Why I changed my mind about nuclear power | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxBerlin

Translator: Morgane Quilfen Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Like many children born in the early 70s, I was lucky to be raised by hippies. One of my childhood heroes was Stewart Brand. Stewart is not only one of the original hippies, but also one of the first modern environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s. As a child, one of my favorite memories is playing cooperative games that Stewart designed as an antidote to the Vietnam War. I am from a long line of Christian pacifists known as Mennonites, and every August, we went as children to remember the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States government by lighting candles and sending them on boats to Bittersweet Park.

When I graduated from high school and during college, I brought many delegations to Central America to conduct diplomacy, seek peace, and also to support local farmer cooperatives in Guatemala, Central America, and Nicaragua. And over time, as I've traveled around the world, passing through many small communities on every continent, I've come to appreciate that the young people I interview don't want to be stuck in the village, they don't want to spend their entire lives chopping and hauling. firewood, they want to go to the city in search of opportunities (most of them do) of education, of work. And what I have realized is that this process of urbanization, of moving to the city, is actually very positive for nature.

Allow the natural environment to return. It allows Central African mountain gorillas, for example, an important endangered species, to have the habitat they need to survive and thrive. And, of course, in this process you have to go vertical. So even places like Hong Kong can preserve their natural environment around the city, but it requires an enormous amount of energy to grow. So the great challenge of our time is: how to get abundant and reliable electricity and energy without destroying the climate? I started out as an anti-

nuclear

activist and quickly became involved in renewable energy advocacy. So at the beginning of this century, I helped start a labor and environmental alliance called the Apollo Alliance, and we pushed for a huge investment in clean energy: solar, wind, electric cars, and the investment idea was adopted by President Obama.

And during his tenure, he invested about $150 billion to make solar, wind and electric cars much cheaper than they were. And that was having a lot of success, but we were starting to notice some challenges, some of them that you are familiar with: solar and wind generate electricity 10 to 30% of the time, so we depend on the weather to solar and wind. There were other problems we were noticing. Sometimes these sources of electricity generate too much

power

and you hear a lot of hype about batteries, but we actually don't have enough storage, even in California, where we have a lot of investment, a lot of Silicon Valley guys who are putting money into storage technology of batteries.

We were trying to figure out how all that renewable energy is managed. And while we were struggling with this issue, around 2005, Stewart Brand came out and said we should rethink

nuclear

power

. And this was like a shock to the system. I mean, to me and all my friends, Stewart was one of the first big proponents of solar energy in the world. In the late '60s and early '70s, he advised the governor of California, but he said, "Look, we've been trying to go solar for a long time" - and at that time - less than 0.5% of our electricity worldwide. , comes from solar energy, about 2% from wind and the majority comes from nuclear and hydraulic energy.

And he said, "Look, despite what you might think, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nuclear power actually produces four times fewer carbon emissions than solar power." In fact, that's why they recommended in their most recent report that achieving deep cuts in emissions will require more intensive use of renewable energy, nuclear power, and carbon capture and storage. Let's take a closer look at Germany. Germany gets most of its electricity, and of course all of its transportation fuels, from fossil fuels. So in the electricity sector alone, last year Germany got 40% of its electricity from coal, 12% from natural gas, 13% from nuclear power, 12% from wind power and about 6% from Solar energy.

So to go from 18% wind and solar to 100%, you actually have to go further. If you replace the entire transportation sector with electric cars, you get just over 150%. Germany has done a lot to invest in renewable energy and innovate in solar and wind energy, but there is still quite a steep road ahead. That's before even addressing the storage issue. Well, let's take a look at what happened last year. Last year, Germany installed 4% more solar panels, but generated 3% less electricity from solar energy. Even in meetings with energy experts, I ask people if they can guess why that is, and you'd be surprised how many energy experts have no idea.

