 So, who's arguing against a nuclear, excuse me, who's arguing for a nuclear renaissance? Our two Nobel Prize winners, Burt Richter and Steve Chiu. Each has a long list of accomplishments highlighted in your program, but once I'd like to draw your attention to include Burt Richter's membership in the Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee, and his award-winning book, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, which is credited with cutting through the illusions and haze of on-energy technology and policy discussions. Steve Chiu was the 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy and our longest-serving energy secretary. While he is credited with several initiatives and accomplishments, the one I personally would like to thank him for is the establishment of RPE, the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Energy. So, thank you, Dr. Chiu. In the opposite corner, we have Dan Kammon and Ralph Cavanae arguing against the motion. Again, each has a long list of accomplishments, so, again, I'll only mention a few. Dan Kammon, our science envoy, is the class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in three departments, including nuclear engineering. Oh, and by the way, he has a nuclear, excuse me, a Nobel Prize too, but he had to share it with a lot of people for his membership in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So, Ralph Cavanae, he served on the U.S. Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board. He teaches energy law and policy at Stanford and Berkeley, and he serves as the co-director of the Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, that organization working to safeguard the earth. The person at the controls of today's debate is Jeff Ball, a scholar in residence at Stanford University's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, where he examines financial and policy mechanisms to scale up cleaner forms of energy. He also writes extensively on energy issues and won the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Top Energy Writing Prize in 2015. So, Jeff, please take the helm and explain the rules of engagement. Barb, thanks. Welcome, everyone. I think everyone has eaten, and so that means that you're about to fall asleep and our challenge is to ensure that that doesn't happen, and we're going to work hard to make sure it doesn't happen. It's a full house, which is terrific. What I want to do here is give a really brief frame of what we're going to talk about today and a really brief explanation of how these folks are going to talk about it, and then we will jump into it. So I'm just going to add two things to the bios. One is that neither of these people up here is a shrinking violet, and if they play one today, I will pour cold water on them and make sure they are no longer shrinking. So we will have some fun with the discussion, and I will also be pretty militant about it hearing to time because the structure of the Oxford debate is such that everyone has a set amount of time as we'll get into in a second. Just indulge me for 60 seconds or so as I just try to frame this discussion of nuclear, so we all start on a level playing field. You're going to hear arguments foreign against nuclear energy today, and very broadly speaking, people who argue that the world needs a nuclear renaissance often do so on climate change grounds for the following reason. Nuclear energy is a carbon free, essentially a carbon free energy source, and unlike other carbon free or near carbon free energy sources like, for instance, wind or solar, nuclear energy runs essentially all the time. Now, those who argue against nuclear energy that the world doesn't need a nuclear renaissance often do so on grounds of safety and cost. They sometimes raise concerns about nuclear accident. You may have heard something called Fukushima four years ago, five years ago. And they also argue that nuclear has cost problems, and you will probably hear the question of the extent to which government subsidizes nuclear energy raised today. And people further debate the need for nuclear energy given what's happened to the cost of wind and solar. Again, I suspect you'll hear some of that today. So, I want to take off just a couple of really quick statistics and stay with me because I think they're important to framiness. Nuclear power today provides what percent of electricity worldwide? Anyone know? Shout it out. 11%. 11%. Ralph Cavanaugh wins the first point. The International Energy Agency expects that by 2040 that number will change. Two? 22%. 12%. 12%. 11 to 12%. Now, before you laugh, on the one hand, that's a small increase. On the one hand, that's an increase of only one percentage point. On the other hand, that's an increase of one percentage point in the size of the slice of, the nuclear slice of the global energy pie, a pie that itself is gonna get a lot, a lot larger. So, a one percentage point increase in nuclear energy share actually equates to a near doubling in the absolute amount of nuclear energy that is generated. Not my numbers, the IEA's numbers. A couple more numbers and then I'll stop. Of that increase in nuclear power that the IEA predicts through 2040, the International Energy Agency, sort of conventional wisdom often on nuclear matter, on energy matters, the biggest chunk of that increase, 46% will come from which country? China. China. Let's keep that in mind as we have a discussion to some extent about the United States. 46% supposedly from China, 11% from India, another 11% from Japan, and there I'm sure will be some discussion about nuclear in Japan here. And how much of that from the United States? 6%. 6% of the one percentage point increase from the United States. So, what that tells you is that whatever the world, whatever you think about the need for a nuclear renaissance, at least one influential group of experts thinks that if a nuclear renaissance happens, it's not gonna largely happen here. It's gonna happen largely elsewhere. Okay, 20 seconds for the rules of this debate. We have two teams, a team four and a team against. And we're gonna start with opening statements, one for, one against, one rebuttal for, one rebuttal against, two minutes each. Then we're gonna have 30 minutes of discussion up here, and then we're gonna have final closing statements. You are gonna decide who wins. And so really quickly, I've already gone over my time, really quickly, we're gonna have a vote now, and then we're gonna take a vote later. And the winning team, and this gets complicated, the winning team is not the team that has the greatest number of hands at the end. The winning team is the team that has swayed the greatest number of people at the end. So we're gonna have to do a little bit of counting, okay? So if you believe that the world needs a nuclear renaissance, you are for the resolution, raise your hand. It's a little hard to see up here, so someone who's not looking straight into lights needs to raise them really high. Okay, Barb, do you see those? Can you're getting a sort of an idea? All right, now if you believe the world does not need a nuclear renaissance, raise your hands. All right, so that's clearly fewer. Does anyone disagree with my sentence? I think that's clearly fewer. All right, that doesn't mean anything, it just means this is the baseline. Okay, here we go. So, so if we gain theory, so let's again, the motion is the world needs a nuclear renaissance. And