These are mostly challenges of outdated nuclear technology. The newer technology has solved a lot of these problem. The latest designs of nuclear power plants can actually use the nuclear waste from the older nuclear plants.
Lighto The reason there has been reduced nuclear power usage is because the irrational fear of all things nuclear. I think they kind of associate the danger of nuclear bombs with nuclear power. Since most people don't like nuclear anything, there is pressure to shut down all current nuclear plants and switch to alternate power sources which caused the decrease from 18% to 11%. Also most governments are using old nuclear powerplant technology which aren't as safe or as efficient. Most operational nuclear power plants were created 20+ years ago with old technology. the technology they used was severely outdated before they even started. Look up thorium reacters. From what I've read they seem to be the future. Also there are working designs that actually use nuclear waste for fuel.
You can look up for Thorium reactors and they are not fully developed. And the reason governments are not interested in this safe and clean nuclear power is because it doesn't produce weapon-grade plutonium. At the end, everything is reduced on the war economics system we love to have.
The reason is Big Oil buys all the politicians, all the media, NGOs like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, lobbyists, institutions so of course nuclear is in decline. Corruption, crony capitalism that is how our government works. Man people are just so naive.
@@thesauce1682 Even some solar plants essentially use mirrors to magnify the sun into a single spot, that spot has a giant rock of sodium that heats up, then is used to boil water etc...
Humanity’s rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
@@jaytotheh the effects of fukukishma are minuscule compared to the effects of similar disasters of fossil fuels that have killed far more and destroyed much more of the world
They completely ignored the fact that the "waste" Plutonium-239 produced from the transmutation of Uranium-238 in the nuclear fuel rods can be filtered out and used in fast breeder reactors as an energy source. There are several of these in the world currently. In addition fast breeder reactors don't need moderators to slow down neutrons and the fuel is self-sustaining in a sense because the neutrons released from the fission of Pu-239 can be used to transmute U-238 into Pu-239 again.
Yeah except it was a bad one. There were no survivors from Vault 11. They were all executed except for 5 who all killed themselves. Edit: Nevermind, one of the 5 refused to kill himself
*_It's amazing how people are against nuclear power for feeling "unsafe" but are fully for having 200+ nuclear submarines carrying 16 icbm's each to make them feel "safe"_* It's a wonderful & educated world we're living in, truly
Yes there are challenges, but there are also solutions to the challenges suggested here. For example @3:14 they describe the fission rate of being too low. What is occurring is that U-235 has too small of a neutron cross section for uranium 238 to split the parts. However there is a solution to this problem. Instead of using U-238 which has 5% probability of fission production, you can use Th-234 (thorium) to transmute U-233 which has an 80% probability of fission production due to a significantly larger cross section. This is why thorium reactors do not require as much fuel, and why they don't produce as much waste as the common reactors of today.
+Gusstavv's Stuff Nuclear power has never really had a problem with production. By far nuclear requires the least amount of fuel of an energy sector. Even the issues of uranium supply can be solved by engineering cost competitive harvesters to pull uranium deposits from the ocean. The major issues of nuclear have always been public reception of safety and economics of design. I believe if you factor in all the potential reductions in cost combined with reductions in come regulations you can make thorium reactors cheaper than LWRs and more competitive with natural gas.
It skips a lot of important explanations though. Like how modern plants have many more safeguards to prevent a containment breach (the disaster in Japan a few years back was because it wasn't built to code to withstand earthquakes which cracked containment and then a Tsunami washed the material out to sea). Or the fact that material with long enough halflives are harmless and emit less radiation per second than what's naturally present around us everyday.
I agree, while I think this video did a great job explaining the technology I completely disagree with the conclusion. Nuclear technology might not be perfect but how many technologies are? We need to manage the risks, not blow them out of proportion.
As a future nuclear engineer, I give this mostly a B+ on facts, which is actually a cut above the rest of internet videos on nuclear power :D Couple of minor physics details were off (it isn't that water doesn't slow down neutrons enough, it is that it absorbs to many that we need enrichment!) One of the things missing, and this is hard to do with a primer like this, are other reactor types. See the one mention in the video is one of dozens or ways to do nuclear. It happens to be one of the most popular designs, but not the only design and many competing designs can resist meltdown dangers, recycle spent fuel, ect ect. Basically, most of the downsides could be engineered away if we had the desire to. I know that is what I am in school for!
