- il y a 16 minutes
Watch Power Trip The Story of Energy Disasters PBS, Season 2 Episode 2 on Dailymotion (2026).
Catégorie
📺
TVTranscription
00:30Energy enabled many good things. It made us more comfortable. It made us safer.
00:33And it is a solution to many of the world's challenges.
00:36But energy, because it has great power, also can be very dangerous.
00:40And the story of energy includes a lot of disasters over time.
00:44These are tough industries.
00:46There's often dramatic loss of human life.
00:50Studying, learning about remembering energy disasters is absolutely vital to more responsible and greater and greater use of energy.
00:59With every disaster, we learn things.
01:01As each failure occurs, we get more insight into how failures might occur.
01:06We will always rely on energy. For that reason, we have to continue to carefully manage it.
01:12Energy can be produced safely.
01:14The danger of it is why it's a highly regulated industry.
01:17But when things go wrong, there's always lessons to be learned.
01:24To understand ourselves and each other,
01:29we must understand the force behind the global events that shape the world.
01:38This is Power Trip, the story of energy.
01:54Earth is full of untapped energy.
01:57Hidden deep underground.
01:59Or in a waterfall.
02:01Or disguised in a cool breeze.
02:06Our living planet makes its pulse heard throughout history with enormous displays of energy.
02:12We often call these natural disasters.
02:18Our modern energy has allowed us to save countless lives in response to these disasters.
02:24But this was not the case for much of human history.
02:30In the pre-industrial times, life was very hard and people didn't live very long.
02:35Every weather event was potentially a killer.
02:39Imagine a volcano in an era where you don't have electricity or clean water.
02:51There's definitely a sense of traditions holding onto the culture and the history in Iceland.
02:56Because it was very difficult to make a life on this rock in the North Atlantic.
03:17I think there's something noble about the fact that we've managed to survive on this island for a thousand years.
03:25This is a replica of a house in the age of settlement, so about a millennium ago.
03:31They made their houses out of sod and grew grass on top as basically a form of insulation to keep
03:37warm.
03:39Icelanders have, throughout the ages, relied a lot on our natural resources.
03:44Iceland was settled in the 9th century.
03:46Settlers clear-cut the forest to make pasture land.
03:49They burnt the wood for energy.
03:51As the country was deforested, the soil was degraded and we didn't have that source of energy anymore.
03:57Then people would use either peat or actually dried lamb dung as fuel, as a source of heat, and also
04:05of a delightful aroma.
04:07As an island, I think we have a rich tradition of just making use of the resources that we have
04:14around us.
04:15Because oftentimes there's just not a plan B.
04:21Iceland is an amazing story from an energy perspective.
04:24We live isolated so far away, living on the edge of disaster at all times.
04:32Our environment is pretty threatening, whether it be volcanoes or glaciers or raging rivers.
04:41We move merrily along in the light of natural disasters.
04:48In Iceland, people live side by side with some of Earth's most powerful displays of energy.
04:55The saga of Iceland is both a lesson in the rewards a society can reap from the resources around them,
05:02as well as a sober reminder that nature can give or destroy.
05:10The current eruption that we have in Fagratalsviertl is of the tourist variety.
05:15It's an attraction.
05:16You know, people like to come and visit it.
05:18Nobody is in great danger.
05:19It's not causing any economic disruption.
05:22But that's not always the case.
05:35Magnitude and significance, the largest eruption in Iceland was in Lakhagigar.
05:43Lakhig took place in 1783 to 1884 and lasted for eight months.
05:48Volcanoes like Lakhig released a significant amount of fluorine into the atmosphere in the gas.
05:55There was a famine associated with it called the Moduhardhente.
05:59It means the haze famine because all the noxious gases caused fluoride poisoning in grasses.
06:05And at that time in Iceland, their livelihood was the livestock.
06:09And they basically started there.
06:12One quarter of the Iceland population died not from direct contact with the volcano, but because of famine.
06:19People had to resort to mass graves because they were just too weak to bury the dead.
06:28The Lakhigar eruption was really the first time in Iceland's history that this island that people knew vaguely about in
06:34the 18th century was on everyone's minds and lips.
06:39The effects of that eruption were so devastating that they were felt in Japan and Egypt.
06:46Europe was under a cold spell for two years.
06:55Most of the northern hemisphere was covered by a haze, or what people referred to in those days as dry
07:02fog.
07:03Benjamin Franklin was in Paris, in France.
07:06One of the things he realized is that dry fog was actually reducing the amount of income in solar radiation.
07:13And the way he demonstrated that is actually he took a magnifying glass, and then he focused the solar beam
07:19on the piece of paper, and as you'd normally do when you want to ignite it.
07:24But he couldn't ignite it.
07:26Today, when two guys drive through the lava, they point to it and say, this is where the French Revolution
07:31started.
07:32When Marie Antoinette told the population, let them eat cake, she was referring to the price of bread, but no
07:38one could afford it.
07:39And you could trace some of that to the eruption of Laki.
07:44When the climate changed, it caused crop failures across Europe.
07:48The French Revolution probably would have happened, but it would not have happened maybe at that particular time.
07:55When you go to that lava, you should thank it for the birth of modern democracy.
08:01The Laki eruption in 1783 caused the death of one quarter of Iceland's human population, and the fog covered much
08:11of Europe.
