Original subtitles

We've been trained from the very beginning

to fear nuclear power.

And with it, our terror of radiation.

It was in our subconsciousness.

There was the original sin of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It became a collective trauma,

with schoolchildren responding to nuclear alerts,

and the need for fallout shelters,

having been told more than once

that civilization could be destroyed

in a few moments with little, if any, warning.

There were movies in the 1950s

already picturing the doom of man

from radiated sea monsters...

and all kinds of genetically mutated creatures.

No doubt it was the outcome

for us who were severing Mother Nature

from human nature with our technology.

It was a horrible vision,

bigger than any child's basic fear of death.

It was a death of everyone and everything.

The end of the world almost happened in October 1962

during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But President Kennedy and

Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union

mercifully backed down.

Young people began protesting "The System"

that produced cruel wars and nuclear weapons,

along with various injustices and the destruction of nature.

A counterculture emerged,

offering a broad critique of American society.

Industrial capitalism and corporate America

were seen as the enemy.

Earth Day 1970 marked a visible shift in global consciousness.

Drawing huge crowds, it became a key rallying point

for environmentalism and the counterculture.

It created broad public support for anti-pollution measures.

And within this atmosphere,

the government's push for nuclear energy

was suddenly suspect.

Licensing and construction of nuclear reactors was ramping up.

And the fear of nuclear energy plants in your own backyard

merged into an army of other pollutions fouling the earth.

We realize that with these multi-national corporations,

we're going to uranium mining and uranium milling.

We're going to have possibly nuclear power plants.

We're going to possibly have

high-level nuclear waste disposal.

-No one in the world wants nuclear waste.

-We have to have either oil

or coal or whatever, but certainly not nuclear.

And, as with all emerging technologies,

there were setbacks.

It was the first step in a nuclear nightmare.

As far as we know, at this hour, no worse than that.

Three Mile Island wasnthe only famous nuclear accident

in the United States ever.

Thousand gallons of radioactive water

escaped into the reactor building... Yet no one was harmed.

But the public was shaken.

Close all windows and doors!

And the breathless news coverage

with no acknowledgement of the lack of casualties...

Officials of Metropolitan Edison

conceded some workers may have been contaminated.

...stoked their fears into a sense of urgency

and even panic.

But in a twist of history,

it happened just as a fictionalnuclear power disaster movie

was in theaters.

-No, please, let me answer the question.

Misinformation about nuclear's true potential

and safety spread rampant.

-If there's one accident,

it could just devastate an area like southern New York State.

Nuclear power would produce

over 32,000 cancer deaths per year in the United States.

People don't think well when they're scared.

Fear is a mind-killer,

and all these fears traumatized young people.

And as momentum built toward anti-nuclear sentiment,

a second, potentially-avoid able disaster struck.

We were recently stricken by a disaster...

the Chernobyl nuclear power accident.

It deeply affected the Soviet people

and disturbed world opinion.

I too once believed the environmentalists were right

and that nuclear power was dangerous.

We were, in our way, terribly miseducated,

subconsciously cross-wiringnnuclear war with nuclear power.

And then, as nuclear energy was being quietly shunted

to the side as an aberration in our scientific development,

another physical revolution

snowballed into the public consciousness,

completely eclipsing the nuclear controversy:

Climate Change.

It was as bad or even worse to the imagination

as nuclear extinction had been,

which in a way we had accustomed ourselves to.

But here now was a monster that could, in fact,

deliver the end of the world.

Climate scientists were now warning us

that humans were destabilizingnthe world's ecological systems.

In 1988, the congressional testimony of Dr. James Hansen,

a leading climate scientist,

rang the alarm loudly and clearly.

-We have already reached one tipping point.

And we are going to lose all of the sea ice

in the Arctic in the summer season.

Among others, he clarified

that we were burning more and more fossil fuels

and dumping too much carbon into the atmosphere...

mostly gases like carbon dioxide and methane.

These gases were raising global temperatures

and beginning to change the climate.

An outspoken minority reacted with sarcasm and anger...

-Do you know what this is?

It's a snowball, from outside here.

So it's very, very cold out, very unseasonable.

So here, Mr. President, catch this.

They thought the notion highly exaggerated and overblown.

While on the other side, many others reacted with alarm

demanding radical change.

Hope is taking action.

We can still turn this around.

It will take drastic annual emission cuts

unlike anything the world has ever seen.

In 2021, the IPCC stated

that if we didn't cut carbon emissions

by nearly 100 percent in less than 30 years,

by 2050, the world would suffer serious damage

to ecosystems and economies.

Because we are still depending on fossil fuels

for one of our most basic needs:

electricity.

Most of our power still comes from burning gas and coal,

and the amount is going up, not down.

The resulting volume of carbon-free electricity

needed over the next 30 years is almost unimaginable.

Realistic estimates range from two to four times

the electricity we currently use.

This is an even bigger problem than we thought.

How can we create even more electricity

and still cut down on carbon dioxide emissions

to halt the climate crisis?

We've run out of time to be afraid.

It's time to look again at a proven source of energy.

It's time to look again at nuclear.

Because this incredible power... the very thing that we fear...

is what may save us.

An estimated five billion years ago,

our sun and solar system

were formed in the aftermath of an exploding star.

Scientists call this kind of explosion a supernova.

Light, X-rays, and radio waves pour out in every direction,

and immense shock waves, with unimaginable energy,

fling matter across great distances.

A bit of that matter collided and became Earth.

Hidden below the surface of this newly-formed planet

are many elements that were created in that supernova,

including those we extract from the Earth

like tin, copper, gold and many others.

One of these elements is the element of uranium.

Packed with energy from its creation in a supernova,

it's a natural energy source that has been there,

connecting us to our galaxy for billions of years.

The presence of this star power throughout the planet,

radiating energy,

has kept the Earth warm since before life began.

And still does.

In 1896, 5,000 years into our recorded history,

the Polish-born Marie Curie

and her French scientist husband Pierre Curie,

along with French engineer Henri Becquerel...

Pierre... discovered the energy-releasing property

of certain elements, like uranium.

It's there.

They knew then that the whole conception of matter

would be changed.

That there indeed existed a unique form of matter

that was not inert, that was alive, with a superpower.

Marie Curie named it radioactivity.

They could only imagine what this volatile matter

could become or later achieve.

For this, one of the greatest gifts nature has ever given us,

energy in a new form, they received the Nobel Prize.

Then just a few years later, in 1905,

independently working in Zurich, Switzerland,

the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein

discovered the astounding truth that, in its simplest form,

matter is energy waiting to happen.

And that the Earth contains more energy

than we ever imagined.

Liberating energy from matter was now the new challenge.

Scientists then discovered

that particles colliding with uranium atoms

sometimes split the uranium into smaller fragments

with a large and rapid release of energy.

They named this process "fission",

which could access the stored energy quickly

instead of in a slow trickle, as does radioactivity.

The physics of fission were first explained

by the Austrian Lise Meitner in 1938.

But unfortunately, that year,

through a coincidence of history,

came on the eve of the biggest war ever.

And the first thing people did

with this scientific breakthrough, was make a bomb.

And use it.

America's Manhattan Project, born out of World War II,

created the knowledge and fuel to build such a bomb.

By packing uranium together densely enough,

scientists learned to create a chain reaction.

Enrico Fermi and his team in 1942

created the first controlled nuclear chain reaction

in a squash court under the University of Chicago stadium.