They have had a hard time making it work. Though, they have teamed up with southern company and ORNL to develop a molten chloride fast reactor using some of the wave reactor design I believe. I dunno, been awhile since I looked at Gate's team since they starting working more closed
I know this is an old comment, but would you mind explaining how we could deal with the waste that is produced by nuclear power? From my (severely) limited knowledge of nuclear power, it seems to me like we have no safe way of dealing with nuclear waste, since some of it can take thousands of years to stabilize.
saying this is biased, is an understatement. it leaves a lot of very important qualifiers and caviates on modern countermeasures and engineering which prevent such issues. new reactor deaigns deal with most of these problems. in addition, making a bomb from light water spent fuel is incredibly difficult and messy (meaning easily detrctable). i hate it when these ted eds speak with an agenda, instead of presenting facts
In a way they try to be fair. Clean Nuclear power like clean coal can be achieved through breakthroughs in modern tech, new design and reprocessing but politics and bad past experience make it hard to sell.
wow, im glad you backed that up with a lot of facts. light water power reactors use a long fuel burn, for increased efficiency, which builds pu240 and other non undesirable components into the spent fuel. these products cause the fuel to be almost impossible to create weapons grade material from. in addition, the process required for reprocessing and enriching the spent fuel would leave a large industrial and radioactive foot print. furthermore, seperating pu239 from pu240 and pu238 is unbelievably difficult and has never even been attempted. i work in the field and tire of fear mongering, when it comes to modern nuclear technologies. modern reactors absolutly address the meltdown concerns by making the cooling systems passively safe. that means they can be cooled no active components, such as electic pumps ans diesel generators.
Key word there; "deal with most of these problems". Sure, they may be safer but are they still really better? You still have nuclear waste that is a huge problem, as it will keep accumulating and the chance of it polluting the environment increases as well. (If you think we should just launch it into space, it would be even more expensive, watch Kurgestats video on it) And even if you have a very safe reactor, accidents do, and have happened.
I like how all this video talks about is the doomsday scenarios associated with nuclear power instead of the potentially millions of lives that could be saved each year by switching to it instead of coal.
@@biswajitpramanik3426 That's a terrible approach. That's like saying "Until we have a drug to treat the disease a hundred percent, don't treat it". Fossil fuels are killing people and already destroying the environment. It's not a risk of harm they're doing, they're actively doing harm. Nuclear has a risk. But even with that, it's still objectively better.
@@biswajitpramanik3426 Per unit of energy produced, coal power causes over 300 times as many deaths as nuclear power (and some estimates even say over 1000 times as many deaths). Oil-fueled power is similarly deadly to coal. Natural gas is safer, but still 30 times as deadly as nuclear. And those three are by far the most commonly used fuel sources by humans. By your logic, we should immediately shut down all power plants and engines that run on coal, oil, and natural gas, because they aren't foolproof! In fact, the deaths per unit of energy produced caused by solar, wind, and hydro power are pretty much the same as for nuclear power. Shut all of those down too! Not foolproof, after all!
@@TheLordoftheRavens nuclear disaster can make a large part of the world inhabitable, long term nuclear power is the way 2 to along with solar and other renewable energies, but technology must be robust enough to save us from the disasters first. Coal , oil, natural gas they are good for short term, but in long term they will kill us
It is sad to see it go down as this kind of power generation has the most potential using cutting edge science. I've read some developments in using the plutonium as fuel, where the nuclear plant doesn't consume fuel but creates them. I never heard of it again these days. I do hope research is still being done and wish it to see working alongside with renewable energies such as solar and wind in the future.
I learnt this in geography class two months ago, I better know everything the video is about to (re)teach me! *_Edit:_* After watching the video I concluded that I only knew about ~15% of the information given in the video.
@@I_am_Signal In the short run, yes, but in the long run, hopefully, we'll be able to innovate better energy storage and other technology that will permit the full employment of renewables.
they do make it seem like these problems are still based in science rather then the reality that the problems are based in economics and the mindset of those in charge of nuclear plants.
The video is already long for a TED-ed. Apart from the difficulty intrinsic to animating something at least twice as long, how many of us would have honestly clicked on a twenty minute video?
I said "mentioning", not "explaining". It would have been enough to let people research more on their own if interested. If would have been a few more seconds, maybe 1 minute more and that's it. And if we look at the almost 7M subs from TED Talks, with vids that are almost 50 minutes long .... quite a lot of us would watch a 20 minutes video.
I didn't complain, just pointed out a trouble that would have added merely a few seconds to a minute. If you're not OK with it and consider it worthy of a noted disagreement, press the down thumb and move along.
This video was quite limited in what it actually discussed given the title. It also does NOT touch on any current reactor generations or improvements. Who funded this? An oil and gas company/lobby?
@@cesaradrianherrera1382 Fallout is a game about nuclear war. The man in blue and yellow at the end is a reference to the suits worn by some of the characters in the game
The rejection of nuclear as "dangerous" and "dystopian" reveals a chronic myopia of our global society. Even if nuclear energy has the potential to bring about world-ending consequences, the chance of it happening is a far better prospect than the certainty that it will happen with our reliance on oil and coal. Of course, our best course of action is to use renewables for anything and everything beyond a sustainable use of non-renewables, but that simply can't happen in the short term without some adjustment period.
I'm surprised it didn't mention LFTR (Liquid Fluride Thorium Reactor) technology as a safer modern alternative. I still believe Nuclear is the best solution, we have currently, to the energy crisis.
6:20 Finland is currently building a 500-meter deep storage facility that is supposed to be operational in 2020. Sweden is also developing a similar storage.