08:12The following winter was one of intense cold, lizards, and heavy rain.
08:18An untold number of people froze to death.
08:21It was a natural disaster amplified by the lack of modern energy resources to aid those in need.
08:29And at the same time Laki's deadly haze spread across the globe, scientists and inventors in Great Britain were making
08:38the breakthroughs that paved the way to our modern energy.
08:44When the Laki volcano erupted in 1783, energy at the time was still primarily biomass.
08:50If you look at France, they had a lot of falling water.
08:52So they used water mills and water wheels to do their industrial work.
08:56And in the Netherlands, they had flowing air, so they used wind wheels or windmills to grind grain or cut
09:02wood or polish glass.
09:04So you look at each country, and they used the resource they had, whether it's the wind in the Netherlands,
09:09the falling water in France, or the coal in the UK.
09:17At the end of Elizabeth's reign, England is a little, peripheral country on the edges of Europe.
09:25By 1870, it's the richest, most powerful country in the world.
09:29How does this happen? Coal.
09:34One of the questions with this is, could we have done what we've done in the last 200 years by
09:38cutting down trees and relying on getting whale oil from the South Atlantic?
09:44Nowhere near, you could not sustain an industrial revolution just using wood or whale oil.
09:51Coal was important because of the intensity of the energy which you could extract from it.
09:57People realise just the quantity of coal that they're sitting on.
10:01You know, there's surveys across the country, it produces amazing maps of the whole of the UK, and they're really
10:06just saying, wow, I mean, we can keep mining this for a very, very, very long time.
10:10Britain is really a lump of coal in the North Sea.
10:14Once we get the exploitation of coal, dramatic things happen.
10:19Britain surges ahead of other countries, it becomes vastly more wealthy.
10:24In fact, scholars call it the Great Divergence, because Britain leaps ahead and is able to then build these trade
10:30networks all around the world that further enrich it and empower it as a giant empire.
10:39But here is the sign and symbol of the new order, steam and smoke.
10:44There is power behind it, and behind the power is coal.
10:51When you are powering ships or vehicles with steam, you obviously need the best coal.
10:58The Welsh coal in particular was the best steam-generated coal in the world, particularly in West Wales, where you
11:04add the anthracite coal, which is the harder coal nearly diamond.
11:09We kept the Royal Navy going, the Titanic had Welsh coal on it when it sunk.
11:15The rest of the UK thinks that all Welsh people were singing miners, you know, playing rugby on the weekend
11:22and what have you, but it is a huge thing.
11:25One time, three-quarters of the population was either directly or indirectly connected with the coal industry.
11:32When the coal industry is actually at its height in the UK in 1913, there's 1.1 million coal miners.
11:41These areas and their communities and their people gave a very significant advantage to the economy at great cost to
11:50themselves.
11:59If you drive around Wales, you'll see statues and these plaques, memorials to the people who died in the Welsh
12:07mining disasters.
12:12These memorials are a way to honor the people who died, trying to lift the economy out of poverty, to
12:18lift their friends and neighbors and family members up in the world.
12:21And that's why we need to remember them.
12:26The U.S. government defines a mining disaster as one in which five or more people died.
12:35By this metric, there have been hundreds of coal mining disasters in the industry's history.
12:43Disasters continue to occur today in some parts of the world still reliant on coal.
12:50In the early days of the industry, it was the people of Wales who took on much of the burden
12:56of learning from mining disasters.
13:00There's around 152 disasters in Wales over the last 150 years, from about 1856 right through to the 1990s.
13:11In many of these Welsh mining towns, like Sengeneth, the mine is the biggest employer and the central piece of
13:17the local industry.
13:18And so when you have a disaster, not only does it really upend the local economy, it kills neighbors and
13:24friends and family members and colleagues.
13:27The worst disaster was in 1913, which was at the peak of while South Wales was exported the same year.
13:35439 people died in a single incident.
13:38I don't think anybody really knows, but they think it was a spark ignited from a storm.
13:45Our coal is very gassy.
13:47Each seam has got its own gas content built into the coal, so as you mine the coal, it releases
13:52the gas.
13:53And I mean, all you need then is a spark and bang.
13:57Half the pit got wiped out.
14:01Not just from the initial explosion, but from the after damp, which is basically carbon monoxide.
14:07So the majority of the people were actually suffocated to death underground.
14:11Down to 12-year-old, that's the starting age.
14:14Then up into the 60s, still working underground.
14:17Down to 12-year-old, that's the end of the year.
14:24Down to 12-year-old, that's the end of the year.
14:24I don't think something ended really recovered since then.
14:27You've still got that feeling that something awful happened to you.
14:40Les hommes qui mourraient, ils n'ont jamais été oubliés.
14:43Le valley n'aurait pas été ici si il n'aurait pas à la cause.
14:46C'est tout ce qui concerne le valley.
14:49Je veux dire, c'était un pire de travail en 1900 et il s'enclosait en 1928.
14:56Il s'enclosait seulement 28 ans, mais il s'enclosait à tuer 500 hommes quand il s'ouvre.
15:02William Harris, qui était mon grand-fâtre, il s'est après l'explosion.
15:08Mon grand-fâtre était le seul surpire de l'explosion du 1901.
15:12Et il a eu seul surpire de car il était un hossier, c'est vrai Jean?
15:15Et il a eu lieu de leer par sa son et l'a fait le full blast, pas lui.