The stadium did not blow up, nor the university.

They had built a simple device

in which a pile of graphite and uranium

was filled with cadmium rodsthat slowed the chain reaction.

As the rods were removed one by one,

the uranium fission chain reaction began.

Remove more rods and the energy increased,

put some rods back in place and it decreased.

Thus, if a chain reaction could be sustained and accelerated,

it would result in a powerful explosion.

The good news was that uranium'senergy could be controlled,

as Fermi had done in Chicago.

If controlled, the potential of this new discovery

for the benefit of society was beyond measure.

The first productive use of that energy

was to run submarines and ships.

Admiral Hyman Rickover was a poor Jewish immigrant

who, once admitted to the Naval Academy,

never left the Navy.

He had the mind of an engineer

who, seeing the goal clearer than anyone,

cut through time and space to make it happen.

The idea of solving a problem, building something,

creating something, drove him all his life.

-This is the reactor or the atomic pile.

There's uranium in here...

Rickover built the first nuclear reactor

that fit into a submarine hull.

The USS Nautilus was inspired in part by Jules Verne's

classic 19th century fable 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,

exploring our original home in the sea.

Nautilus was, in its own way, a fantasy underwater vehicle

designed and built by Rickover

in just three years between 1952 and '54.

It was a magnificent achievement.

And over the next three decades,

Rickover supervised the building of hundreds of reactors,

all quickly and successfully.

The Navy still has 100 of them operating now.

More than 60 years later,

the Navy has run this fleet of small floating reactors

for a combined 6,000 reactor years

without a single major nuclear-related incident.

An aircraft carrier is a 100,000-ton, 6,000-person

city of steel, moving at 35 miles an hour.

It's an awesome piece of technology

that's being powered by supernova energy.

In other words, a mere two reactors so compact

that they could fit into a large living room.

With just one of these reactors,

the submarine can stay submerged for months

and thousands of miles.

It doesn't need refueling for 25 years.

- A fuel pellet, the size of my... - the tip of my pinkie

has as much energy as a ton of coal.

The uranium to make that pellet costs a buck or two.

A ton of coal costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100.

Huge difference.

And nuclear operates so cleanly, you can do it underwater

with 150 people sealed up in a ship

and having their power plant running.

Now imagine trying to operate

even just a small gasoline engine in a sealed building.

Wouldn't take very long before you'd kill everybody.

After I went on board submarines,

I recognized that all the things

that excited me were still there.

And technically it was so easy.

The secret that nobody wants to tell you

who serves in the Navy is... the easiest job in the Navy

is being a reactor operator.

-You don't have to do anything.

You're sitting there and everything works,

and you just sit there.

In a major address at the United Nations

in front of 3,500 delegates

from most of the countries of the world,

President Eisenhower shared his vision for nuclear technology.

-This greatest of destructive forces can be

developed into a great boon for the benefit of all mankind.

Eisenhower proposed that the only way

to overcome international conflict

was to use nuclear power to produce cheap

and massive amounts of electricity.

-Experts would be mobilized

to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture,

medicine and other peaceful activities.

A special purpose would be to provide

abundant electrical energy

in the power-starved areas of the world.

Thus the contributing powers would be dedicating

some of their strength to serve the needs,

rather than the fears, of mankind.

He went on to make probably

the most optimistic statement of his eight years in office.

The United States pledges before you...

to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way

by which the miraculous inventiveness of man

shall not be dedicated to his death,

but consecrated to his life.

The entire assembly of delegates

from around the world, including the Soviet Union,

responded with warm and sustained applause.

Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program was born here.

This was a most promising moment for mankind.

Fulfilling his pledge to the world

and turning to his proven team,

Eisenhower asked Admiral Rickover and the Navy

to build a nuclear reactor

that could generate civilian electricity.

Adapting his submarine design,

Rickover went at it in his usual way,

and in Shippingport, Pennsylvania,

broke ground in 1954 and began generating in 1958.

-But here is truly the most wonderful

and exciting thing I've ever had the chance to talk about...

it's the Westinghouse Total Electric Home.

A home where electricity does everything.

It heats, cools, preserves and prepares food,

and entertains.

The Cold War was a period of prosperity.

The plan was that by the 21st century, the American economy

would be mostly nuclear-powered,

with little if any air pollution,

no climate gasses, and grids of plentiful

clean electricity crisscrossing the country.

New York City was going to be powered by nuclear reactors,

the first of which was being built upriver at Indian Point.

Carbon emission would drop substantially.

We would be in the process ofelectrifying our entire country.

Futurists imagined modern all-electric cities

with electric heat, light and air conditioning

in our homes and buildings.

Electric trains would replace diesel,

and new transportation systems would evolve.

Westinghouse and General Electric

followed in Rickover's tracks.

And from the late 1960s to the '80s,

built almost 100 large reactors.

Other countries followed.

France, embracing the vision of its president,

Charles de Gaulle, opened its first nuclear power plant

in 1964 at Chinon.

And then from 1975 to '90,

in response to the escalating price of oil

in the crisis of 1973, built 56 reactors in 15 years.

Sweden built a dozen reactors on four sites in the '70s and '80s.

Six of those plants continue to operate today,

producing 30 percent of Sweden's electricity

and most of the rest coming from hydro, wind and bio fuels.

Sweden during this time cut its carbon emissions by 50 percent.

And contrary to what many critics claimed would be

a disaster for its economy,

electricity generation more than doubled

and its economy actually expanded by 50 percent.

The same is true for Canada,

which built 19 reactors of Canadian design,

mostly in the industrial heartland of Ontario province,

which in those years switched off coal

and reduced emissions by 90 percent.

West Germany launched its first commercial reactor in 1969,

and by 2010, 22 percent of the electricity

of a reunited Germany came from nuclear.

Japan, which imported its first commercial reactor

from England in 1966,

had five operating reactors going by 1973,

and was expanding construction with a major program.

By the end of the '70s, Japan had become an expert

in standardized designs,

and exporting nuclear to other countries in Asia.

But the world's first nuclear power plant

to ever produce clean electricity

was actually built back in 1954 by the Soviets.

The atomic power station

has become one of the operating industrial plants

of the U.S.S.R.

The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant today stands as a museum,

and a monument to clean energy and the power of the atom.

The process of uranium nuclear fission,

releasing of atomic energy, takes place in this reactor.

Many important world figures visited the plant in operation,

including three high-level American delegations

curious about its usages for industrial production,

as well as any signals for use in war.

They could find none.

But it was a signal from the Soviet Union

in the middle of the Cold War,

a demonstration of their peaceful intentions,

especially after Eisenhower's speech

asking for shared nuclear know-how

for the benefit of all mankind.

Atoms are working for peace.

This mid-century dream of a fuel-efficient world,

run by clean atomic energy, without fossil fuels...

it was all within our grasp.

So, what happened to this promising moment?

Eisenhower's 1953 vision of Atoms for Peace

was a mortal threat to the rich and powerful

coal and oil industries.

And they were ready to challenge nuclear energy

from the beginning.

The giant oil companies, nicknamed the Seven Sisters,

straddling all the world's markets

since early in the century, spent a great deal of money

to present themselves as necessary to our prosperity.

America's iconic oil family, the Rockefellers,

through their foundation, set about promoting the idea

that low-level radiation harms human health.

-And so they set up a committee

to study the biological effects of atomic radiation and...

kind of put their thumb on the scale

for what the committee's results would be.

