on matters of nuclear power and radiation.
After the Fukushima disaster and a discussion with Caldicott on Democracy Now-
The biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine, George!
Monbiot wrote: The anti-nuclear movement,
to which I once belonged,
has mislead the world about the impact of radiation on human health.
The claims we made were ungrounded in science,
unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong.
We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible dis-service.
Helen Caldicott, the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner,
has made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation.
I asked for the sources.
Caldicott's response has profoundly shaken me.
None were scientific publications.
None contained sources for the claims she'd made.
Geoge Monbiot published our email exchanges in The Guardian.
How dare he? So stupid.
That revolting little man said [that] after Fukushima he's become pro-nuclear.
He's either get a cerebral tumor or he's had a psychotic breakdown,
that's my clinical diagnosis.
I've listening to a lot of Caldicott while editing this video.
Is he being paid?
I do wonder.
Something... something fishy is going on.
She says not crazy things than I can possibly include,
without giving this video an "R" rating.
In our town there was at another presentation made at another Unitarian meeting house.
Yeah?
And it convinced a lot of people in the audience that thorium was a safer alternative.
Who presented that?
Who?
Two people who- From where?
Well, they were both connected to the nuclear industry in one way or the other!
Of course!
Thorium?
But they were very convincing.
Yeah, they are idiots.
These people are mad!
Now, let me tell you about thorium.
To produce electricity you need to reprocess, like, melt the fuel.
Then make the fuel rods with Uranium-233 then put them in the reactor.
It is economically totally out of the question, so these men are mad!
There's some sort of psychotic element in the nuclear industry
it has to do with testosterone and hormone receptors in the brain.
Behavior and sex comes into it.
All these men operate from their reptilian mid-brains and use their left cortex to justify
what their emotions want them to do, and a lot of it's about testosterone
and I'm fed up with testosterone!
E=mc 2 is a substitute probably for male... will I say it?
Erection and ejaculation!
Um, and they like it, and it's the sort of energy that really grabs them.
What you are about to hear
is the least crazy SOUNDING thing Dr. Helen Caldicott has ever said.
That people living near nuclear reactors are more likely to get leukemia.
This is either a scary thing to hear...
It causes excessive sweating, excessive urination- ...or a terrifying thing to hear...
And it's in the grocery stores and in our baby's foods.
...depending on whether or not you have children.
Germany did a classic study of children under the age of five living less than 5 kilometers
from sixteen reactors.
The incidence of leukemia was more than double normal.
That study was then duplicated by the French.
So they don't need to do another study!
The first one looked at leukemia rates among German children living within five kilometers
of any operating nuclear reactor.
Where 17 incidents leukemia would have been expected researchers instead found 37.
The second study looked at leukemia rates among French children
living within five kilometers of operating reactors.
Where 7 cases of leukemia would have been expected, researchers instead found 14.
In both studies childhood leukemia rates very close to reactors are doubled.
Also, in both studies, researchers strongly cautioned against assuming the increase
in leukemia was from any sort of radioactive plant emission.
How is it, the researchers involved in both studies saw a doubling of leukemia rates near
the reactors, and then argue against any sort of radioactive plant emission as a cause?
Wouldn't anyone like to know?
And those two studies are classic studies, they don't need any more studies.
QED, it's proven!
Both the French and German Studies
measured leukemia rates against distance from nuclear power plants.
The French study followed the German, and so attempted to address from confounding factors
that the German study lacked data for.
The French study used 2 geographic models.
One was simply distance to the reactor, as the German study had done.
The second model incorporated wind direction to more closely model where any emissions
from the reactor would be distributed.
The excess cases of leukemia disappeared when using this more accurate weather model, meaning
the vast majority of leukemia cases were not downwind from the reactors,
as one might expect.
This curious finding was then explored further in a third study, which saw elevated leukemia
rates where nuclear power plants were planned, but had not yet been constructed.
There was not yet any radioactive material on those sites.
They don't need any more studies.
It's proven!
Nuclear power plants may be located close to cities and large population centers,
but they're not dropped in the middle of housing units.
Most frequently, in Europe and the UK, they're put in the industrial zones of small towns.
On land previously used for other purposes.
The German study's increase in leukemia rates were all clustered where a chemical factory
had once operated and later the nuclear power plant had been built.
They don't need any more studies.
The vast majority of scientific research finds
that NO increase in cancer or leukemia is caused by nuclear power.