I expected better from TedEd. Nuclear power is efficient and a lot of the issues presented here didn't elaborate solutions well. Nuclear power is probably our best option to fight climate change, even though it is a slow process. It will help in the long run.
thing about plutonium bombs is that A: they're extremely expensive just to construct, and B: they require micro-meter precision in their construction or the reaction fizzles
Thanks for the lesson, so if we could have a breakthrough way of expediting the decay of plutonium greatly then the waste of Nuclear Power would be safer?
What i never understood, even when doing physics, is where that percentage of mass that becomes energy comes from, is it entire subatomic particles randomly selected to become energy, or is it a portion of each atom/subatomic particle that does so?
Honestly, I wish we have more budget to make Nuclear power safer and more acceptable. It just seems like the proper way to progress to the future rather than continue with our current one which is slowly ruining us and being spent completely.
Could the writers please provide authoritative information regarding the feasibility of using the plutonium specifically present in used conventional commercial light water reactor fuel assemblies? Especially in the context of relative difficulty compared to actual military material production?
This video highly distorts what the problems with nuclear power really are. The engineering "problems" were worked out in the 50's, as were the "problems" of waste, storage, etc. Nuclear's real problem is a political one, stemming from the fact that most people don't know anything about it except for what they read or see in poorly made videos and blogs online, which have a tendency to greatly distort the truth and make people irrationally fear the only sustainable zero-carbon power source ever invented...
What the fuck. This was such a biased piece and I am disappointed in it. They didnt talk about how we are designing nuclear reactors to run off that waste. They didn't talk about how nuclear power plants 'leak' less radiation than coal power plants. How nuclear power plants are safer for humans and the environment than coal power plants (this includes the major disasters). How about how we would still need to process those radioactive materials because many industries rely on the byproducts of the refinement process to get things like Yellow Cake and Depleted Uranium. We have learned a lot sense Chernobyl and the industry has banded together to make nuclear power MUCH safer because our entire industry is at risk. Fukushima may also be brought up but let me remind you that they recovered much of the land around the Fukushima power plant (and moving closer each year) and the radioactive levels of the ocean is almost down to its natural levels. Nuclear isnt perfect, nothing is, but the world is far away from being able to function without power plants that have a stable source of power. Nuclear is the safest type of plant for that job. Dont take my word as the gospel, go and look at the facts for yourself. Just remember that nuclear is not the terror that the media frames makes it out be. I am sad that TED-Ed has sunk down to this level also.
It's better to have waste contained, which happens with nuclear, than to release it into the air and killing thousands and thousands of people - and the planet - in the process. I'm looking at you, coal.
They also didn't talk about the fact that long half lives are safer. What most people don't understand is that radiation isn't just instant death it's about how much you're exposed to and material with a longer half life emits LESS radiation per second. so material with a half life of 20,000 years is generally pretty safe as long as you don't just litterally eat it and even then it might not do too much. This was a borderline fake science video that covered the real science of nuclear reactors only just far enough to reach the fear mongering and then stopped.
A lot of careful engineering goes into designing a nuclear power plant. fuel rod has many levels of barriers (like clad, inner and outer containment). For LOCA ( loss of coolant accident) which is pretty improbable to happen, they have ECCS ( emergency core cooling system). Every plant has rigorous analysis and safety reviews before commissioning ( like fault and event tree analysis of the whole system). Also regulatory bodies keep a close watch on whether the safety protocols are properly followed or not. Also problems of spent fuel are being addressed by vitrification, storage bay and also accelerator driven subsystem ( which can burn the long lived fission product to turn them into short lived daughter products). So, many apprehensions conveyed by the video are not very substantial and if we look for a better and greener future, nuclear energy is one of the best possible options that we have.
our problem is the efficiency of most power generators. With coal, we exchange chemical energy for thermal(heat), heat to elastic in the form of pressure, pressure to mechanical and from mechanical finally to electricity. from all this we only got 30 to under 50% of the energy released.
just wanted to ask. does nuclear power plant make electricity cheaper for the common households ? i live in the philippines and they are planning on installing a nuclear power plant. how will this affect our monthly bills ?
Humans need to start thinking in a more recycling and reusing system. Nuclear Power waste products could be recycled into nuclear medicine, if only we have the technology and resources. By applying this type of thinking we will lower a lot of the obstacles associated with nuclear energy, and see its true potential.
Even though alternative power supplies like solar, wind etc will surely play a massive role in the future, we should not underestimate the fact that every country or power grid system needs a source of stable 24/7, constant supply of energy to build it's baseline. This could be done either with nuclear or fossil so far. Even the newest methods are fossil related so nuclear pretty much has no reasonable competition besides when speaking about price.
Nuclear power is high-risk and high-reward. To those who herald it as the solution to climate change and the use of fossil fuels, I believe it'd be better if we balance out the usage of nuclear power vs renewable non-nuclear power. That should hopefully give us enough time to fix the problems associated with fossil fuels and find ways to manage long-term nuclear waste. Afterwards, we could easily rely on nuclear power and sources such as solar and wind power for our needs (maybe even fusion power if it ever becomes a reality!) Here's one long-term nuclear storage solution that's being tried out by Finland: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Nuclear power is no where near high risk. The chance of a meltdown is currently required to be 1 in 10 million, which is considered statistically improbable. Even if a nuclear reactor melted down, they are currently built to withstand a melt down and are extremely safe.
