Electricity can be a byproduct
of providing industrial process heat.
-A byproduct
of desalinating seawater.
-A byproduct of reducing
the lifespan of nuclear waste.
-And a byproduct of valuable fission products.
This is an energy revolution
to be driven by manufacturing,
a need for clean water,
and the anti-nuclear movement's
own fear-mongering
over spent fuel rods.
Such a future isn't very hard to imagine.
Just as Kennedy could easily articulate broad
mission parameters for Apollo 11, by saying
"We choose to go to the moon", a future of
energy abundance is already part of our pop-culture.
It is called Star Trek.
First airing in 1966, it took the concept
of abundant clean energy, and ran with it.
The thing I liked about Star Trek
was that it gave you hope
that there was going to be a positive future.
Because it was taking place,
you know, 300 years in the future.
I mean, at the time there were race riots
that were going on in my town of Cleveland.
Strife and pollution.
And here you had this civilization
that was really healthy.
It was exciting and they
were pretty much at peace.
Do you inherently become a
better society just because you
have access to a more
advanced form of energy?
I've read some a Gene Roddenberry's writings
and some of the other writers and their
feelings when they were doing the show.
Yeah, they were talking about dilithium
crystals and warp drive for the starships,
but basically it was a
nuclear-powered society.
And that's how we were
able to become peaceful
and live with each other and
be able to develop civilization.
Miss Nichols, there's someone who wants
to meet you, he's a great fan of yours.
And I expected to turn around and see some
young person, uh, and I turned around into
the face of Dr. Martin Luther King,
and he said, yes, I'm a big fan of yours.
And I said thank you very much,
and I'm of course I'm leaving the show
after this first year and he said-
You cannot!
...And I was taken aback and-
Uh, I- I beg your pardon?
He said-
Don't you know who you are?
Don't you know what you have?
A character with dignity and beauty and intelligence?
He said- Your most important input is
for everyone who doesn't look like us,
who sees us for the first time
as we should be seen.
As equals.
As equals.
In peaceful exploration-
Michelle, you cannot leave.
Every time mankind has been able
to access a new source of energy
it has led to profound societal implications.
You know, the Industrial Revolution
and the ability to use chemical fuels
was what finally did in slavery.
You know, people- human beings have
had slaves for thousands of years.
And when we learned how to make carbon
our slave, instead of other human beings,
we started to learn how to be able to be civilized
people and how to use machines to do
what we need to do instead
of making other people do it.
Based on a utopian future of the 60s,
this was where some of us
were convinced we were headed.
Technical realizations we've made
since then are pretty simple.
Fusion is hard.
Fission is easy- it can even happen in nature.
Coolant choice is important.
Nuclear fuel can be liquid.
Aye, the haggis is in the fire for sure.
It is hard to create a TV show
about space exploration
without breaking the rules of physics...
the stars are just spaced too far apart.
But manned exploration of our solar system,
permanent outposts on the moon and Mars,
and sending a probe under the ice of Europa,
those are all doable with everyday fission
of a non-water-cooled variety.
Extract the water from the soils of Mars.
Separate the hydrogen and oxygen.
We now have a supply of rocket fuel on Mars!
A filling station.
So you don't have to carry
all your fuel with you.
On Earth, Star Trek features high density
human population, unspoiled nature,
access to ridiculous amounts of energy-
And apparently  no resource
constraints worth fighting over.
Give me a martini,
straight-up, with two olives.
For the vitamins.
Gene Roddenberry had a vision of the
future where mankind had overcome
many of its problems and desired nothing
more than a peaceful quest for knowledge.
Must be kind of boring, ain't it?
A lot has changed in the past 300 years.
We've eliminated hunger, want.
Then what's the challenge?
The challenge is to improve
yourself- to enrich yourself.
Is THIS vision of prosperity
and nature as doable
as sticking a nuclear reactor on
a probe and melting thru ice?
I've said this many times before,|
I want to go ice fishing on Europa.
It has had an ocean of liquid water
that's been liquid for billions of years.
And every place on Earth we find
liquid water, we have found life.
I want to go ice fishing on Europa.
Lower a submersible.
So is this doable?
Is an ecologically sound Earth
compatible with 8 billion people
living healthy, dignified lives,
chasing their full human potential?
Or is this just another fantasy component of
Star Trek - like warp drive, and teleportation?
We're going to exhaust every
option until we finally get clear
that actually what matters
is making clean energy cheap.
