 Thank you very much. Thank you for coming So I'm a nuclear engineer and I feel some sort of Responsibility as an engineer to come up with brilliant solutions to address climate change and global warming But today I would like to suggest a slightly different perspective First of all, you may have heard that carbon dioxide is the root cause of global warming and climate change And you may have also heard that fossil fuel combustion is the main contributor to carbon emission That's why we are keep trying to substitute those rotten dinosaurs with other kind of energy sources and Actually the question arises Why is CO2 so detrimental? Why is it so bad? Simply speaking it works as a warm and fine blanket of the earth It traps the heat which should have been reflected to the universe and eventually the planet gets warmer and warmer But there is one more alarming fact about carbon emission While 40% of CO2 we produced is Absorbed by forests and oceans which literally means that the mother nature is providing us kind of very lenient buffers on But still 60% of CO2 ends up in the middle of the atmosphere and Approximately 10% of CO2 stays in the atmosphere longer than 20,000 years so carbon hangover and global fever last much much much longer than expected You know some environmental activists always say let us pass on our blue planet to our sons and daughters Oh, yeah, I do agree with that idea, but I really want to ask is it really a matter of just your sons and daughters? The carbon dioxide we released today is going to stay longer than 300 generations and this is how urgent the situation really is and Considering those fossil fuels are keep accelerating global warming and climate change It seems pretty obvious that we should substitute fossil fuels ASAP and hopefully There are two very powerful and very well-known candidates one is nuclear the other is renewables Actually, it takes me back to 15 years ago when I was very young Especially when I was a middle school student in Korea. I was kind of anti nuclear guy for two reasons First of all in 2010 there was the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan which ignited a lot of anti nuclear movements in South Korea Secondly the idea of renewables the idea of getting energy from sun and wind Seemed really really fascinating to me at that time But eventually as you can see I'm trying to become a nuclear engineer and I totally flipped my mind So let me explain why Renewables seems really really romantic and it really is because it neither produces carbon dioxide nor problematic byproducts It seems perfectly clean. However Solar farms and wind farms require covering a large amount of land with solar panels wind turbines and even transmission lines So and building solar farm is just like building any other kind of farm Which means we need to clear the best area of wild life So when people established Ivampa, one of the largest solar plant in California What they what they literally did was they had to pull out those little desert tortoises from the borough and Put those tortoises and their little babies in the back of the pickup trucks and they transported them to the captivity Unfortunately, many of them ended up dying because it was impossible for them to adapt such drastic changes. I Hope you would agree with me that driving a huge bulldozer in front of a small living entity is not such a good idea Then what about wind turbines in fact wind turbines are one of the most Significant threats to the birds especially to those big birds I'm not talking about little birds like sparrows or pigeons on the street. I'm talking about eagles and owls You know, many of those species are at the edge of extinction However, annually 234,000 birds are killed by wind turbine blade And you may imagine how significant this number really is so I brought one example You know bald eagles, right? So one of the most beloved animals throughout the American history, so how many bald eagles are there in this country? Approximately, there are 316,000 bald eagles in the United States. So think about it Almost two-thirds of bald eagles could be just wiped out because of wind turbine blades This is kind of tragedy and considering those Sun and wind is kind of very dilute fuel, which means they produce very low density energy Building solar farms and wind farms to meet huge energy demand of human population will inevitably be Catastrophic to those wild species Ironically, we are destroying the planet to save the planet On top of that Intermittency of solar and wind energy is a huge problem You know Germany is truly a world leader of renewables Germany has invested an astronomical amount of money into renewables and they drastically modernized their energy system And here's one thing happened in Germany So Germany installed 4% more solar panels in 2016, but somehow they generated 3% less electricity from solar Germany also installed 11% more wind turbines in 2016 But somehow they generated 2% less electricity from wind So it's kind of interesting, isn't it? And you may be shocked that how many energy experts had absolutely no idea about what really happened And it turns out That the answer was simply Germany was not sunny and windy enough in 2016 There was nothing we can do about it So at this point it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that the biggest concern with renewables does not lie in the problem per se But it lies at the fact that those problems are not technologically solvable For example, it might be unrealistic to make certain region sunnier or windier It might be also unrealistic to guide a bird to not to collide against a wind turbine blade So majority of problems with renewables are not technical, but they are rather natural So let's shift to the gears and let's talk about nuclear then Nuclear, the atoms, have been considered as one of the most powerful energy sources ever since it has been utilized peacefully So the main strength of nuclear is that it produces extremely extremely dense energy So you can see this small uranium fuel pellet on the screen which is really used in nuclear power plant So the size and volume of this small amount of uranium is more or less the same as the lithium battery in your car key However, this small amount of uranium fuel can actually produce electricity to the average American household for three months So it's insanely dense, right? On top of that, nuclear power is very stable and reliable, you don't have to wait for the good weather to do it Nuclear power plant produces a fixed amount of energy regardless of the oil prices, twenty for seven, seven days a week So the most successful story of nuclear is that of France France in 2020 produced around 70% of its electricity from the nuclear power And interestingly in the same year, France's carbon emission was one of the lowest throughout the world And this consequence actually implies a very significant meaning to the human being A lot of climate researchers and climate scientists are saying that we already passed the tipping point of global warming and climate change The earth lost its resilience permanently So considering this fierce urgency of current situation, nuclear might not be an ultimate solution But it would give a good amount of time to the human being to come up with better ideas, better solutions And this is the main reason I do believe in the power of atoms But at this point, it seems pretty legitimate to raise some uncomfortable questions to a nuclear engineer What about nuclear waste? What do you do with nuclear weapons? Well, in fact, the United States generates around 2,000 metric tons of nuclear-spent fuel annually Which is highly, highly radio toxic And some problematic waste products take even a few hundred years to decay It's clearly problematic, and this is the main weakness of nuclear industries, by the way However, some environmentalists started to rethink about this issue So compared to CO2, which is uncontrollably emitted directly into the atmosphere Nuclear waste is kind of manageable What nuclear engineers do in the nuclear power plant is they put those nuclear waste into the container And they transport them to the repository Additionally, countless research is going on about reprocessing and recycling of those nuclear fuel I mean nuclear waste So I do believe this is kind of technologically solvable problem Then what about nuclear weapons? What about nuclear weapon proliferation? If nuclear power actually increases the possibility of nuclear war, I would be against nuclear I have always been a pacifist, and I still am I'm from South Korea, and I have observed a stark contrast of nuclear utilization between North and South And honestly, the Korean Peninsula proves the point So South Korea, my country, is still operating a lot of nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well actually They are producing a good amount of electricity to the people with affordable prices But South Korea does not own any nuclear warheads or nuclear weapons On the other hand, North Korea, whose nuclear missiles are literally threatening the whole world Does not own any nuclear power plant So, concerns with nuclear weapons are always a matter of diplomacy We can solve this problem by conversations and regulations Up to now, we have seen two different energy sources to deal with climate change and global warming And it becomes clear that there is no God-given energy Every energy source has its own set of problems Nuclear does, fossil fuels do, and renewables do So what really matters is not what is the problem with this energy But is this problem with this energy technologically solvable? This is the right question we need to cast on those energies Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of problems with renewables are not technologically solvable On the other hand, as a nuclear engineer, I do believe problems with nuclear are solvable through technological innovations I do understand that this conclusion might not be comfortable to some of the audiences But don't forget, how many atmospheres do we have? One Yeah, there's one, obviously Thank you And how many planets do we have? One Thank you again Yeah, so this is not a partisan debate, it is a human one We are all living together on a single planet So we are always on the same board Thank you