Steve, you are starting and you have three minutes. All right, thank you. We're starting off two to one in favor of the nuclear renaissance, so it's ours to lose. In any case, here's the situation. In order to really deeply carbonize what's going on, every study that I know of, including the clean power plant, assumes that the nuclear fraction of electricity generation will continue. I think safety and security and where we put our spend fuel are solved problems. In the sense that can be solved in the sense that the first generation nuclear power plant, Fukushima, was bad. It could be made much, much safer. And in the third, fourth generation nuclear power plants were aiming for passively safe, lose complete control forever, and it will not melt down. So these I think are safe. But let me tell you about what I'm afraid of and why I think we need the renaissance. We have 61 nuclear reactor sites, 99 reactors operated. Many of them have gotten another 20 year license. But by 2036, 43 of those reactors will have to retire after the 60 year operating license. By 2049, all of them retire. Let's look at the experience in Japan and Germany. After Germany, they decided they're going to retire older nuclear power plants by 2022. So what is their new plan? Their new plan is to build new coal. The total new coal build will be equal to the total solar and wind build in the coming years, all right? So it's not as those solar and wind replace. They're going to build more coal electricity generated, not generating capacity generated in the coming years because of that decision. Japan was going to go to 60% nuclear. It was at 30% nuclear. Now they're going to be lucky if they can get the 20% nuclear. What's the difference? They're building more coal. And so again, we have two examples of the reaction to the loss of nuclear. Another thing that we have to think of, it's not just electricity generation. It's agriculture. It's electricity. It's process heat for steel, cement, chemical products. It's all of those things. Where is that process heat going to come from? And where is desalinatization going to come from? If you build a desalinatization plant and your duty cycle for solar is 30%, your duty cycle for wind is 40%. The capital expenses for that desalinatization plant won't justify a desalinatization plant. You need to run it more or less 24-7. A lot of the same can be said for refining plants, for cement plants, for steel plants. And so to have this steady base load of carbon free is really what we need. I should say in terms of cost that even though the clean power plan says we need nuclear at maintained the same ratio, they give no credit for it. We should make a clean power plan based on clean energy, not renewable energy. Thank you. Excellent, two minutes, two seconds to spare. Okay, Dan, all yours. So I think if you take the motion as stated, do we need this renaissance? The answer has to be no. And the reason why it has to be no is we have pathways to address essentially all of the issues you've just heard. The basic equation though is that this process has to take place by mid-century. And in that context, the nuclear dog won't hunt. And by that I mean that the time we would need to ramp up, even if everything went exactly as a nuclear sort of a proponent would argue, does not work out to not only replace all of the plants that we've heard that will be retired, essentially to turn over the global fleet of 420 or so plants by 2050, but also to build and expand to share. And if you don't need to go double or triple that, the opportunities to build on what we've already seen in terms of what solar is done, what wind is done, the opportunities for geothermal, a process of heat source, the opportunities to do ocean power, a whole variety of technologies, and to be super aggressively efficiently, of which Secretary Chu was the best proponent we have seen since Art Rosenfeld in terms of getting that squarely on the table. My laboratory builds utility scale models of power systems. It's called Switch on our website. And we have worked in close collaboration with powers that be the NDRC in China, with the grid operators in the United States, utility in Chile, in Mexico, Nicaragua, in Scandinavia, in the Balkans. And we consistently find that decarbonization paths that have little or no nuclear in them are all workable in the electricity sector and in the expanded sector for massive vehicle electrification. And that opens up the scenarios that allow us to talk about deeply decarbonizing the system in economies as diverse as Nicaragua, Mexico, Kenya, United States, China. Our China model, for example, finds at about $45 a ton of CO2 decarbonizing and meeting China's 2030 commitments and the deeper targets are all workable. This is even before we get to all of the challenges that are in front of nuclear in terms of the technical processes, the economics, the risk. As a physicist, nuclear wins the physics story. It is entirely workable, but nuclear fails today and is almost surely to fail for the decades to come the system story. I would love to see that picture changed around. But right now, the mid-century carbon numbers, the need to invest in technologies that we can scale and diversify. And the opportunity cost to put a huge amount of nuclear and not build up in these other sectors is a risk that climate change and energy access don't allow us to do. Excellent. One second, before we go to Bert, for those of you who have your phones, you may not use them except to tweet, and you may use them to tweet. And it is hashtag SVES2016. Maybe someone can put them on the screen so you have them. I've heard a couple tweetable things if my phone weren't turned off. Bert? Jan and I come to completely opposite. First, there is no difference in the goal. Everybody's goal is 20% of the emissions of 1990 by 2050. That's no argument. The question about the number of nuclear power plants, well, the question is who is building these nuclear power plants? There's 67 under construction right now. 25 of them in China, lots of them in India, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt wants 12, lots of others. And there have been a whole bunch of studies which just disagree 100% with them. These studies say you cannot meet the goal on renewables alone. One of them I participated in is called California's Energy Future. You can find it at ccst.us, the California Council on Science and Technology. What's the problem? The problem is there is no decent way to back up the highly variable wind and solar at the scale that you need if you're not going to use nuclear. There's another one if you like, two guys from Google. I have an article in IEEE Spectrum which says exactly the same thing. New York State's Public Utilities Commission has come to exactly the same conclusion. There's an article in Europe by the International Energy Agency that disagrees with them. And so we got a problem here and the problem is I got a whole things published and I want to see your report because I don't believe. So you can get around to doing that. There's also a problem about cost. If you were here a little earlier, you heard the mayor of Palo Alto said he's getting solar at 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour. That's what he pays for it. That's not what society pays for it. I know the cost for wind better than solar. Wind says it's approaching grid parity of six cents a kilowatt hour. But it