Note again, that researchers of both the German and French studies caution
SPECIFICALLY against presuming any emission from nuclear power plants was the cause.
So what does Caldicott do?
She tells her audience that the reports are proof of exactly that.
We've lived and survived for 3 million years without electricity.
We can laugh about her prescription of a candlelit future...
We've got to stop- Do not- Never- Never use a-
You don't need all this electrical gadgetry-
Turn them all off! -television, DVD, ah, uh, uh, uh, uh,
electric carving knives, all the flashing lights-
But it comes at the end of a terrifying diatribe.
These look like thalidomide babies.
Remember when pregnant women used to take thalidomide?
Between mischaracterizing good science, and regurgitating bad science,
and just flat-out making stuff up...
This is a nuclear fallout released by the Australian Radiation Service
It's an absolutely wicked, wicked, wicked industry which kills people.
These people should be tried like the Nazi war criminals were in Nuremberg,
and I'm fed up with them!
...it's not until you're scared out of your wits that she suggests-
we should switch from a clean source of lighting, to one of the very dirtiest.
If a woman who repeatedly tells audiences easily refutable falsehoods...
-and there must be a law that people can't lie!
People should be sued!
Doctors can't lie.
We would be deregistered.
I would be be deregistered.
If I lied about medicine- I would be deregistered.
And they haven't sued me, so I'm right.
What you see behind you are real environmentalists.
We're not caught in some dogma from 40 years ago, and that's why they place the goal of
beating climate change above the goal of building a bunch of solar and wind.
I think it's natural to re-examine your beliefs as you age up.
Nuclear's the best way to go for energy for the future.
You and I are religious fanatics- have been- about nuclear.
Nuclear's bad.
And we're the ones then who should lead the discussion.
I remember the intensity of the nuclear debate, I was on the other side of it...
This administration does not support the Department of Energy's
Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor program,
and will oppose any efforts to continue the funding for this reactor project.
...but given this challenge we face today?
And, given the progress of 4th Generation nuclear?
Go for it!
No other alternative, zero emissions!
We all know there isn't 4 hours of sun here in Michigan every day, and so on those days
there's no sun... how am I warming up my pizza?
People who once opposed nuclear power are the ones speaking the loudest, and the clearest.
I assumed, like most people, the existing Light Water Reactor was a kind of static technology,
and there would be some incremental improvements to it like we improve all kinds of things,
but there wouldn't be a fundamental change in the reactor concept itself.
And when you present that to somebody who's been anti-nuclear their whole life they go, huh?
To anyone concerned about the environment, poverty, exploration
or just untapped human potential, this stuff is inherently compelling.
People are drawn to it, just like every other source of clean energy.
Can you give me an update on Diablo?
What update do you need, except to close it down?
I cannot believe you are shutting down an operating source of reliable clean energy.
In fact, nuclear plants are shutting down faster than new ones are being built.
Operating reactors are being shut down and replaced with solar and wind power-
Backed up by natural gas and coal.
Most the ones that are kind of cute and cuddly- its energy farming.
There's the intermittency problem, you have to have some way of getting energy
during those time periods that it's not available.
During the day we generate as much electricity as we can using solar.
At night, when it's cloudy, we use more natural gas.
Each year we probably get over 200 days of sunshine.
But there's 165 more days without.
As big as this solar plant is, it's not enough to meet our customers needs.
The plant operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
That's why we need natural gas.
The result being higher, not lower greenhouse gas emissions.
We are headed in the wrong direction.
We have to get beyond burning stuff for energy.
And we can go to a dispersed form of energy, which is gathering wind and solar.
Or we can go to a more concentrated form of energy, which is nuclear.
And the disadvantage of wind and solar that will always exist is the amount of labor,
energy, and expense of gathering and concentrating and directing that energy.
Because energy had to be collected and directed to do work.
And nuclear energy has already been collected.
We won't be using energy to tackle problems, if we've constrained our own access to it.
Human mechanical energy is so amazing.
Why can't we use that to create energy?
You will never run out of electricity.
You never generate any pollution.
So half the world is not going to generate pollution.
We call it- Free Electric.
Solar Freakin' Roadways-
-replaces all roadways, parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, tarmacs, bike paths and outdoor
recreation surfaces with smart, microprocessing, interlocking, hexagonal solar units!
Maintaining a nation of solar highways.
Manufacturing bicycle-battery-generators for every home.