So that we can live in a world where we mostly
live in cities, we have high intensive agriculture,
we've got clean energy, we've got
clean water, recycling your materials
that's a vision of a world where we
can all live modern lives, and it does not-
it's not- It does not require any uh-
It does not require any science fiction.
Human beings have done amazingly
well over the last half century.
In 1950 there were just
2.5 billion people on Earth.
Today there's more than 7 billion of us.
Everywhere infant mortality
has been going down,
and almost everywhere
people are living longer lives.
Unfortunately, all of our success has come
at a high cost to the natural world.
The number of wild animals on planet earth
has declined by half since 1970.
It seems like we're always
using nature in some ways,
but, human save nature by not using it.
It's the part of the Earth that we don't use
that we leave to wild nature.
Humans use about half of the Earth- half of
the land surface of the Earth- The part of
the Earth that's not underwater
or under glaciers.
Of that half, about half of the human impact
is meat- or 24% of the Earth's surface.
Another 10% is crops.
Another 9% or so is for wood production.
And this is really amazing, 3% of the Earth's
surface we use for cities and suburbs- for
the places that we live.
And what's important about that, is that now
half of all humans three-and-a-half billion
of us, live in cities and suburbs- and this
is going to prove to be a crucial part of
how negative impact will peak and decline
in this century.
If we take the right actions today, the overall
size of the human population, and our overall
negative impact on the natural world could
peak and decline- not by the end of the century,
but within a few decades.
Many of you know that whaling was
a huge industry in the early 1800s.
Mostly we hunted whales for their oil.
We used their oil as energy to light up our
lamps.
Grand Ball given by the whales in honor of
the discovery of oil wells in Pennsylvania.
We save nature by not using it,
we save nature by not needing it.
We didn't need the whales anymore,
we had a better substitute.
It was kerosene, made from abundant
and cheap petroleum, and,
we didn't save the whales by using whales
more sustainably, we didn't save the whales
by having more efficient lighting to
burn the whale oil more efficiently.
We saved the whales by not hunting them.
This is New England in 1880.
There was only 30% of it
forested at that time.
Most of the rest was farmland.
This is New England today.
80% forested.
Martha's Vineyard was really
a large sheep farm in 1900.
Today, it's mostly forested.
The forests are growing back, why?
Farms went bankrupt.
We mostly didn't need them
for their land anymore.
We became more efficient at growing food,
we grew more food on less land.
We saved all of that nature,
allowing the forest to grow back
because we didn't need it.
Look at this beautiful green
forest that surrounds Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is only able to save
that beautiful nature because
it doesn't need it for growing
food or for using it for energy.
And they've made an incredible city,
and people worry, you know, they say-
Well, if you go to the city you're
alienated from nature, but look!
They can walk into nature from Hong Kong.
Nature's right there.
That sounds nice for Hong Kong,
but what about poor countries?
What about developing countries?
What about all the slums?
We're talking about industrialization,
about factories,
where the conditions are terrible
and people are treated miserably.
That was certainly my view.
20 years ago I was involved in an effort to
hold Nike and other corporations accountable
for their labor practices in other countries,
particularly in Indonesia.
It was a successful effort,
and Nike did make some improvements,
but 20 years later I wanted to go back.
I wanted to see what
happened to the workers.
Had their lives really improved materially?
I met this young woman,
her name is Supartie.
She makes four times more money than 
the people back in the village, farming rice.
We're growing much more food on much smaller
amounts of land, it's one of humankind's most
extraordinary achievements,
with great benefits to the natural world.
We use half as much the land, per person
globally, to provide our food.
It's only possible for Supartie to live in
the city, as long as she doesn't need to make
her own food, and we're making
more food for more of us.
In the countryside, when you're a poor farmer
you need a lot of kids to you work on the
farm, you need a lot of kids to help you in
your in retirement.
In the city, you can invest more in fewer
kids.
And that trend is consistent around the
world- As women become more powerful,
more educated,
as they have more income.
Her grandmother had 13 children, her mother
had 6, and you can see it right here.
We don't know
what's going to happen next.
There's one scenario that we keep going up,
and another scenario we go down.
The high population estimate, where
the world goes to 16 billion or more
by the end of the century, is a world of low energy,
wood energy, wood, dung and charcoal,
and large families,
mostly in the countryside.
A world where the population peaks
at 8.5 billion, and then declines
by the end of the century-
is a world like Supartie is living.
Higher energy, smaller families,
more development, and more opportunity.