And then they took one of the directors

from the Rockefeller Foundation, a guy named Warren Weaver,

was put in charge of this genetics committee.

And not surprising to me,

the report from the genetics committee

came out on June 12th, 1956,

and said radiation, all the way down to a single gamma ray

was hazardous to your health.

The Rockefeller Foundation included the publisher

of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger.

So if they wanted to help sway public opinion,

they didn't need to buy ads, necessarily.

They just helped get a particular point of view published.

The resulting fear of low-level radiation,

which has never garnered evidence to justify it,

began to erode the optimism around this new industry.

The Sierra Club promoted nuclear power before it opposed it.

The club was an old organizationfounded in 1892,

primarily devoted to hiking, climbing and exploring nature.

Will Siri, a biophysicist from Berkeley

and experienced mountaineer and a veteran of

Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, had been influential

in conserving the California redwoods and the Grand Canyon.

Like many early conservationists,

he strongly favored nuclear energy

and arranged for the club's blessing

to the opening of California's Diablo Canyon reactor

in San Luis Obispo in 1966.

Twice the club membership voted to support the action.

Siri said at the time:

"Nuclear power

is one of the chief long-term hopes for conservation."

Ansel Adams, the club's legendary photographer

and board member, said nuclear was,

"the only practical alternative that we have

to destroying the environment with oil and coal."

-They spent a lot of time in the early years

fighting against dams that would fill up valleys

full of water.

The Sierra Club used to have a campaign called

Atoms, Not Dams, under David Brower.

And then David Brower left the Sierra Club in a huff

and founded Friends of the Earth.

And did you know, I'd known Friends of the Earth

was a big anti-nuclear organization.

But then I found out

where David Brower got his first check...

$200,000 from Robert Anderson, who was the CEO of ARCO.

He wrote the first check to David Brower,

who was founding an environmentalist organization

specifically to fight nuclear energy.

So why would an oil guy fund Friends of the Earth?

Makes sense to me. And it's not conspiracy.

It's simply business.

Soon, Brower's faction regained power in the Sierra Club

and switched its position.

Other groups sprang up as well, notably

Greenpeace, in 1971 in Vancouver, Canada.

Along with issues like saving the whales,

it fused a peace position on nuclear disarmament

with an environmental position on opposing nuclear energy.

-We lumped nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons

as if all things nuclear were evil.

This was a mistake. We got a lot of things right.

Stop the bomb. Save the whales.

Stop toxic waste, et cetera.

But we made that one serious error.

The new battleground was Ohio,

where new reactors were to be built instead of coal plants.

The environmental groups hired nlobbyists and filed lawsuits.

The young attorney, Ralph Nader, nwho'd gained the public's trust

in the mid-'60's with his criticism

of the safety of American cars, joined the cause

and now helped turn the public against nuclear power.

-If we stop nuclear power, or shall we say,

when we stop nuclear power, we will usher in

throughout the United States and the world

the sun, the sun...

which Exxon doesn't like because it's free,

it's abundant, it can bypass Exxon.

Stopping atomic energy is saving this country.

He wildly exaggerated the dangers from radioactivity,

saying "A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland

and the survivors would envy the dead."

Six of the eight Ohio reactors planned were closed,

including one canceled in 1975, when it was 97 percent complete.

It was then turned into a coal plant.

To this day, two-thirds of Ohio electricity

is powered by dirty coal, which alone kills

about half a million people worldwide per year

and sickens millions more with horrible effects

such as cancer, emphysema, and heart disease.

-If you want to accuse us of having raised the costs

of building new nuclear plants by demanding more regulation,

I plead guilty.

In 1979, there were 72 commercial reactors in the U.S.

...happened early this morning

at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

But then came Three Mile Island.

The reactor overheated and partially melted down,

but the containment structure prevented radiation

from affecting the surroundings.

-There was no apparent serious contamination of workers.

But the accident in 1979 was a gift

to the anti-nuclear movement, that would lead to a halt

in the building of any more nuclear reactors.

Later that year, a star-studded cast of musicians

put on five nights of No Nukes concerts

at Madison Square Garden...

...followed by a rally

on Battery Park landfill attended by 200,000 people.

Along with Ralph Nader and other stars, Jane Fonda spoke.

-The money that is being raised

is going to support all of the local anti-nuclear groups

around the country, and I want to express my gratitude

and I know you feel the same way.

She followed up with a 32-day, 50-city tour

to spread the gospel and raise a good deal of money.

For the environmental groups, stopping nuclear power

was now glamorous, virtuous, and lucrative, all at once.

And they had a friend in President Jimmy Carter,

who promoted energy conservation and installed solar panels

on the White House, while downgrading nuclear energy

below coal on his list of priorities.

-It does now seem likely

that sometime in the last couple of days,

there's been perhaps the worst accident

in the short history of the world's nuclear power industry.

But the fact that they've had to reveal it

and admit that there are casualties

suggests they're deeply worried about the scale of it.

When Chernobyl in the Ukraine part

of the Soviet Union struck,

it deeply shook the public's faith in nuclear.

It was just what the environmentalists

had feared and predicted.

But what happened exactly?

There's no question the reactor was poorly designed

and lacked a containment structure to keep radiation

from leaking out into the environment.

The operators carried out a risky experiment

that led to a meltdown...

which was very badly handled by the bureaucracy

of what was then an empire in decay, the Soviet Union,

which tried to keep it secret.

This allowed low-level radiation to spread across northern Europe

before the government finally admitted the problem.

They sent in first responderswith inadequate protective gear

to get the fire under control.

And these men were exposed to massive doses of radiation.

Vladimir Asmolov was the scientist

in charge of the investigation.

As he spoke, I saw he was haunted by the event.

Yeah, it was a big responsibility.

But you're not responsible for the explosion.

You were in charge of the cleanup.

-I don't agree with you about this.

He thoughtnthe highly-successful HBO series was a fiction,

that the real scientists were professional,

and that there was no conflict with the government,

or the International Atomic Energy Agency.

According to the United Nations

and World Health Organization,

about 50 people died from radiation at the reactor.

And possibly 4,000 from cancers

over the long term in areas downwind.

That's a small fraction of

the hundreds of thousands of deaths every year

from generating electricity with coal.

Chernobyl, the world's worst

nuclear power accident in history,

was far less deadly than many industrial tragedies.

The 1984 Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India,

where chemical gas leaked, killed 15 to 20,000 people

and injured half a million more.

The 1975 collapse of a hydroelectric dam in China

killed roughly 200,000 people.

Outdoor air pollution kills an estimated

four million people a year.

Industrial accidents and disease, roughly two million.

Nuclear's death toll, all from Chernobyl,

is at most in the low thousands,

which is a very tiny fraction of fossil fuel deaths.

By the early '90s,

activist anti-nuclear groups were on fire,

calling for no compromise on the bottom line

that nuclear power must be eliminated

and that any amount of radiation,

even if below the normal background levels,

had to be treated as a risk to human health.

Every new nuclear-related project from mining to transport

to construction, operation, and decommissioning

was now facing a series of legal, political,

and economic obstacles

that would stall any further progress.

The supposed death knell for the industry

finally happened 25 years after Chernobyl,

in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011.

It was the second largest accident in nuclear history.

It happened when the biggest earthquake

Japan ever suffered...

created a tsunami, 100 feet tall.

The earthquake and the tsunami killed about 18,000 people,

but it had nothing to do with nuclear power.

