The nuclear industry is a death industry.
It's a cancer industry.
It's a bomb industry.
It's killing people and will for the rest of time.
Well, why doesn't President Obama know this?
He's an intelligent man. He's got 2 little girls he loves.
What the hell does he think he's up to, supporting the nuclear industry?
It's wicked.
Do you mind if I use the "F" word?
Can I use the "F" word?
We can get rid of all these fucking nuclear plants right away
because we can switch to solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal...
all that energy is available to do today.
We can shut all the nuclear plants
and all the coal, all the oil and all the gas plants.
We can shut them down.
We have the technology.
It's called "Solartopia."
As a life-long environmentalist, I'm against nuclear.
But what if what I have been thinking all this time
and what my friends have been thinking all this time, is wrong?
STEWART BRAND Founder and Editor of Whole Earth Catalogue
It's been interesting to see how people respond to
my pro-nuclear power position.
Because they respect me for my books about nuclear weapons,
they know that I'm a liberal Democrat and they are puzzled.
RICHARD RHODES Pulitzer Prize winner for "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"
I was against nuclear power.
All I had to say was Three Mile Island, Chernobyl,
atomic bombs, atomic weapons.
My mind was made up, definitely.
So I needed a lot of input.
The research I did, and the scientists I interviewed, and so on.
Going and visiting, and seeing for myself.
GWYNETH CRAVENS author, "Power to Save the World"
I was under no doubt
that my whole career and my whole reputation
as an environmental activist, communicator
was at risk if I talked publicly about
having changed my mind about nuclear power.
I'd have been much better if I had only just keep my mouth shut.
But I couldn't do that.
MARK LYNAS Environmental Activist
Whenever you change your mind so radically,
like those of us that have become pro-nuclear have changed our minds,
you start to wonder what you were thinking.
I mean, what exactly was going on?
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER - President and Co-founder, The Breakthrough Institute
You know, the more you peel that onion, the more strange things you've figured out.
...a top radiation issue in Tokyo...
from the nuclear power plant Ai at Fukushima Daiichi.
Now today, 4 of the 6 reactors there remain in states of danger.
A nuclear accident is one of the biggest media stories it's possible to have.
...reactor number 3, this is the one whose fuel contains a mix of plutonium...
In my first blog entry, within the first 2 or 3 days of it happening,
I didn't know what the scale of the radiation release was going to be,
I didn't know whether people were going to be injured.
The fact that this was happening live on TV and that there were explosions,
you know, this was a nuclear power station blowing up.
Clearly, this situation was out of control.
The Chief Cabinet Secretary has asked the residents of Tokyo
not to hoard bottled water.
So you have these awful images of total devastation from a tsunami,
and the story was a nuclear power accident.
It all got muddled together.
Some people on the West Coast of the United States worry
- that the radiation could travel 5,000 miles... - I hadn't been pro-nuclear all that long
before the Fukushima plant started to melt-down.
It's hard to watch that happening and not insert the question of
whether or not this is an energy source that is really safe.
Radioactive isotopes will likely reach California...
but experts say those levels are so low, they certainly fall within safe limits.
Now, a large network of radio monitors is keeping close tabs on all of this.
The long-term effects of all of this, obviously, still to be determined.
I thought: "I've got to keep my head, you know,
"I could really lose it here, and I could just panic."
JAPAN A year later
What do you think, Mark?
- I feel like a bit of an idiot, actually. - Why?
I don't know, because it's sort of...
I'm wearing radiation clothing.
It shouldn't be necessary.
SPECIAL SECURITY ZONE FUKUSHIMA POLICE DEPARTMENT
It must be absolutely awful to have your town wiped out by a tsunami
and earthquake, and you can't even come back and rebuild,
because the whole place is contaminated by radiation.
Even if it's not massively contaminated, it's contaminated enough
that it scares the shit out of you. And I think that's...
you know, nobody can look you in the eye and say: "You shouldn't be worried."
Um, you know, there's no other energy source that does this,
that leaves huge areas contaminated by this strange invisible presence
which, you know, is potentially deadly, you know.
Everything has it's drawbacks, everything has it's risks
but this is something that is unique to nuclear.
I guess I can understand why people are scared of nuclear power as a whole.
You know, it's um...
it's kind of eerie.
So, um, yeah, I would say I'm having a wobble.
I can see why we'd want to do without nuclear power, I really can.
FUTABA 2 kilometres from Fukushima Daiichi
This parking lot is the hottest spot in the whole exclusion zone.
This place got some serious fallout, I think.
So, are you still pro-nuclear?
Um, am I still pro-nuclear?
Ask me in a few days, when I've had a chance to get my head around it, alright?
Are you still pro-nuclear?
To start the chain reaction, all we need is one neutron.
I think you can see what is going to happen.
Watch.
My first introduction to nuclear power was quite nice.
It was a Disney movie called: "Our Friend the Atom".
The atom was going to bring about a wonderful revolution
in the way we got our energy.
And, there was a nuclear powered submarine called the Nautilus...
that went under the North Pole and us kids were really enthusiastic about that.
And then, when I was in my early teens, Admiral Rickover came to give a speech.
And, my dad knew I was interested in science, so he took me.
Watch the control rods come out.
As the control rods come out, the reactor starts.
And water starts encirculating through here.
He was a wonderful speaker and he was very inspiring
about American technology and about the future
and he talked about nuclear energy being used to light up cities,
not just run submarines.
So, it was a generally positive notion.
I got into the nuclear business in early 1948.
Prior to that I was working on engines for the Tucker automobile.
Everything we had done, up until that time, that produced energy
was by burning something.
The enticement in the nuclear business was the fact that it was a new
LEN KOCH Engineer and Nuclear Pioneer
source of energy, a new way to generate heat.
But the equivalence is huge.
One pound of uranium, which is the size of my fingertip,
if you could release all of the energy,
has the equivalent of about 5,000 barrels of oil.
And that, to me, is amazing.
I worked at Argonne National Laboratory, in Idaho.