This is Maiyishia.
She is one of the 900 remaining
mountain gorillas left in the world.
She, as a baby, grew up in Africa's oldest
national park in Congo, called Virunga.
In 2007, her parents and much of
the rest of her group were killed-
by men making charcoal for energy.
Since then, there's been well-meaning efforts
to plant trees, to help people in the region
burn wood more efficiently, and the
situation has only gotten worse.
When we visited it in December
of last year, this is an aerial photo
that we took above the park.
You can see here, here, here, and here-
illegal charcoal burning in the park.
Why?
Because people need it.
Over 90% of the people
depend on wood for fuel.
We didn't save the whales by using whales
more sustainably, by using whale oil more
efficiently, we saved the whales by using
a different kind of energy, by using a substitute.
Supartie uses propane- what we use as camping
fuel, similar to natural gas that we all enjoy;
it's an important substitute for the 3 billion
people that still depend on wood and dung.
As more of us move to the cities,
we're going to consume more energy.
For everybody to have moderate living standards,
a basic material-needs-met living standard,
our world is going to triple or quadruple
the amount of energy it produces today.
Propane is a fossil fuel.
What are the clean energy options?
There's not many.
There's solar, there's wind,
there's a little bit of geothermal,
there's hydro-electric dams,
and there's nuclear power plants.
Solar and wind are wonderful; I've spent
much of my professional career advocating
for more solar, for more wind, including
a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod.
But solar and wind alone cannot power Shanghai
at night, and there's a lot of exciting development
in batteries, but we're so far away from being
able to power cities on batteries.
Geothermal is great where it's available,
and it's not available in many places.
Hydro-electric dams have mostly been built
in the rich world.
We've mostly dammed the rivers,
and even in places like China,
many of the rivers have
already been dammed.
That means we have to take
a second look at nuclear power.
When I was boy, my aunt took me
every August to Bittersweet Park,
where we would remember
the Hiroshima bombings.
We would light candles,
and put them on paper boats.
I saw a television movie about
the aftermath of nuclear war.
I was anti-nuclear my entire life.
A million people dying right now,
or have died, because of Chernobyl.
You know, I found myself
quite disappointed in myself.
And, honestly quite angry at others
who were propagating that myth.
More people have died from
Chernobyl, than in the black plague.
Fear is a really important emotion,
but if we allow fear to drive us,
we can end up making up decisions
that actually put us at greater risk.
What's so striking is just to go read the
original World Health Organization documents,
and read the public health reports.
It was a complete shock to me.
I mean, I'm reading all the Chernobyl stuff
and I'm- I'm- I'm kind of not believing it.
Because it was so out of sync with what I
had come to believe.
The biggest medical conspiracy and
coverup in the history of medicine, George!
In order to believe that a million people
were killed by Chernobyl,
What Greenpeace and Helen Caldicott,
a number of other people claim-
You have to believe there was a
cover-up of just massive proportions
by the World Health Organization,
by the United Nations,
by literally hundreds of the world's
top public health experts.
Close down all those reactors, now!
With solar and wind and geothermal...
...forget about all of the data
and the figures and stuff.
Listen to your intuition, and you'll
know what you've got to do.
And then I confronted this data, and the challenge
of meeting global energy and development needs,
and also dealing with one of our
most serious environmental problems,
and I've changed my mind.
On top of that rock there must be 500
sea lions on top of that rock right now.
This is a nuclear plant in California.
You can see here all around it,
natural life, sea life exists,
because nuclear power is zero-pollution.
One of the things we've learned about
energy production is that what you want
from an environmental perspective,
you want the least natural resource in,
the least amount of fuel in,
the most amount of energy out,
and the least amount of pollution and waste.
You can't walk alongside a coal plant
and not be affected by the smoke.
You can with nuclear.
How do humans save nature?
Moving people out of their dependence
on wood and agrarian poverty;
Moving away from large families
to medium-sized families;
Access to the modern energy
so that the forests are spared,
so that forests can grow back from agriculture;
the final step: small families,
universal prosperity, and nuclear energy.
Today we leave half of the Earth for nature.
Can we leave 75% for nature?
We're going to need more lands for cities,
but given current trends, higher energy,
smaller families, more development,
more opportunity, we can drastically reduce
how much of the Earth we use for
wood, crops, and meat production.
Can we do it?
I think we can.
Why am I so confident?
Because we've done it before.
Thank you very much.
Split, don't emit.