15:23Il s'est très difficile car il ne s'enclosait pas le désastre,
15:27mais il ne s'enclosait pas parce que la guerre première a commencé.
15:30Et bien sûr, le premier jour de la guerre, 5,000 hommes s'enclosait en Assam.
15:35Donc on a eu lieu d'être faite en insignificance.
15:37Mais vous savez, pas maintenant.
15:39Pas maintenant, pas maintenant.
15:39On a fait notre chemin de retour.
15:44La prece que c'était payé pour coal doit toujours être faite.
15:57C'est toujours important de vérifier les raisons pour desastres,
16:01où est-il y a un desastre.
16:04Après chaque explosion major, et depuis le 1850s,
16:07il y a toujours une enquête sur eux,
16:09et qu'ils aient en détail sur ce qui s'est passé.
16:12C'est ce qu'ils aient en détail sur le futur.
16:17C'est ce qu'ils aient en détail sur le 1900,
16:23jusqu'à la 1930s, 1940s.
16:26Il n'y a pas un helmet.
16:27Le scarp autour de lui, c'est pour peintre.
16:29C'est pour peintre,
16:31c'est pour peintre.
16:32Au fronte de lui, il y a un lamp de peintre et ball,
16:35c'est un lamp de peintre,
16:36c'est un lamp de peintre,
16:37c'est un lamp de peintre.
16:39Et les tabacotiers seuls sont intéressants,
16:41car ils seuls ont de l'aim,
16:44le collier a travaillé,
16:45etc.
16:48Il y a de l'aim,
16:50ce qui a été déroulé,
16:51c'est ce qu'il y a eu,
16:51c'est ce qu'il y a eu,
16:52c'est ce qu'il y a eu,
16:54c'est ce qu'il y a eu.
16:56Il y a desfaits de l'aim.
16:57Il y a desfaits de l'aim,
16:58il y a desfaits orange,
17:02avec des bandes de reflètes.
17:03Il y a eu,
17:04il y a eu,
17:04il y a eu,
17:05il y a eu,
17:06il y a eu,
17:08il y a eu,
17:09un mascar d'eau.
17:12Il y a eu,
17:18il y a eu,
17:20En 1961,
17:21il y a eu,
17:22il y a eu,
17:22il y a eu,
17:25la explosion de Tauwakolri,
17:27la explosion de Six Bells,
17:29la explosion de Lewis Merthyr,
17:31la explosion de Cambrian.
17:32la explosion,
17:33all still happening.
17:38Aberfan disaster,
17:39was because the industry
17:41had never regarded tipping on a mountain
17:43as being a problem.
17:45When they produce coal,
17:47they've got to have somewhere
17:48to dump the rubbish,
17:50so a lot of the stuff
17:50is actually tipped on the mountain.
17:53Now, tip number seven in Aberfan
17:55was one of a number of tips
17:56for Merthyr Vale collier,
17:58and for some reason,
18:00whoever formed it first,
18:01put it on top of a stream.
18:03The tips were on the side of the valley,
18:05the collier itself was in the bottom of the valley.
18:08Between the two,
18:10there was the village of Aberfan.
18:12October 1966,
18:14about quarter past nine that morning,
18:16the tip blew out in the middle,
18:18half of it just broke away
18:20and headed down into the valley.
18:23Pantsglass was the local primary school
18:25and for generations,
18:27every village family sent their children there.
18:29Three classrooms disappeared,
18:32buried underneath 60,000 tons of slurry.
18:35When I went back up the steps and looked,
18:38it was horrible.
18:40You knew that nobody could have come out
18:41from that bottom end.
18:53Tipping had to change.
18:55A lot of tips were removed all over the country,
18:58you know, all over the world.
18:59The safety and the culture
19:01were all improved
19:02because of all the disasters we had.
19:06The coal industry,
19:07it's one of the first industries
19:08to develop a safety culture
19:09because of the amount of people
19:10who could get killed
19:11for very simple reasons.
19:13They introduced PPE
19:14and then, of course,
19:15it's adopted by other industries.
19:17If you go up the motorway,
19:19you think they were miners everywhere,
19:20because they all got orange overalls
19:21and white helmets.
19:23When the coal industry basically shut down
19:25in the late 1990s,
19:27it was the safest coal industry in the world.
19:33I think a lot of the coal industry
19:35has been erased from memory
19:37since the mines have gone.
19:40The valleys are green again, you know.
19:43It's difficult in parts
19:44to imagine what they were like
19:46even in my childhood,
19:47where coal was king, really.
19:51When you think of all the human beings
19:53which built the valley,
19:54it was built on coal.
19:55and it was vast.
19:59You've got to maintain respect for the dead
20:02and the memory of the dead
20:03and what they represented.
20:05Hopefully you learn, innit?
20:06Hopefully mankind will learn from these things
20:08and do it better, innit?
20:11Next time.
20:15The Guardian is a memorial that is there
20:18to remember a lot of the major disasters
20:22that have occurred in the coal mining industry
20:24throughout South Wales.
20:28You've got the stature of a miner
20:30but he's looking and he's looking to protect.
20:36I always think the doom and gloom of the story
20:39is not all the story.
20:41Prior to 1840,
20:43the valleys had no people,
20:44a couple of farms.
20:45and then by 1910,
20:47ribbon development,
20:48houses everywhere,
20:49the people came there
20:50to work and live, you know.