Which really was the headquarters in the world for nuclear power at the time.
We were building this first in the world experimental breeder reactor.
EBR-I was an experiment just to prove that the concept made sense, scientifically.
Everything happened just like we expected it to.
The reactors went critical.
Critical means that you have enough uranium so that it generates heat.
All the reactor does is generate heat.
The end product is steam,
and then once you have steam, it's the same whether you generate the electricity
with oil, or coal, or gas, or... just as long as you have a source of heat.
So, we generated electricity and then we hooked-up 4 light bulbs.
And we lit the light bulbs from atomic energy.
December 20, 1951
Nobody else had done it before.
But the fact that the whole nuclear business,
atomic energy, was started for a bomb, and used as a bomb...
and I think that put the negative side on it.
SAN ANTONIO, NEW MEXICO July 16, 1945
I'm just old enough to have conscious memory of World War II,
and the ending of World War II.
MONUMENT AT TRINITY SITE White Sands, New Mexico First nuclear test site
Nuclear bombs were not just a weapon.
They were a little window into some kind of Armageddon.
The photographs and the films and the stories
that came out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
those things cut pretty deep.
So, you had this very strong residue of
this is not primarily an energy source, this is primarily a weapon,
uh, that we feel very badly about.
And then the testing went on and on.
We're hearing about the radiation from strontium-90.
And then the Russians were doing tests.
Ah, the Chinese were doing tests.
And before it really slowed down,
there were over 2000 tests with nuclear weapons.
I grew up having nightmares that my home town was bombed into oblivion
and I was the only survivor.
Those kids were in school doing duck-and-cover routines under the desks
and the back yard fallout shelters and all that stuff,
made it all pretty personal.
I grew up in an anti-nuclear family.
You know, my parents were children of the '60s.
They were liberals and environmentalists.
To actually believe in nuclear power was, by definition to be a dupe.
Every step along the way, measures will be taken
to guarantee that our plant at Connecticut Yankee
contributes to the beneficial
and harmonious development of the Connecticut Valley.
The Haddam Neck site will be artfully landscaped
so that the buildings harmonize with its wooded background.
Plans even call for an information and educational centre
for those wishing to visit the Haddam Neck project.
I actually visited the nuclear power plant with my buddies in high school.
And we knew enough to have a very sarcastic attitude
toward the tour they gave us.
They would say: "It's this clean source of energy,
"it's really safe, it doesn't have anything to do with nuclear weapons."
And we would just laugh, we thought they were all "tools,"
stooges of the nuclear industry and its propaganda campaign.
Of course, that gets reinforced for people in my generation with The Simpsons.
Warning: problem in sector 7-G.
7-G? Good God, who's the safety inspector there?
Where the evil character is the C.E.O. of the nuclear power company.
Simpson, eh? Good man? Intelligent?
And Homer Simpson is bumbling while the whole thing is melting down.
Doh! Whoever thought that a nuclear reactor would be so complicated?
You just always had the sense that nuclear power was something sinister,
something that was a lurking danger.
I was against nuclear power because I was an environmentalist.
I am an environmentalist... and the two things go together.
Certainly, that always seemed to be the case.
Looking back, I suppose you could say that I was a hard-core activist.
It's almost like being in a battle-zone.
It's the kind of experience that most people never have.
Where you're battling the forces of evil almost on a day to day basis.
"Evil" being the big corporations,
those who are making profit out of Earth's destruction;
and "good" being us.
The slogan was: "No compromise in defence of Mother Earth."
That was the original Earth First slogan.
And it's one I still subscribe to, on a very deep level I think.
Well, I mean, nuclear power was evil.
No doubt about it.
Who are the criminals?
I was writing for national magazines many years ago.
Writing articles about the dangers of nuclear power.
And I had the standard point-of-view that I think, many journalists still have:
that it must be bad.
I came to realize
they basically avoided looking at the whole picture
and only looked at the questions that seemed to prove to them
that nuclear power was dangerous... as I had too.
The only reason I changed my mind is
that I talked to experts, physicists in particular,
who were the pioneers of nuclear energy.
And who carefully, one by one, explained to me
again and again, until it finally got through my head
why it wasn't what the anti-nuclear activists felt it was...
believed it was.
I was right there at the beginning of this.
It was my chance to do something for humankind.
This, after all, was an unlimited source of energy.
I assumed that all electrical power, if we were successful,
would be generated by nuclear means.
In the '50s there were essentially two kinds of reactors being developed.
The breeder reactor, which EBR-1 was a prototype for,
and the light water reactor.
The breeder reactor breeds plutonium and can recycle it over and over again
It's a very good fuel.
The light water reactor is a much simpler reactor,
but it produces much more waste.
It was chosen by Admiral Rickover to be the reactor for the submarine.
CHARLES TILL Nuclear Physics Pioneer
There are many things to be said for light water reactors,
and there are some to be said against.
But, with Rickover's influence, the light water reactor
became the principal commercial reactor around the world.
We developed water reactors,
but we looked upon that as sort of a near-term, short-range stepping stone
to real nuclear power: the breeder reactor.
That's what we considered to be the most likely,
real long-range future for nuclear power.
But, the water reactor got marketed first.
This was partly a commercial move on our part.
In the early 1950's we were concerned that the Soviet Union,
which had kept pace with us
in the development of nuclear reactors for power,
would steal a march on us and get the commercial business in Europe.
So, President Eisenhower decided
to share the benefits of nuclear energy with other countries.
It's called: Atoms for Peace.
We've had 50 years now of water reactors,
400 of them, roughly, all over the world.
And they've produced a hell-of-a-lot of waste that we didn't anticipate.
You know, you've mentioned a 100,000 years of stuff
that you gotta keep isolated from the rest of the world,
it's enough to scare a lot of people.
There was perhaps a price we paid for commercialization,
in the sense that we didn't look ahead.
Nuclear power was developed as a kind of a boutique energy source
by utilities executives who really didn't know much about it.
I talked to people who said, "Well, I heard about it on the golf course
"from the guy who runs the plant down the road.