doesn't include production tax credits, investment tax credits, the cost of integration and the studies I've looked at say the real cost of that is two to two and a half times. So you're looking at a question of money and you're looking at a question of can you do this and we have a disagreement here. Dan says you can and the studies I have cited say you can't. Somehow or other you're going to have to decide whether an old guy like me is more credible and a young puppy like him. I wish I was a young puppy. Ralph? All right, you've heard from the three world class scientists and now you get the lawyer. In an effort to exceed your expectations, I want to invoke a perspective not yet heard from on the panel, which is the people I've spent the last 40 years working with, the people who are most important in determining whether we're going to have a nuclear renaissance and that's the people who write the checks. The utilities, the generation sector people who have to make the decision about which of the three of them is most credible or whether perhaps there are some other competitors that merit attention to. When I arrived at NRDC in 1979, in the previous 15 years, the US utilities had constructed and were operating 104 nuclear reactors. That's in the 15 years before 1979. Most of them are still running. They're about a quarter of worldwide operating capacity today. In the years since, you know how many nuclear plants have been built and are now operating, ordered after 1979. I believe someone in the audience has noted that the number is quite memorable. It is zero. And that tells you something about a market judgment. A market judgment that by the way is not simply a US market judgment. Bert told you there were 60 reactors under construction now. He's right. When I joined NRDC in 1979, I bet he remembers this, there were 240 reactors under construction worldwide. 20 years ago, the global market share of electricity was about 18% for nuclear. Now it's below 11, as Jeff pointed out in his introductory remarks. Something is going on. And the most important thing that's going on is that the people who are making the decisions about how to allocate scarce capital and how to integrate resources in complicated power grids are voting for resources other than nuclear. And in many respects, this is a good news story. The US grid is decarbonizing now. It is doing, and Bert and I could not be in more violent agreement on the proposition that what we all want is to get affordable and reliable energy services with no carbon emissions. And the question is, what's the best path to get there? In the United States, we are making those decisions now through competitive markets. We don't dictate them from the central government. We don't have integrated monopoly utilities imposing their will on customers. We have competing options, fighting for scarce investment dollars. And what I submit to all of you in the heart of Silicon Valley, this is how you should want it to be. For all of you who are rooting for a nuclear renaissance, you have to also be rooting for a system that picks winners and losers best based on the merits and looks for the lowest cost way to get a portfolio of resources that minimizes carbon and minimizes cost. Now, Bert and Steve think they know how to do that, and they think nuclear is the right option. And Dan and I disagree, but in the end, we're not going to make the calls none of us are. What's going to make the calls in the United States is a competitive market that increasingly is valuing low-cost energy efficiency thanks to pioneers like Chu, who got 3 billion tons of CO2 at negative cost from efficiency standards alone, plus renewables. They're winning the competition. Let's let the competition proceed, but I think we can see where it's going. Excellent. Everyone was incredibly on time. So we now have 30 minutes, and we're going to dig in. I was a little afraid that I was going to have to sharpen the disagreement up here. But actually, that appears not to be necessary. But let me go ahead and sharpen the disagreement up here a little bit more. So let's all take a trip to Illinois. And there is an interesting test case of the future of nuclear energy going on in Illinois. And here's what's going on in Illinois. There's a company called Exelon, which is a large power generator. And it has been unable to win auctions to provide power in Illinois from its nuclear power plants. And essentially, the concern is that cheap natural gas in the United States has so reduced electricity prices that it is hard for at least that nuclear generator to continue to pay off the capital costs of its power plant, given where electricity prices are today, prices that people didn't anticipate historically. That's the predicate. So where we are now is that Exelon has announced that it is going to shut down two of its nuclear power plants. And I want to read you something. And then I'm going to ask you a question. So there is an organization called Environmental Progress, which Burt sits on the Science Advisory Committee of, which is an environmental group that espouses quite significantly espouses nuclear energy. And I got an email in my inbox yesterday, and it said the following. The names of these two nuclear power plants are Quad Cities and Clinton. Saving Quad and Clinton will cost less than half the cost of the federal wind subsidy and will protect Illinois ratepayers from future price shocks when natural gas prices go up. What happens next will reveal whether the Environmental Defense Fund, the NRDC, and the Sierra Club care more about addressing climate change than continuing with their counterproductive and outmoded effort to dismantle our largest source of clean power. So what's going on here is that these nuclear producers want effectively additional subsidies from the federal government to help them out, given how low prices are as a result of natural gas. So dig in, Burt. I mean, you're part of the organization. Talk this through. OK, well, what you heard is simply gross untruth. The renewables get subsidies. Nuclear does not get subsidies. The subsidies for wind are so large that the wind people can actually pay the system operator to take their energy. They can charge negative amounts for it. There is no subsidy like that for nuclear. And I will point out that every time the subsidies for wind and solar have expired, all new wind and solar plants have stopped. There have been no new ones without subsidies. Question is what is a reasonable subsidy and what Exxalon was looking for was a quite small subsidy on top of the price of electricity for giving them 90% uptime electricity, which didn't care whether we had hurricanes or what have you. I can look at New York State. I mentioned it earlier. New York State gets 28% of its electricity from big hydro. It gets 22% from nuclear power. And the rest of it is mainly largely compared to those is fossil and some of standard renewables. New York has decided that it really needs to do something to make sure that nuclear is affordable. I don't know what the Public Utilities Commission is going to do, but they are working on it. And in fact, you can find a report from the New York POC on the problem and on what they're considering for some of this. OK, so Ralph, is it true that nuclear gets no subsidy, number one? And number two, is your organization just sort of singing yesterday's environmental tune in hoping that wind and solar can