An extremely ambitious idea to replace our nation's roads with solar panels.
The Department of Transportation has kicked in $850,000.
People are actually taking this seriously.
Despite the media attention they've received, I think these ideas are flat-out crazy.
But they're par for the course in today's energy landscape.
They Keystone XL Pipeline extension-
For a while, the entire national energy discussion revolved around a single pipeline.
Sometimes it seems the more difficult an energy source is to harness,
the more attention it receives.
If you'll give me a chance to serve, I'll bring the EPA and the Agriculture Department
and all the people together and we'll use ethanol
as a part of our nation's energy security future!
For example, corn ethanol receives $7 billion in subsidy, each year.
Corn ethanol's Return On Energy Investment is 1.3x.
Only 30% more energy is recovered from corn ethanol, then went into producing it.
Ethanol is a lousy molecule.
I'm sorry, but the farm lobby did a really good job- because they had a lot of money-
to be able to peddle a really grossly inferior molecule like ethanol.
Its got 25% less energy density- per mole- than regular old gasoline.
And it costs a hell of a lot more money to make.
Even Al Gore, who was a key proponent of Corn Ethanol, acknowledges the subsidy was a mistake-
The energy conversion ratios are, at best, very small.
How does Corn's 1.3x compare against other energy sources?
Solar cells return 7 times.
Natural Gas is 10 times.
Wind is 18 times.
Today's water cooled nuclear is 80 times.
Coal is 80 times.
Hydropower is 100 times.
A thorium powered molten salt reactor can return 2000 times the energy invested in it.
As another point of reference, 7 billion dollars is not just our yearly corn ethanol subsidy-
It would triple NASA's entire technology development budget.
Uh- personally if I was going to try to be living on the Moon or Mars I would definitely
want a nuclear power source.
I would consider anything less to be tantamount to suicide.
I'm an aerospace engineer by training, went to Geogia Tech got my masters degree there.
Now I spent 10 years working at NASA.
This is the kind of community I was thinking of.
It would have all the needs a community on Earth would have
but it had some very unique constraints.
He grew up talking space, living space, did his 4th grade state report
on Alabama because of the rocket center.
Even from our first date I knew he was passionate about space.
Harrison Schmitt was the first trained geologist, and only trained geologist, to go to the moon.
So he was a guy who knew what the heck to look for.
And so the scientific take was so vast,
it almost eclipses all the other [Apollo] missions put together.
During the Apollo era you didn't need government programs to try convince people
that doing science and engineering was good for the country.
It was self evident.
And even those not formally trained in technical fields
embraced what those fields meant to the collective national future.
We choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Who wants to be an aerospace engineer so that you can design a plane
that's' a few percent more fuel efficient.
That doesn't really work.
Saying who wants to be an aerospace engineer because we need
a plane that can navigate the rarified atmosphere of Mars.
You're going to attract the very best of those students.
And the solutions to that problem, in every case I've ever seen,
have improved life back here on Earth.
Zero, and liftoff of the Atlas 5 with Curiosity.
It had, like, heat shields and a hypersonic drogue chute.
I said this is not going to work.
Retro-rockets and then a hoist.
It was something Rube Goldberg would have designed.
An SUV sized rover was plunked down on Mars.
How confident were you that this whole sequence of landing devices would work?
I wasn't confident at all I was shitting bricks.
It was scary.
This lander has more than 10 times as much scientific instrumentation
than anything we've sent onto the surface of Mars.
So it needs more power?
Needs more power, as Kirk would say to Scotty.
Well the last one was solar this one's got nukes.
Wait, wait. So you've got a nuclear power plant on the rover?
It's not a power plant, it's a power source.
We're touchy about this because when you use the nuclear word-
One of the two verboten n-words-
That's right, that's right.
Just saying.
So when we use THAT n-word, we try to speak carefully.
And it's not like a nuclear power plant with the cooling towers
and the turbines and all that.
It's a bunch of Plutonium that's giving off heat and we use that to generate electricity.
So you found another thing to call it to not spook people when it's launched?
Yeah.
Okay.
Apollo astronauts used plutonium RTG to power their science equipment.
The Mars rover Curiosity is entirely powered by RTG.
And it can run at night.
It can run in any season.
The other ones had solar panels they could only run in the daytime?
Yup.
Couldn't you charge a battery and keep working at night?
In the Martian winter, your monopower goes down
if your solar panels get covered with dust.