"He's going to build one, and so I thought I should too."
The first commercial nuclear power plant, that was built in the United States,
was built in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.
It was a modified version of a large submarine reactor.
One of the major reasons the power company wanted it,
was because there was a lot of coal pollution in Pittsburgh.
And nuclear energy looked to people to be, as it is, a clean form of energy.
The first power reactors were fairly small.
But the push by the power and light companies of America
was to scale them up as quickly as possible.
Safety, instead of being inherent in the design of the reactor itself,
had to be engineered around it, as it were.
You had to have multiple core-cooling systems
that had to be added on
to anticipate possible break-downs of various kinds.
The odds of "X" happening or "Y" happening were very small.
But unlike the smaller reactors, they really couldn't say it was impossible.
March 28, 1979
Late today, officials here in Washington summarized briefly what seems to have caused the problem.
First, a pump in the generator system broke down at 4:00 a.m. yesterday.
The reactor immediately shut down.
Reactor operators decided to open the valves
and release radioactive water from the reactor.
That, apparently, may have been the wrong thing to do.
When the emergency core-cooling system came on automatically,
an operator turned it off.
That too, apparently was a mistake.
For then, high levels of radiation were released inside the containment building.
And not until 3 hours later was it realized
that radiation was being released; and in fact, was penetrating to the outside.
Three Mile Island happened.
And, the first thing I thought of is:
are those rays coming out of Three Mile Island
gonna come to New York and harm my daughter?
I remember standing in my apartment and thinking:
"What can," you know, "what can we do?"
This is Jack Godell, we have a serious condition.
You get everybody into safety areas, and you make sure that they stay there.
Of course, 2 weeks earlier, The China Syndrome had come out.
So I was already prepared to be terrorized by this event.
The China Syndrome.
The what?
If the core is exposed, for whatever reason, the fuel heats the...
The idea behind The China Syndrome
is that the nuclear power plant would melt down and it would
burrow a hole all the way to China.
Never mind that China is not actually on the other side of the Earth
as the United States, but, that was the idea.
That, the worst-case scenario would be apocalyptic.
...the number of the people killed would depend upon which way the wind is blowing...
...render an area the size of Pennsylvania, permanently uninhabitable.
Not to mention the cancer that would show up later.
That's when I think I began to conflate nuclear power with nuclear weapons.
...from a leaking nuclear plant.
We don't want a radioactive wasteland, whether it's from a bomb or a nuclear plant.
That kind of... that's probably the sort of thing I would have answered.
It just seemed like, okay, nuclear anything is a bad idea.
WASHINGTON, D.C. May, 1979
I want to just say a few words about The China Syndrome.
My movie, The China Syndrome.
Because, we continue to place our health and safety
in the hands of utility executives
whose main goal in life is to maximize profits,
then we will see more Harrisburgs, we will see more leaks
and we will see an increase in the cancer epidemic
that is already running rampant in this country.
No more nukes! No more nukes! No more nukes!
NEW YORK September, 1979
Stopping atomic energy is practising patriotism.
Stopping atomic energy is fighting cancer.
Stopping atomic energy is fighting inflation.
Stopping atomic energy is saving this country.
♪ Just give me the restless power Of the wind ♪
♪ Give me the comforting glow Of a wood fire ♪
♪ But please take all your atomic Poison power away ♪
In the 1980's, my husband and I were living in the east end of Long Island.
And, um, word gets out that this nuclear plant is going to start-up.
And this is, of course, right after Three Mile Island.
That was very much in people's minds.
The local-grown environmental people...
and I would be one of those, ah, just said:
"Yeah, we've gotta stop Shoreham, however we can."
- No nukes! - No one will survive!
Every day the plant operates
radiation will be coming out of the plant, right?
And it will get into the food.
Women may be hard-wired to protect our families.
Stay clear of the bus.
And it's just a natural impulse.
Stop the fraud!
If something looks like it's bad,
we're holding up our hand and saying: "No, no, pl... please, we... we can't have that."
I remember these big scare ads in the papers.
Getting people to organize rallies against Shoreham.
There were many things that I didn't know at that time, that I've learned since.
For one thing, it turns out, the ads were placed by the oil delivery industry.
You know, the companies that deliver fuel to people on Long Island.
And sure, the oil companies can say: "Go solar!"
Because they know that it's never going to replace oil heat.
You cannot turn on the sun in the winter and hope to warm-up your house.
Good luck.
- Solar, not nuclear. - Solar, not nuclear.
- Sponsored by the Oil Heat Institute. - Yeah. Yeah, no problem.
Yeah, you don't need a furnace, just have solar panels.
I mean, this is the cynicism of the fossil fuel industry.
Shoreham was actually finished and started-up,
when it immediately got shut-down by the Governor of the State
and basically, moth-balled.
It was this immense investment, billions of Dollars,
in a reactor that would have been of great use to New York City.
But people were so afraid of it, that they simply said:
"Shut it down."
And, today it's a mausoleum.
Those of us who were worried about nuclear power,
perceived that nuclear power wasn't really needed.
And this, I think, was one of the fundamental tragedies of the anti-nuclear movement.
To be anti-nuclear, is basically, to be in favour of burning fossil fuels.
I had, finally, to change my mind.
And, I have seen friends of mine change their minds.
One of them being, Gwyneth Cravens,
who started out rather anti-nuclear, as I did,
and ended up writing a book about the benefits of nuclear power.
November 8, 1989 United Nations, New York
The difference now, is in the scale of the damage we are doing.
We are seeing a vast increase
in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere.
It is mankind, and his activities
which are changing the the environment of our planet
in damaging and dangerous ways.
Change to the sea around us.
Change to the atmosphere above.
Leading, in turn, to change in the world's climate,
which could alter the way we live, in the most fundamental way of all.
That prospect is a new factor in human affairs.
It's comparable in its implications, to the discovery of how to split the atom.
Indeed its results, could be even more far-reaching.
We can't just do nothing.
One of the key arguments that the climate-deniers use is:
"Oh look, climate is a huge thing.
