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quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue. Who’s going to be sure? Who’s going to guarantee something that is literally billions of time large than any type of of wasted you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? This is a lot of volume. So that’s a tough one.
Next would be nuclear. It also has three big problems: Cost, particularly in highly regulated countries,is high, the issue of the the safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong ,that,even though you have these human operators,that the fuel doesn’t get used for weapons. And then what do you do with the waste? And ,although it’s not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. People need to feel good about it. So three very tough problems that might be solvable,and so ,should be worked on. The last three of the five,I’ve grouped together. These are what people often refer to as the renewable. And they actually--although it’s great they don’t require fuel -they have some disadvantages. One of that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plan. This is energy farming, so you’re talking about many square miles, thousands of time more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. Also, these are intermittent sources. The sun doesn’t shine all day,it doesn’t shine every day, and,likewise,the wind doesn’t blow all the time. And also, if you depend on these sources,you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time period that’s it’s not a available. So, we’ve got big
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cost challenges here,we have transmission challenges: for example,say this energy source is outside your country; you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. And finally, this storage problem. And, to dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all types of batteries that get made--for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything--and compared that to the amount of electricity energy the world uses,and what found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that’s going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. It’s not impossible, but it’s not a easy thing . Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above,say, 20 to 30 percent of what you’re using. If you’re counting on it for 100 percent,you need a miracle battery. Now, how we’re going to go forward on this--what’s the right approach? Is it a Manhattan Project? What’s the thing that can get using. What’s the thing that can get us there? Well, we need lots of companies working on this,hundreds. In each of these five paths, we need at less a hundred people. And a lot of them,you’ll look at and say, “they’re crazy”. That’s good. And, I think, here in the TED group.
We have many people who are already pursuing this. Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. Vinod Khosla’s investing in dozens of companies that
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are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I’m trying to help back that. Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly,is actually taking the nuclear approach. There are some innovation in nuclear: modular, liquid. And innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there’s some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium-the one percent, which is the U235-we decided, “Let’s burn the 99 percent, the U238. ” It’s kind of crazy idea. In fact,people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it’s through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material’s approach, this looks like it would work. And, because you’re burning that 99 percent you have greatly improved cost profile. You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today’s reactors. So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. It’s a great thing. It breathes this uranium as it goes along, so it’s kind of like a candle. You can see it’s a log here, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. I’ve got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they’ve taken out the part they burn now, so it’s called depleted uranium. That would power the U.S for hundreds of years. And, simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you’d have enough
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fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. So, you know, it’s got lot’s of challenges ahead,but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. So let’s think:How should we measure ourselves? What should our report card look like? Well, let’s go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. For 2050, you’ve heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. That really is very important,that we get there. And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries, still some agriculture, hopefully we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. So, to get that percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. So, the other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed in all the developed countries and we’re in the process of getting it elsewhere? That’s super important. That’s a key element of making the report card. So, backing up from there,what should the 2020 report card look like?
Well, again, it should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions. The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and, therefore, the less the temperature. But in some ways, the grade we get there,doing things that don’t get us all the way to the big reductions,is only equally, or maybe even slightly less,important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies,
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pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. There’s a lot of great books that have been written about this. The Al Gore, “our choice” and the David Mckay book, “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.” They really go through it and created a framework that this can be discussed broadly,because we need broad backing for this.
There’s a lot that has to come together. So this is a wish. It’s a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years-I can pick who’s president, I can keep a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that’s half the cost with no CO2 gets invented-this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact. If we don’t get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the U.S. and China ,between poor countries and rich, and most of all the lives of those two billion will far worse. So, what do we have to do ? What am I appealing you to step forward and drive? We need to go for more research funding. When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn’t just discuss the CO2. They should discuss this innovation agenda, and you’d be stunned at the ridiculously low level of spending on these innovation approaches. We do need the market incentives-CO2 tax,cap and trade something that gets that price signal out there. We need to get the massage out. We need to have this dialogue to be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes.
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This is an important wish, but it is one think we can achieve.
Thank you!
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比尔盖茨谈能源(TED字幕)
