Already we're pretty constrained in fresh water.
We in California are experiencing this first-hand right now.
Another application of having lots of energy,
is to be able to create fresh water from ocean water.
Every drop of drinking water on the planet is desalinated with nuclear power- today.
I think we should just use a little bit more.
And everybody on the planet has all the fresh water they can drink.
Put a power plant on the coast.
Bring in seawater from a couple miles out.
Desalinate it.
Suddenly you're not even pulling water out from the aquifers any more.
So the river's not touched.
The lake's not touched.
I must be missing something.
These guys who are real nuclear engineers, they must know something about nuclear that
would- if I knew it then I'd know why we're not doing molten salt reactors.
So I need to go, get my degree, and get an understanding,
and then I'll see whatever it is they see.
Turns out everything I learned, everything I studied,
just made this look better and better.
And these are kind of arcane reasons, but they're very important-
Like one day I learned how the reactor would always homogenize its composition.
That may not sound like a big deal but to a reactor designer that's a humongous deal.
It's just of absolutely incredible performance.
I'm sitting here thinking-
You guys should build this machine if you only picked one reason it would be for that
reason because if would make it so much easier for you to design and operate the reactor.
And I brought it up to my professor- he was talking about how current reactors work-
I said did you realize this design would always have a homogenous composition, and he goes-
I never thought about that.
From cyberspace, from Kirk Sorensen, who is with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
He would like for you to comment on the Molten Salt Reactor program.
The molten salt people included the most famous figures in nuclear energy, in particular Eugene
Wigner, are all dying off.
We don't have people building molten salt reactors now.
The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was one of the most important and, I must say, brilliant
achievements of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
And I hope that after I'm gone people will look at the dusty books that were written
on molten salts and will say-
Hey, these guys had a pretty good idea let's go back to it.
Once you learn something, you know, you can't pretend you didn't learn it and you can't
pretend you don't know what a powerful thing this is.
And- You can choose to do that.
But that's not the moral choice to make, right?
To ignore it.
To pretend you didn't learn it.
So the moral thing, the right thing to do is to do what we're doing.
Which is, in my opinion, it's sort of the bare minimum.
Well I've been in this energy game for about 10 years now.
No one's ever told me there was a safer, more sustainable form of nuclear.
So I was kind of instantly interested.
So I kept thinking about it occasionally, and I kept in touch with Kirk a little bit.
And then Fukushima happened.
This is great, this is just what I wanted to have happen.
Is for her talking to these guys, and getting that straight dope.
Oh, man, it's just perfect.
Dick Engel is probably the most knowledgeable person around these days, right?
I've never met Syd I've read all his papers.
I've actually extracted all the text from them, converted it all, rebuilt- I mean I
have-
I don't know if there's anybody who's studied his stuff more than me.
I was so tickled when I found out he was alive.
I mean how do you feel about the reactor now?
It sounds like kind of a boring job in a way.
Did you feel fondly towards this reactor design?
Oh yes.
It wasn't at all boring.
I mean boring in the sense- it was safe.
It did exactly what we calculated it ought to do.
And that's pretty satisfying.
I think it would unleash a lot of human potential which isn't currently being fulfilled.
Standard of living does correlate quite well with access to energy.
Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood,
and she had hand washed laundry for 7 children.
And now, she was going to watch electricity do that work.
There's a great talk on TED by Hans Rosling, how women in the 50s, when they started to
have washing machines, became suddenly hugely more productive.
To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.
Washing clothes is a really unproductive task.
It's just repetitive, you have to keep doing it.
You're not creating anything that's sustaining anyone really, it's just time wasted.
So 2 billion have access to washing machines.
And the remaining 5 billion, how do they wash?
How do most of the women in the world wash?
They wash like this.
By hand.
It's a time consuming labor, hours every week.
And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away.
And they want the washing machine!
And there's nothing different in their wish than from my grandmother 2 generations ago
in Sweden, water from the stream, heating with firewood, washing like that.
They want the washing machine in exactly the same way.
But when I lecture environmentally concerned students they tell me, no, not everybody in
the world can have cars and washing machines.
How many of you don't use a car, and some of them proudly raise their hand and say-
I don't use a car.