All the nuclear plants in the tsunami's path,

with one exception, avoided serious damage.

But the plant at Fukushima, like Chernobyl's,

was poorly designed.

Not the reactor, but the site design.

It had too low a seawall, less than 20 feet,

and all backup generators were located on low ground

where they flooded.

The plant lost electricity. The core melted down.

Hydrogen gas built up, and exploded inside the building,

and radiation was released into the air.

But the authorities, unlike at Chernobyl,

did not send in unprotected people

to fight the highly-radioactive fire,

and the public never received

more than low-level harmless radiation.

Fukushima might be the only disaster in history,

widely called a nuclear disaster by almost everyone,

with a death toll of zero from nuclear.

More than 600 died from the badly-managed forced evacuation,

such as when patients were abruptly yanked out

of hospitals.

But the actual disaster was the tsunami,

with its 18,000 victims.

Nonetheless, Japan reacted in panic,

closing down all its nuclear plants,

whether affected by the earthquake or not.

And the country remains frozen with doubt.

In 2021, ten years after the accident,

only ten of Japan's 33 operable reactors were in use.

Imported fossil fuels replaced the rest.

The negativity of world opinion resulting from

both Chernobyl and Fukushima now reached a critical mass.

Germany took the most severe course,

and under significant political pressure from the Green Party,

began phasing outnall 17 of its nuclear reactors,

while continuing to rely on coal plants.

Even in Sweden, winds were blowing against nuclear.

A new government that included the Green Party

dramatically raised anti-nuclear taxes

which led to the premature retirement of four reactors.

South Korea had a well-trained generation

of engineers and scientists and a standardized design,

and had been generatingelectricity at a very low price

when it decided to pull back.

The heavily-publicized 2016 feature "Pandora,"

which pictured an accident farnworse than the actual Fukushima,

grabbed and swayedpublic opinion against nuclear.

And the government stopped construction on new plants.

The trend of politicians around most developed countries

of shutting down well-working nuclear reactors

met little political opposition.

And it became far easier to approve

a new methane gas power plant or a new coal plant.

And without forward movement, the U.S. nuclear industry

was slowly declining as well, with existing plants

being shut down early... including Indian Point

which supplied 25 percent of New York City's electricity

for many years.

And, the planned closing of Diablo Canyon... California's

last remaining nuclear power plant.

Although in 2022, this was reversed after a fierce battle.

I now believe that nuclear is vital to our future

on this planet, and I've helped start a group

called Mothers for Nuclear to help explain why.

These reactors have operated safely and reliably

for decades, producing about 9 percent

of California's electricity in recent years.

There are still a number of nuclear reactors

working in the United States today.

These legacy reactors, more than 30 or 40 years later,

still supply 20 percent of U.S. electricity.

Working 24-7 without oil spills, gas leaks or coal pollution.

They have become so uneventful

it's easy to forget they even exist.

Many people to this day still think that these plants

are capable of blowing up like a nuclear bomb.

But that's physically impossible because their uranium

is not sufficiently enriched

in any way close to the necessary amount.

The idea that low levels of radiation are dangerous,

right down to near zero, is a contamination phobia,

which, when you think it through, is kind of ridiculous.

We've evolved, after all, on a planet filled with uranium

and bombarded by both sunlight and cosmic rays.

Our bodies are built by nature and evolution

to handle small amounts of radiation.

Medical procedures such as dentistry account for

about one-third of the radiation to which humans are exposed.

The other two-thirds being natural background radiation.

This low-level background radiation doubles

if you live at altitude in Denver, Colorado.

Or triples if you work on a long-distance airline crew.

Or if you smoke a pack of cigarettes each day.

The FDA sets a radiation dosenlimit for diagnostic procedures.

Radioactive iodine treatment of thyroid cancer

delivers 100,000 milli-Sievertsto the thyroid

and 200 milli-Sieverts as a whole-body dose.

Granite contains some uranium, and you get extra radiation

if you live near a mountain

or work in a building like the U.S. Capitol.

And it's far higher in Ramsar, Iran,

with its radium hot springs.

Or the black sand beaches of Brazil,

where people bury themselves in the sand

to get what they consider a healthy dose.

High levels of radiation are dangerous, for sure.

People died and got very sick from exposure

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at Chernobyl.

But there is no basis for the public perception

that the offspring from these survivors

had an increased rate of genetic defects.

Massive and careful long-term studies

do not support these conceptions.

Fears of passing down horrible mutations

like the three-eyed fish of The Simpsons

are without foundation.

-So what kind of audience do you get,

and what kind of feedback?

-On TikTok, it's mostly 18-to 25-year-old females,

which is unheard of for science communicators.

A single one of my videos can get something like

500,000 views, and that's 500,000 people

that didn't know anything about nuclear power,

but now do and might have changed their minds.

-What are some of the things that young girls say?

-Some things, like I used to think

that millions of people died when Chernobyl happened.

So there are a lot of people

changing their minds around that.

And nuclear waste as well.

The nuclear industry is the only energy generating industry

that's actually responsible for its waste

because it is radioactive.

And so as soon as it comes out of the plant,

it's handled by the industry.

-We have a highly rigorous process

to manage the waste coming from a nuclear plant.

And we can tell you exactly where every bit of waste is

from every nuclear plant that is operated.

It's contained, it's located on sites that are protected.

We can't say the same for many other energy resources,

where waste goes up in the air,

or we have piles of tailings from those materials.

And I hesitate to call it waste a lot of times

because it's really just used fuel.

-Not a single person anywhere in the world

has ever been harmed by used nuclear fuel.

What many don't know is that if we brought together

all of America's spent fuel from 60 years of powering

20 percent of our electricity,

it would be the size of a Walmart.

60 years, 20 percent of our electricity

would be the size of a Walmart.

There's nothing uniquely dangerous

about radioactive materials.

They're just one of many industrial materials

that can be toxic and must be handled carefully.

The U.S. solution for now is dry cask cylinders,

eighteen feet high, made of concrete and steel,

that keep radiation contained,

and are not damaged by things like earthquakes.

Concrete absorbs radiation.

The government hopes to use

the spent fuel someday to power new reactor types.

Or it can, like their military has been doing for years,

safely bury the waste underground,

because radioactive materialsnactually lose potency over time.

Finland is already building a permanent storage site

for spent fuel in bedrock deep underground.

Sealed in copper canisters and back filled with clay.

Sweden plans to use the same design.

Two billion years ago in Gabon, in Africa,

there were natural nuclear reactors.

Meaning in these uranium mines in Africa,

water would pool around the uranium

and that would create a chain reaction.

And so these reactors operated

for hundreds of thousands of years,

and they left behind what we call nuclear waste,

fission products.

And just by analyzing where these fission products are

in the area, scientists actually know

that nuclear waste doesn't move very far,

even in a scale of hundreds of thousands of years

or, in this case, two billion years.

Hey, guys, so a lot of you have been asking

about my makeup routine.

The most important thing is,

make sure you wash your face really well

because we want those pores

as clean as we want our electricity.

And the best way to get that is to use this cleanser called

Stop Shutting Down Nuclear Plants For Christ's Sake.

It's carbon free, emission free pollution,

free electricity.

The answer to solving climate change

is very straightforward.

We have the solutions. We just have to implement them.

You know, the first question is, but isn't it too dangerous?

What about the waste?

Nuclear waste is nothing compared to climate change.

In 2006, the film An Inconvenient Truth,

produced by former Vice President Al Gore,

dramatized vividly the dangers of carbon emissions

and overheating the planet.