"You mean were affecting the weather? It's just us, we're just little people."
But we are.
October, 2012
We are beginning to see the kind of destabilization and chaos that you get
actually, when you see this transition to much warmer global temperatures.
HURRICANE SANDY
And that process of change, very very rapid climate change
is going to wreak havoc on human society.
Having children has made me even more concerned about the future.
So, it's deep in my commitment to tackling global warming.
Loving your children is about loving the future
and loving the world that they're going to inherit.
And so, you've got to make sure that that's right.
You know, I had a sneaking suspicion that nuclear was going to have to be part of the solution,
simply because it doesn't produce carbon dioxide.
But, I didn't want to go there.
- Why? - I was too scared.
I mean, it's pathetic really, but, looking back, but you know, yeah,
you don't want to make enemies
of your main allies in the environmental movement
by tackling something which is difficult, controversial.
Ted and I spent basically the entirety of our professional careers
working for the big environmental groups.
I mean, you name it: Sierra Club, NRDC,
even worked with Earth First on a campaign to save
the last ancient redwoods in California.
We were movement guys. I mean, we were consultants to the big green groups.
We really accepted most of the basic ideas of the environmental movement,
and I think over time we, you know, became gradually disillusioned
with the traditional environmental approaches to climate change.
It is my assessment that we have no consensus here for Article 10.
Then, we are going to delete Article 10 from the Protocol.
It is so decided.
THE KYOTO PROTOCOLS ASSEMBLY
People would tell you that: "Oh, everything is going to change.
"The world is going to implement the Kyoto Treaty on global warming.
"We're all going to start using solar and wind for our energy."
It was a very seductive narrative.
Then, Part A is adopted.
There is agreement on paragraph C of this article.
Paragraph C is adopted.
We understand that there is agreement on Paragraphs D, E, F & G.
The idea was that the U.S. was going to sign Kyoto
and then all the countries in the world
were just going to start ratcheting-down their emissions year after year.
Just like they did on their Excel spreadsheets.
We continue with the revision of Part B.
The problem is, these were all proposals based on
making fossil fuels more expensive.
I think it's pretty safe to say, that is not going to happen.
The adoption of this Protocol to the conference is by unanimity.
There is not going to be a global treaty on climate change.
The United Nations treaty process is basically run aground.
We just walked away being like:
"Nobody has a clue as to how to do this."
So, we wrote this essay: "Death of Environmentalism"
that argued that, if environmentalism is that kind of small bore,
then we need something beyond environmentalism.
Modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions,
outdated concepts and exhausted strategies
must die,
so that something new can live.
I would suggest that it will take more than dead penguins and melting ice caps
to get Americans to fundamentally get involved
in its political transformation of our energy economy.
We still didn't think we needed nuclear power.
It really took us getting clear about how big the gap was,
between fossil fuels and renewables for us to take a second look at nuclear.
Part of the problem is intermittency. And that hasn't been solved.
It's not always sunny and it's not always windy
and there a long periods of time
when renewables would deliver no power at all into a grid.
You have to have natural gas backup.
So, what you end up getting with renewables
is a pretty big expansion of natural gas.
You know, I'm sure people had told me that and I didn't believe them.
We're building these all over the country and one of the questions we ask,
we need about 3,000 foot in altitude,
we need flat land, we need 300 days of sunlight
and we need to be near a gas plant.
Because, you know, for all of these big utility scale power plants,
whether it's wind or solar,
everybody is looking at gas as the supplementary fuel.
The plants that we are building, the wind plants and the solar plants are gas plants.
I end up feeling like a sucker.
I... I ended up feeling like I was a sucker.
The idea that we're gonna replace oil and coal and natural gas
with solar and wind and nothing else is an hallucinatory delusion.
You know, you find yourself feeling...
I found myself quite disappointed in myself and...
and honestly, quite angry at others who were propagating that myth.
This light bulb, when everybody's got them, will quadruple the efficiency of bulbs
and that will displace two dozen power plants.
This thing for florescent lights will displace 60 big power plants.
This motor controller chip and about 10 other things you do to motors
will save 70 big power plants.
Just these 3 things: there goes every nuclear plant we have.
I had gotten the religion about energy efficiency and renewables
in college, when I first read Amory Lovins.
Amory Lovins is still taught
in maybe every liberal arts environmental states class in America.
In his article after article,
explaining why solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels
and why you don't need to build nuclear plants
because we can use energy efficiency...
It's a very appealing, seductive message.
Ah, they're getting smaller, here's a little Osram 11, replacing a 50.
And I bought it, my parents and my family bought it,
really, everybody I know believed this.
The standards of green environmentalist narrative
has been that we can all use less energy;
so we can be renewable, we can go for energy efficiency.
The idea that humankind is simply wasting and using too much.
Now, I have a lot of time for that argument.
But you can't keep using less energy forever.
Most people kind of think
that, somehow we're going to be reducing our energy consumption.
Actually, we just find more and more uses for it.
If you look at all the energy that is used by an iPhone,
not just to make it and to power it,
but also to power all the servers, all of the stuff you don't see,
that the iPhone is connected to: it uses as much energy as a refrigerator.
There is a direct correlation
between the amount of energy available to a civilization
and that civilization's quality of life.
Unless you want to condemn more than half the population of the Earth
to poverty and sickness and short lives.
We're going to have to produce more energy.
In regions that don't have electricity, or very little electricity,
the life span is much shorter.
Clinics, schools, refrigeration, all of these things rely on electricity.
And just a few watts make a big difference.
As soon as you get electricity, you improve people's lives.
Well, that's human life.
First of all, we're talking about human, just quality of life.
And if you look at the countries with the best quality of life,
they are the countries that consume the most electricity.
Rain or shine, 24 hours a day, a steady stream of power.
The global south is pretty warm, they would like air conditioning.
And, up till now, they've not been able to afford it. But now they can.
They're getting out of poverty
and they need grid electricity to run their air conditioners.
Of course, various environmentalists freak out at that point.
