Dr. Richard Muller - The Switch Interview

- Energy efficiency in the United States has improved by about 1% per year over the last hundred years. This is without any government program. It's simply because people will buy a car, they will buy a stove that uses less fuel once they recognize that. And people build things that are better. So the 1% a year, during the 1970s, when we had the Arab embargo, we improved by 4% per year, and our standard of living didn't go down. We just got more efficient refrigerators, more efficient cars. If we look at the most efficient refrigerator that you could buy in 1973, the very best on the market, it's worse than the least efficient refrigerator today. Efficiency has improved by a factor of three. So we now use one third of the energy on our refrigerator than we use in 1973. The interesting thing is that refrigerators are much better, and they're much cheaper, and they're bigger. If you look at how much energy the US is saving by that difference, by that factor of three, it turns out to be about 23 large power plants. 23 coal burning, pollution spewing power plants, 23 gigawatt power plants. The difference, if we switched all of our refrigerators today to the same kind we had in 1973, we would need 23 new power plants. The efficiency of energy use is improving by, when we do nothing, 1% per year. During a crisis, 4% per year. We could easily legislate and get it to go at 2% per year. What this means is if you work out the numbers, then by the year 2100, with this improved efficiency, we could have a standard of living around the world where everybody has the current European or US standard of living, and we would be using no more energy than we're using today, just from improved efficiency, from the conservation, and also from the saturation of the population growth. Conservation has to be comfortable, it has to be natural, you have to be oblivious to it. - Comfortable conservation. - Comfortable conservation. - Interviewer] This is your term. - Conservation means not putting on a sweater when you wanna save energy. It means putting insulation in the walls of your house, and then turning up the thermostat to as warm as you want, on a cold day. - Put the sweater on your house instead of your body. - Basically that's right. And after three years, you pay back the cost of the insulation on the saved electricity, on the saved natural gas or coal, and whatever you use to warm your house. So air conditioners can be made considerably more efficient, just as refrigerators have been made more efficient. But a big thing is putting insulation in your house, better windows, so the cool air inside doesn't wind up heating up the outdoors. - What part of our mix comes from nuclear energy in the US? - The United States, it's about 21%. - Of the elctricity. - Of the electricity, that's right. - And that's been growing, but we haven't been adding reactors. - We haven't really added a reactor now for several decades, in part because of the fear of the public, but also in part, because of the dropping cost of alternatives, such as natural gas, which has made those, in many ways, more attractive. Coal is dirt cheap, and cheaper than nuclear. So if you're not worried about the pollution that's coming out from a coal plant, if you're just based on the economics, you build coal. - So step me through just real simple. We have reactors today, are they light water reactors? What are we using in the US? - In the United States, we use what are called light water reactors. Light water is a physicist term for water. Just ordinary water. - And what happens> Just real simple-- - In a nuclear reactor you have the uranium fuel, which is enriched uranium. That means it has a higher fraction, somewhere between three and 4% of the good stuff, the Uranium 235. In that uranium, the uranium neutrons come shooting out. They have to be slowed down. If they're not slowed down, it will not, the reactor will not continue to operate. It's slowed down in the water, and eventually they accidentally find their way back in, and they cause another fission which releases more neutrons. Those are slowed down. In the fission, not only neutrons are released, but things called fission fragments. When these are stopped in the fuel, they give their energy to the fuel, they make the fuel hot. The water that's used as a moderator is circulated, so the heat is taken away in the water, sent to a steam turbine and a generator. - So it's just another way to boil water. - [Dr. Muller] That's exactly. - And the steam turns a turbine like you would burn coal, or methane, or-- - And we call it nuclear burn. - There's concern that with nuclear power you end up with a lot of depleted uranium. But there's also plutonium. If I'm a bad guy, can I get to the plutonium? If I could, can I do anything with it? Are these concerns that are realistic? I think having nuclear fuel like plutonium moving around in the United States is very unlikely to lead to some being stolen and turned into a bomb. For one, the plutonium in such waste fuel is polluted plutonium, and has a large fraction of plutonium 240 in it, which makes it very difficult to make a plutonium bomb. So it's not-- - Even I knew - what I was doing, which I don't-- - Even if you know what you were doing. You wouldn't want to do it that way, you'd wanna get, there's a special grade of plutonium that's made for bombs. Bomb grade plutonium that's made from special reactors, that, even then, it's hard to make a plutonium a bomb. We have a lot of experience with nuclear, and it's not just the United States. And the capability of designing these plants has increased enormously. These days when we design a plant, it's all done in the computer. So we know where the pipes go. In the olden days they used to have to put it together when they fixed it. So the quality of the plans that we can design, and just compare the automobile you drive today to the clunker that you drove 30 years ago, in terms of reliability and everything else. So I don't expect there will be any nasty surprises because of our experience, and our capability now to really work out the design. And the experience around the world of different kinds of reactors. I think the rest of the world knows that they have to go this way, that the dangers of nuclear power, although they're real, are less than the dangers of not having sufficient energy with all the problems that brings. They're less than the dangers of coal. They're looking desperately for natural gas, but all fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide, and the world is seriously worried about increasing even further the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So we're having international treatise on that. So everything has its dangers, and as we begin to appreciate that, we realize that nuclear looks better. - [Interviewer] Tell me about natural gas vehicles. - Well the big surprise of natural gas has been the discovery of enormous natural gas reserves in the United States. The reserves are five times bigger than we thought they were. We have enough natural gas to last for decades, even if it were our only fuel source. The problem with it is it's a fossil fuel, and so it does produce carbon dioxide, but only half as much as coal. So it's good from that point of view too. Natural gas is easily adopted for our present automobile industry. If you really make just a few small adjustments, and you put a natural gas tank in the back of your car, and you can start driving by natural gas at a much lower cost than the gasoline. It's very important for energy security because the natural gas comes from within the United States. And so we don't have to import oil from the Middle East, or equivalently from Canada, so that other people import it from the Middle East. It's not quite as compact as gasoline. You might have to put a bigger tank in your trunk. But even now, half the taxicabs in San Francisco use natural gas. Why? Because you're running your own taxicab. You worry about the cost of gasoline. There are devices that will allow you to refill your car, at home, at night, if you have natural gas coming into your home. - Yeah, and most of us do. - Most of us do. You