-Look how far above the natural cycle this is.

And we've done that.

-And the Oscar goes toAn Inconvenient Truth.

It opened with a worldwide impact

and won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.

In the years that followed, the issue of climate change

became even more polarized,

with conservatives holding on to their position,

that this was not

an extraordinary event created by mankind.

-Climate change is not science, it's religion.

In 2017, President Trump,

despising tree huggers and liberals,

pulled the United Statesnout of the Paris Climate Accord

and called climate change a hoax.

At the other extreme, environmentalists and activists

were folding the issue of climate change

into a wider agenda of ending capitalism and globalization,

bringing to the forefront inequality.

-We are in the beginning of a mass extinction

and all you can talk about is the money

and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

How dare you!

But most people were in the middle,

confused by the claims, but scared by the changes

they were seeing so vividly in the weather,

oceans, and animal kingdom.

People wanted not partisan or ideological solutions,

but practical ones.

One solution that gained momentum during this time

was clean energy in the form of renewables.

Global investment in renewables

reached close to $3 trillion dollars

and costs dropped by 80 percent for solar

and 50 percent for wind. A giant step.

Together, wind and solar grew from about two percent

to ten percent of world electricity generation.

Hydroelectric power, the biggest of the renewables,

expanded across southeast Asia and elsewhere.

But despite the massive effort and the optimism,

the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change...

the IPCC... stated in 2018, and again more strongly

in 2021, that if we didn't cut carbon emissions

by nearly 100 percent in less than 30 years,

by 2050, the world would suffer serious damage

to ecosystems and economies.

There would be mega changes like the melting of polar ice sheets,

sea level rise, coastal cities might become uninhabitable.

There would be an increase in the frequency and size

of extreme weather events, forest fires, droughts,

terrible heat waves, and unusually strong hurricanes.

Ominously, the predictions from the 1980s

are proving to be accurate,

because we're still depending on fossil fuels

and we're in the same place we were

at the turn of the century.

How can that be?

We have put such effort and money into renewables,

yet we burn more fossil fuels than ever.

To understand how this happened, Germany is a good case in point.

No nation has done more to promote green power

in the last 20 years and received a great deal

of favorable publicity.

Germany made the fateful decision

to phase out nuclear power by 2022.

-We won't support even a one second extension

for an energy form that we can't fully control.

Replacing it with roughly the same amount

of electricity using renewable power instead.

How did that work out?

Germany's largest solar plant, with 465,000 panels,

was built on 500 acres.

The nuclear plant, which was recently closed,

was built on about 100 acres.

It operated around the clock, all seasons, all weather,

on average producingnat near 90 percent of its peak.

The average for the solar plant

has been about 11 percent of its peak,

because most of the time,

it's either night, winter, or cloudy.

So the reality is that a nuclear plant

produces almost 100 times the electricity per year

as a solar plant, and can do soon one fifth the land.

Germany also built about 30,000 wind turbines,

some of the newer ones almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

Wind has worked for Germany,

producing twice as much electricity as solar.

But it still averages less than a quarter of its peak capacity.

To equal the same amount of nuclear power

would require 4,000 giant turbines

spread over many square kilometers.

And would still depend on the weather.

One way to make wind and solar more efficient

when weather is a factor,

is to store some of their power in batteries.

Their prices are dropping quickly

and there's an intense race going on.

China, at this point is far in the lead,

producing more than 70 percent of all battery cells.

Still, despite the promise of bigger and better batteries,

Bill Gates, who's invested a billion dollars in renewables,

has said there's no battery technology

that's even close to allowing us to take

all of our energy from renewables.

-It'll be a lot of renewables and either a storage miracle

or quite a bit of nuclear.

The problem is scale.

What works for a phone or a car

doesn't work for a city or a continent.

Germany doesn't have the naturalhydroelectric potential

like Norway or New Zealand.

And most of the great hydro sites in the world

are already dammed, leaving little upside in development.

And geothermal energy, such as it exists in Iceland,

is unproven outside of limited volcanic locations.

Which leaves biomass, the burning of organic material.

Germany cuts down and burns forests

in Europe and North America

with a similar result as fossil fuel pollution.

And yet it's called renewable energy, because in theory,

new trees grow back when you cut the old ones down.

But it takes decades for the new trees to grow back.

The mathematics simply do not add up.

All of these renewables combined are not enough to provide

Germany's demand for energy.

So it still has to burn coal.

A more economical solution is natural gas,

also known as methane gas, which is widely available,

especially since the fracking revolution.

Is this a solution?

-Methane gas is less polluting than coal.

That's true. Half the CO2.

But that's still putting CO2 in

every time you light methane fire,

you're putting CO2 into the atmosphere.

And then the dirty secret of it is,

it leaks out all along the line.

Although it's invisible to the eye,

methane can be seen by infrared cameras,

which reveal that it severely pollutes the atmosphere

when it leaks and escapes unburned.

If you take a methane gas detector

and go around, you'll find that

there's gas pipelines everywhere.

Under our streets. Your gas stove.

You turn it on, goes click, click click and then it lights...

that unburned methane.

And when that stuff gets into the atmosphere,

it's 80 times worse for global warming than CO2.

And it doesn't last as long as CO2, but in the immediate,

the next few decades, it's a major problem.

Methane levels are going way up in the atmosphere,

and it's definitely contributinga lot to climate change.

It's no wonder that publicly, oil and gas companies

fully support renewables and lobby for subsidies.

They tell us natural gas is the nperfect partner for renewables.

But it's a false solution.

In the last 30 years, renewables have been going in

on top of fossil fuels, not replacing them.

And that's why the overall proportion

of clean renewable energy hasn't changed.

Sadly, more than 80 percent ofnenergy use is still fossil fuel.

Altogether, Germany has spent over $200 billion

on renewables since 2013.

But within Europe, Germany has the highest electricity prices,

and their carbon emissions are among the highest.

This energy indecision is not just a European phenomenon,

but is something that is affecting many countries

on a global scale.

India, with well over a billion people,

represents another crucial participant

in our world community.

Demand for air conditioning alone

in India and other hot countries

is projected to triple by 2050 worldwide.

India has made tremendous gains in solar power

and is planning to build at large scale very cheaply.

It has a new technology-trained workforce.

Its solar power has become cheaper than coal.

And wind has become cost competitive.

Both energies are still weather dependent.

India has ventured into nuclear power with 23 reactors on-line,

seven under construction and more planned.

And Indian consumers, sick of the deadly pollution

in their cities, may well push the government

to accelerate these kinds of clean energy initiatives.

But India is a democracy, and if you don't give people

what they want, which is cheap electricity,

you'll be voted out of office.

So the Indian government says

that for the next foreseeable future,

75 percent of their electricity will be from coal.

In Russia, there is also some indecision

about their energy future.

There's a lot of cheap methane gas,

which can supply electricity

and can be exported successfully to other countries,

though at the cost of accelerating climate change.

But Russia has a significant nuclear program,

as their government agency Rosatom

employs some quarter-million engineers,

researchers and employees.

-Global warming,

which is caused by CO2 emission, is something which is

very painfully felt here in Russia

because a big chunk of Russia's territory

is located closer to the North.

This is why we actually feel all these variations in temperature.

So I'll give you an example, Mr. Stone.

Currently in the world, there is 490 gigawatts

of installed nuclear capacity.