Last year it wasn't very sunny in Germany. (Laughs) Well, that probably meant, then, that it was windier, right? Because if it's not as sunny, maybe it's more windy and those two things can balance each other out. Germany actually installed 11% more wind turbines in 2016, but got 2% less electricity from the wind. Same story, but last year it wasn't very windy. So you might think, "We just need to do a lot more solar and wind so that in the years when there isn't much sunlight and wind, there's more electricity from those energy sources." Therefore, Germany's plan is to increase the amount of electricity it obtains from solar energy by 50%.

That would take it from 40 gigawatts to about 60 gigawatts in 2030. But if you have a year like 2016, that means you'll still get only about 9% of your total electricity from solar, and this is actually the country's most solar biggest in the world. Germany is truly the powerhouse of renewable electricity. So the obvious answer is: "We'll put it all in batteries." We hear so much about batteries that you would think we simply have an enormous amount of storage. Our staff took a look at California's numbers and what we discovered is that we have 23 minutes of electricity storage for the California grid.

But getting those 23 minutes requires using every battery in every car and truck in the state, which, as you can imagine, isn't very practical if you're trying to get somewhere. And Germany may be a little different, but not much different from that. Most people are aware that to make this transition to renewable energy, Germany has been spending a lot more on electricity, and you can see that electricity prices in Germany have increased by around 50% in the last 10 years. Today, German electricity is about twice as expensive as electricity in France. You might think, "Look, that's a small price to pay for addressing climate change," and I'd be okay with that.

Spending a little more money on energy, especially for those of us in the rich world, is a decent thing to do to avoid some of the catastrophic possibilities of global warming. But the interesting thing is that when you look and compare France and Germany in terms of their electricity, France gets 93% of its electricity from clean energy sources, mainly hydroelectric and nuclear; Germany gets only 46%, about half. And here's the really shocking thing: German carbon emissions have actually been increasing since 2009. They have increased over the past two years and may also increase this year. And German carbon emissions have been declining since the 1990s, but most of that is simply due to the fact that after reunification, Germany simply pulled the plug on all those inefficient coal plants in East Germany.

Most of that reduction is simply due to that. And let's take a look at last year. One of the things that can really reduce emissions is switching from coal to natural gas, because natural gas is about half the carbon intensity of coal, and that would have resulted in a pretty significant reduction in German carbon emissions on last year, except for the fact that Germany pulled the plug on nuclear power, and when it did, it meant that emissions actually ended up rising again. Now, there are some questions about what about the future? So if we just do more solar and wind power, won't everything take care of itself?

One of the biggest challenges in this regard has come from someone here in Germany who is not a pro-nuclear person at all, he is an energy analyst and economist named Leon Hirth, and what he finds is that the problem that I described above , where sometimes if there is too much wind in certain parts of the day or year, or too much solar energy and it is not clear what to do with it, that reduces the economic value of wind and solar energy. So wind power actually drops in value by 40% once it hits 30% of your electricity, and solar power, even more dramatically, actually drops by half when it hits just 15%. .

However, one of the things you hear is that we can make a solar roof very quickly. Solar energy is fast, you simply install it in one day and you have it installed; while it takes 10 or 5 years, depending on where you are, to build a nuclear power plant. And so it makes sense that you think that if we use the solar wind, you can go much faster. But this was studied in an important article published in the journal Science last year. One of the authors was James Hansen, the famous climate scientist, and what they discovered is that even when you combine solar and wind power, you get much less clean electricity than when you use nuclear power.

And that applies to both Germany and the United States. So, what they did was compare the ten years of greatest deployment of those two technologies, solar wind versus nuclear. And it's a pretty stark comparison. I can imagine what you're thinking because that's what I was thinking: "Well, it looks like I now have to reconsider my attitudes about nuclear energy, but then what about Chernobyl? What about Fukushima? What about All the nuclear waste? Those are really reasonable questions. And in fact, when I tried to ask them, there were other people who were starting to change their

mind

s.