It is a great disservice that the tiny quantity of high level waste is not mentioned. All high level waste generated in the past 60 yrs in the USA can be stored in a single football field
I think that if we choose to use nuclear products to harness energy then we are also responsible for it's proper disposal. The high cost of space flights permit us from just ejecting the waste into space but with time the costs of a space flight might become low enough that space disposable of nuclear waste just might become feasible enough that we can do it. But this seems the only logically sound option for the proper disposal of nuclear waste.
These are mostly challenges of outdated nuclear technology. The newer technology has solved a lot of these problem. The latest designs of nuclear power plants can actually use the nuclear waste from the older nuclear plants.
ًThen why did the use of nuclear power plants to generate electricity has decreased from 18% to 11% in the last 20 years
There are things called public opinion, and money. I hope that answers your question.
Lighto The reason there has been reduced nuclear power usage is because the irrational fear of all things nuclear. I think they kind of associate the danger of nuclear bombs with nuclear power.
Since most people don't like nuclear anything, there is pressure to shut down all current nuclear plants and switch to alternate power sources which caused the decrease from 18% to 11%. Also most governments are using old nuclear powerplant technology which aren't as safe or as efficient. Most operational nuclear power plants were created 20+ years ago with old technology. the technology they used was severely outdated before they even started.
Look up thorium reacters. From what I've read they seem to be the future. Also there are working designs that actually use nuclear waste for fuel.
You can look up for Thorium reactors and they are not fully developed. And the reason governments are not interested in this safe and clean nuclear power is because it doesn't produce weapon-grade plutonium.
At the end, everything is reduced on the war economics system we love to have.
The reason is Big Oil buys all the politicians, all the media, NGOs like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, lobbyists, institutions so of course nuclear is in decline. Corruption, crony capitalism that is how our government works. Man people are just so naive.
I like how this is still basically a giant, super-high-tech steam engine.
same
Lol yes
The majority of powerplant use steam.
@@thesauce1682 Even some solar plants essentially use mirrors to magnify the sun into a single spot, that spot has a giant rock of sodium that heats up, then is used to boil water etc...
@@imarocklobster Don't solar panels absorb the suns rays and the suns rays knock the electrons out of the silicon?
I love the protester's sign that says "could you not?"
Humanity’s rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
I mean, I’m all in on nuclear power, but we may never fully know the effects of Fukushima.
@@jaytotheh effects of what?
@@jamesabestos2800 The environmental impacts.
@@jaytotheh the effects of fukukishma are minuscule compared to the effects of similar disasters of fossil fuels that have killed far more and destroyed much more of the world
Capitalism
They completely ignored the fact that the "waste" Plutonium-239 produced from the transmutation of Uranium-238 in the nuclear fuel rods can be filtered out and used in fast breeder reactors as an energy source. There are several of these in the world currently. In addition fast breeder reactors don't need moderators to slow down neutrons and the fuel is self-sustaining in a sense because the neutrons released from the fission of Pu-239 can be used to transmute U-238 into Pu-239 again.
Ayyyyyyy...... Fallout reference
Vault 11... The one where people sacrificed one survivor every year, until only 5 were left
And Watchmen
Sahil Maheshwari where was it?
and simpson
Yeah except it was a bad one. There were no survivors from Vault 11. They were all executed except for 5 who all killed themselves.
Edit: Nevermind, one of the 5 refused to kill himself
*_It's amazing how people are against nuclear power for feeling "unsafe" but are fully for having 200+ nuclear submarines carrying 16 icbm's each to make them feel "safe"_*
It's a wonderful & educated world we're living in, truly
My stance in nuclear energy is this:
I believe in Nuclear Energy but I don't believe in people
Juan
Fair
nuclear plants literally kill less people than coal😭😭
Just build thorium salt reactor. Can't be used as weapons, safer and thorium is cheaper... Just again the construction costs.
>can't be used as a weapon
so it's ultimately useless for the powers that be?
Did you see the thorium thing from Sam o nella?
@@xherof4470 yea i did
Plutouim is needed for the reaction
@Genius With enough energy, you can synthetically turn any element into another, the question there is how much energy is needed.
Yes there are challenges, but there are also solutions to the challenges suggested here. For example @3:14 they describe the fission rate of being too low. What is occurring is that U-235 has too small of a neutron cross section for uranium 238 to split the parts. However there is a solution to this problem. Instead of using U-238 which has 5% probability of fission production, you can use Th-234 (thorium) to transmute U-233 which has an 80% probability of fission production due to a significantly larger cross section. This is why thorium reactors do not require as much fuel, and why they don't produce as much waste as the common reactors of today.
Thorium reactors solve (almost?) every problem of actual nuclear power production. But they are too expensive to be implemented... or even mentioned.