20:54The Guardian represents
20:55the strength of miners,
20:57it represents the community,
20:59it also represents like a Guardian
21:01looking after his dead.
21:06But there's something,
21:07you know,
21:08big about him, innit?
21:10You know,
21:10it's a powerful,
21:12powerful looking guy.
21:19We often think of the rundown
21:21of the British coal industry
21:23as being associated
21:25with political events of the 1980s.
21:28But this was not only political.
21:31Also,
21:32there was new sources of fuel energy.
21:36Humans have benefited from crude oil
21:38for millennia.
21:39And today,
21:41oil is refined and distilled
21:43into innumerable products
21:45used in every facet of life.
21:53Our society essentially runs
21:55on petrochemical fuels.
21:57And it's been one of the big drivers
21:59of our societal technological gains.
22:03It's not free.
22:04We know the consequences
22:05to fossil fuel burning
22:07pose enormous hazards.
22:08But it has high energy density,
22:1144 kilojoules per gram.
22:13That's an enormous amount of energy.
22:17Coal helped lift us out of poverty
22:19with the Industrial Revolution.
22:21Oil lifted us even further
22:22and then gave us great freedoms
22:24because it gave us mobility.
22:26Oil is a better transportation fuel
22:28because it has such great energy density.
22:30It doesn't take much liquid
22:31to get a lot of energy
22:32and move a car a great distance.
22:34And it's easy to store.
22:35It doesn't freeze very easily.
22:37It doesn't boil away.
22:39Even though the old oil lamp
22:40is a thing of the past,
22:42oil still helps light up America.
22:45But drilling for and extracting oil and gas
22:47is inherently dangerous.
22:48There are just a lot of things
22:49that could go wrong on the site.
22:50It's big machines dealing with heavy rocks
22:53and high pressure,
22:54and the fuels themselves
22:55are flammable and explosive.
22:58as we used more oil,
22:59we needed to find more oil
23:00to get the energy out
23:02that we could use for our cars
23:03and for our factories.
23:05So we started to explore the world
23:06for oil and gas deposits offshore.
23:10These offshore locations
23:12have their own risks.
23:14It's just really hard conditions
23:16to work offshore,
23:17and more can go wrong.
23:19And because these are large deposits
23:21of oil and gas,
23:21the consequences are larger.
23:26120 miles northeast of Scotland,
23:29at 14,000 tons
23:31and two and a half times
23:32the height of the Statue of Liberty,
23:34it is one of the largest rigs in the world.
23:37In the Piper Alpha accident,
23:39over 150 people died.
23:42Piper Alpha,
23:43it's been studied enormously
23:45because it was sort of a series of steps
23:48in terms of maintenance,
23:49human action,
23:50in terms of specifications and guidelines
23:53that seem to have all failed.
23:57Fire on the Piper Alpha
23:59was started because of a fuel leak.
24:02The fuel mixed with air,
24:04created a flammable cloud,
24:06found an ignition source.
24:18The Piper Alpha
24:20exploded and sank on July 6, 1988,
24:24killing 167 workers on board.
24:27It took over three weeks
24:30for the fires to be extinguished.
24:3230 of the bodies were never recovered.
24:34A public investigation made 106 recommendations
24:39to help prevent future incidents.
24:49If you look at the merchant marine educational process
24:54or if you look at the Navy,
24:55the assumption is every sailor is a firefighter
24:59because if a fire occurs on a ship,
25:02you have very few opportunities to escape,
25:04for example,
25:05other than to fight the fire
25:06and to try to suppress it.
25:08Typically, we think about the thing
25:11that kills or hurts people and fires as the burn.
25:14It's actually smoke inhalation that kills people.
25:17And so after the accident itself,
25:20reconstruction and analysis determined
25:22that most of the people died
25:23because of smoke inhalation hazards also.
25:27It's not really clear that there are things
25:29to mitigate smoke inhalation hazards
25:31and the absence of respirators,
25:33but the pre-planning of what to do
25:35once that alarm went off was missing.
25:38With that escape plan
25:40and better pre-planning for that accident,
25:42more people would have lived.
25:45Safety culture develops in response to accidents
25:49that cause a lot of people to die.
25:50The deaths are horrific.
25:52They are emotional.
25:53They're expensive.
25:55In fact, today,
25:56if you go to an oil and gas company,
25:58they will start every meeting
25:59with a safety minute
26:00to remind you where the exits are
26:02and what you need to do to be safe
26:03if there's an emergency.
26:10The global thirst for crude oil
26:12has resulted in thousands of oil spills
26:15over the years
26:16and large-scale environmental disasters.
26:20In January of 1991, Iraqi forces attempted
26:24to prevent American soldiers
26:26from landing on Kuwaiti shores
26:28by intentionally causing an oil spill
26:30that spread across 4,000 square miles
26:33of the Persian Gulf.
26:35In Mexico, a state-owned petroleum company
26:38was drilling an oil well when a blowout occurred.
26:41In Russia, a poorly maintained pipeline
26:45caused a massive oil spill
26:46where millions of gallons flowed into streams,
26:50fragile bogs, and marshland.
26:53Deepwater Horizon oil spill began when an oil well
26:57in the Gulf of Mexico blew out,
26:59causing an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig,
27:02which killed 11 people.