So in the Martian winter the Sun is very low in the sky?
Yeah.
The Martian exploration rovers often found themselves short on power
as dust settled on their solar panels.
They were the only source of energy, and the Martian winter was approaching.
The part of the it that really breaks my heart is that
we just didn't have power to drive any more.
Well, one of them did die, because of the winter-
One of the two rovers?
Yeah, if the power goes down enough so that you can't run the heaters at night,
then you die.
That already happened to one of our previous rovers, so, if you want to do a lot of science,
you want a lot of power a lot of instrumentation, you want to
last a long time and run anywhere on Mars- Send nukes.
Exploring space requires energy.
Energy to run experiments.
Energy to scrub carbon dioxide from Astronauts oxygen supply.
The carbon dioxide removal assembly is being worked on today inside the destiny laboratory.
A short was seen in one of the heating elements that you see Mike Barratt there.
He put a filter in there that helps keep the water pure.
That system uses water because obviously water is made of hydrogen and oxygen.
It uses electrolysis which is passing an electrical current through that water
to split the water into hydrogen and its oxygen.
The hydrogen is dumped overboard, the oxygen is used
to pump into the air of the station for the crew members to breathe.
You go to the moon and there's no oxygen atmosphere there's no lakes of water or anything.
So it really comes down to nuclear and solar power.
They called it the n-word at NASA.
They're like we can't even talk about nuclear.
And I said how can we not talk about it?
We have exactly two options for how to make power in space and this is one of them.
Europa!
Another Europa.
A black and white picture of a ring of Jupiter!
Why is the Earth round?
Why isn't it square or any other shape?
That's a good question.
That's a question I've asked myself.
And the answer has to do with gravity...
Carl Sagan was a member of Voyager's imaging team.
And it was his idea that Voyager take one last picture.
That's here.
That's home.
That's us.
Every hero and coward.
Every creator and destroyer of civilization.
Every king and peasant.
Every young couple in love.
Every mother and father.
Hopeful child.
Inventor and explorer.
Every teacher of morals.
Every corrupt politician.
Every superstar.
Every supreme leader.
Every saint and sinner in the history of our species.
On a mote of dust.
Suspended in a sunbeam.
As we explore further from the Sun, the utility of solar panels shrink to zero.
To illustrate, imagine we can power a space mission orbiting the earth
with one solar panel.
We'll call this solar panel, the Earth Panel.
If we use Earth Panel orbiting Venus instead of the Earth,
we'll get almost twice as much electricity from it,
because orbiting closer to the Sun, more photons will be hitting the panel surface.
The same Earth Panel orbiting Mercury will generate almost 7x as much electricity.
Mercury is closer to the Sun.
More photons hit the panel.
But when we start moving away from the Sun, In Mars orbit, we only get half as much electricity.
So to power an identical space mission, we now need 2 Earth Panels.
At Jupiter, where only 4% as many photons can hit Earth Panel,
we now need 27 Earth Panels to power the mission.
The distance between Earth and the Sun is what's called an Astronomical Unit.
Earth is 1 Astronomical Unit away from the Sun.
Jupiter is only 5 Astronomical Units away from the Sun,
but it requires 27x as many solar panels.
The relationship is not linear, its quadratic.
At Saturn, 91 Earth Panels.
Uranus [370].
Neptune [900].
At Pluto, 1500 Earth panels are required to power the mission.
Somewhere between Mars and Saturn, our mission became impractical.
Clouds and haze completely hide the surface of Titan, Saturn's giant moon.
Titan reminds me a little bit of home.
Like Earth, it has an atmosphere which is mostly nitrogen.
But it's 4x denser.
NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn pulled into orbit,
dropped off of itself a little probe.
The probe Huygens descended down from the Cassini spacecraft and landed on Titan.
Hidden beneath lies a weirdly familiar landscape.
Titan has lots of water.
But all of it is frozen hard as rock.
In fact, the landscape and mountains are made mainly of water ice.
On Titan, the seas and the rain are made not of water but of methane and ethane.
On Earth those molecules form natural gas.
On frigid Titan, they're liquid.
There might be creatures that inhale hydrogen instead of oxygen.
And exhale methane instead of carbon dioxide.
They might use acetylene instead of sugar as an energy source.
How could we find out if such creatures rule a hidden empire beneath the oil dark waves?
The probe Huygens landed in one spot.
You know it's a big moon, it's 1 of 6 moons bigger than Pluto by the way.