But, on the other hand,
if you could have vast quantities of really, really clean energy,
in the developing world in the next decade or so.
That is such an improved world, it takes your breath away.
Assuming that the world continues to develop,
and that China and India and Brazil become rich countries,
over the next half-century or century,
how much energy is the world gonna use?
When you start running those numbers, it's a sobering exercise.
And you may not be able to get that number exactly right,
but you realize that we're gonna basically double the amount of energy we consume by 2050.
We're probably going to triple it or quadruple it by the end of the century.
And meanwhile, if you want to stabilize emissions at some reasonable level,
almost all of that energy has to be clean energy.
You know you've got only, you know, create a clean energy infrastructure
to replace the fossil fuel infrastructure we have,
but we have to create yet another one, or maybe two of 'em
between now and 2050 or 2100;
in order to reduce our emissions, to stabilize the climate.
And, that is just nothing that anybody has really been talking about
or dealing with over the last 20 years.
It comes as a shock to a lot of environmentalists to hear this,
but coal is not only the most widely-used source of energy in the world,
it's also the fastest growing source of energy.
It's use is accelerating world-wide... faster than natural gas,
faster than renewables, faster than anything else.
When I have 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 fine particulates alone, kill 13,000 people a year.
World wide, 3 million people die a year, from air pollution from fossil fuel plants.
One of the big surprises for me, when I started looking into the mortality data:
the death rates associated with each energy technology
per, the amount of energy they make,
is that nuclear is the second-safest after wind.
And in fact, to add to the irony of it,
nuclear power is even safer than solar panels.
Making solar panels is an incredibly toxic process.
But, I thought people died at Three Mile Island.
I thought that hundreds of thousands of people died at Chernobyl.
I thought that there was nuclear waste scattered all around the country
and that it was seeping into our water systems.
I believed all that stuff and I... and I thought, even if maybe it was getting a little bit better,
or maybe if the problems with it were exaggerated,
a little bit by my fellow environmentalists,
that it was still a risk that we didn't need to take.
There hasn't been a single death
from the operation of commercial nuclear reactors in the United States.
Not one death in the history of nuclear power in this country.
At Vermont Yankee, which anti-nuclear people are trying to shut down,
protesters keep saying, it's causing public health problems.
- It's not. - But it's leaking tritium.
It's leaking tritium, that's true.
- Banana break? - Oh, I'd love one.
- Sure. - Thank you.
- If you ate one banana... - Banana Breaks?
which have a potassium isotope that's a little hot,
you would get more radiation exposure
than you would if you drank all the water that comes out of the plant in one day.
Banana Break!
Tritium is a naturally occurring hydrogen isotope.
I'm going to ask that all those people who are willing to risk arrest
remain in this safety zone, until the rest of the people have moved...
Vermont, 2012
In New Mexico, where I grew up, there's Radium Springs.
And, um, I had a friend who went with his Geiger counter,
and these hippies were there soaking in the baths
and he got out his Geiger counter and said, "You know, this is radioactive."
and they said, "Yeah man, but it's natural."
It is true to say that we are all bathed in natural radioactivity.
It's affecting all of us all the time.
It comes from the rocks and the air, and even from space.
It's in our food and our water and in our teeth.
So, radiation isn't dangerous in an everyday sense.
And there's enormous variation in different parts of the world.
Do you have any numbers just to put that in a kind of a context?
Well the numbers, I mean the units are difficult: it's grays and millirems and all this kind of thing...
Right.
You know, so the numbers are not familiar to people in any way, shape, or form.
If I say to you: "The radioactivity: Oh, it's only another 4 microsieverts."
Are you going to feel better about that? Of course you're not, because you don't know what on Earth I'm talking about.
Iodine 131.
They were reporting those radiation levels, and it was as confusing as they could possibly be.
...has just about zero point seven rem...
You have to get up to 50 to 75 rem to get to...
We hear about rems, and millirems and microrems
and then, oh now there's sieverts.
We hear a lot about sieverts, microsieverts, millisieverts.
And you're looking and squinting, and okay, that looks like large numbers.
Is that a number I should worry about? And compared to what?
What's the background radiation level relative to all this?
LOS ANGELES 0.09 microsieverts per hour
LONDON 0.10 microsieverts per hour
I didn't even know that there was such a thing as natural background radiation, actually.
I had assumed that radiation was something which humans
had artificially introduced into the environment; which was doing us harm.
NEW YORK 0.13 microsieverts per hour
There's background radioactivity affecting all of us, all the time,
which is many many times more powerful than artificial radioactivity
in terms of how we are affected.
TOKYO 0.14 microsieverts per hour
So, zero tolerance of radiation doesn't make any sense.
Radiation increases with altitude.
NEW HAMPSHIRE 0.30 microsieverts per hour
People who live at a higher altitude get a higher dose
than people who live in low-lying areas.
ON THE PACIFIC OCEAN 2.20 microsieverts per hour
And, if you are travelling on an aeroplane, say, you're going from New York to Tokyo,
you will get 20 times the average background level during that flight.
For example, in Guarapari Beach, in Brazil,
the natural background radiation is way above permitted levels
in terms of what the public can be exposed to.
GUARAPARI BRAZIL 30.81 microsieverts per hour
And that's what is coming out of the soil that's on the beach.
Can you ask him why he does this?
Eh, he has, ah, body pains, you know?
And this helps?
Ele ajuda. Ajuda. Ajuda.
It helps.
And, what's really striking, is that there is no correlation
between background levels of radioactivity
which vary by such enormous amounts and high levels of cancer.
Cancer is something which is the greatest fear of most people in rich countries.
And, because it kills 20% of people anyway.
We all know people who've died of cancer...
and so this idea that radioactivity is a cause of cancer
is probably the number one reason why people are scared of it.
EXCLUSION ZONE Chernobyl, Ukraine
You can't go to Chernobyl
and not re-examine your core beliefs about nuclear power.
I mean, you would have to be really thick-headed.
Not... not to look at that and the damage that was done and say:
"Alright, when it goes wrong...