27:05In some sense, what we can learn about previous accidents
27:08is how to minimize the negative consequences
27:11of technologies as they evolve.
27:14Fossil fuel as a technology in terms of safety
27:17has improved enormously.
27:19An example that we all see is a gas station.
27:22Gas stations should be incredibly dangerous.
27:24Gas stations are incredibly safe,
27:26and it's because of the layering of safety
27:29after any given accident.
27:31And it's like, oh, we didn't anticipate someone doing that.
27:35Eventually, these standards are developed.
27:38Then the issue becomes the human factor.
27:49If you look at the history of humankind's use of energy,
27:52we started with things like windmills,
27:55and then we graduated to fossil energy.
27:58Nuclear showed itself as a natural next step.
28:01to provide sustainable energy for humankind.
28:06Splitting this uranium nucleus generates the fission reaction
28:10on the order of 100 million times more energy
28:13per unit volume than fossil energy.
28:17One of the ways in which nuclear energy is different
28:19in its origins from other sources of energy
28:22is that the underlying technology is very much dual use.
28:35nuclear energy was born out of this violent era of World War II.
28:41So it always had a negative image.
28:44The first thing we would know about it would be the flash.
28:47And that means duck and cover fast wherever you are.
28:51There's no time...
28:521953, Dwight Eisenhower went to the United Nations General Assembly
28:55and made his famous Atoms for Peace speech
28:58in which he proposed that the United States
29:00would share its knowledge, its technology, and uranium.
29:04We believed that nuclear energy could be a force for good.
29:12When the atomic age began for civilian nuclear power,
29:18the approach that we had towards safety
29:21was mostly to focus on the design of power plants.
29:25What we have learned is, if you look at the spectrum of accidents,
29:29there is a clear human element.
29:33But a government official said that a breakdown
29:36in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today
29:38is probably the worst nuclear reactor accident to date.
29:43At about four o'clock in the morning,
29:45the reactor shut down due to problems in maintenance
29:49that was being performed.
29:51The reactor began to heat up, and a relief valve opened
29:55to relieve pressure that was building up.
29:57That valve stuck open.
30:01If the valve was closed, pressure should have been maintained,
30:04but it kept dropping.
30:06And they didn't understand why.
30:09And that led them to make mistaken decisions
30:12to turn off pumps that would have kept the core covered in water
30:16and kept it cool.
30:19The byproducts of nuclear fission ends up being naturally radioactive.
30:24This radioactivity shows up as heat.
30:26We always have to have some kind of a flowing water
30:30that continues to remove this heat.
30:33If you don't remove that heat from the reactor core,
30:37then you're in danger of actually melting the fuel,
30:40which can be potentially catastrophic.
30:42Two water pumps that help cool reactor number two shut down.
30:46Some 50,000 to 60,000 gallons of radioactive water...
30:50The public basically suffered no health exposures whatsoever,
30:54and it led to a real tightening up in terms of the safety regulations.
30:58Public support for nuclear power after Three Mile Island dropped dramatically.
31:03It was unsettling for the public to see the Nuclear Regulatory Commission seemed confused about what was going on.
31:11So it was a crisis of confidence.
31:15With Three Mile Island, the fact is that the human operators did make a number of mistakes,
31:22which eventually the engineered systems overcame.
31:27Chernobyl, very, very different.
31:36First of all, a reactor that never would have gotten licensed in any Western country.
31:42If you have a government entity regulating safety at the same time that it's government ownership,
31:48there's really no good adversarial relationship.
31:53That tension does lead to safety.
32:00At Chernobyl, the plant operators were carrying out a series of tests on the safety systems.
32:08The way in which that test was executed interacted with a flaw in the reactor design itself.
32:17It led to a buildup of pressure in the core, a steam explosion.
32:21The fuel itself in the core melted.
32:24There wasn't a containment structure around the Chernobyl reactor.
32:28It took a full 18 days before the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made any public pronouncement on the nuclear disaster
32:34at Chernobyl.
32:35Where things really went wrong is beyond the plant itself.
32:39The bureaucracy stretching all the way to Moscow, I suppose, made a series of bad decisions.
32:45They delayed evacuations.
32:47They didn't form the international community.
32:51That turned what would have been a very serious accident into something that was truly a disaster.
33:03The Chernobyl accident was at a reactor that is fundamentally different than the technology we use in the United States.
33:11Nevertheless, the NRC did an extensive review of our operations here.
33:16Ultimately, we determined that ongoing programs, especially because of Three Mile Island,
33:21largely captured most of the questions that were raised because of Chernobyl.
33:27A lot of work went into this human-machine interface,
33:31training operators to make the right decisions on their unforeseen scenarios.
33:35But as these 400 plants across the world accumulated experience,
33:40what turned out to be true is that actually the events that happened within the reactor
33:45are not the ones that you should worry the most.
33:53I was born and raised in Koreyama, Fukushima.
33:56I've experienced earthquakes when, like, from childhood.
34:00But it was an order of magnitude different experience.
34:05We lost the power just after the earthquake.
34:09In a nuclear power plant, the safety systems need the power to be on.
34:13But one of the first things that happens in a natural disaster is a power outage.
34:19Once the tsunami hit, backup diesel generator got flooded,
34:23and then we could not circulate the coolant.
34:29If you look at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima,
34:33they're really all so different.
34:34With Fukushima, the problem was not the operators.