save the world when indeed nuclear is necessary to get any significant carbon cuts? Of course, in my cheerful tune, there's an energy efficiency theme, too, Jeff. But before, I actually am going to surprise Bert by agreeing with him on one thing. Although I do think nuclear is still robustly subsidized, starting with its immunity from potential damages associated with accidents in the Price Anderson Act, which is still there, which I once challenged Bert to join me in supporting repeal of so we can have a more pro-market system. Every energy source that we've got now, every major energy source, has some federal subsidies. I think Doug Coplow's website does the best job of comparing them and refer you all to it. But Bert, here's where I want to cheer you up a little. I would not make decisions about the long-term future of any operating nuclear plant based on short-term wholesale market prices. They're volatile. They go up and down due to a whole host of largely unpredictable factors. I don't think long-term resource decisions should be made that way. So when I argue for competitive procurement, I'm talking about robust competition for long-term contracts, in which I do think nuclear plants should be able to participate. And I challenge Bert to join me in suggesting that the best way forward right now is to layer on top of this excessive reliance on short-term wholesale prices, a more robust system of long-term contracts awarded competitively. But Bert, the reminder here is the entity that first pushed Illinois into this excessive reliance on short-term wholesale prices was excellent. It was their idea. And it worked very well for them for a while when nuclear plants benefited from high gas prices. It's not working now. I opposed it then. I oppose it now. You're not always wrong. So, OK, jump in, and then we're going to move on. Go ahead, Steve. That's good for two votes. Let's define what's short-term and long-term and mid-term. I mean, 90% to 95% of the energy allocating now is going towards next-day bidding. Long-term and Rouse Mine might mean 20-year contracts. Or 30. Or 30-year contracts. So let me define something beyond that. Because it's likely natural gas will remain low for five or 10 years, probably likely for even longer as we electrify. And so the question is, what do you do after 20 to 30 years as things progress? And there's where, as natural gas prices rise. Well, no, in terms of the bidding. Because right now, I think the world's fixated on making climate goals of 2030, maybe 2040. And so I want to look beyond that into this middle ground of 2040 to 2100. How do we do this? If we just use markets, which, by the way, don't really work for 50 years, foresight, then you're going to see things like natural gas and the 20-year contract, it gets the lowest bid. And that's the thing I'm most worried about. And so there has to be something that means a diversity of cleaning energy sources. And that's the most important thing. So nuclear does need to be subsidized in a way that it's, even if it is now, regardless of whether it is or isn't now, it needs to be subsidized to a greater extent, and that needs to happen because of the low price of a fuel that exists today. If you consider having a long-term 50-year view of energy and having the lowest cost for the long-term 50 of a 60-year view of energy or a 60-year view of a subsidy, you can call it a subsidy. But I also see the, I don't see storages coming in more than peak load shifting or maybe day-night. I don't see see new storage. I don't see all those things that you need some of this steady clean power. Okay, so Steve Chu has just called you out, Dan, and said that you're wrong when you contend that things other than nuclear can do the job. Well, I mean, it's actually, it's largely due to efforts put in place when Steve was secretary that I think we can all be so bullish about the opportunities. But he's not, he's not so bullish. But he should be more bullish because he launched a wonderful process and I would say we're so far along that the avalanche has begun, it's too late for the pebbles to vote because what we're seeing is if you want to bet on a robust basic research to applied research and deployment category, that's far favors the storage revolution than it does the nuclear revolution. Even when we talk to later on about small modular reactors as a way to accelerate the Moore's law learning curve process, the efforts what Elon Gur is here who ran the storage program at RPE for a while, the diversity of technologies, the rapidity of, we can now look at sub millisecond power coming out of flywheels of huge range of chemical reactors at a dramatic range of scales. We have compressed air as an interim storage technology which is already competitive in some markets. If you want to build out a system to really do what Steve said, which is to diversify the system, it's that mixture of storage that plays this critical role. And one of the key features is that we can get a great deal of that storage effectively for free because in the medium term, the ability to use light duty vehicles, buses, large vehicles as a storage component, not in the next five years, we don't need it then. The low gas prices give us a short-term window to push this process along and to make the markets truly competitive as well. So Dan, my sense of Steve choose a pretty optimistic guy. So why is he insufficiently optimistic? I'm not asking for a psychological answer. I'm asking for a factual answer. What is he underestimating and be really specific and quick? What is he missing? And after Dan answers, can the patient answer? Indeed, indeed. The couch will be wheeled on the stage in a minute. An element that we have not described directly is that one of the features that didn't just come with a dramatic ramp-up in solar was the dramatic realization that a diverse decentralized system can provide the same critical features that we think about with a base load, a highly centralized system. Not tomorrow morning, but in the timeframe that we need it, it's absolutely there. And so in this switch model, you can find it on our website, again, the paper's published with Chinese government as a cooperation on this. Deploying large amounts of storage to allow us to utilize this, changes the tune. And it changes the tune in terms of cost and it feeds directly into, you want a competitive market, you want a lot of players to bid in, carve out for incredibly expensive technologies, nuclear being in that category, the subsidies are large and where it would need to go to build out that capacity to see the market. The argument is rather than having yesterday's no carbon technology, which is a very centralized, big generation technology, you think the world now has tomorrow's no carbon technology, which looks like a ballet of lots of different sources and it's ready to go. With base load obsolete, the base load concept is up. The notion of big stuff. Okay, Steve, why is that wrong? Well, it's really, if you look at the numbers, now I'm optimistic. I think we can get a 50, 60% renewables, even maybe even higher by mid-century with all the things. 