Renewable Energy: Is the Future in Nuclear?: Gordon Aubrecht at TEDxColumbus

Over the short term (the next two centuries), climate change is the largest threat to a salubrious planet that we can leave to our grandchildren. While it seems still an open question whether if we humans do manage to address climate change at all, Dr. Aubrecht will present that while undeniably controversial, nuclear energy may be the only choice for a fully renewable energy system for our future.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

[marcelopacheco]

The biggest problem with nuclear today is the regulatory system.
With every accident the nuclear regulatory authorities see a reason to overreact by a factor of a hundred.
TMI = no deaths, no cancers, strictly monetary loss to the owner of the plant
Chernobyl = couldn't happen in any operational reactor in the west
Fukushima could have been prevented with a 100 thousand dollar solution (moving one of the emergency generators of each reactor to higher areas of the reactor building), could also have been prevented by restarting one of the reactors in its lowest power levels to produce electricity to cool off all reactors, or increasing the height of the tsunami wall defense of the reactor. Two of those three solutions have been strongly recommended by GE (supplier of the reactor in question), but ignored by the nuclear operator and the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency.

Instead of focusing on commonsense, affordable solutions, the US NRC (and their counterparts throughout NATO land) addopted increasingly paranoid safety regulations that skyrocketed the cost of building a nuclear reactor.

The US NRC must be forced to give up on its most expensive, most paranoid regulatory changes. They can't have the power to price nuclear out of the market, which is what they're doing.

The biggest problem with the US NRC is there is no clear guidelines that if followed guarantees a reactor will be certified within X years. So operators wishing to build a nuclear reactor must spend many hundreds of millions of dollars dealing with the NRC before they have authorization to operate the reactor. Since they have no certainty they will get authorization, they only do the cheapest foundation work on the reactor until they have approval. Then there is layer after layer of signoffs and other bureaucracy that has parallels only in the military.

[saeedbaig]

Go to 11:45 to skip the global warming lecture and actually get to the nuclear talk.

[GentlemenMonkey]

The nice thing about nuclear energy is it makes sense on so many fronts, you don't need the global warming lecture.

[robertweekes]

Good talk, I love seeing a pro-renewable guy also supporting nuclear. He wants solar but he's realistic - a characteristic sorely lacking in the hyppie green anti-nuclear populace.

[MMuraseofSandvich]

19:10
Not sure if someone's mentioned this already, but not all breeders are fast reactors. If by "liquid thorium reactor" he means liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), that's a thermal breeder. The "fast" and "thermal" denote the energy of the neutrons hitting the fissile material.

All breeders can destroy spent fuel and make the half-lives of radioactive materials much shorter. He kinda fudges the distinction between decay and fission, though.

[seanb]

Could we please compare the number of deaths over the last 100 years attributed to; coal, oil, gas, solar, wind, and of course nuclear. Guess which one has killed the fewest people? even compared to wind (really frigging dangerous heights and bird chopping) and solar (very toxic chemicals used during production and accidents while cleaning, electrocution, etc.).

[omgponies]

Fukushima happened due to 3 reasons:
1: It was built in an earthquake hotspot near the coast where tsunamis are common, a stupid decision.
2: It had inadequate anti-tsunami protection and badly placed reserve diesel generators.
3: The reactors needed active cooling. Modern reactor design usually have a passive safety system. Active cooling is not necessarily a bad thing but in an disaster prone area you probably should increase the robustness of the safety measures that they failed to do.

[blufuz]

17:20 has some good points
I think it it would be more in our interest to redirect what ever money will be used on a nuclear bridge into researching new technologies or improving existing ones such as solar; a shortening of the gap between now and the future if you like. I think we can do that with encouragement of creative problem solving in the classroom as well.

You don't solve a complex problem by retracing your mistakes, a better future comes with innovation and creative thinking.

[giovannifoulmouth]

I agree, but the reactors we use should be LFTR type.

[aristhocrat]

He misses the fact that warmer summers also means warmer winters. Right now, a whole lot of more people die from winter cold than summer heat. So it is expected that less people will die in the winter. So by that measure climate change might decrease the number of dead from heat/cold. Source: Bjorn Lomborg "Cool it"

[bredfern]

@Saeed Baig, thanks for the 11:45 heads up, video should have started here.

[rexseven]

I like how all of these "nuclear Ted" talkers think any amount of logic and fact can take hold with greens. It's not about what works. It's about what will hurt capitalism along with help acquire and consolidate their power.

[davidhilderman]

The temperature graph is tree rings up until the last few decades leading up until now. The tree rings showed a drop in temperature, so they spliced in temperature data from a different source.

[Donthaveacowbra]

The one thing I have a distaste towards, and I actually love solar power tech, is that stat about how much energy the earth receives from the sun. Yes, it's massive. Freaking huge. Even after subtracting the amount bounced off before hitting the earth, the amount absorbed by atmosphere, etc. But this number is just ridiculous. That is the amount of energy hitting the earth. THE EARTH. We aren't about to capture every square centimetre of energy from the sun. Sort of runs into issue of everything else. Consider if we were to combine all human urban centers, how much area that would take up? Adding in agricultural areas that area increases massively but still no where near what you think.

[VQV]

Well actually I did not have to pay out of pocket due to scholarships and research internships but I appreciate your concern.

I do not work for the government, I work private sector.

[earnthis]

Why would a bridge to a solar future be nuclear energy? Why not just make more solar energy? Oh right...because we could just build nuclear power plants fast and get lots of "clean energy" quick and cheap??? What total nonsense. Build solar to make the future solar.

[dirkryan]

(4:42) from what i have gathered regarding man-made greenhouse gases, the nitrogen molecules we create have a very short lifespan and therefore has no serious, long term affect on the atmosphere.

[jamescampbell]

@7:50 slightly deceptive talking point about european heat wave and mortality rate. I grew up in germany through portions of my youth and was there as recently as 5yrs before that event, I can tell you that due to their traditionally mild summer temps, alot of homes didn't even have air conditioning. So to say "this is what will happen in the future if we don't change!" no... we will just install AC into the homes like other places have, and we will not have a huge mortality spike.

[OfficeThug]

LLNL had an older version of the LIFE reactor, called the PACER. It was a bit more direct about getting fusion to work, using "tiny" on-site assembled fission-fusion hybrid nuclear bombs and detonating them inside an underground cavity. A batshit crazy idea for sure, but it worked very very well with a fusion fuel efficiency of 95+%, the ability to stabilize practically any sort of radioactive material, and its ridiculous cost-efficiency (less than a cent per kW hour). Too bad it used bombs.

[PHILMKD]

1:47 Hey, that's not just any bridge, it's the Sydney Harbour Bridge.