Split, don't emit.
What you see behind you are real environmentalists.
We're not caught in dogma from 40
years ago, and that's why they place
the goal of beating climate change above
goal of building a bunch of solar and wind.
Today, the case for nuclear
is being made by environmentalists,
engineers, scientists and specifically-
climatologists.
I thought nuclear power was dumb.
And I was an anti-nuclear campaigner.
I found out that it is a
zero-carbon power source.
I thought the opposite.
I was wrong.
I used to be strongly opposed to nuclear power.
I was appalled by it.
Well, nuclear power was evil.
I didn't want to go there.
I do have empathy for the people who
disagree with me, because I was that person.
People who once opposed nuclear power
are speaking the loudest, and the clearest.
I understand where you're coming from
because I went through the same process.
You can reach people.
And their message is resonating.
On opening night, I polled the audience, and
I asked the same question after the film.
And that was the response.
Common sense says...
I'm Robert Stone I'm the director
of Pandora's Promise.
...explaining the value of nuclear power
shouldn't be this easy.
If it was, the industry
would have done it already.
Have you received any funding
from the nuclear industry at all?
No, absolutely not.
But the nuclear industry is not properly
incentivised to solve obvious problems like-
explaining what fission is to the public-
I would be a complete idiot to have ever
taken a dime from the nuclear industry
or anyone associated
with the nuclear industry.
It's an industry that's
forgotten to sell its product.
And no other industry acts that way.
There are natural gas
advertisements on TV
all year long encouraging
me to buy their product.
Airlines, you know, show you
pictures of people on beaches.
Part of the anti-nuclear narrative
is the big, bad, nuclear industry-
Doctors can't lie.
We would be deregistered.
I would be deregistered.
I would be deregistered.
I would be deregistered.
And they haven't sued me.
And they haven't sued me, so I'm right.
-however...
In my experience in advocacy and
outreach standing up for yourself
and being proud of what you
do tends to work quite well.
-making it clear that nuclear power
is a carbon-free energy.
Nuclear power is essentially
carbon-free energy.
-or even addressing people's
concerns about fuel rods.
For example, nuclear power plants
have been paying into a DoE
nuclear waste fund for 35 years.
Permanently housing nuclear waste
was not the responsibility
of utilities or the nuclear industry.
It was the responsibility of
the Department of Energy.
Nuclear power plants paid
into the waste storage fund,
based on how much energy their reactors produced,
NOT how much WASTE they produced
That's like trying to reduce pollution
by paying a head-count carpool tax,
instead of a
per-gallon gasoline tax.
How effective in fighting pollution
would a carpool tax be?
There's no nuclear industry incentive
for addressing the public's fear.
No incentive to communicate
that solutions even exist.
Instead, put nuclear plants
into early retirement,
and free up the billions locked away
in their decommissioning funds.
Such perverse incentives have turned an industry
once capable of crystal clear communication
into the punching-bag of fake environmentalists.
Nuclear power produces a substantial
amount of global warming gas.
Nuclear power produces massive
quantities of global warming gas.
In fact, a nuclear power plant will produce
the same amount of CO2 in-toto,
as a gas-fired plant-
So you might as well just use gas.
Carbon footprint of nuclear is
much higher than wind and solar.
Everything pales in comparison to nuclear!
If the nuclear industry wants to correct
misinformation directly, they can do it.
Up and atom!
Up, and, at them.
That is a hundred-million dollar
communications challenge-
Up and atom!
Up and, at them!
-for a multi-billion dollar industry.
Up!
And atom!!!
Up and at them!!
They haven't sued me.
So, I'm right.
But they haven't done it-
An AP1000 it's called an
eggshell reactor in the industry,
so it could easily have an accident,
it's very dangerous.
-and I don't think they're going to do it.
There are growing markets for
conventional nuclear around the globe,
and we are not living in one of them.
As everyday middle-class citizens, we can
still advance clean, abundant energy,
without the help of the nuclear industry.
That's because anti-nuclear propaganda
depends on a single, easily discredited message-
Safe and sound!
-that all nuclear power is the same.
Thorium.
-reprocess -then make the fuel rods with Uranium-233
and put them in the reactor.
As if all cars were wood paneled station wagons.
There she is!
Where?
Right here, it's a wagon!
Correcting that misconception
takes people to a new space-
-it convinced a lot of people that
thorium was a safer alternative.
Who presented that?
-One they haven't yet explored, and where
they haven't yet formed a strong opinion.