"you know that we do everything we can to make it go right,
"but when it goes wrong: it can go really very wrong indeed."
Chernobyl was a... a real-world experiment
of what happens when you irradiate a very large population.
But, 1986 was a long time ago.
So, we've gotten the perspective and the distance
to be able to assess what the real impacts of that were.
And they were nothing, nothing like what was expected.
CHERNOBYL 0.92 microsieverts per hour
You will soon feel...
The reactor that exploded in Chernobyl in April, 1986,
was actually number 4, reactor number 4 of a whole set of them.
No one really realizes it, the 3 other units
which are in the same building, carried-on operating and generating
electricity, right up until the mid-'90s.
CHERNOBYL REACTOR Unit One
And people just went to work there every day.
Isn't that amazing?
Outside of the old Soviet Union,
we didn't use the reactor design that Chernobyl had.
Among other things, the Chernobyl reactor had no containment building.
It was in, virtually a quonset hut.
So, when there was a fire and an explosion,
there was nothing to contain it.
Chernobyl was a different kind of reactor. It was inherently unsafe.
It was primarily designed to make plutonium for bombs.
No Chernobyl-style reactors were ever built in the West.
But, if you could then point to other nuclear power stations and say:
"Each of those could be a Chernobyl..."
then, you've got a pretty powerful argument against nuclear power.
The city nearby, called Pripyat,
the entire place was evacuated when Chernobyl blew up.
It's just fascinating to see some place which is frozen in time
at the very end of the era of the Soviet Union.
It's an extraordinary place. I really can't even describe it.
It's a bit like the Fukushima thing, in the sense that
you're tramping around on this, debris of broken glass and broken everything;
and it's almost as if the explosion at Chernobyl had somehow caused this.
Of course it didn't, it's just the decay of time and things have been broken.
Obviously, what people are concerned about at Chernobyl is the radioactivity.
I never knew, until I went to Chernobyl, that there were places full of people
that just decided to ignore the restrictions
and they just moved back to their houses.
And, you can go to this old church and you can meet them.
PRIPYAT, UKRAINE 0.20 microsieverts per hour
Just ask him when and why did he decide to come back
and um, how many... how many people came with him?
This is our Chernobyl.
It is where we have always lived.
Nobody wanted to leave here.
By the spring of 1987, people were already beginning to return.
Of course, nobody let us come back, we just came through the woods on our own.
People returned to their homes a few at a time. They just came back and re-settled.
I have lived here in Chernobyl for 25 years.
And I'm perfectly healthy.
Among those who have returned,
no one has died of cancer or any other disease.
OUTSIDE CHERNOBYL REACTOR BUILDING 3.74 microsieverts per hour
The explosion of the reactor at Chernobyl had enormous consequences.
But not the ones, I think, many people expect.
I've followed the studies that have been done by the international experts
in radiation and oncology
that followed the damage at Chernobyl for all the years since.
The damage that was caused to people by the fallout
from that worst-of-all nuclear power accidents
has been remarkably limited.
You can look at the evidence, it's all been published.
It's been certified by the United Nations and the World Health Organization.
What's so striking is just to go read the original World Health Organization documents
then read the public health reports.
- Was that a shock to you? - It was a complete shock to me.
I mean I... there was a period when I'm reading all the Chernobyl stuff,
and I... I, I kind of am not believing it.
Because, it was so out of sync with what I had come to believe.
Literally hundreds of thousands of people were involved in the clear-off operation.
They're known as liquidators. And they got some really significant doses of radiation.
Their doses are known and their health has been studied ever since.
And even in that large number of people who were very heavily irradiated
40 or 50 people have died so far
and a few thousand may have shortened life spans due to cancer in future decades.
And there have never been any children born deformed from Chernobyl,
according to the best authoritative science we've got from the United Nations.
So, people have substantially been fed
an urban myth, really, about what the impacts of Chernobyl actually were.
I mean I've got books full of it.
A million people dying right now, or have died because of Chernobyl
and it was only 25 years ago.
How many millions more will Chernobyl kill?
40% of the European landmass is radioactive.
It will be for hundreds of years...
In order to believe that more than 56 people were killed at Chernobyl,
or more than the maybe 4,000 who would eventually die of cancer;
in order to believe that a million people were killed by Chernobyl
which is what Greenpeace and Helen Caldicott and 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.
It's so absurd of an idea.
And it is exactly the same thing global warming deniers think.
Helen, what do you think is the motivation for the United Nations,
to perpetuate such an appalling cover-up?
I don't know, I'm not... privy to their motivations.
But the difference between 50 people and a million people is so extreme.
I think people are confused about what to think.
Well, they should look at the literature.
This is the most important study, almost, that's ever been done.
How do you explain it?
This is the biggest cover-up in the history of medicine.
Many of the tactics and the arguments
that have been used by the environmental groups against nuclear power
are exactly the same tactics and arguments that are used by climate sceptics.
The United Nations, that's where all of this started.
Senator James Inhofe R-Oklahoma
It was the IPCC in the United Nations, said that the world was going to come to an end
because of the emissions of CO2.
So, the cherry-picking of scientific data, the nurturing of... of scientists
who happen to believe your ideological position
and the production of reports which apparently are authoritative and scientific
but actually are ideological propaganda, basically
41% of the people believe that global warming claims are exaggerated
Climate change deniers are idiots.
- But they're saying the same thing. - I don't care about them.
They, they are denying science.
- We're going back into the Dark Ages. - But they're saying the same thing.
How dare... how dare they deny science?
Not to understand science and medicine in this day and age
is more than irresponsible.
- How do you square these two conflicts? - I can't.
You know, we think of Japan, we think of Hiroshima, those pictures,
horrible after the event that happened...
No radiation is safe.
But, generally speaking, Americans don't have anything to worry about.
We have this map here, and we're showing obviously, the path of 5,000 miles.
First to the Aleution Islands, this is where they expect...
You can't reassure people. People are so terrified that anything you say,
because they don't have that background context,
that understanding of what radiation is and what it means,
they can't actually decide for themselves what's safe
and what risk they want to bear.
