Why I changed my mind about nuclear power | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxBerlin

I'm impressed that you care enough about the environment that you're willing to say some things that are very unpopular among mainstream "environmentalists." I admire your integrity.

I think it's the same sort of risk perception the general public has for air travel vs car travel. Plane crashes are sudden and unexpected and really grab our attention. Car crashes are background noise that we tune out.

I lived for years in France, where there is no environmental controversy whatsoever over nuclear energy. In a nation no larger than the size of Texas, there are 70 reactors in service, and in 50 years of operation, there has never been a serious accident or leak of nuclear materials.

As a child I lived when the 3 Mile Island accident occurred. I remember people saying that this was about as bad as a nuclear accident could get in the US, yet no one died, and there was almost no release of radiation. I thought to myself that if this is as bad as it can get, why are people against nuclear power?

The misinformation really is alarming, I mean I was kind of scared at the very concept of nuclear until I went to school to specifically study environmental and energy engineering . As soon as I went to a plant, saw the processes, saw the nuclear waste containment plans, and studied the facts about emissions and health effects, I realized how many people still feel the same way about nuclear as I used to. If it takes for a person to WANT to study the field before they realize the potential of nuclear energy, I'm afraid we're going to need a reaaaaaaaally good PR campaign.

The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) was the US first nuclear Air Craft Carrier in service 1961-2012 (51years), It could run ~20 years without refueling. Imagine how many Gallons of diesel it would have burned if it was conventional powered

kudos to Michael. You start out with a view, a theory, you study, resurche, learn and you go with the evidence. This is called wisdom

This is what an intellectually honest person concludes when looking at the data, even if they came into the issue with biases. Well done Michael.

22 years ago in my short lived attempt to study engineering I made all these environmental arguments in favour of nuclear power in a class debate. I was completely laughed out of the room by supposedly the country’s finest engineering minds. No energy source is problem free but nuclear has by far the greatest potential to provide the energy we need while reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental movement needs to be led by good science not pipe dreams.

Man, I had a chemistry professor tell me all of this 10 years ago. Thought he was just a nut. Should probably trust scientists.

I've just found you Michael, and want to thank you for a series of outstanding and deeply-considered presentations. We now need to change global public opinion regarding nuclear energy, so that we can use democratic pressure to move governments' policies in the right direction.

I’ve followed this guy for quite some time and he makes a lot of sense. One question he must wrestle with is that when he looks at what ‘changed his mind’, that information was largely there from the beginning. To take his original position meant either ignoring this information, or just not looking for it. This sadly is the norm for activism.

Its amazing the conclusions you can reach when you use data instead of just gut instinct.

wow.,.. I have been totally anti nuclear for years.., but your talk has inspired me to do more research to see if your facts are accurate. You presented a powerful argument. Thank you for sharing.

And storage in lithium and cobalt based batteries have huge environmental concerns.

I think that there is one more, very important point he didn't make. Most of nuclear plants we know today operate under nearly obsolete technology designed in the 50's and built in the 60's & 70's. Including Chernobyl and Fukushima (which is actually older than Chernobyl by 5 years). The new technologies for clean nuclear today use spent fuel rods at a fraction of the cost and with materials that are impossible to create viable nuclear weapons. Besides, the compact nuclear plants (similar to the ones used in submarines and other Naval ships) have 3 to 5 times the safety redundancy that the old plants did, they are now virtually impossible to fail and as he said, if they did, the fall out would be minuscule in comparison to the destructive force of other power generating options over time.

Due to the massive scare campaign up through the 70´s and up until today we´ve lost valuable momentum in reserching on how to build almost 100 percent safe nuclear facilities. That´s a damn shame.

People are afraid of what they don’t understand. As a nuclear engineering student I’d say almost all of what people are afraid of are nothing to be afraid of. It has some major issues though, but if we invest into the research then in some time we could be 100% nuclear with about no repercussions. If we abandon this technology we’ll be far behind our potential.

I live in a country that was occupied by Soviet Union. Men from here were sent to clean up to Tshernobyl after the accident happened. I know 2 who died of cancer a couple of years after they returned. And one who was disabled for years and never fully recovered.

I was already pro-nuclear going into this, and I had never considered the point you made about waste before. Someone should gather some data and make a visual comparison between nuclear waste volume and the volume of waste spit out by coal, oil, natural gas, etc... to help illustrate this point. It might be a little difficult to work out a visual that isn't deceptive, seeing as how most non-nuke emissions are gaseous and nuclear waste is almost all solid. I always think it's important to note, too, that the overwhelming majority of stuff that gets classified as "nuclear waste" isn't actually radioactive or dangerous. Most of it is just anything that gets taken beyond the different containment zone barriers (usually they have multiple levels of increasingly-tight safety zones as you work your way in toward the actual reactor), like booties, coveralls, paper products, office supplies, etc... that just gets chucked into the nuclear waste bin because of an extreme focus on safety and containment. The amount of waste that is actually the spent uranium/ plutonium fuel rods/ pellets is pretty small. That's the whole reason that nuclear is so amazing, you get an insane amount of energy out of these "little" (in the context of industrial energy production) metal sticks just sitting there generating crazy amounts of heat. Plus, you can actually reprocess spent fuel to use up every little bit of useful isotope in them. These spent fuel rods also have a bunch of other useful and rare elements in them from the radioactive decay, and while we don't know how to separate these elements out economically right now, if we have a drastic increase in nuclear power in the world then we might start to have enough spent fuel sitting around to make it worth extracting and recycling these elements out (which would also reduce the total volume of nuclear waste, by the way). Oh, and don't even get me started on Thorium reactors. Talk about cold war mentality, the main reason we don't have thorium nuclear plants all over the place is because the US nuclear committee wanted to use uranium fission specifically because the byproducts could be used to make nuclear weapons, which can't be don't with the thorium process! Research into these new reactors could be the solution to bringing safe nuclear power to developing nations without the risk of proliferating nuclear weapons development. Damnit, I got started on thorium reactors, didn't I? One more thing: THORium. I want my nuclear reactors powered by the MF-ing GOD OF THUNDER!