34:38It was not the engineering of the nuclear power plants.
34:41They had a thousand-year tsunami,
34:45which just came sweeping over the plants.
34:50Because there was radioactivity being released to the environment,
34:54the government decided that it was prudent to evacuate.
34:58And a historic earthquake and tsunami has taken place during that rushed evacuation.
35:04Many people lost their lives.
35:10Nuclear accidents anywhere tend to have an everywhere kind of flavor.
35:16I was Secretary of Energy, and I did visit there in late 2013,
35:21helping with the environmental cleanup, the groundwater cleanup,
35:25but also understanding the accident,
35:28looking at some of the remedial steps that could be taken.
35:31And that leads to another set of innovations going on today.
35:36Technologies which are essentially immune to those kinds of accidents.
35:46There is a bit of a silver lining.
35:49Each disaster altered the trajectory of the industry.
35:54Hopefully, every successive accident will be much less serious than the previous ones.
36:00In the U.S., there's two reactors being built in the state of Georgia.
36:05Those reactors already have built in those passive safety systems
36:09that doesn't require any electricity for the heat removal.
36:13And so those plants actually would sail through a Fukushima-type disaster with no issue.
36:22Very few people have actually died from nuclear energy, so it's one of the safest options we have.
36:27But it's scary for people.
36:28I don't always know how to respond to the question of, is it too dangerous?
36:33Yes. When new countries decide that they want to build and operate nuclear reactors for the first time,
36:39they are potentially developing the capability to make a nuclear weapon.
36:44And so this is why nuclear energy is very tightly regulated, not just from a safety standpoint,
36:50but also from a non-proliferation standpoint.
36:54But there is also a significant potential for good.
36:59Nuclear is so promising because it has supreme energy density,
37:03and it doesn't generate air pollution, and it doesn't emit greenhouse gases.
37:08When people think of nuclear power, they think of these hyperbolic towers that have these plumes of what looks like
37:12smoke.
37:13But actually, that's not smoke. That's just water vapor.
37:16The pollution from burning fossil fuels is itself an energy disaster that kills millions of people a year.
37:24In China, there is a tremendous amount of air pollution and water pollution that is directly associated with fossil fuels.
37:31Reports suggest that breathing the air in Beijing on an average day is equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes.
37:38The rates of cancer have gone through the roof over the last 20 or 30 years.
37:42It's a disaster from a public health perspective.
37:45That air pollution globally is a killer.
37:47Seven million people a year die prematurely from air pollution.
37:50But in the end, it's better to have energy or else everyday life becomes a disaster.
37:56We think of disasters as an incident, an explosion, a fire, a mine collapse,
38:00but there's also the disaster of climate change where it unfolds over centuries.
38:05Nuclear is so promising because it has supreme energy density.
38:0920,000 times more energy from a kilogram of nuclear fuel compared to a kilogram of coal.
38:15Much more energy than you get from oil or gas.
38:17It's just so much energy and so little material.
38:19But also, when you react it and you use the fuel, it doesn't generate greenhouse gases.
38:24It doesn't generate acid-forming gases.
38:26So if you have nuclear power, you're not getting acid rain, you're not getting climate change.
38:32There is no completely risk-free source of energy.
38:38Hydroelectric power is central as a renewable source of energy and is cleaner than fossil fuels.
38:45In most cases, hydroelectric power is safe.
38:49But while hydropower brings us massive benefits, it's not without its risks.
39:01Hydropower is the renewable energy source with the highest accidental deaths.
39:06Largely because of a single catastrophic event.
39:12In the late 1800s, there was the rise of a bunch of electric appliances, things like light bulbs and motors
39:18that were really good for life.
39:20And that required the need to generate electricity.
39:23As a country, if you have mountains and a lot of falling water, like the Fox River in Wisconsin or
39:29Niagara Falls, you can dam it up and harness that power to generate electricity we could use for these electric
39:34appliances.
39:35And that led eventually to a dam building frenzy.
39:41In the United States, a lot of the dams were built by the Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps
39:45of Engineers.
39:46Two big federal government agencies.
39:47And they could say, we're going to build a dam, we're going to do it here.
39:50And they didn't really care who they were going to flood or have to push out of the way to
39:52get it done.
39:55The dam building frenzy followed in China.
39:59Through the ages, waters from the mountains have been fed to the fields of the valley.
40:04For here, irrigation is one of the ancient arts.
40:08For centuries, the muscles of men have raised the water as needed for crops that have never failed.
40:16Immediately upon coming to power in 1949, Mao Zedong looks around and sees a Chinese nation that is dominated by
40:23household farms with people producing just enough to feed their families.
40:26And he says, this is no way to build a modern superpower.
40:31So at first, he says, well, this is a hundred year process where we're going to catch up to countries
40:35like Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States.
40:38But starting in the 1950s, Mao says, actually, we should do this within 15 years.
40:42Within China, Mao Zedong draws up a ruthless program to change an agrarian nation into an industrial power.
40:50It will move whole villages and set up communes.
40:53This eventually becomes the Great Leap Forward, which officially starts in 1958.
41:00China wanted to build dams for a whole host of reasons.
41:03This map gives some clues to China's great problem of being able to feed its 500 million people.
41:10Much of China is mountain, desert, infertile soil.
41:15The Great River valleys are often subject to disastrous floods.
41:19And the population is growing at the rate of several millions a year.
