Facts are not persuasive.
They're not.
The social science about this is really interesting.
If you just present somebody with facts that are contradictory to their core beliefs
they actually become more beholden to those core beliefs.
Murph is bright, but she's been having a little trouble lately.
She brought this in to show the other students.
It's one of my old text books.
It's an old federal textbook we've replaced them with the corrected versions.
Corrected?
Explaining how the Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
Let's say you'd like to land a man on Mars.
6% of Americans think the Moon landings were faked, and another 5% aren't sure.
If you wanted to sway those 11% how would you go about doing it?
By arguing over shadows in photos of Apollo 11?
Or whether a nylon flag was flapping in a breeze?
Stanley Kubrick was involved faking the Apollo Moon landings.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" was a research project for the Apollo footage that was shot.
This is the biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine, George!
It would be more productive to talk about the existence of ice on Mars.
How that ice can be split apart into Oxygen and Hydrogen,
and combined with Carbon from the atmosphere, to make rocket fuel.
Avoid debating the contentious past which implies an error in judgement.
Instead, focus on shared goals, and technological solutions not yet dismissed.
Where does advanced nuclear ultimately take us?
Is it more appealing than drill-baby-drill?
And wind-baby-wind?
President Kennedy didn't challenge the nation to launch humans
into orbit around the Moon for a flyby.
The challenge was, specifically, to land on the moon.
That was the difference between Apollo 8 and Apollo 11.
In Britain they have the crown jewels, in America we have moon rocks.
And as they say it is it is priceless.
It is priceless, and the fact we haven't gone back makes it more priceless.
First landing was at The Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11.
That was chosen because it's very close to the equator,
they thought it was a very safe site.
As a Neil Armstrong was approaching the landing site though, he noticed
there were boulders everywhere!
And I mean- they didn't have maps that showed them that kind of detail,
and he had to take over from the computer with very little fuel left.
And he really piloted his way down.
I mean, it's one of those stories where- You hear stories you go-
that was over played for dramatic effect...
No!
On Apollo 11, the more you learn about what really happened, the more scared you get.
You go this guy was in big, big trouble and he pulled it out by sheer ability.
He was one of the best pilots the United States had
and he proved that day on landing on the Moon.
He pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
Apollo 11's touchdown was incredibly risky, and the slightest mistake would have resulted
in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stranded on the moon, waiting to die.
In 1962, one of these goals must have seemed far less audacious.
In terms of driving technology forward, Apollo 8 would have been enough.
Two major revolutions made the Saturn 5 possible, and the Moon landing possible.
One was the decision to build a really big engine.
It was a step-change from what had come before.
It's huge. Over 1 million pounds of thrust.
Far bigger than anything anyone had comprehended before.
The other revolution, liquid hydrogen on the 2nd and 3rd stages.
Liquid hydrogen is a very efficient fuel, and it makes the rocket lighter.
Now we look at it and it looks huge! It looks giant.
But you have to remember, this was actually an extremely lightweight design
compared to what could have been.
Moving humans safely in and out of lunar orbit drove life support and propulsion research.
The computing requirements alone helped kickstart the microchip revolution.
This is called the J2 engine and this was the other great breakthrough
of the Apollo program, which was to use hydrogen as a rocket propellant.
No one had ever done that before.
If you could do it the benefit was tremendous fuel efficiency-
the downside was you were starting from square one.
It's highly- It's highly explosive and it's super cold
and it's challenging- All kinds of materials that are fine dealing with kerosene-
you take 400 degrees below zero- they don't have a prayer.
So they had to come up with all kinds of new materials, new seals, new gaskets new piping,
new- Everything was new, to build the J2 rocket.
There was a part of Kennedy's speech I've always loved, where he says-
We will use new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented,
capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than ever been experienced.
Fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch.
Carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control,
communications, food and survival.
And then return it safely to Earth.
Re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour.
Causing heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun.
Almost as hot as it is here today.
And do all this, and do it right, and do it first!
...before this decade is out, then we must be bold!
Just grab me a color.
A color exterior.
Hurry up.
Yeah, I'm looking for one.
C-368.
Anything, quick.
I think we missed it.
Hey, I got it right here.
Let me get it out this one, it's a lot clearer.
Apollo 8's lunar fly-by produced Earthrise:
"the most influential environmental photograph ever taken"
Apollo 8.
An underappreciated Apollo mission.
Most people never heard of it.
Apollo 8, what's that?
Excuse me, that was the first time anybody ever left Earth.
There was Earth.
Seen, not as the mapmaker would have you identify it.
No, the countries were not color coded with boundaries.
We went to the Moon, and we discovered Earth.
Apollo 8 was enough... to change how we saw ourselves,
and spark an interest in science and engineering.