+Gusstavv's Stuff Nuclear power has never really had a problem with production. By far nuclear requires the least amount of fuel of an energy sector. Even the issues of uranium supply can be solved by engineering cost competitive harvesters to pull uranium deposits from the ocean. The major issues of nuclear have always been public reception of safety and economics of design. I believe if you factor in all the potential reductions in cost combined with reductions in come regulations you can make thorium reactors cheaper than LWRs and more competitive with natural gas.
Nuclear power in long term say 30 years can give highest profits
This is most insane explanation of such a complicated topic.
I wish I had seen this in my high school..
Thank you TED-Ed.
It skips a lot of important explanations though.
Like how modern plants have many more safeguards to prevent a containment breach (the disaster in Japan a few years back was because it wasn't built to code to withstand earthquakes which cracked containment and then a Tsunami washed the material out to sea).
Or the fact that material with long enough halflives are harmless and emit less radiation per second than what's naturally present around us everyday.
Homer Simpson will be the end of us.
Anastacia Perez Flanders will kill him and save us.
kornetbeef nroe
kornetbeef buba
I'm watching this on my phone while the Simpsons are one my TV.
Anastacia Perez how dare you insult my science teacher Mr J. Simpson
we want to end climate change but won't use the most efficient way to end it?
I agree, while I think this video did a great job explaining the technology I completely disagree with the conclusion. Nuclear technology might not be perfect but how many technologies are? We need to manage the risks, not blow them out of proportion.
"why risk wasting money?" is the defese given...
and as much as I would argue against it, it would cost a fortune...
good luck counting the money you saved while holding your breath.
because oil company lobyyists wont give up because oil companies run out of business
Oil companies want oil prices as high as possible...
watching a video about nuclear power, got an ad about war
ttue story lol
Adblock Plus.... - no ads
Good Moriarty
An add about which war? In which country do you live that advertises wars? :P
Is It the legend 27?
In Sweden they started to show ads about joining the army
As a future nuclear engineer, I give this mostly a B+ on facts, which is actually a cut above the rest of internet videos on nuclear power :D
Couple of minor physics details were off (it isn't that water doesn't slow down neutrons enough, it is that it absorbs to many that we need enrichment!) One of the things missing, and this is hard to do with a primer like this, are other reactor types. See the one mention in the video is one of dozens or ways to do nuclear. It happens to be one of the most popular designs, but not the only design and many competing designs can resist meltdown dangers, recycle spent fuel, ect ect. Basically, most of the downsides could be engineered away if we had the desire to. I know that is what I am in school for!
Do you believe that Traveling Wave Reactors are legitament in design?
They have had a hard time making it work. Though, they have teamed up with southern company and ORNL to develop a molten chloride fast reactor using some of the wave reactor design I believe. I dunno, been awhile since I looked at Gate's team since they starting working more closed
How hard is it to become a nuclear engineer
I know this is an old comment, but would you mind explaining how we could deal with the waste that is produced by nuclear power? From my (severely) limited knowledge of nuclear power, it seems to me like we have no safe way of dealing with nuclear waste, since some of it can take thousands of years to stabilize.
Hello I am a future senior developer.and also a future CEO of a trillion dollar company
saying this is biased, is an understatement. it leaves a lot of very important qualifiers and caviates on modern countermeasures and engineering which prevent such issues. new reactor deaigns deal with most of these problems. in addition, making a bomb from light water spent fuel is incredibly difficult and messy (meaning easily detrctable). i hate it when these ted eds speak with an agenda, instead of presenting facts
In a way they try to be fair. Clean Nuclear power like clean coal can be achieved through breakthroughs in modern tech, new design and reprocessing but politics and bad past experience make it hard to sell.
Hah no they dont. and making a bomb means having a drived mind behind it, and we know thoose stop at nothing.
wow, im glad you backed that up with a lot of facts. light water power reactors use a long fuel burn, for increased efficiency, which builds pu240 and other non undesirable components into the spent fuel. these products cause the fuel to be almost impossible to create weapons grade material from. in addition, the process required for reprocessing and enriching the spent fuel would leave a large industrial and radioactive foot print. furthermore, seperating pu239 from pu240 and pu238 is unbelievably difficult and has never even been attempted. i work in the field and tire of fear mongering, when it comes to modern nuclear technologies. modern reactors absolutly address the meltdown concerns by making the cooling systems passively safe. that means they can be cooled no active components, such as electic pumps ans diesel generators.
Harry Ferrari
That is actually an amazing way to summarize much of the nuclear power debate.
Key word there; "deal with most of these problems". Sure, they may be safer but are they still really better? You still have nuclear waste that is a huge problem, as it will keep accumulating and the chance of it polluting the environment increases as well. (If you think we should just launch it into space, it would be even more expensive, watch Kurgestats video on it) And even if you have a very safe reactor, accidents do, and have happened.
I am having a course of nuclear chemistry and radiation, and this video helped me a lot!! Thank you TED-Ed! And SCIENCE IS AWESOME!!!!!!