And then I put the really tough question-
How many of you hand wash your jeans and your bedsheets?
And no one raised their hand.
Soon as you could get a machine to do that for you that time became time for the family
and he said that's when he sat down with his mom and started to learn to read with her.
And that would happen multiplied over all these women suddenly have much more capacity
for being more nurturing, being more productive.
It's a great empowerer to have energy and to do things for us
that are just routine, route tasks.
Huge fractions of the developing world, women spend all day looking for sources of water.
And, when they get to the water, it is typically filthy.
And-
Parasites, disease, etc.
I mean, if you could have clean water, disease and parasite-free water for homes- you would
liberate an enormous amount of time.
And you'd increase the health of the people.
There's a lot of things we just throw away because the energy to re-use them is more
expensive than virgin material.
Dig it out of the ground, you use it, you smash it, then you throw it back in a pit
in the ground.
Ultimately it means you just leave one big hole in the ground over here and start filling
up another hole over there.
Is that sustainable?
Perhaps there's a more closed-loop system that could be employed.
That's the dream.
But that does require energy.
That was one of the things that attracted me about the notion of exploring space was
that you had to implement that simply to survive.
If you were going to live on the Moon or Mars, there was no pit over here and pit over there.
You better figure out how to make it all stay.
Every atom of nitrogen or oxygen or hydrogen became precious to you.
When I would tell people why are we doing NASA, that was the most effective thing was
the whole idea of recycling and what we would learn from exploring space.
What prevents us from doing that right now on Earth?
I mean, why do we have to go to space to learn how to be really, really good recyclers?
Why don't we recycle like that on Earth?
It was energy, you know- Energy has to be really, really cheap or the penalty has to
be really, really bad.
Now, in space, the penalty was really, really bad.
If you didn't recycle, you ran out of air and water.
But, on the ground, to go achieve that dream of a closed loop, you need to have really,
really cheap energy.
For example in the copper mining space, when they extract the copper-
They'll do a first pass, and then leave it as a mound.
And they'll wait until the price of copper goes high enough.
There's a price at which you can justify doing a second, third or more passes.
It's all a function of what's the energy input and what's the market price.
And when those reach parity, you can go in and justify more extraction.
Well the same is true with recycling materials.
If we can bring the cost of electricity down far enough,
we can conceivably go back and recycle landfills.
Appliances, we chop up old rail cars.
Demolished bridges, buildings.
Whatever.
We load scrap into large haul trucks.
Back up into this bucket and dump scrap inside.
That's dozens of cars.
Yeah.
A lot of cars.
That bucket probably has 140 tons of scrap metal in it right now.
I told them if they see anything go boom to run behind you.
That's still the standard protocol?
That's right I've got Kevlar on.
Alright you guys do the same we're all getting behind.
So you've been able to drop your power consumption by ton almost by a third it looks like.
Probably since the mid-early-80s.
So besides your scrap material input, what's you next largest cost on production?
Electricity.
How's your water use?
We're evaporatively cooling.
We use about 2.5 million gallons a day.
So we're pretty big water users.
Which is about a tenth of what the paper mills use.
But you can get far more recycles on steel or aluminum
than you could out of paper or plastic.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, actually it is debatable whether paper recycling is even that great a pursuit.
In some cases it is mandated, but-
This is one where economics drive the recycling.
But the steel industry is probably one of the better models of recycling.
Aluminum too would be.
There's less given over to waste.
If we could make energy cheap enough there's a lot of other products you could make economic
to recycle.
Absolutely.
It's easy to forget about that in our world here on Earth because we're so extracted from
our energy sources.
Food is at the grocery store.
We flush the toilet and the waste goes somewhere, where someone takes care of them.
We don't really think about the flow of energy that makes all of this possible.
With the energy generated we could actually recycle all of the air, water, and waste products
within the lunar community.
In fact doing so would be an absolute requirement for success.
We could grow the crops needed to feed the members of the community even during the 2
week lunar night using light and power from the reactor.
It kind of was this microcosm that made it easier for me to understand the bigger picture
that we have going on here on Earth and how we can make the bigger picture better.
How we can enhance our quality of life on Earth.