41:24Mao sets down these targeted plans about output, and it's all quantitative.
41:28It's how much earth are you moving? How much cement are you producing?
41:33And that's how you ultimately get fed.
41:35You know, you get your food ration by producing your quota of output.
41:38And so it causes all this kind of cheating among a population that also has no prior experience building something
41:44as massive as a dam.
41:45Between 1950 and 1979, approximately 87,000 dams were built in China.
41:55The Bangchao Dam is a microcosm of the problems of a central planning project like the Great Leap Forward.
42:08The Bangchao Dam is one of a number of dams that's built in the 1950s, but the scale was just
42:14unprecedented in China's history at that point.
42:16It's a massive undertaking. It requires thousands of workers, in many cases, digging literally with shovels and their own muscle
42:22power to try to build this humongous dam.
42:25The Soviets provide technical expertise, but there's a number of flaws.
42:28There was an engineer named Chen Xing, and he was one of China's leading experts on how to harness hydropower,
42:36how to build dams.
42:37Chen Xing said, we need to have more sluice gates, the kind of overflow gates that allow water to pour
42:42through so that if there is some massive weather event, tremendous rainfall, that the dam isn't overwhelmed.
42:49He wanted 12 of these sluice gates. They ultimately ended up only building five of them.
42:55He tried to warn people, and he was silenced and taken off the project.
43:00Where there's a culture of silencing, of criticism, an inability of people to say, hey, wait a minute, this is
43:07not being done with the proper safety precautions, it just sets itself up for a massive disaster.
43:17In 1975, there was a typhoon that only comes around once in a millennium.
43:21Some people say that the raindrops were so large that it was killing birds that were trying to fly through
43:27it.
43:27It was just a tremendous amount of rain concentrated in a small amount of time.
43:31And it completely overwhelms the dam, the dam breaks.
43:37Being in the path of that water would have probably felt like the end of the world.
43:42A wave, the height of a tall building coming at you at the speed of a car.
43:47And there were a number of villages, small cities that ultimately get washed away.
43:54The Bingchow Dam disaster is the single worst energy incident in the history of humanity.
44:00In addition to the hundreds of thousands of people who perish, more than 10 million people were displaced by that
44:05dam collapse.
44:06But it was a secret for a couple decades.
44:09It happened in the mid-70s, and the world didn't know until the 90s.
44:13That's how close the information was coming out of China.
44:22Hydropower has long been harnessed to produce electricity.
44:30It has evolved into a fixture in energy production, currently supplying one-sixth of the world's electricity.
44:45We often take it for granted that energy will be available to us.
44:50But power plants, power lines, gas lines, even whole power grids can fail.
44:58Disruptions to our energy systems, whether by sabotage, negligence, or natural disaster, can be deadly.
45:08It was probably 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning when we were woken up by the gust of
45:14almost 200 miles per hour winds.
45:16Knocking out power everywhere. All of the electricity is out tonight.
45:20After the hurricane, the biggest toll was not directly the result of the winds or of the storm.
45:29It was people who did not have access to the bare necessities.
45:35Blackout leaves a lot of people without water, because the water treatment plants needed power.
45:41After a few days, you know, everything spoils in your fridge, or you eat everything that you have,
45:48and then you need to go out and get food.
45:52Communications collapsed completely.
45:54Banks were closed for more than a week.
45:56If you had no catch, you could not do any transaction.
46:03The blackouts started to be hours, days, into weeks.
46:09Weeks turned into months.
46:154,645 people died.
46:19The mortality rate in the four months after Hurricane Maria raised by 62%.
46:27And ever since, what we've experienced is constant blackouts.
46:35In Texas, it's a full-on humanitarian crisis.
46:39People are just fighting to stay alive after a weather disaster has knocked out power to millions of people.
46:44In February of 2021, much of North America was hit with a very severe cold snap.
46:50And what was unique about that storm was that it lasted for over a week of continuous freezing or sub
46:58-freezing temperatures across the entire state.
47:01Power plants in Texas started to falter.
47:05Those that own and operate power plants in Texas are prepared for extreme heat.
47:09They're less prepared for sub-freezing temperatures.
47:12There's a popular narrative that this was the result of the failure of wind and solar farms.
47:16That is not true.
47:17You saw coal piles freeze.
47:19You saw coal plants trip off because they couldn't get the necessary water intake.
47:23You saw gas plants fail because wellheads froze off.
47:27There was a nuclear plant that tripped offline.
47:29There were fluctuations in the availability of wind and solar.
47:32And so all of a sudden, faced with the reality that there was so much generating capacity offline,
47:38the Texas grid operator had to call for utilities to cut power to customers to keep supply in line with
47:44demand.
47:46Our water system relies on electricity to pump water to our homes.
47:51And so if the power grid goes out, soon thereafter we lose access to potable water.
47:55And you can imagine how challenging it is to try to boil water if you don't have power.
48:04People died from the cold.
48:06They died from needing medical treatment and not being able to get to the hospital because of the icy roads.
48:11They died because the power went out and they couldn't operate the medical equipment they needed.
48:16Officially, about 250 people died.
48:18Unofficially, more than 700 people died from this disaster.
48:24A power outage quickly reveals how our lives are built around energy access.
48:31But people can live their entire lives in congested cities or remote areas,
48:37plugged into a grid without ever seeing the source of the energy they consume.