50 to 60% of total electricity generation. Total electricity generation, not total energy generation. Worldwide. No, the United States. Worldwide, maybe, maybe, as a possibility. Now the question is, and I don't want to debate whether it's 60% or 80%. What I want to debate is what do you do with the last 20%. And that's where I cannot see the 100% of clean energy. And so then I see at the 30% level, or 40% level, 20%, choose your number. What is it gonna be? Is it for seasonal? Seasonal generation. Is it gonna be possible? But our target is necessarily 100%. Well, the target by the end of this century, I'm not 20, 50, I'm talking about 2100, should be very close to 100%. And so I don't think anybody on stage disagrees with that. And so the issue really is how do you get that last 20% or 30% of the total energy consumption? Why not go out for bids? Including agriculture. Bids are great, as you well know, Ralph. The bids for solar in countries without subsidies are coming in at 33. So let me just define terms. These guys, when they talk about... 35 cents is cool. Three cents announced yesterday at the sea. Three cents for wind and solar. And I'm praying that those contractors will not go bankrupt. But three and a half or four cents, a kilowatt hour, those are real bids. No subsidy included profit. Four cents, I'm convinced. Let me just at the risk of offending people who are experts in the room to find what these guys are talking about. They're talking about bids, and they're talking about cents. What they're talking about is the amount of the price that a producer of electricity promises to be able to produce that electricity for. And the lower the number, the cheaper the power. And these guys are basically saying that there are sort of eye-poppingly low numbers that the producers of wind, particularly solar in this case, are contending that they can produce for. And produce that profit. Includes all the profit they're gonna make. And just one point. Okay, and then we're gonna move on real quick. But so if we're gonna debate what we need by 2100, I'm willing to bet on 84 years of time to innovate, to make storage, things that we didn't talk about before, space-based solar, entirely realistic. There is a huge opportunity for baseload, clean power, to get very far away. And if we give me 85 years, that's a lot of it. I'm not giving you 85 years. I'm giving you 50 to 20, 50, 2100. By 2100, lots of great things will happen. It's in that 50-year period that I want. Which is important in a carbon sense. Which is the next generation. Okay, Bert, I wanna ask you to go ahead really quickly and then I wanna ask you to address something else. Dan talked about using cars for storage. I don't think that you can use for car storage. If you look at the standard- Electric cars for storage in the sense of day of batteries. If you look at the standard Tesla, the batteries are about 100 kilowatt hours. You take a billion cars at 100 kilowatt hours and you get not that much energy compared to what you use in California alone. So in California, I did the following calculation. I'll leave it for you. Lake Shasta, biggest lake in California. Put in all the hydro you want. Lake Shasta will deliver 50 gigawatt hours to drain it. Two days without wind and that lake is empty. You can't do the things you're talking about. Stranding all the people in the United States at their place of work or their home when the wind stops blowing. I agree that somebody may invent a really efficient and affordable energy storage system. We don't have it now. We know if you're gonna deploy anything at large scale by 2050, it better be at the beginning of production now and it's not. I don't know what somebody will invent between 2050 and 2100. We may even get fusion power, which you might even love. I don't know that, but I do know that you are not going to get 250 gigawatt. Oh, I disagree. Well, okay, so I'm gonna stop this because I think we've established that we have a debate over the extent to which things other than nuclear can or cannot fill the breach. I want us to address a few other things before we run out of time. One is a place in Japan called Fukushima. So five years ago, you will all have heard there was a quite serious nuclear accident in Japan. And as a result of that nuclear accident in Japan, essentially I'm oversimplifying, but essentially swore off nuclear energy. And more recently, Japan has sworn back on nuclear energy. Now, the jury's still out as to the extent to which Japan will swing back, but there are quite aggressive predictions about Japan ramping up nuclear again. And here's the question I wanna ask you guys. So put yourself in Japan and you're in a town meeting in Fukushima. Or you're speaking to someone in Tokyo at a meeting where the government is trying to defend its position to go whole hog in nuclear again. And argue persuasively that people in this audience don't have anything to worry about in terms of safety. I got challenged by Mark Jacobson. I don't know if you know Mark. Mark says you can do everything with wisdom. He's a Stanford professor. He wrote a very nice paper looking at integrated cancer death worldwide from Fukushima radioactivity using the standard linear no threshold model. I wrote a comment on this. I said the linear no threshold model is probably wrong. We don't know what to replace it with, but he did a right calculation. But then I did a different one. I said, how many years of life were lost if you had never generated any nuclear power at Fukushima but if you generated it with coal? And the answer is five times as many from a particulates and other such things that give people emphysema and all sorts of stuff. So what the Japanese are doing is they're importing coal like crazy and they're importing coal and they're gonna replace their nuclear. Their own diet said that the problem with Fukushima was regulatory capture. All the safety systems at Fukushima worked after the earthquake. 40 minutes later came the tsunami. All the auxiliary power was in the basement. It all got flooded out and so all the safety systems were turned off. The regulators knew that that sea wall was too low and the regulators say, well, you get out to it. We're not so innocent. The whole Gulf blowout was another issue in terms of regulatory capture, okay? The report from the Japanese diet said Fukushima was entirely human. Okay, great, all right, so Ralph, does it give you now a sense of security to know that the accident was caused by human error as opposed to being caused by that plant? With great respect, Bert, no one in the audience was reassured by any of that. I mean, the problem is, yes, one can explain how it happened. The Japanese, though, before the accident were widely accounted, and certainly, Bert, I thought this, as competent nuclear engineers and operators. I did not think, this was not Russia blowing up a reactor that was badly designed. So the most important lesson for me is simply, and I think for the financial markets, was that a very competent operator got it so badly wrong that Bert, it almost sunk. One of the largest and best managed utilities in the world. And should have sunk it. And should have sunk it. And that's an argument for us. If you want to mobilize investment going forward, Bert, that's a tough hurdle to overcome. Well, just so, Steve, jump in, but I want to try to focus this. I'm curious, we've heard a lot of discussion about the ostensible advances technologically in wind and solar. I'd like us to hear a little bit about the extent to which you think there have been technological advances in nuclear that are significant for this audience to consider in the context of everything we've talked about, Steve, jump in. The most important technological advance