If we replace this with gas or oil power generation,

that would cause emission of more than

two billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

-I get it.

-So the nuclear industry is

in fact, an extra lung that our world has.

-Well said, an extra lung.

When it joined the World Trade Organization

on favorable terms in 2001,

China became the world's workshop.

Incomes rose for hundreds of millions of people.

And with agricultural and computer progress,

the expectations of people in general brightened.

But the worm in the apple was that as the West moved

much of its manufacturing to China,

more and more coal was burned.

Half of the world's coal is now burned in China.

The poster child of this shift

was the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, built by China,

its pieces then shipped over

and put together in the Bay Area in 2013.

California brags that it doesn't burn coal.

It's a nice and clean state.

But China burns the coal for California.

China has a major decision to make,

which will impact all our futures.

Does it modernize

or does it continue down the path of coal?

China's emissions, combined with the United States,

make up almost half of the world's total.

The key to decarbonization lies in these two countries,

who ideally should be partners in this global issue.

What's scary is not the same as what's dangerous.

Coal is dangerous.

It kills millions of people every year.

More people die from coal in a couple of weeks

than have ever died from nuclear,

which is all from the one accident in Chernobyl.

People are scared of flying because it's dramatic.

If a plane crashes, you know, you're going to die.

-"I'd say severe turbulence, definitely severe turbulence."

-And they can't get that image out of their mind.

But actually driving is far more dangerous than flying.

And in the same way, a nuclear accident,

because of all this hype around nuclear power scares people.

But actually, it's orders of magnitude safer

than fossil fuel, especially coal.

It's as though you're on a bridge

and a train is coming onto the bridge.

-"Train!!!"

And the train coming at you is climate change.

-Oh, shit.

And what we're doing is trying to run off the bridge

away from the train,

but we don't have time to get off the bridge.

That's our renewables. That's our personal

carbon footprint.-

All the little things that we're supposed to do.

But it's not working.

And the thing that we have that we know works

is to jump off the bridge into the water below,

and that's nuclear power.

The jump is scary,

but it's the train that's going to kill you.

Many in the West's post-industrial lifestyle

feel they're taking steps in the right direction.

And they are.

People preach the green gospel, they recycle,

they install solar panels,

and look for sustainability in their consumer brands.

'Turn out the lights. Drive more efficient cars.

Reduce your carbon footprint.'

We do things that are politically doable, affordable,

convenient and make us feel good

about being virtuous, better citizens.

And we all hope, somewhat blindly,

that these things will add up, but they don't.

So what do we need to do?

How do we solve this problem in a better way

than just trying to add up things

that don't get to a solution?

The answer is to think objectively,

top down from the future back to now, and be very honest.

Where do we actually need to be in 2050

to solve carbon emissions?

And working backwards from there,

what steps can we take to get to that solution?

One place to start is to include everyone in our thinking...

not only the billion people

living in the richer parts of the world,

but the seven billion who don't,

and are now producing two-thirdsof carbon emissions...

700 million of whom don't have any access to electricity.

Did the West think the populations of China,

Africa, India, South America and the Middle East

wouldn't want what we have?

Electricity in their homes, cars, computers,

air conditioners, modernized agriculture?

Or at a more basic level,

if your destiny is to grind sugar cane by hand in India,

that destiny can be hugely transformed

by an electric grinder.

That's why poorer countries are building electricity generation

as fast as they can.

And they're using the cheapest, fastest, simplest technology

they can find.

Coal.

Can the West now seriously tell billions of people

they can't enjoy a life-changing event like electricity

because we've already burned up most of the carbon

the planet can afford?

Did we think these populations would use less energy

than we did?

And the truth be fully known,

it's not just electricity we need.

That's only a third of the total,

because two-thirds of the energy-related

carbon dioxide emissionsncome from non-electric sources.

That is, most transportation, including cars, trucks,

trains, ships, and planes.

Secondly, industries such as steel, cement, and fertilizer.

And thirdly, the heating of homes, offices,

and all buildings which are not yet electrified.

And just to get these sectors off the coal, oil and gas

they depend on, they need to be electrified,

which will enormously multiply demand for clean electricity.

The resulting volume of carbon-free electricity

needed over the next 30 years is almost unimaginable.

It depends on several factors, but realistic estimates range

from two to four times the electricity we currently use.

The world is not standing still as this is going on.

All these economies are growing fast,

month by month, year by year.

We're going to need a gigantic amount of clean electricity

by 2050... two, three, maybe four times

all the electricity we use now.

And it has to be cheap enough to out compete coal and gas.

And also scalable, able to be built in large quantities

and at quicker speed.

Realism dictates that renewablesaren't going to be able

to bridge this energy gap.

And we don't have much time till 2050

to switch over an extremely large system.

So it becomes apparent, for the sake of humanity,

that we must seriously reconsider nuclear energy.

At present, more than 400 reactors

are producing over 10 percent of the world's electricity.

Dozens of countries are building more right now,

about 50 reactors in 16 countries,

notably in China, India and Russia.

And another 100 are on order. Most of these in Eurasia,

with its rapidly rising electricity demand.

Turkey, Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates

are newcomers to the game.

President Xi Jinping surprisingly,

suddenly announced in 2020 to the United Nations

that China intended to drop its carbon emissions

to zero by 2060.

This is a huge commitment.

But can China deliver?

They have 37 nuclear reactors and are building 19 more,

which is faster than anyone else.

They hook a new reactor to the grid every two to three months.

Having adapted American, Russian, Canadian

and French designs over the years,

the Chinese now have their own design,

the Hualong One, which took

about five years to build and is now in operation.

These are inexpensive, heavy workhorse reactors

that can be built by the tens, maybe by the hundreds.

China also is building the Linglong One,

a low-cost small modular reactor,

called an SMR - a technology first deployed by the Russians.

It's about one third the size of the Hualong One,

and can be built in a factory and either sited on land

or barged to locations around the world and plugged in.

Whether China standardizes and replicates

its big reactors or small ones,

it will be investing deeply in the future of this century.

These reactors are to last 50 to 80 years or more.

There's no question the cost of building nuclear plants,

though dropping, is still huge.

The positive side is they're inexpensive to operate.

And once the pattern of building is established successfully,

reactors could conceivably be built like airliners

or giant turbines on a factory-scale at a central location.

The first fully functional SMR

has already been successfully deployed in Russia

in a remote but important Arctic port town, Pevek.

Built in the St. Petersburg shipyards,

the plant was barged to the Arctic.

Greenpeace called it a nuclear Titanic,

but it dodged the icebergs, arrived in a new home,

plugged into both the grid and the district heating system

for the town's buildings, and in 2020,

was powering the town without a problem.

Similar to the United States,

Russia is operating 35 reactors,

accounting for almost 20 percent of its electricity.

But unlike the United States,

Russia is building a new reactor each year to replace retirements

and raise the nuclear share of electricity

to what they plan, if they stick to it,

50 percent by mid-century and 75 percent by century's end.

Russia, with 60 percent of the market,

is the world's leader in exporting larger reactors,

specializing in turnkey plants

that it designs, builds and operates.

Dozens of projects are underway in India, China,

Bangladesh, Turkey, and elsewhere.

The most ambitious development in Russia

is its fast breeder reactors, which we visited

close to the foot of the Ural Mountains.

Beloyarsk is a unique facility.

It's the only industrial scale fast reactor in the world.

In a conventional reactor, uranium fuel regularly degrades,

whereas in a fast neutron reactor,

it becomes higher and higher grade.