48:42Behind everyone's electric outlets lies a vast, complex infrastructure that requires constant maintenance.
48:53mismanagement can have disastrous consequences.
49:01California is a state that has been prone to wildfire for as long as the land has been there.
49:06That has become more true as the climate has changed.
49:09And we've seen longer droughts, more intense heat waves.
49:13And that has made it so that the risk of a very deadly and destructive fire has become heightened.
49:18And all of the state's utilities have had power lines that have ignited large-scale fires over the last 10
49:24years.
49:25But some of the most deadly and destructive have been started when PG&E's power lines have failed.
49:32PG&E has had a number of challenges over the last two decades.
49:38There was an energy crisis in California in the early 2000s that ultimately pushed it to seek bankruptcy protection.
49:44The few years in which it's emerged from bankruptcy, they were focused on delivering returns to shareholders.
49:50The company was also focused on procuring wind and solar contracts, basically at the behest of the state.
49:58Wind and solar power were much more expensive than they are today, so the company faced additional pressure to keep
50:05expenses low.
50:07The company is still tasked with maintaining the infrastructure.
50:11It's a sprawling service territory. It covers 70,000 square miles.
50:16Part of it involves managing trees that have the potential to touch live wires, looking at the strength of the
50:23structures, the integrity of the hardware.
50:26In November of 2018, Hook, on a transmission tower that was 100 years old, broke and dropped a live wire
50:33that showered the ground with sparks.
50:43The component that broke had never been replaced. The company had known of the risks and yet done very little
50:49to mitigate them.
50:53Destroyed the town of Paradise and several nearby towns in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento, 84 people died.
51:03If you look at the three disasters in California, Texas with the freeze, and Puerto Rico with the hurricane, they
51:10seem so different.
51:11But they're all part of a broader trend of intensifying weather extremes.
51:17After Rick and Maria, around 200,000 people left. Some came back. Many didn't.
51:24I don't think that's something that can be measured in any other way than how important is the access to
51:33a reliable energy supply.
51:35Do we need to build back what we had before, or do we need to look into the future?
51:42Reliability issues are very challenging, and they actually really don't lend themselves to a clear-cut political narrative.
51:50Wind and solar power are inherently intermittent. They don't produce power all the time.
51:55You know, fossil-fueled-fired assets, they, too, have reliability challenges.
52:00And so, as we change the types of energy that we rely on, comes a whole new set of questions
52:05that we need to explore.
52:09We've had a number of energy transitions.
52:14The dominant fuel source changed rapidly from wood to coal.
52:20However, wood has never gone away.
52:22When oil came in, it didn't eliminate coal.
52:27The energy transition we're talking about today is different.
52:32I would argue that it's not some one-size-fits-all lens, but just the opposite.
52:37Addressing the energy transition calls for different regional approaches.
52:51Nature has been practicing engineering for a much, much longer time than we have.
52:57It has perfected so many aspects of that engineering.
53:01We are living proof of that in so many ways.
53:05I think we should look at what nature does and try to mimic it.
53:13In Iceland, I think we've come quite a ways in terms of just recognizing the potentials of all of these
53:18resources that we have around us and actually having that transform our way of life completely.
53:25If you think of the Lockheed Volcano in 1783 and how dangerous that would be without energy to deal with
53:30it, we don't want to go back to that world.
53:32The Icelandic people have taken this very dangerous, powerful force, volcanic eruptions, and harnessed it in a way to get
53:38the energy they need.
53:41Here we have the Headless Heithi geothermal power plant, and it's actually one of the largest geothermal power plants in
53:48the world.
53:49It produces 303 megawatts of electricity, but also about 1000 liters per second of hot water that is piped to
53:57Reykjavík for the district heating system.
54:02Even though geothermal is considered green energy, it still emits some CO2.
54:07We are developing a method to capture and prevent it from going back to the atmosphere by turning it into
54:14stone.
54:16Iceland is the perfect spot to develop this method because it is mostly made up of basal, so it's 90
54:24% of the rocks that we need to turn CO2 into stone.
54:28It's kind of like a sponge, so it's very convenient and it can store a lot of CO2.
54:35There is not a solution to the climate change, but hopefully this is one of the solutions that we need.
54:48All around the world, we all have a common desire for safety and comfort, peace and prosperity.
54:55The rise of availability of modern energy helped reduce suffering and really gave us great civilized quality of life.
55:04These energy disasters are scary.
55:07From each disaster, there's a lesson to learn.
55:11And it's important that while we pursue having more energy available for more people, that we're honest with ourselves and
55:17each other about its risks.
55:21As the need for energy grows, so does the risk of disasters.
55:27For the first time in human history, the world must come together to face collective energy challenges.
55:34On the table are decisions about how to invest trillions of dollars to manage a massive transition in a way
55:43that ensures access to clean, affordable, reliable, and above all, safe energy.
55:50The decisions being made in this decade will have far-reaching consequences for billions of people over centuries to come.
56:02When inspiring busy owners.
56:02We are K稜'm so human for every year and thus, in time.
56:17This has been the master's opportunity to achieve that unroyable mercen яв desiree.
56:17Of course, you're the master's opportunity of learning to help you.
56:20Thank you, I'm so figura.
56:23I compte you're even told about our next chapter,
56:23there's a national gathering it'sicarisk knowable with our onesucrani.