in nuclear is you build the new reactors with enough heat capacity, so what you do in the next three days and going to one week is you don't have to do anything. You lose control of your water, you lose control of your electricity, you use your people, they have to go away for some other reason. It doesn't matter. It's like an airplane, except you lose your engines, I don't think you can lose your wings, and then you land safely. And so they'll walk. That's ready for prime time. The AP-1000s have a three-day period of thermal inertia. The small nuclear reactors, when I was Secretary of Energy, our stipulation is we want a passively safe period, and that you need about seven days. But this is not a science project. This is commercializable or commercialized? Well, the AP-1000s being built in China and the United States are being built today are a three-day delay. And that just to wrap up, and I see Dan's about to jump out of his seat, but are you confident, does that three-day window make you confident that this is safe and that you'd be comfortable living in town with the plant in your backyard? I would be much more comfortable living next to a nuclear plant than a coal plant. Without question, if you look... As would I. Yeah. We're all with you there. There are other choices, though. I would be very happy living with solar. I don't think I really want to live directly under a wind tower. But let me just say something else. The number of fatalities, I disagree with Bert on the number of fatalities of coal versus nuclear. There's an Oak Ridge study that said per terawatt hour, it's 6,000 times more deadly coal. Discounting what might happen in climate change. So let's say they exaggerate. Let's say it's 3,000 more deadly per terawatt hour than nuclear. Oil turns out to be 1,000 times more deadly than nuclear. If you include Chernobyl, Fukushima, and... There's a little bit of a difference, though. Politically, right? I'll send him the paper I use, which is from a German public. All right, Dan, Dan, go. So first, I have to slide with Steve. So I wrote a book called Should We Risk It, where we examine the numbers, and ours are much closer to Steve. Oh, good. I'm feeling better. But the problem is that these passively safe reactor designs, and I was on the Department of Energy's Generation Four Committee to assess the technologies from some of the liquid metal to a whole variety of technologies, they are not ready to scale up at the point we're talking about here. And that is what the criteria you said. No, I'm only talking light-water small modules. No, I know. But to have a reasonable fleet of these, 2050, it's not gonna happen because we do not have the capacity to build out the research and the testing of these, and we would be betting against innovation if we counted on that, whereas the diversified renewables, aggressively efficient, and storage is a system that does work in this mix. Wait, wait, wait. How would we be betting against innovation if we're, I don't get it. We need to figure out how to utilize on a research and development budget, which unfortunately is finite, and to put it into areas that are proven productive. But you're betting for innovation in nuclear. You're saying that's not gonna happen the way wind and solar is. Right, because the smaller scale, even if we get to the new scales, the terapowers, the small nuclear reactors that have an interesting future, but incredibly far from market, despite some of the Bill Gates and other claims where they should be. They say their first one's gonna be delivered in 2024. And nuclear was gonna be too cheap to meter. So the challenge is, if you wanna bet on a energy revolution, you're gonna need to bet on something that has the capacity to innovate and be diverse. And this would be an over-weighted chunk in an area that we don't even know if it can deliver these numbers. Now I'm actually more optimistic that these things will happen in the long term, but that 80% decarbonization by 2050, even before we get to the risks and the fact that we've consistently not been able to manage the nuclear fuel cycle, risk-wise, cost-wise, policy-wise, we would have to reinvent the regulatory structure, which I actually think is even tougher than the R&D. Do you buy the notion, so there have been a few, well, there have been some very high-profile nuclear accidents, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Do you buy what Dan just said, that that means that we have, I can't remember your words, but essentially that statistically that's particularly problematic? Or are those just big deals that the press likes to cover and if you look at them against other things, it's not such a big deal? Well, they are big deals. However, to say that, okay, we've had a Chernobyl, it's a different story for technical reasons, but Fukushima, first generation, light-water reactor, very, very disturbing. But if you look at how, you know, mostly operator, airplane, not airplane, well, car crashes, mostly operator error. Okay, the number of car fatalities is plummeted. It went down maybe to one quarter, one fifth of what it used to be. Why? A number of things. Number of technical things that you can put in current generation nuclear reactors and next generation nuclear reactors. The equivalents of airbags, better training. Simulator training once or twice a year of all nuclear reactors should be worldwide, the way it is done in the United States. There are passively safe things you can do. Yes, it exceeded the, even if the sea wall were built at the proper height, that tsunami would have still exceeded, but you could have done minor, minor things. And actually other plants in Japan did minor, minor things like put diesel generators a couple of meters even higher, and those things worked. And so very small, minor considerations actually improve the safety. So I can see just like airplane safety, just like automobile safety, a steady march to safer and safer things. Don't say, oh, airplanes crashed, cars crashed, people died, therefore we shouldn't use them. Okay, I wanna, we have time for maybe one more sort of meaty subject, and I wanna take us to China. So as I mentioned at the start of this discussion, according to the International Energy Agency, 46% of the growth in nuclear power generation that the IEA sees over the next quarter century will come, the IEA says in China, more than in any other country. And if you actually pick apart those numbers, what those numbers mean is that China will bring online more nuclear power generation over the next 25 years than either the United States or the European Union has in operation today. That's quite a build in China. So I just throw it open. Does that make you feel good or does that make you feel bad? And I'm not being facetious here. I'm asking about your view of what's going on in China and what the particular potentials or concerns are. Who wants to jump in? Ralph? Just a cautionary tale to begin the discussion because trend isn't destiny and you're citing projections. When the US in its time had a massively ambitious nuclear buildout, Bert remembers it well, and there was an artifact of it this week that bears note, my friend Peter Bradford wrote about it in the boat and the atomic scientists. TVA has put up for sale the site of the Belafonte nuclear units which were part of the enormous US nuclear surge. TVA spent $6 billion erecting a plant on that site too that will never