One of the people who impressed me the most and was very influential is a British newspaper columnist called George Monbiot George Monbiot wrote a column, shortly after Fukushima, where he talked about scientific research into radiation, and what he wrote was: "The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the health impacts of radiation." human. "Sometimes I write pretty harsh things, but this was a pretty strong call and he was talking to several scientists who have really studied big accidents. One of them is Jerry Thomas of Imperial College London. Jerry founded something called a tissue bank. of Chernobyl because of his concern about the accident (fully independent professor of pathology at Imperial College) and I asked him and said, "I'd like to present this, but I'm not a radiation scientist." "So, can I steal your slides?" ?

I'll put your picture on them if you let me do it." The first thing he points out, he says that most of the ionizing radiation, it's the potentially harmful radiation that comes from a nuclear accident, most of it is natural. And I said, "Well, that sounds good. You know, I like natural foods, natural radiation sounds good. Hot springs, you know." And she said, "No, actually natural ionizing radiation is potentially just as harmful as artificial radiation." So that's the first thing. What's surprising about this is that the total amount of ionizing radiation at The amount of radiation we are exposed to, not only from Chernobyl and Fukushima but also from all the atomic bomb testing in the 1960s and 1970s, amounts to only 0.3% of our exposures.

Most of the radiation we are exposed to It comes only from the earth, the atmosphere, or the buildings around us. Let's look at the big one. This is Chernobyl. This is the event that really scared me about nuclear energy and led me to be an anti-nuclear activist. The United Nations United have done these very large comprehensive studies. They have hundreds of scientists around the world doing this research, so the chance of someone manipulating the data or maybe trying to cover something up is pretty low in that environment, simply because there are so many different credible scientists at different universities around the world doing the research.

So this is really... I think it was a pivotal moment for me. Chernobyl is the worst nuclear accident we've ever had and I think some people say it's the worst we couldhave. I don't need to make such a strong statement, but they literally had a nuclear reactor with no containment dome, and it was on fire, it was raining radiation down on everyone. It was really a terrible accident. And when they start counting bodies, what they get is 28 deaths from acute radiation syndrome, 15 deaths in the last 25 years from thyroid cancer, which as horrible as it may seem, is actually the best cancer you can get because almost no one dies for him.

It's really treatable, you can take thyroxine, which is a synthetic substitute, and have surgery. In fact, most of the people who died were people who lived in remote rural areas and were unable to receive the medical treatment they needed. And if you take the 16,000 people who got thyroid cancer in Chernobyl, it's estimated that 160 of them will die from thyroid cancer, and it's not that they're dying right now, but that they will die from it in old age, and that Not to say it's okay, but to put it in some kind of context. There is no scientific evidence of thyroid cancer outside of those three main countries: Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

No effects on fertility, malformations, infant mortality, no conclusions or data on adverse pregnancy outcomes, no evidence of genetic effects. And I think this last one is the most striking: there is no evidence of any increase in cancer, even in the cohort of people who put out the fire and cleaned up afterward. And I saw some people surprised by this find, so I put the link to the website there. Don't take my word for it, I think you should read it because just reading about Chernobyl, for me, was a big part of changing my opinion on nuclear energy.

What about Fukushima? This was the second worst nuclear disaster in history. There was a much smaller release of radiation than from Chernobyl, so what we found is that there are no deaths from exposure to radiation from Fukushima, which is somewhat surprising. 1,500 people died being taken from nursing homes and hospitals. It was crazy, it was panic. The Japanese government shouldn't have done that, it violated all the rules on how to deal with a disaster like that. You're supposed to shelter in place. In fact, by removing people from their homes and moving them outside during that accident, they actually exposed them to more radiation.

Of course, you have to compare that to other things that were happening, like 15 to 20 thousand people died instantly from drowning, trapped under many different technologies, by the way, killed by that tsunami. There is unlikely to be an increase in thyroid cancer, and the big problem, of course, is simply the stress and fear of having been contaminated when the evidence suggests that is not the case at all. They did an interesting study. They brought a group of schoolchildren from Paris to Fukushima and they carried dosimeters: that's what we now call the old Geiger counters. And what they discover is that these children, when they go through the security systems, the radiation increases.