What does the other side of the moon look like?
The probe only had battery life for a couple of hours.
We weren't there long enough to see how things change.
Does is snow methane?
So these long baseline questions can't be answered by 2 hours worth of data.
Cassini Mission was launched in 1997 and Saturn is a long way away,
it took 7 years to get there.
The huygens probe launched from Cassini only operated 2 hours.
But Cassini itself, powered by a plutonium RTG,
continues to study Saturn and her 62 moons.
Hours of operation.
Decades of operation.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a tireless advocate for NASA, explaining to politicians and public
what we miss when space exploration is severely financially constrained.
We lost an entire generation of these smart people they became investment bankers
or lawyers out of the 1980s and 90s because they had no place for them
to take their interest in science.
The merger promised in the press release $150 million of savings.
Instead there were billions of dollars of cost overruns.
And entrepreneur Elon Musk explains how space exploration is launch constrained.
Musk created SpaceX to drastically reduce the cost of launching payload into orbit.
Space-X was founded to make radical improvements to space transport technology
With particular regard to reliability, safety and affordability.
We have top men working on it right now.
Who?
Top men.
But what about powering space exploration?
Most of our RTG fuel, the Plutonium-238, was created a quarter century ago.
NASA started producing more in 2013, but the worldwide shortage of RTG fuel
is a perpetual constraint on space missions.
And while our tiny supply of Plutonium-238 can power exploration missions lasting
decades anywhere in our solar system,
the radioactive decay of Plutonium really does not provide much power.
Curiosity runs on 100 watts.
Rolling across the surface of Mars, taking photos, grinding samples, detecting neutrons,
monitoring the atmosphere, and sending all this data back to us-
Curiosity does all of this on 2 incandescent light bulbs worth of power.
The main thing about Mars is actually going to be energy.
If you have energy there's plenty of water because there's massive amounts of ice.
So it is really just about getting huge numbers of solar panels out there.
And I think, assuming the public is receptive, I think there might be nuclear.
I think certainly, if you build nuclear on Mars.
As to whether you transport nuclear to Mars would be up to the public to decide.
That a starving astronaut's journey across Mars consists of repeatedly deploying
solar panels, sleeping during the day while his vehicle recharges, and then driving at night,
is a realistic but unnecessary challenge created for dramatic tension.
Had Mark Watney been abandoned during a Mars Direct mission,
he'd have ample electricity to journey across Mars,
thanks to the small nuclear reactor on wheels
he could tow behind his rover.
It's not a giant nuclear power plant that powers a city,
it's just a nice little putt-putt nuke sitting in the back of a truck.
Look I don't mean to sound arrogant or anything but I am the greatest botanist on this planet.
Similarly, Mark Watney rations his potato crop to survive 400 days on Mars.
I now have 400 healthy potato plants.
I dug them up being careful to leave their plants alive.
The smaller ones I'll re-seed.
The larger ones are my food supply.
The carbon in Watney's potato crop tissue
does not come from nutrient rich astronaut poop.
It comes from the carbon in the Martian atmosphere.
Photosynthesis is carbon dioxide + photons creating plant tissue and emitting oxygen.
Because there's no shortage of carbon or water on Mars, more photons means more potato.
Artificial lighting means bigger potatoes than could otherwise be grown in Mars orbit.
It is the difference between one-half of Earth sunlight,
and as many photons as the potato crop can absorb.
Hey watch him.
Oh my God!
El Dorado, the legends are true.
That is how illegal grow operations are routinely busted-
simply by monitoring unusual behavior on the electrical grid.
This is also why high yield urban farming requires so much energy.
You want to see what minimal calorie count looks like?
It has been 7 days since I ran out of ketchup.
Andy Weir put his astronaut on the brink of freezing to death
and starving to death, by downgrading
the Mars Direct nuclear reactor to an RTG.
Even so, nuclear power of some sort was still required, as the author explains.
At one point I considered when he's on his long drive to Schiaparelli,
I thought, what if the RTG develops a problem?
What if it leaks or something like that and he has to live without it?
Throws it away and he has to drive away without it?
There's just no way you'd survive.
You are dead.
When you see a futuristic and inspiring space mission on the big screen,
it's not being powered by RTG or solar.
Well what if NASA missions had access to far more energy?
Most people don't appreciate how little energy
NASA has at their disposal to design missions around.
The most exciting missions
are not even under consideration because we have no way to power them.
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