Kids wanted to be astronauts long before we touched down on the Moon.
So why was the stated goal a risky Apollo 11 moon landing,
and not the more attainable Apollo 8 fly-by?
Because one could be articulated easily,
and leveraged the nation's pop-culture understanding of space travel.
Apollo 8 was orbital mechanics and delta-vee.
Even today, Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains the difference between low earth orbit,
and honest-to-goodness space.
Textbooks, they have to fit the Moon on the same page as the Earth.
So you think Moon is much closer than it actually is.
Understanding what made Apollo 8 worthwhile was not a part of the culture.
Apollo 11, that was stepping out onto an alien world.
We got that.
We'd read books about it, watched movies about it.
You understood the implication the moment you heard it.
Atomic Power used to be communicated in such simple visionary terms.
It held the public's imagination back when explained as a source of energy
which would become too cheap to meter, just like a good internet data plan.
Despite the routine shutting down of domestic reactors,
and the deliberate sabotage of California's energy supply,
there is still a pathway to abundant energy.
But it can not be achieved by solid-fuel, water cooled reactors.
Because the only thing conventional reactors have to offer is electricity.
The Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear power plant.
A new generation of energy, to power our homes, and our businesses.
Designed to meet the world's growing need for electricity.
Many nuclear advocates argue that a mislead public and misdirected regulations
have driven up the cost of nuclear power.
I don't disagree.
But whether nuclear can be a bit cheaper than coal, or will remain perpetually more expensive-
that's marginal.
Slightly cheaper nuclear power is not a game changer.
If CO2 were taxed, or if Westinghouse could lower the cost of each successive AP1000,
or if anti-nuclear organizations were effectively called-out on their misinformation,
we'd still be stuck in a chicken-and-egg world
where utilities lack the incentive to saturate the market with clean energy,
and energy is too expensive to spark new industry which could otherwise thrive.
And it's not disruptive to the existing energy paradigm.
And this is a core motivation of the environmental movement,
is we don't just want to replace Peter with Paul.
There is a romantic vocabulary that goes with renewable energy.
Living in harmony with nature.
It's safe.
It's free.
It's democratic.
It's localized.
There's an overarching narrative to the renewable energy dream that's very attractive.
We don't just want to replace fossil fuels with nuclear
and have the same big centralized power plants, and the same corporations-
We want a revolution!
We want to change the way the world works!
Advocates for nuclear energy need to find that narrative, need to find that dream.
You need to have that positive overarching vision
that goes beyond simply the technological aspect and saying well, it's safe!
You know, it's- it's not that bad!
It's not as dangerous as you think it is!
Right?
It's got to be something more than that.
What Molten Salt Reactors offer
is what even cutting-edge water cooled reactors like AP1000 can't.
Molten Salt Reactors produce more than just electricity.
Molten Salt Reactors can be used in 2 ways.
So, they can be used as a form of electricity generation where it is being
attached to the grid- And there are no constraints to where you can site it.
You don't even need it to be near water which is often a constraint with existing nukes.
So you can put it anywhere, really.
So, if there's a coal-fired power station that's running down,
put your Molten Salt Reactor at that point and there's already the grid you need.
You're just swapping out the source of electricity, the grid's already there.
And, I think, that's a perfectly viable way for it to go,
but there's also heat for industrial uses.
You might actually see that come forward first, where these reactors
are being sited on industrial complexes, to provide heat.
Because there are not many sources of low-carbon, cheap heat.
We have very high operating temperatures up to 700 degrees.
We can make almost that temperature in steam.
Traditional nuclear water cooled reactors- they're warm.
But, running only 300 degrees Celsius, making steam that that's less than that?
They just really have cut off so much of the potential markets
Ammonia, making ammonia, the haber bosch process.
Fractional distillation of crude oil.
And, catalytic cracking of those hydrocarbons.
Those 3 things require temperatures above 450 Celsius.
And those 3 industries are worth 2 trillion dollars a year- on this planet.
So you have a little reactor as an industrial site and then just run a pipe of the salt.
They have their fuel salts and a heat exchanger for clean salts, not radioactive.
And you can pipe the clean salt and use the heat directly.
It also makes the whole thing cheaper, because you save the turbine, which is expensive.
A great deal of the price of electricity will depend on the ability of the reactor to produce co-products.
With today's reactors it's difficult to desalinate water.
If you desalinate water you take away from the electricity production of the reactor.
In these reactors, because they're high temperature, there is a potential there to desalinate water.
Put a great big power plant on the coast.
Bring in seawater from a couple miles out.
Desalinate it.
Suddenly you're not even pulling water out of the aquifers anymore!
So the river's not touched the lake's not touched, the aquifer's not touched...
and anybody see how big the Pacific is, recently?