Then you have the capability to recycle the same fuel

multiple times.

-So we operate using the waste from other reactor types.

We don't extract resources from the earth.

-And why do you call it a fast breeder?

-Because we breed, we produce more fuel than we burn.

This is the most advanced nuclear reactor in the world.

With breeder reactors, no one yet knows

if this technology will be cheap enough to standardize

and be the complete breakthrough technology.

Or perhaps it'll be the model for the next stage and so on.

Like any science, nuclear keeps adapting and renewing itself.

In 2021, Europe split into pro- and anti-nuclear camps.

The United Kingdom has begun to build again,

with multiple reactors planned.

The Netherlands, Poland, and much of Eastern Europe

all intend to build new plants in the coming decades.

But, with its 56 nuclear reactors, and more promised,

France continues to be the true world leader in clean energy.

And when they look at it,

they see that the end price for corporations

and for households is significantly less in France

than it is in all the neighboring countries.

We believe that in 2050,

mankind has the ability to be a net zero planet,

or very close to net zero,

in order for global warming to stop.

We need global warming to stop,

we believe electricity is the key success factor

in managing global warming issues

and we believe there are a lot of solutions

and nuclear is a key part of these solutions.

Voila, welcome to the swimming pool.

The water is hot, clear.

France still to this day runs a clean grid,

with one-third of the carbon emissions

per person of the United States.

Truly a major accomplishment.

This brings us around to the United States,

still dependent on fossil fuels:

40 percent gas, 20 percent coal.

Despite tripling output in the last decade,

wind power only supplies eight percent

of the nation's electricity.

And solar power, despite its highly-publicized fast growth,

generates only two to three percent.

But, public support for nuclear energy has grown,

in fact, to 60 percent in 2021.

-I was reading a book about the Wright Brothers.

You know, they started as bicycle mechanics,

but they wanted to fly.

And they kept doing it and doing it and doing it;

it took forever.

They flew 20 feet, 30 feet, a minute.

It was a long haul, eight, nine years,

but they did it and they were the best fliers.

Well, it just shows you that tenacity

in scientific matters is crucial.

-And certainly, the nuclear industry in the United States

has done that as it keeps being counted out...

-Counted out for dead in the United States,

never in the world.

- That's right. - Too good to let it die off.

-Yeah, it's too good to let it die off.

-Yeah.

The spirit of innovation

has always defined America's character.

And now 50 or more new companies have entered the energy field

with creative new designs for nuclear reactors,

with a focus on SMRs.

These new reactors are small,

taking up a fraction of the footprint

needed for traditional nuclear power reactors.

They're modular, making it possible for these designs

to be scaled up and factory assembled.

And they're reactors,

utilizing the same reliable nuclear fission technology

to generate heat to produce electricity.

-There's two fairly significant projects

that are going to be built by the end of 2028.

First of all, the partnership between Bill Gates' TerraPower

and General Electric/Hitachi is called

the Natrium facility.

And it's going to heat a set of molten salt tanks.

The other one of these advanced reactor demonstration projects,

by a company called X Energy,

initially funded by an entrepreneur from the space program.

So we're actually building stuff.

And bigger American companies,

like General Electric, are also building new reactors,

in partnership with Hitachi of Japan.

They've designed a most promising,

low-cost workhorse boiling water reactor.

Built in a factorynand dropped into a hole on site,

the SMR is scheduled for completion by 2028.

And then it can be built as a fleet.

There are high hopes and demand from the utilities

for this potentially breakthrough reactor.

-China and Russia seem to be

the leading explorers in this field.

-Absolutely.

-If General Electric's got this kind of thing

with the Japanese company called Hitachi,

why are we not going all out on this?

-Part of the problem is that General Electric

is a very large company with a very small nuclear division.

General Electric has a huge business in wind turbines,

gas turbines and natural gas drilling equipment.

Their priority is a little low in the nuclear range.

So perhaps there's an advantage to these new,

smaller energy companies.

They comprise a whole new generation of young people

who are focused primarily on nuclear.

And the Department of Energy

is working with several of these startups

to build prototypes at America's first nuclear test lab:

the Idaho National Laboratory.

Located on the outskirts of Atomic City, Idaho,

and established in 1949, this facility, known as "the Site"

has provided the space for several organizations

to build over 50 reactors to date,

including Admiral Rickover's groundbreaking engine

for the USS Nautilus.

Today, the lab is the epicenter

for the next generation of reactors.

And you work for the government, right?

-So I'm the Director of

the National Reactor Innovation Center,

and, it's also called NRIC for short.

NRIC is charged with accelerating the demonstration

of advanced reactor technologies

in partnership with private industry.

-So what are we going to do about the climate?

What's the best solution in your mind?

-I think that it's straightforward

to get to the first 30 percent renewables

and then probably 50 and even greater.

- Right. - But when we get to

higher levels of deep decarbonization,

we really find that we need firm low carbon resources

to have the most affordable decarbonization.

-And that would be?

- Largely nuclear. - All right.

-Where the United States excels most is in innovation.

And the Department of Energy has made an enormous investment

in advanced reactor demonstration projects,

and my organization is working closely with the companies

who are pursuing those designs.

Our vision is that we help demonstrate

at least two advanced reactors by the end of 2025.

We need nuclear energy to address climate change.

And nuclear energy is one of

the safest forms of energy that we have.

-On Capitol Hill, do they care about that?

-There is growing bipartisan support

for advanced nuclear, more so than there has been

for the traditional technologies.

But there's a large audience that we haven't reached yet.

And my view is that we need advanced technologies

because if we're going to have

nuclear meaningfully addressing climate change,

it needs to scale globally in a really big way.

I mean, in the United States, our electricity demand

is fairly stagnant, but that is not true globally.

Globally, it's skyrocketing,

and we have to provide clean, affordable energy to the world.

- That's a good point... - India, China, Indonesia.

-Africa and the Middle East, yeah.

All growing very rapidly.

The other thing that we can look at is,

what is the alternative?

And if the alternative is climate change,

that is a much more serious risk.

We need to do nuclear differently.

And this is where we're going to build our first reactor.

-You're going to build a reactor here?

-We're going to build a reactor here.

-Do you know where?

-Yeah, basically out in there.

Pretty neat, right?

Because this is the first advanced reactor

that's going to be a commercial plant

that gets built in the United States.

And it's a micro reactor, which is different.

You know, it's a lot smaller than what we have today.

It starts, at one and a half megawatts electric.

-So that's going to light up how many homes?

-Like a thousand homes.

-A thousand homes.

-Yeah, really well suited for,

you know, small towns, small communities.

-You're going to build a micro reactor

and it's going to give you 1.5 megawatts?

That's nothing compared to some of the SMRs.

-Exactly.

-You know, if we start with something so small,

then we can really meet the regulations

but do it efficiently and quickly.

A big problem with nuclear is,

maybe it takes a decade, and billions of dollars.

We want to show that it can take a couple of years and less money

while still meeting the same regulations.

-Is it your money, or how does that work?

- We're a private funded company. - It is our money.

-Can I ask you roughly how much you've spent?

-Yeah, less than 10 million dollars to date.

-So you raised $10 million, less than ten.

It's likeShark Tank.

-Yeah, kind of.

We've talked a lot about how we're starting small.

So that's where the Aurora comes in

at one and a half megawatts.

And that provides a platform on which we can scale.