REFUGEE HOUSING Fukushima Prefecture
And I think that's one of the real problems at Fukushima.
There's no way for the experts
to actually communicate what s safe to the general public.
FUKUSHIMA HOUSING 0.18 microsieverts per hour
I don't let my children play outside for very long.
At most, one or two hours, not more.
If you are exposed to the fallout from Fukushima
and according to the World Health Organization and the U.N. generally,
the increased risk of getting cancer is estimated to be
so infinitesimally small, given the large population,
that you will never be able to identify this impact epidemiologically.
I just won the bet.
This particular weed here is more radioactive than Guarapari Beach in Brazil.
So we got, what did we get, 44?
Now we've seen what the worst is that can happen
with a 1960's era Western design reactor,
which does have a containment structure, which Chernobyl didn't.
But, this isn't something you can just brush away.
This was not supposed to happen to a reactor.
IDAHO, U.S.A.
Back in the '80s, it was clear to me that something had to be done.
Something better than present day,
about safety.
And, it wasn't only in safety.
It was in matters of waste as well
and in proliferation matters.
And over all of those things, the matter of economics.
You can't make the plant impossibly expensive by making it too complicated.
Go ahead and go up to the main parking lot there, Mac.
All right, thanks very much.
So, in 1980, I was given the job of directing the entire program
of advanced reactor development at Argonne National Laboratory.
Our goal was to design a new type of reactor.
Where the very physics of it would be such
that it could withstand almost any type of accident
that nuclear plants can be subject to.
EBR-II CENTRAL REACTOR
It was called the IFR. The Integral Fast Reactor.
The budget was about $100 million a year.
1,500 people, scientists, engineers, supporting staff.
This was a very big development program.
But you've got to test it.
Calculations don't tell you everything.
You've got to have the big facilities and say:
"If we have an accident of this kind, what will happen?"
We're now going to set-up the test...
April, 1986
We did two experiments to demonstrate some unique safety features
that that reactor has, that others don't have,
and invited people from all over the world to come and witness it;
T minus 2 minutes.
Station black-out is a term that is used by N.R.C., the safety folks,
to describe the situation where one loses all bulk AC power.
You assume that you lose all site power.
You assume that you are getting no AC power from your own turbogenerator.
You assume that your first diesel started up and it failed to start up.
The second one started to start and it also failed.
So, you end up dead in the water with no AC power.
This experiment was almost a direct parallel
to what happened at Fukushima.
- It was eerily similar. - Mark.
We ran the reactor at full power,
disabled the shut-down system
so that the operators had no ability to shut the reactor down.
And we shut-off the cooling system, didn't extract the heat,
so we just let things get hotter.
In most reactors, you can't do it.
No reactor that I know of, could survive that accident.
You have a melt-down.
The international audience were watching the temperature
going up like that, straight up.
They turned around like so, to see if I was,
or if the Argonne guys were running.
By the time they looked up again,
the trace had turned like so, and it was on its way down,
and the reactor just quietly shut itself down.
No action required of the operators,
no action required of the safety systems, nothing.
You could just stand back like this, watched the dials if you wished,
and the reactor shut itself down.
- 30 seconds. - 30 seconds to test time.
Well, in the afternoon we started the reactor up again,
and carried out the conditions
responsible for the accident at Three Mile Island.
5, 4...
We shut off the pumps.
Just shut off the pumps.
All major reactor accidents
CHERNOBYL
happen because of one thing:
inadequate cooling.
The IFR type reactor, which EBR-II was a prototype for,
if you cut it off from the steam systems so it cannot reject its heat,
it will just shut itself down.
So it can't melt down?
No, it can't melt down.
REPROCESSING FACILITY Idaho National Laboratory
We are now in the facility that completes the circle, if you like,
of the Integral Fast Reactor.
We've come out of the reactor building, we're now in the fuel-cycle part.
The intimate part of it was
that every part of a complete nuclear reactor system,
not the reactor itself, but also the facilities for treating the spent fuel,
for treating the waste,
would all be an integral part of the same system.
Ready for the transfer. Bring it over to me...
What this enables you to do is you can take the spent fuel
chop it up, and back it goes into the reactor.
You can recycle the fuel again and again until the end of plant life.
Ready to receive fuel.
The other thing that needs to be said about all of this technology
is that this is not... a dream.
This is not somebody's calculations on a piece of paper.
This is real. We know how to do these things.
Now, let me frame this debate, if I may,
by reading a letter from the President of the United States,
sent to me yesterday.
"Thank you for your letter
"supporting our decision to terminate the Department of Energy's
"Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor program
"including the Integral Fast Reactor.
"I want to assure you that this administration
"does not support the IFR
"and will oppose any efforts to continue the funding for this reactor project..."
Democrats have gotten themselves on the wrong side,
in my opinion, in this issue.
Being opposed to nuclear power, for, I think, no good reason
other than it's very high on the list of what Republicans like.
We know that nuclear energy is clean.
We know that it doesn't pollute the air.
We know that it doesn't damage the ozone.
We know that it is a tremendous producer of energy in a clean sense
and our only problem is that we can not come to political terms
on how to handle the waste stream.
We're talking about what it's gonna cost.
If we go that far and continue
our obsession with nuclear power.
IFR waste streams
lose their radioactivity to background level in about 800 years.
Light water reactor, in nearly 10,000.
I share with my colleagues some of the public opinion on this.
The Washington Post: "The Wrong Reactor."
The Oregonian: "Give Up Nuclear Breeder Dream."
The San Francisco Chronicle: "Saying No to Nuclear Pork."
The IFR program was shut down.
And the project went down the black hole of Government politics.
It was by chance, about the year 2000, I think,
I wound up in the desert, on a visit to Yucca Mountain.
America's planned nuclear waste repository
100 miles north of Las Vegas.
A hole in the ground where 10-plus billion dollars were spent
on vastly expensive experiments.
Trying to prove that this place is going to be absolutely safe
over the next 10,000 years.