When they boarded the plane to fly to Tokyo, the radiation would increase. They would go to the French embassy and the radiation would increase. Iwaki did not receive - Iwaki is a city - it did not receive the column, the radioactive column. Tomioka did it, and it's still a small problem compared to just getting through the security system. So let's look at some of the basics to put this into context. If you live in a big city like London, Berlin or New York, you will increase your risk of mortality by 2.8%, just from air pollution. If you live with someone who smokes cigarettes, 1.7%.

But if you were someone who cleaned up Chernobyl and you were exposed to 250 millisieverts of radiation, 1%. 100 millisieverts, 0.4%. It's simply because there wasn't as much radiation as people think. The atomic bomb tests in the 1960s exposed people to so many different measurements of radiation. Much more radiation exposure can be seen during the atomic bomb test than in Chernobyl or Fukushima. I think the key here is that, I'm from the state of Colorado in the United States, we have an annual exposure, simply because there is a lot of granite around us, about 9 millisieverts a year. That's what you would get if you were the 6 million people living around Chernobyl today.

And yet, of course, no one knows. Here's this really basic science, it's right there on the website. But when you take a survey, in most countries (this one was done in Russia) only 8% of the population surveyed accurately predict the death toll from Chernobyl, and 0% accurately predict the death toll from Fukushima. Meanwhile, we face 7 million deaths a year due to air pollution, and the evidence that particulate matter causes harm has only grown stronger over the years. That's why every major medical journal that looks at this (this is from the British Medical Journal Lancet) finds that nuclear power is already the safest way to produce electricity.

And it leads to this really uncomfortable conclusion, which climate scientist James Hansen recently came to, namely that nuclear power has actually saved 1.8 million lives. It's not something you hear a lot about. So what happens to the waste? This is the waste from a nuclear plant in the United States. The thing about nuclear waste is that it is the only waste from electricity production that is safely contained anywhere. All other waste goes into the environment, from coal to gas. And then comes an equally uncomfortable conclusion: solar panels, there is no plan to recycle solar panels outside the EU.

Which means all of us in California will join the waste stream. We calculate how much toxic waste (because the panels contain heavy metals, lead, chromium and cadmium) how much toxic waste from solar energy is there? To get an idea, look at how many more materials are required for each different energy source, and when you calculate all the panels you'll need to produce the same amount of electricity as nuclear, solar actually produces 300 times more waste. than nuclear, it contained very little and all of it contained toxic heavy metals. What about weapons? If I thought there was any chance that more nuclear power would increase the chances of nuclear war, I would be against it.

I have always been a pacifist. I still am. Diplomacy is almost always the correct solution. People say, "What's wrong with North Korea?" Korea proves it. To get nuclear power right now, it's been that way for 50 years, you have to agree not to get a weapon, that's the deal. South Korea wanted nuclear power, they agreed not to get a weapon, they don't have a weapon. North Korea wanted nuclear power, I think they should have gotten it, we didn't let them for various reasons, they got a bomb. They are now testing missiles that can reach Japan. Soon they will be able to reach California.

So if nuclear power led to nuclear bombs, there is no evidence of it, not only in Korea but anywhere. So where does that leave us? I think it leaves us with some uncomfortable ideas. If Germany had not closed its nuclear plants, its emissions would be 43% lower than they are today. And I think if you care about climate change, it's at least something you have to wrestle with, especially in light of some of these facts about the harms and benefits of different energy sources. And I'll end with a quote from someone else who

changed

his

mind

, and someone else who was a big childhood hero to me, and that's Sting. "If you're going to tackle global warming, nuclear power is the only way to create massive amounts of energy." Thank you so much.

I thank you all for listening. (Applause)