I assumed, like most people, existing
Light Water Reactors were a static technology,
and there would be incremental improvements
like we improve all kinds of things,
but there wouldn't be a fundamental change
in the reactor concept itself.
And when you present that to somebody who's
been anti-nuclear their whole life, they go,
huh?
And they think.
That's why thorium, like, do you know you
can power a reactor with thorium?
They go what's that?
Well, they don't know what it is, but they
know it's not uranium and it's not plutonium!
It's thorium.
Oh, that sounds nice.
And, people are generally open to
something new and better, rather than-
Oh, the thing that you've been hating
for so long, it's really not that bad?!
I think it's an easier sales pitch.
And also, quite frankly, the Light Water
Reactor isn't like, a horror show-
by any stretch of the imagination.
But what we have is something-
Molten salt is just so much better.
There's nothing taboo about Molten Salt Reactors.
People don't realize that water is just a choice
And that Molten Salt is already used
today in solar energy collecting towers.
Anti-nuclear groups, the thing
they attack most vociferously,
if you see the attacks against my film?
It's about the fourth-generation stuff.
It's like- This is bullshit!
It doesn't exist!
It's all exaggerated!
It's all problems!
It's like- They've built- tried this for years,
it's always been a disaster.
They go after that because it's
the most effective deconstruction
of all of the things we object
to with nuclear power.
Helping people identify exactly which
component of existing nuclear technology
is responsible for their concern, how we can
build something better than what they fear,
speaks to everyone's faith
in our ability to solve problems.
Talking about ADVANCED nuclear
is NOT doing the same thing,
and expecting a different result.
It is a NEW approach, driven by people
OUTSIDE the conventional nuclear industry.
And we're finding- that it works.
We're part of this broader movement that's
changing how people perceive nuclear technology-
that's redefining what nuclear power can be.
I think in a 5 minute conversation,
I can open somebody's mind.
And talking about next-generation
reactors is the way to do it.
Some folks can start off simultaneously
opposed to nuclear power-
and, advocates of thorium energy.
This contradiction sorts itself out, the moment
they start fact-checking a Caldicott.
Thousands of people learn about
Molten Salt Reactors every day,
in somewhat excruciating
levels of technical detail.
The PDFs are all public domain.
The technical lectures are all free.
The molten salt research conducted in our
national labs can be piggybacked on by anyone.
I started learning myself when I stumbled
upon some Google Tech Talks in 2009.
Casually, part-time,
for the next 2 years of my life-
I tried to figure out why Molten
Salt Reactors were a dumb idea.
Eventually, I realized not only were
molten salt reactors a pretty good idea,
but nuclear power itself
was nothing like I'd imagined.
To anyone concerned about the
environment, poverty, exploration
or just untapped human potential,
this stuff is inherently compelling.
People are drawn to it, just like
every other source of clean energy.
I'm a huge advocate of geothermal.
Also a long-standing environmentalist-
and was very against nuclear
until quite recently, when I realized
all of the renewable energy in the world
doesn't even come close to
stacking up to our energy demand.
Then the final tipping point for me was
the opera singer singing about thorium reactors
and I was like- Wow, these guys
care a lot about nuclear energy!
There must be something behind that.
We could have far more clean energy.
We can have next-generation nuclear.
Thorium reactors that have no risk of meltdown.
The energy department are committed
to regulating existing nuclear.
There's next generation nuclear!
Thorium reactors!
That could be encouraged.
And market-based, American solutions
that clean the air, reduce emissions,
and grow jobs, make us
a more secure country.
Thorium has the potential to make nuclear
energy much safer, and more efficient.
I think it's natural to re-examine
your beliefs as you age up.
Nuclear's the best way to go
for energy for the future.
You and I are religious fanatics-
have been- about anti-nuclear.
Nuclear's bad.
And we're the ones then
who should lead the discussion.
I remember the intensity of the nuclear debate,
I was on the other side of it...
This administration does NOT support
the Department of Energy's
Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor program,
and will oppose any efforts to continue
the funding for this reactor project.
...but given this challenge we face today?
And, given the progress
of 4th Generation nuclear?
Go for it!
No other alternative, zero emissions!
We all know there isn't 4 hours of
sun here in Michigan every day,
and so on those days there's no sun...
how am I warming up my pizza?
You don't have to explain what the promise
of abundant, clean energy means.
Everyone understands this concept.
We're just introducing a very real technology-
that can actually deliver.
