electric light for two weeks and now they're back in darkness so they hate us okay they're like somebody blew up your power plant give us another one and you have to give them another one because if you don't you know they've been flyingfirst class for two weeks now they're back in coach you know can't go back and they are upset so you have to give them
it's not catastrophic, but you have a large coal fire for a long time releasing toxic fumes that you may have to deal with. And in nuclear power, in a fission power plant , you may have several years of fuel sitting in the core. And in that case, if something bad happened, you have all that potential energy for things to happen. But in fusion, you have literally one second of fuel at any time in the system. And having a tank of deuterium, which we have around all the time,
co-generation systems and all of a sudden what you get is you get a network with distributed energy instead of one big Power Plant then when it goes out it goes out you have multiple sources and you have multiple Pathways and what you create is called what's called a self-healing network much more flexible much more adaptable uh much by the way
hydrogen, that heavy water, that deuterium, just goes back into the environment safely and cleanly without issue. And so that's the fundamental safety mechanism of fusion, and you can compare that with other types of power plants, oil or a coal power plant . You might have a large pile of coal that then catches fire and burns. And it's not catastrophic, but you have a large coal fire for a long time releasing toxic fumes that you may have to deal with. And in nuclear
Look at the fuel. A coal-burning power plant , these are plants of comparable electrical power output. It burns 360 tons of coal an hour.
You saw that in the picture of the two power plants being refueled. A coal-burning power plant produces 400,000 tons of air pollutants per year. Nuclear, it's only about 6,000 tons, and they're quite benign compared to what a coal plant produces.
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. a medium-sized nuclear power plant , Vermont Yankee.
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. Perfectly functional power plant , with a reasonably safe record, producing about 600 million watts of power, shut down.
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. cycle in a nuclear power plant .
So there's a large asymmetry here. In the nuclear power plant , it's almost disappearing.
And all of these stories that we have through our history, of civilizations falling in ways large and small, whether that's just the lights going out because the power plant collapsed, or because we had a horrible quake, or whatever, or all the way up to the fall of the empire, every one of those situations was not resolved by the people who ran to the hills.
the river came up to the top of the berm and then came back down didn't quite go over it they were within one day of turning off that nuclear power plant but that flood would have been problematic with Fukushima and Japan it wasn't the earthquake that was the problem it was the flood or tsunami that was the problem that's where you really got the challenges so you can have too much water and then you can also have too
create is called what's called a self-healing network much more flexible much more adaptable uh much by the way when we produce power in a power plant by the time the plant itself is uh is energy inefficient the conversion of burning something into Fuel and then it goes through the has transmission losses and line losses and by the time it gets
focus on health it was a revolving door you'd have people come in you'd um treat them they'd go out and they'd be back example without the Hydro power plant which we just completed we couldn't you know we would
So this is a coal port. And a coal power plant . And the port shown on the left was actually built on top of one of the Kogi sacred sites called
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. our nuclear power plant production facility.
So net zero energy has gotten the financial thumbs up. And we powered nuclear power, but we made sure we put the nuclear power plant 93 million miles away.
And it's not a bad thing. If you build a power plant , you need a lot of physical integrity.
So for example, why not nuclear power? Everyone thinks "Oh, it's clean power." Well, in fact, because of the, you need to mind the uranium, and refine it, continuously over the life of the power plant , and then use it and then you have to store the waste, it's, and that's half of the emissions are associated. There are two coal fire power plants in the US whose sole purpose is to refine uranium for nuclear power plus weapons. But there's also the fact it takes like 11 to 19 years to put up a nuclear reactor. And due to, not only due to the construction
Well, how can I avoid to have that not happen to a power plant ? And spin a power plant too fast and break it? Well, how about an old fashioned '50s style control.
Let's think about some more things. The Japanese nuclear power plant accident. I read everything I could find about that.
way and then you process it and cause more mayhem and and waste and then you take that final product and you put it in a nuclear power plant . What do you do with it? You boil water to turn turbines with the steam and then you take all this poisonous stuff out and you have nothing to do with it because we've never solved the waste problem. And this is considered a good solution somehow
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. It does have a large fossil-fueled power plant in-state-- again, not gets its energy, but generates its energy in-state.
The first scrubber on a coal-fired power plant that was there to reduce the damaging effects of air pollution was on the Bankside plant
start the cycle again that means there's an incredible amount of water embedded in our electricity system now these are withdrawals where withdrawing the water cooling the power plant and returning that water it's not consumption it's not evaporated it's very well small fractions evaporated it's mostly just borrowed so to speak that means the water needs to be there in the first place and there's risk of river impacts
And why does the Clean Power Plant rule matter?
It's an integrated gasification combined cycle. It's the kind of power plant that burns coal in oxygen, instead of air. So there's no nitrogen oxides in the fuel, or no nitrogen.
But once you've got a nuclear power plant , it's very cheap to run.
He had no speech 'til he was three. Nikola Tesla who invented the electric power plant . So at one end of the spectrum it's probably just a personality variant.
Well, I'm now beginning to find out that the problem is, they really didn't see it. I can't design a nuclear power plant . But I can visualize all kinds of physical things that could go wrong.
to do the first nuclear power plant safety study 20 years after the industry started.
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. And they have this 70-megawatt floating small modular reactor power plant which has recently been deployed to Murmansk.
at Austin Texas that's my hometown and this dam was the largest in the world in 1892 and the modern capacity of that dam is 16 megawatt which it's actually a pretty small power plant by Modern Standard so this huge Dam in 1892 is like a baby Dam today it's not that big I've walked across the top of it before and it's uh scary for me but not really
is that when you burn up the fuel in a nuclear power plant ,
When Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant in Russia, exploded many years ago, the radiation wafted all through Europe, and everybody
So net zero energy has gotten the financial thumbs up. The only difference in cost is the cost of building the power plant .
The chances of a significant accident in any single nuclear power plant are very, very low, but the theoretically possible consequences of a runaway accident are almost unimaginable.
Somebody told me that the cost of fuel in a nuclear power plant is less than what they pay the security guards.
Really cool stuff there. And you might forget especially at something like a power plant , what the computer is connected to.
10 years in New Mexico in the Waste Isolation Power Plant which is pretty cool to visit
shoot to to deal with the uh uh you know stealing of the hydrop plant or or blow it up the villagers say what are you doing how come you you're taking our power plant that we paid money for and the villagers reject the Taliban so actually we fixed the whole project just by getting the hell out of the way and turning it from an aid project into a
years you think of a brilliant new idea for a nuclear power plant it will not be
government is obeying the law and is considering approving a new power plant should it be coal or should it be
happen to somebody like Einstein today Tesla the inventor of the power plant also would have been labeled with autism okay what's the difference between
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. Because in 2014, the Vermont Yankee power plant was shut down.
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. But we don't know how to make that happen in a power plant .
It gets some from-- and that isn't counted here. And you've got to figure out how to extract the energy in a practical power plant .
He was able to go and look in the mountainsides above the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and find sand and stones that came from this Jogan tsunami.
And Fukushima, what happens when a nuclear power plant has no power?
dirty stuff in the mine that might get into the water you have to worry about thermal pollution where the power plants can actually heat up the water using cold water to cool the power plant well then that water returns hotter and the power plants cooler dams actually lead to thermal pollution where it makes the water cooler cool water comes out the bottom of the dam and that can disturb