operate. And the asking price for the site is $36 million after a $6 billion investment. And the cautionary tale is just what makes me nervous about those trends is that a lot of money is being invested in something that might be used more productively and that my bet is the Chinese right now are doing centralized command and control procurement by and large. They are not doing competitive procurement that anyone here would recognize. Every time I'm asked in nuclear debates why can't we be more like China? It's always by people who would never want us to be more like China in any other aspect of economic policy. So on this one, even as the Chinese move toward introducing more competition as they have in every other sector, my prediction is they'll do it here too. They'll be more like us and they'll make different and better choices. Just to be clear, the Chinese also are installing more solar than anyone else in the world. And more wind. And more coal. And are the number one producer of batteries at a whole variety of scale. So there's a lot of kind of ecumenical every energy source goes. Anyway, jump in. How do you feel about what's happening in China? Well, what's happening in China, I think the thing that gives me some hope is that the Chinese regulators used to be subservient to their Ministry of Energy and they've been moved out of that. So the Chinese nuclear regulators are gonna get a lot more serious. If the Chinese- Serious in the safety sense? In the sense of- And it's serious in the safety sense. Remember, our regulators, the NRC, was created in the mid 1970s because our Congress got worried about having the people responsible for producing nuclear regulating nuclear. And we did a very wise thing. And our NRC is generally considered the gold standard of regulation around the entire world. The India has started to separate its people. China has separated its people. The Japanese have overhauled their regulating system because they thought it was regulatory capture. Do I think the Chinese can do this effectively? Yes. I think they can do it effectively and reliably. I see South Korea selling a bunch of reactors to the United Arab Emirates and also training the people in how to operate them and supervising them till they set up their own regulatory system. And if I was sitting in dance chair, I would say my big worry is could you ever trust Nigeria to regulate nuclear power? Okay, so we're gonna go to Dan and Steve. You're gonna take your time in your closing statement because we're already at the end. 15 seconds, Dr. Kamen. Well, since my wife is Nigerian, I'm gonna have to represent that comment, but... Most corrupt government in Africa. Actually second most corrupt after South Sudan, but we'll get there. But what you just raised is actually the death knell for the pro-nuclear argument is now you have to say, I expect an ideal functioning technical system which we don't have yet and I expect to marry with an ideal functioning regulatory system. And actually most of the arguments for where the Chinese system are going and I work directly with State Grid that manages this process is there's some intense worries that they could even get the regulatory part right when the technologies are if and then ready. And so I would say bet on innovation and that is this broader, aggressive renewables, super aggressive efficiency. That route gives you many more bets to get there than the amount you'd have to sink into tweaking the technical and the managerial system for this nuclear bet. That sounds like a bow tied on an argument by someone who's been in a couple of debates. So let's go to closing statements and we're gonna go in the same order, two minutes apiece, pay attention because then you're gonna vote and we're gonna see who wins. Steve Chu. We talked to, you heard something about the nuclear reactors as a fiscal project works but the nuclear system fails. Let's cast in another question. The renewable system, what will be the hardships added? And imagine where you have 75% renewable energy and how do you get the system to actually manage the two way floods going back and forth on this? And so I see it much, much harder to actually get a system that's resistant to blackouts when you have 100% renewable or 90% renewable. You need some standby power that you can really turn on. Nuclear reactors, by the way, are not only base load, they can be modulated by 50%. Today's reactors are modulated by 50% pretty quickly. And so I see nuclear as part of that standby, not standby for one day or two days, standby for one month in seasonal that I think we absolutely need. I'm gonna go back, is that my time? China, your question on China, what's going on in China? China is gonna be the laboratory for innovation in energy. China's trying desperately, I know very well, Chairman Liu of the state grid, and they have an issue integrating their system. They're determined to do that. This is one country where there is no debate in terms of what climate change, the risks of climate change, and they're really focused on trying to cure this and all the things. So the nuclear reactors, the small modular reactors, the terapower reactors, China's actually gonna be the test bed. Now, there's an NRC pledge that says they will take 40 months to review the small modular reactors. We'll keep our fingers crossed as to whether they can do that, but I think China with full cognizant of safety can do this and have them built. Thank you, Dan, you're next. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a huge bet on an unproven route and the regulation, the issues of the cost of those reactors, which we clearly do not know. The Chinese numbers, as Ralph said before, are not in any transparency and any clarity in what they're going. All the reactors built outside of China have come in well over a cost. But I think the real crux of this is where do you want to bet on innovation? And the Silicon Valley Moors Law type of process so strongly favors massive more amounts of renewables, a hugely diversified storage sector, and storage, by the way, is ahead of solar at its same phase of the game in terms of investment, in terms of the length of the run. We've basically been investing heavily in storage since 2009 in Steve, and it's amazing where it's come to so that some of the quotes we're now seeing are solar integrated with storage at prices that are forecast now to be cost competitive well under a decade. And that's a total different world than we talked about before. The numbers announced yesterday the clean energy and misterial, wind and solar coming in at three cents just cannot be touched by the technology mix we're looking at these very large centralized systems. I'm actually quite excited about what small modular nuclear reactors could do. The physics, the systems engineering look quite attractive, but you're essentially betting against all of the human history argument we argued here. Taking out a 1.5 gigawatt traditional reactor and putting in six or seven small ones is a management nightmare waiting to happen at levels that we haven't even discussed yet. Even with all of the passive safety things we might be able to mix into the game. The final feature is I, of course, hope we win the debate, but ultimately lose the argument that the nuclear does all these things. I don't plan around a miracle, but I wouldn't mind seeing one. But I think we already have economically and technically viable paths to