So, I just felt like, wait a minute! This is nuts!
Among other things, have you even thought:
No, we are professional futurists, many of us who are on this trip,
what exactly is this world 10,000 years from now that we are trying to protect?
Science Fiction
is what we are playing out, at vast expense, at Yucca Mountain.
The kinds of experiments they were doing at that mountain,
it's not a mountain, it's just a ridge,
certainly didn't persuade anybody.
For political reasons, Yucca Mountain was not opened,
and will probably never be opened.
Then, I started to look at, well, what actually is
the amount of hazard that comes from nuclear waste?
The first thing I found out is what people are actually doing with the nuclear waste
which is being generated all this time
by every nuclear power plant. Turns out to be pretty good.
They put it in this, pretty simple, but very workable dry-cask storage.
And they park it out at the back of the parking lot.
And you can go there and see it.
There's the nation's nuclear waste.
Is it causing any problems?
No.
OUTSIDE WASTE CANISTER 0.10 microsieverts per hour.
The other realization for me, and it took a while to get through,
is that by not putting it in the ground,
you've got the option to use it as fuel in 4th generation reactors.
Wow! We can take this waste from the nuclear plant
and recycle it into fuel
either by reprocessing, or by having a new kind of reactor that uses this fuel.
That looks very much like a renewable resource.
People are always talking about nuclear waste,
the accumulation of nuclear waste,
and I did too.
I think it's around 70,000 tons
have accumulated, of used fuel in the United States.
I thought the quantity was staggering.
In fact, all the spent nuclear fuel
from commercial nuclear plants in the United States
could fit in a single football field,
if you stacked the fuel rods to a height of about 3 meters.
That's it.
But of that, only a very small fraction,
mainly plutonium, is long-lived.
By long-lived, I mean that it would still be "hot" thousands of years from now,
still be highly radioactive.
Volumetrically, nuclear produces tiny amounts of waste.
The entire waste production from France's 50 nuclear power stations,
which produce 80% of the country's electricity
are under the floor in one room.
Compare that with the billions of tons of waste
produced by coal-fired power stations.
It completely blows away most of the anti-nuclear arguments.
So it's... it's not...
Nuclear waste is not an environmental issue.
It's not something which, as an environmentalist, I'm concerned about.
One of the most inspiring stories anywhere, is the story of France.
Here was a country, in the early '70s that was burning oil for electricity.
It doesn't have coal reserves,
it doesn't want to be dependent on gas coming from Northern Europe and Russia.
But, when the oil shocks happened and the prices went up dramatically,
the French realized that they needed to get serious
about a different source of energy.
They said this was serious and it has to do with national security.
So, they focused on making sure they had the best nuclear engineers
and the standard design for the reactors, and they just rolled it out.
What's so significant about what the French did,
is that they did it so quickly.
They scaled up almost exactly at the pace
that we need to scale up nuclear power globally.
They now have 80% of their electricity coming from nuclear.
The trains are electric powered.
They have clean air.
They have the cheapest energy in Europe.
They're selling it to everybody else.
And they are greener than Green Denmark,
greener than Green Germany.
I didn't know what French per capita carbon dioxide emissions were,
which is actually the most important question to ask.
The answer is they are about 5 tons per person per year.
Germany is about 10 tons per year.
So, Germany has much, much higher per person emissions of carbon dioxide
than neighbouring France because France is nuclear
and Germany is trying to get out of nuclear.
When we look at nuclear
we have to understand that we are making a long-term investment.
Now, it's a big up-front capital cost.
But these are plants that are going to last 60, 80, maybe even 100 years.
And much of the other infrastructure that's being built will last far longer than that.
And, when you really look at it that way,
there's just really no question,
it's a much more economical alternative to very expensive solar panels,
or very expensive wind turbines that require back-up power.
The current generation of reactors we're building now,
are third generation reactors.
This technology is much safer.
But fourth generation reactors, like the Integral Fast Reactors
can use the waste from the first three generations as fuel.
The great philanthropist, Bill Gates
has put money and time into a Travelling Wave Reactor,
that you basically stick in the ground and it goes through its body of fuel
over a period of 60 years. You don't need to refuel it.
There's a thorium reactor that the same group is working on.
Other fourth generation, coming along with a small modular reactor.
They look exactly like the kind of local power source
that environmentalists are increasingly saying we should have.
So, there's a renaissance in reactor design,
that those are just the first glimpses of.
For some people, who perhaps accept most of these arguments,
in favour of nuclear power,
the ultimate argument is:
"But knowledge of this technology
"is also the kind of knowledge you can use to make nuclear weapons."
And that's quite true. It is.
There are, by the CIA's estimate, about 37 countries in the world today,
that if they wanted to, could develop nuclear weapons.
They have the technical and scientific infrastructure to be able to do that.
How many countries actually have nuclear weapons?
Nine.
Which, I think, begins to point out the fundamental flaw in the concern.
We won't get rid of nuclear weapons by forgetting how to make them.
We will get rid of nuclear weapons
by deciding we don't want them around anymore.
It turns out that the United States has been buying up nuclear warheads
from the Russians for over 10 years now.
16,000 nuclear warheads.
And we're recycling all of these nuclear warheads
into energy, electricity, nuclear power.
And so, nuclear power is doing more to de-nuclear-weaponise the world
than any other thing we do.
Poetically, it's rather beautiful.
The very things that were designed to blow up our cities
are now lighting up our cities.
And, basically, 10% of American electricity,
half of our nuclear power
comes from reprocessed Russian warheads.
Ideally, every single nuclear weapon in the world
eventually, can get turned into electricity.
I believe that while much of the environmental movement
that came of age in the '60s will never change,
I feel very confident that the next generation will.
They're going to understand the challenges they face in an energy hungry world.
And, they're going to put nuclear in its proper context.
We can have a world of 7, 8, 9, 10 billion people
that are living high-energy, resource intensive modern lives,
without killing the climate.
And that's exciting.
I have the sense that this is the beginning of something really beautiful.
You actually do feel like this is the beginning of a movement.