I like how all this video talks about is the doomsday scenarios associated with nuclear power instead of the potentially millions of lives that could be saved each year by switching to it instead of coal.
Tallen Capt EXACTLY!
There's no point taking such great risks untill we build a foolproof system,
@@biswajitpramanik3426 That's a terrible approach. That's like saying "Until we have a drug to treat the disease a hundred percent, don't treat it".
Fossil fuels are killing people and already destroying the environment. It's not a risk of harm they're doing, they're actively doing harm.
Nuclear has a risk. But even with that, it's still objectively better.
@@biswajitpramanik3426 Per unit of energy produced, coal power causes over 300 times as many deaths as nuclear power (and some estimates even say over 1000 times as many deaths). Oil-fueled power is similarly deadly to coal. Natural gas is safer, but still 30 times as deadly as nuclear. And those three are by far the most commonly used fuel sources by humans. By your logic, we should immediately shut down all power plants and engines that run on coal, oil, and natural gas, because they aren't foolproof!
In fact, the deaths per unit of energy produced caused by solar, wind, and hydro power are pretty much the same as for nuclear power. Shut all of those down too! Not foolproof, after all!
@@TheLordoftheRavens nuclear disaster can make a large part of the world inhabitable, long term nuclear power is the way 2 to along with solar and other renewable energies, but technology must be robust enough to save us from the disasters first. Coal , oil, natural gas they are good for short term, but in long term they will kill us
It is sad to see it go down as this kind of power generation has the most potential using cutting edge science. I've read some developments in using the plutonium as fuel, where the nuclear plant doesn't consume fuel but creates them. I never heard of it again these days. I do hope research is still being done and wish it to see working alongside with renewable energies such as solar and wind in the future.
I learnt this in geography class two months ago, I better know everything the video is about to (re)teach me!
*_Edit:_* After watching the video I concluded that I only knew about ~15% of the information given in the video.
I can’t believe Ted-Ed, of all channels, would describe nuclear power in such a negative light.
Its all propaganda. Do you think Ted-Ed is non-biased?
I can't believe that people today re-drank the same kool aid as boomers to imagine that nuclear energy will be the way to Jetsons.
@@sapphyrus I know this is old, but you have an anime profile pic so you really shouldn't be talking lol
@@zedm4264 Whining about profile pics is an admittance of not having anything worthwhile to say.
@@sapphyrus try that on for size bucko
We need to be investing in this and renewable energy to replace fossil fuels.
I’m just tryna get the answer on my test
Less solar and wind as they aren’t as reliable and more nuclear as it is reliable.
You can't rely on rewenable energy
@@eternaldarkness1508 That's why we need to be investing in some degree of nuclear energy too until we can ensure the sustainability of renewables.
@@I_am_Signal In the short run, yes, but in the long run, hopefully, we'll be able to innovate better energy storage and other technology that will permit the full employment of renewables.
Dude at 1:18 with the "can you not?!" sign is both exactly what I would probably do if I tried to protest and a mood.
Speaking of the challenges of nuclear power without mentioning any of the possible ways to overcome them ? expected better from a TED-ed ...
they do make it seem like these problems are still based in science rather then the reality that the problems are based in economics and the mindset of those in charge of nuclear plants.
The video is already long for a TED-ed. Apart from the difficulty intrinsic to animating something at least twice as long, how many of us would have honestly clicked on a twenty minute video?
I said "mentioning", not "explaining". It would have been enough to let people research more on their own if interested. If would have been a few more seconds, maybe 1 minute more and that's it. And if we look at the almost 7M subs from TED Talks, with vids that are almost 50 minutes long .... quite a lot of us would watch a 20 minutes video.
Rin if you want the longer one, just watch the full talk instead of complaining on the channel that does condensed animations
I didn't complain, just pointed out a trouble that would have added merely a few seconds to a minute. If you're not OK with it and consider it worthy of a noted disagreement, press the down thumb and move along.
This video was quite limited in what it actually discussed given the title. It also does NOT touch on any current reactor generations or improvements. Who funded this? An oil and gas company/lobby?
Who else thought their phone screen was dirty?
Me
Me
Me
Me
Me
I love how this video has so many Easter eggs/references! Great lesson!
2:56 is it just me or does the red-haired person look like Phineas?
Blocksking101 yep :D
Yea, cool find
Blocksking101 THERE'S 104 DAYS IN SUMMER VACATION
Blocksking101 and it took them 8 years to spend it...
Blocksking101 yep
1:47 the best part of any TED video I've ever seen
I love just how this lesson has so many references. Great video!
yeah bro there was homer simpson, fallout and more
*However, many 100% safe proposals for nuclear reactions exist, making nuclear energy the best
7:41 oh hey! There’s the single survivor of vault 11 entering the Mojave.
Subtle reference to the Fallout lore, hehe.
What is this reference?