get there. That's where we should be betting. Excellent. Bert. I think if you look at what's needed to actually accomplish the goal of 2050, you're talking about maybe 20% nuclear in the mix. You're not talking about 100% nuclear. You need a certain base load. As far as costs are concerned, I looked at the costs of the last seven reactors built in Japan and Korea. Those costs are 3,000 bucks per kilowatt hour. Our costs are seven or 8,000 per kilowatt hour. And I ask people why. And there are two answers you get. One is our regulators are too tough. The other, though, is quite different. The other says that the entire infrastructure to manufacture a nuclear power plant has gone in the United States and it has to be built up. You don't learn to weld a reactor vessel if that's thick in your high school welding class. So there hasn't been an analysis of why they're so expensive. And I picked Japan and Korea because their salaries are not in the basement like Japan's are. So also. You mean like China's or China's? Like China is, yes. So all I can say is that there's one thing that our current Secretary of Energy says and that's all of the above. And part of the above is nuclear and nuclear is supplying 19% of all electricity in the United States now and why the hell do you want to shut down something that's doing that much for you in looking for something that isn't invented yet? I don't think Dan would disagree with me to say that you're not going to have multi-gigawatt days of energy storage by 2050. Maybe by 2100. I'd be happy if somebody will invent it and so we can do something. And the last thing I want you to think about is Diablo Canyon 750 acres. Solar for same power, 100,000 acres. Wind for the same power output, 400,000 acres. Just think of California if you wanted to wind for a lot more than you get out of Diablo Canyon. Ralph and you get a five extra seconds. Let's think about California. I was hoping for that challenge. We've talked about Nigeria, Japan, China, Europe. Time to get back to where we are right now. And Bert invoked, I think everybody's favorite energy philosophy in the United States for as long as I've been here, which is all of the above. Which has a reassuring air about it until you, as you have to if you're actually in the electricity business, come face to face with the cold hard fact that you can't afford all of the above and you've got to make some difficult choices. California is now doing that. First of all, California has adopted and embraced the goals that all of us share to decarbonize its economy. Done, that is the end. The end is to get there with affordable and reliable energy services. And California has embarked on a process for doing that that I simply want to commend to all of you as maybe the strongest possible argument against the resolution that we quote, need a nuclear renaissance. The nuclear renaissance is a means to an end. The end is one that all of us share. The question of how to get there to the decarbonized economy is an adventure you are all now part of and the best minds in Silicon Valley are fully engaged on and look at the way we're doing it. We're doing it again by setting the limits on emissions, by assigning actual costs to carbon emissions, which all of the panelists have talked about the importance of doing. By sending our utilities out to do resource procurement with top priority going to cost effective energy efficiency starting with those three billion tons that Chu got out of efficiency standards at DOE. Looking at all of the options. So yes, nuclear will be able to bid in to California's resource procurement. There's no nuclear plants allowed to be built in California right now because the California legislature is understandably concerned that there's no place for the waste to go. But out of state nuclear can come in. If any of these advanced reactor designs get traction, they'll have a chance to take a shot at what will be the largest energy investment budget, capital budget in the United States and one of the largest in the world. That's the kind of process we should be for. Right now my prediction is that there probably won't be any nuclear renaissance element to the way California decarbonizes at lowest cost. But they'll get their shot. The most important thing is to avoid the magical thinking or the centrally imposed visions that try to anticipate three and a half decades worth of innovation, integration and good management and to substitute instead some kind of single purpose judgment that one technology is the solution or that a magical all of the above can somehow be afforded and achieved. Thank you. And we'll have a chance at a moment to properly thank the four of these folks but now is your moment of truth. So if you just take five seconds to collect your thoughts and I'm gonna ask you to raise your hand first if, don't do it yet, but first if you think that there should be a nuclear renaissance and then second if you think that there should not be a nuclear renaissance and then we will attempt great minds that we are in this room to figure out who won. So here we go. If you think, well I was gonna do that if this didn't work. We can do that. You wanna do that? You think that's easier? All right, that requires a little bit more of an honor system but we're at Stanford which runs on an honor system so what the hell? Okay, if you changed your mind in the affirmative that is to say if you previously thought that there should not be a nuclear renaissance and you are now convinced that there should be so let me just stop a second. If you're not changing your mind either way don't raise your hand right now. If you were against before and you are now four raise your hand. I can't, I have no sense of how many means are left. One, two, three, four. I see four but am I not seeing some? Six? Okay, six or seven, that may become important. If you previously thought that there should not, no if you previously thought that there should be a nuclear renaissance and you now think that there should not be you were swayed in the negative, raise your hand. One, see the six or seven is a big deal. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. No, no it's not a tie actually I think. Wait raise your hand, I can't, Barbie you're gonna make the call. Talk about the swing voter. Stand up, stand up if you were swayed in the negative. All right everyone now take pictures. One, two, three, one, two, three. Oh I'm doing this one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, all right you know what? Here's what we're gonna do, here's what we're gonna do. Call out, ready, we're gonna go from here and around and you're just gonna raise, you're gonna say yes. You're gonna say me, if you were swayed in the negative, if you were just standing up, nine. All right now let's just make the scientific, the people who were up before swayed in the affirmative, let's do the me thing as well. So we just had nine, correct? Okay start over here, if you were swayed in the affirmative say me. So I think that means that those arguing against a new clear renaissance win by one. Oh. No? Oh it's the other way? I think it's within the hope. It was nine swung in the negative and eight swung in the affirmative, right? It's a tie. Yeah it's not a tie. It's, it's, it's you guys win. I had 500 people, I would call it a tie. So Ralph and Dan win by a hair. Thank you all very much and please join me in thanking the four of these folks.