Name: 【TED】Michael Shellenberger: How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment (How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment | Michael Shellenberger)
Uploaded: 2017-02-10T04:53:59.000Z
Duration: 13 min 59 s
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And where I live in Berkeley, California,

it seems like every day I see a new roof with new solar panels going up,

Germany sometimes gets half its power from solar,

and India is now committed to building 10 times more solar

Even nuclear seems to be making a comeback.

Bill Gates is in China working with engineers,

there's 40 different companies that are working together

to try to race to build the first reactor that runs on waste,

going to be a lot easier to solve than anybody imagined?

so my colleagues and I decided to take a deep dive into the data.

The first thing is that clean energy has been increasing.

This is electricity from clean energy sources over the last 20 years.

But when you look at the percentage of global electricity

it's actually been in decline from 36 percent to 31 percent.

you've got to go in the opposite direction

to 100 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources,

"Come on, how much could five percentage points of global electricity be?"

the size of Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant,

which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world,

A big part of this is simply that fossil fuels are increasing

that are still using wood and dung and charcoal

which is that one of those clean energy sources in particular

has actually been on the decline in absolute terms,

You can see its generation has declined seven percent

Now, solar and wind have been making huge strides,

so you hear a lot of talk about how it doesn't really matter,

because solar and wind is going to make up the difference.

When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind,

you see it actually barely makes up half of the decline from nuclear.

Let's take a closer look in the United States.

Over the last couple of years -- really 2013, 2014 --

we prematurely retired four nuclear power plants.

They were almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels,

and so the consequence was that we wiped out

almost as much clean energy electricity that we get from solar.

People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader,

California reduced emissions more slowly than the national average,

German emissions have actually been going up since 2009,

and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you

that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.

Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time,

which means that when the sun's not shining,

And while batteries have made some really cool improvements lately,

the truth is, they're just never going to be as efficient

Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out,

you lose about 20 to 40 percent of the power.

we try to deal with all the solar we've brought online --

we now get about 10 percent of electricity from solar --

when the sun goes down, and people come home from work

and turn on their air conditioners and their TV sets,

is stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain.

but then late last year, it sprung a leak.

【TED】Michael Shellenberger: How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment (How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment | Michael Shellenberger)

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【TED】Michael Shellenberger: How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment (How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment | Michael Shellenberger)

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