@@cesaradrianherrera1382 Fallout is a game about nuclear war. The man in blue and yellow at the end is a reference to the suits worn by some of the characters in the game
*If humans managed to harness the energy produced by nuclear fearmongering we would never run out of energy.*
The rejection of nuclear as "dangerous" and "dystopian" reveals a chronic myopia of our global society. Even if nuclear energy has the potential to bring about world-ending consequences, the chance of it happening is a far better prospect than the certainty that it will happen with our reliance on oil and coal. Of course, our best course of action is to use renewables for anything and everything beyond a sustainable use of non-renewables, but that simply can't happen in the short term without some adjustment period.
Maybe have a follow-up video exploring different types of reactors and why the current design needs to be changed.
Thank you for putting homer in ted Ed!
Now I know how does a nuclear work, I don't need Ted ed anymore
I see you're a man from a radioactive place.
This stuff is so complex, how did anyone come up with this.
A big respect to those guys, truly an unsung heroes for the humanity
And then military commanders used this almost magical technology to almost end the world
ikr how ironic
Just think what will happen in the future.
Cringe
Thank you for another amazing, informative, well-animated video! I love this channel.
Can we take a few moments from our lives to appreciate the brilliant animation
I'm surprised it didn't mention LFTR (Liquid Fluride Thorium Reactor) technology as a safer modern alternative. I still believe Nuclear is the best solution, we have currently, to the energy crisis.
2:04 - 2:06
Doesn't this disturb anyone? The way that the left yellow dude blinks his eyes one before the other...
6:20 Finland is currently building a 500-meter deep storage facility that is supposed to be operational in 2020. Sweden is also developing a similar storage.
solutions to these problems have been around since the 1960 with molten salt reactors.
thanks for the public fear mongering
He makes learning actually make sense and not as boring
I expected better from TedEd. Nuclear power is efficient and a lot of the issues presented here didn't elaborate solutions well. Nuclear power is probably our best option to fight climate change, even though it is a slow process. It will help in the long run.
thing about plutonium bombs is that A: they're extremely expensive just to construct, and B: they require micro-meter precision in their construction or the reaction fizzles
Today I learned what a meltdown is, I always thought it meant an explosion. Also, nice use of pop culture.
I have never felt pure love to anything before, except Ted-ed
5:16 chernobyl didn't have a containment building >.>
insert generic i'm early joke i didn't know this video was just uploaded lol
Give the animatiors a raise , they are the besttttt!!!
1:41 Why does Yoda show up? he's just a force, not a nuclear force.
Thanks for the lesson, so if we could have a breakthrough way of expediting the decay of plutonium greatly then the waste of Nuclear Power would be safer?
Thorium??
Dam Sun
Man???
LFTR
Psycho Mantis?
You know there's a element called Krypton
minxes69 there's an element called dubnium what's your point
What i never understood, even when doing physics, is where that percentage of mass that becomes energy comes from, is it entire subatomic particles randomly selected to become energy, or is it a portion of each atom/subatomic particle that does so?
5:17
*Hmmm, that looks familiar, where have I seen that before???*
Maybe it’s Fukushima
@@ernestbr9786 i think it's Three Mile Island
@@ernestbr9786 i think it's Three Mile Island
This one was great, so many references. Keep making videos like this.
Who else has been watching videos about nuclear reactors after watching Chernobyl?
You and me
i have watched this video before ... Now i am watching it after watching chernobyl
You beat me to this comment
Me too bcuz I couldn’t understand what they said in chernobyl 😐
Haven't finished
What an amazing way to learn about this stuff. Many thanks.
I love these videos. Really informative.
Honestly, I wish we have more budget to make Nuclear power safer and more acceptable. It just seems like the proper way to progress to the future rather than continue with our current one which is slowly ruining us and being spent completely.
All those references get me all the time haha
Fallout, Yoda, Homer, and even the passing Watchmen comment :D
The fission product has a delayed blink like the mutated three-eyed fish in _The Simpsons_.
Could the writers please provide authoritative information regarding the feasibility of using the plutonium specifically present in used conventional commercial light water reactor fuel assemblies? Especially in the context of relative difficulty compared to actual military material production?
These animations 😍
This video highly distorts what the problems with nuclear power really are. The engineering "problems" were worked out in the 50's, as were the "problems" of waste, storage, etc. Nuclear's real problem is a political one, stemming from the fact that most people don't know anything about it except for what they read or see in poorly made videos and blogs online, which have a tendency to greatly distort the truth and make people irrationally fear the only sustainable zero-carbon power source ever invented...
so ... many .... references... so.... awsome.
One of the better TedEd videos! 👏
What the fuck. This was such a biased piece and I am disappointed in it. They didnt talk about how we are designing nuclear reactors to run off that waste. They didn't talk about how nuclear power plants 'leak' less radiation than coal power plants. How nuclear power plants are safer for humans and the environment than coal power plants (this includes the major disasters). How about how we would still need to process those radioactive materials because many industries rely on the byproducts of the refinement process to get things like Yellow Cake and Depleted Uranium.