'Cause what's next for us

is something that's on the order of about 15 megawatts.

And from that we can go all the way up to 100 or more.

-And you would run the plant.

-We'll run it.

By making it sort of a simpler process

where we're selling the power and the heat

and not the reactors, that makes it easier to buy.

-And so the utility company, you cut out of it.

How does that work?

-We see the utilities mostly evolving

to wanting to run distribution and transmission.

We act as an independent power producer

and we just sell the power

to the local utilities or into the market.

And then they can distribute it to the customers.

-We're excited about how that could allow communities

to basically opt in instead of feeling like

a huge plant is being stuck in their backyard.

-Do you sometimes feel frustrated that you know all this,

and it just goes so slowly and you're getting older?

- Yeah. - Absolutely.

-Timescales are just so long in nuclear, and too slow.

We're doing everything we can to change that.

I think another way of looking at it,

if nuclear was just discovered like in the last 15 years,

people would have become a lot more familiar with it

and comfortable with the technology

because once you understand it, people have a better sense of

not being afraid and they'd see the benefits.

We would probably have a thousand nuclear power plants

built around the world.

-That's a good point.

-One of the last public speeches JFK even gave was saying,

We need to use fission to help with conservation

and for clean power.

For various reasons, it was overshadowed by the weapons.

And I think we're looking at it anew

because of the imperative of climate change.

-Younger people seem more open to it.

-I think so.

-They're smarter.

-I think for the younger generations,

climate change is more of an imperative

than worrying about nuclear war.

-Well, Jake and Caroline,

I wish you all the freakin' luck in the world!

- And the wind at your back! - Thank you so much.

If micro reactors work the way Jake and Caroline say,

the industry would gather momentum quickly in the 2030s.

And it's not hard to imagine micro reactors in the future

having the high-end cachet of a nuclear battery

buried away in the basement of a smart home,

putting out the power to run lights, heat,

water purification, as well as perhaps a small

hydroponic indoor farm, all with zero emission.

And not much maintenance required for 20 years,

after which the reactor is replaced with a fresh battery.

-When you have nuclear fission, the primary output

- is heat, thermal energy. - Right.

-We typically convert that to electricity.

We could use that heat for water purification.

We might look at desalination, producing clean, potable water

from sea water or brackish ground water,

metals refining, fertilizer production,

cement production... those require a lot of heat.

-And that heat comes off our reactors,

for example, almost for free because it's heat

that we can't convert into electricity.

So instead of just dumping it into the air,

we could use that in district heating

or industrial heating or different things.

Like, for example, heating a campus or heating a hospital,

or heating a big commercial district.

You could have reactors heating the district,

heating that we have in New York City,

and it would be completely clean.

-This is where we're using

high temperature steam electrolysis.

That means simply breaking down water molecules.

Hydrogen is a highly versatile energy carrier

that can also be used to produce synthetic fuels.

We take that hydrogen, from a clean process,

and we combine that with carbon dioxide

that maybe has been captured from a fossil plant,

an ethanol plant, or even directly from the air,

and we can combine that carbon dioxide

with the hydrogen to produce

liquid transportation fuels that are clean burning.

-To fly a plane?

-Yes.

-So now we have a pathway of using clean, non-emitting

nuclear energy to produce hydrogen,

that goes all the way to liquid fuels for your car,

for heavy transport vehicles, for even aviation.

Shannon went on to explain how hydrogen

is the beginning pathway to many other solutions.

Scientists at the Idaho Lab a real so working on fusion energy,

an even more powerful way of harnessing energy from matter.

Fusion, which is created

when two lightweight atoms are forced together,

can produce immense amounts of energy.

It's the same process that powers our sun.

Its fuel source, hydrogen and lithium, are plentiful.

And after decades of research, the goal is closer

but still elusive.

Several startups think they can reach commercial-scale fusion

faster and smaller, within a decade,

and they've raised billions of dollars

in investment in 2021.

If humanity ever makes fusion practical and economical,

it could power the world of the future,

maybe even in the second half of this century.

-We've done some really fantastic development

here at the site.

-Are you moving fast enough?

-Oh, I think that energy in general,

we need to move faster.

Why do we do this? We do this for our families,

we do this for our kids and those generations.

It's so important that we look to our energy resources

and use them wisely.

We're leaving a legacy and I hope it's a positive one.

As I left the lab, it became clearer than ever to me

that to hit the needed levels of clean energy,

we need to think big.

Among other things, we will shortly need to

stamp nuclear reactors off assembly lines

on the scale of world jetliner production.

This would mean creating a significant new

worldwide industry, redeploying hundreds of thousands of people

of all skills.

It would mean in the first years, 2020 to 2030,

building factories around the world,

then scaling up in the middle years, 2030 to 2040,

as electrification takes over across the world

and multiplies the demand for electricity.

And then going all out with everything we have

in the remaining years of 2040 to 2050.

To do that, we need to rekindlethe spirit of Hyman Rickover,

with the urgency he had to quickly build new things.

And how much faster could it go if we also imagine a world

where countries cooperate to do this.

One partnership here on Earth,

a United Nations of clean energy.

No question the world is changing,

and far faster than I ever imagined.

The future is coming. And I thought,

as little as I know, I know there's no real limit

to where clean energy can take us.

-But the other part of conservation is the newer part.

And that is to use science and technology

to achieve significant breakthroughs

that we are doing today, and in that way,

to conserve the resources which, 10 or 20 or 30 years ago,

may have been wholly unknown.

So we use nuclear power for peaceful purposes and power.

A formidable energy gave birth to our planet,

and that energy... through centuries of war, peace,

cataclysms, the price of potatoes and stocks,

all the history, blunders, tragi-comedies,

and the occasional triumphs...

that energy, E equals M-C-squared,

was always there for us, all along.

And it's still there, like an inner voice,

our most faithful companion.

Why are we not using that power?

If this build out were to occur,

can we imagine a world in which human beings

are not terrified by climate change,

but are smart and confident enough to solve it?

Together, collectively, we're combating viruses,

exploring inner worlds, oceans, and fellow travelers.

We're traveling through space.

And for that matter, just building bullet trains,

housing, deep underground tunnels, and giant aeropolises.

We can do most anything with our mind.

Human ingenuity, the workings of the mind,

can get us out of our climate predicament.

Unless we dull it with fear,

the mind is the most powerful tool we know.

It is more imaginative than any computer will ever be.

There is no force, no energy,

that can contain or stop human consciousness.

We may have come to a point in time

when Earth is asking us, "Do you know what you're doing?"

And there's no going back or forward from this moment.

Time stops now.

Or, maybe I'm being melodramatic.

But I think as a race, we're more informed

and conscious than we've ever been,

and many of us are thinking the same thing.

We're thinking not just about ourselves,

but of the entire world as we know it,

and how we can fix it.

And that's a hell of a lot of consciousness

from many, many people.

And for that reason, let's make something of it.

If we human beings can get this right,

if we can create clean electricity

fast enough to decarbonize the world... and we can...

the effects would be incredible.

People would know, they would sense the changes right away.

And it would energize the world anew.

Imagine that.

Imagine that there is a tomorrow, and it can be better.

If we overcome our fears and embrace the primordial

star power in the nucleus of the atom.

And in doing so, give us all, all living beings,

what is our birthright:

a future that we can look forward to.

We are all time travelers,

journeying together into the future.

But let us work together to make that future

a place we want to visit.

Be brave, be determined, overcome the odds.

It can be done.