We have learned a lot sense Chernobyl and the industry has banded together to make nuclear power MUCH safer because our entire industry is at risk. Fukushima may also be brought up but let me remind you that they recovered much of the land around the Fukushima power plant (and moving closer each year) and the radioactive levels of the ocean is almost down to its natural levels. Nuclear isnt perfect, nothing is, but the world is far away from being able to function without power plants that have a stable source of power. Nuclear is the safest type of plant for that job.
Dont take my word as the gospel, go and look at the facts for yourself. Just remember that nuclear is not the terror that the media frames makes it out be. I am sad that TED-Ed has sunk down to this level also.
It's better to have waste contained, which happens with nuclear, than to release it into the air and killing thousands and thousands of people - and the planet - in the process. I'm looking at you, coal.
They also didn't talk about the fact that long half lives are safer.
What most people don't understand is that radiation isn't just instant death it's about how much you're exposed to and material with a longer half life emits LESS radiation per second.
so material with a half life of 20,000 years is generally pretty safe as long as you don't just litterally eat it and even then it might not do too much.
This was a borderline fake science video that covered the real science of nuclear reactors only just far enough to reach the fear mongering and then stopped.
I’m so used to the typically striking, one-line conclusions of Ted-Ed videos that this one kinda left me hanging.
2:58 is the guy sitting in the middle. "Phineas" from phone as and ferb cartoon.
Now I know where they got those great project ideas XD...
A lot of careful engineering goes into designing a nuclear power plant. fuel rod has many levels of barriers (like clad, inner and outer containment). For LOCA ( loss of coolant accident) which is pretty improbable to happen, they have ECCS ( emergency core cooling system). Every plant has rigorous analysis and safety reviews before commissioning ( like fault and event tree analysis of the whole system). Also regulatory bodies keep a close watch on whether the safety protocols are properly followed or not. Also problems of spent fuel are being addressed by vitrification, storage bay and also accelerator driven subsystem ( which can burn the long lived fission product to turn them into short lived daughter products). So, many apprehensions conveyed by the video are not very substantial and if we look for a better and greener future, nuclear energy is one of the best possible options that we have.
Well, there are reactors capable of using the nuclear waste from older reactors as fuel.
yeah i know your mom exists
Nice to learn these things as I only work for stress analysis of pipes near the turbine and have no idea what happens inside reactors.
1:54 I’m dying 😂
loolololololol my brother when he dies in minecraft
Sometimes, a great invention with an overwhelmingly massive potential comes with a new phobia.
who is comming from chernobyl
yousif Abdulla
Not me, I knew about Chernobyl before it was cool
Me
I watched Chernobyl, I didn't come for it, otherwise I would be saying 15,000 Roentgen everywhere I go.
me. typing with my 3rd hand
Me
Absolutely love the 90s style commentary and visuals !!
7:02 Guy: lalala on my phone- hey someone replied on my tweet! >SIRENS GO OFF- guy: huh? *OH SHI- *BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM*
This explains it well. Thank you becasue you are the only channel that explained it properly.
When i was a child i thought the main nuclear uranium was the one who generate electricity.
our problem is the efficiency of most power generators. With coal, we exchange chemical energy for thermal(heat), heat to elastic in the form of pressure, pressure to mechanical and from mechanical finally to electricity. from all this we only got 30 to under 50% of the energy released.
What I Gained From This Video:
"Water is rad, dude"
So many references! Also, very informing!
brain.exe has stopped working, but the animation is way too cute so the brain keeps playing
No wonder it's not working, it's an .exe! Grow up and use a real OS, winbaby.
Don't watch it
just wanted to ask. does nuclear power plant make electricity cheaper for the common households ?
i live in the philippines and they are planning on installing a nuclear power plant. how will this affect our monthly bills ?
The vault dweller coming out of the vault at the end should be wearing a vault 13 suit. 13 was the main character's vault in Fallout 1.
1:40
3:20 anything
3:40 to keep up the chain reaction.. Enrichment
6:34 plutonium half life 24,000 years
Humans need to start thinking in a more recycling and reusing system. Nuclear Power waste products could be recycled into nuclear medicine, if only we have the technology and resources. By applying this type of thinking we will lower a lot of the obstacles associated with nuclear energy, and see its true potential.
Best Ted-Ed animation ever
Even though alternative power supplies like solar, wind etc will surely play a massive role in the future, we should not underestimate the fact that every country or power grid system needs a source of stable 24/7, constant supply of energy to build it's baseline. This could be done either with nuclear or fossil so far. Even the newest methods are fossil related so nuclear pretty much has no reasonable competition besides when speaking about price.
Nuclear power is high-risk and high-reward. To those who herald it as the solution to climate change and the use of fossil fuels, I believe it'd be better if we balance out the usage of nuclear power vs renewable non-nuclear power. That should hopefully give us enough time to fix the problems associated with fossil fuels and find ways to manage long-term nuclear waste. Afterwards, we could easily rely on nuclear power and sources such as solar and wind power for our needs (maybe even fusion power if it ever becomes a reality!)
Here's one long-term nuclear storage solution that's being tried out by Finland:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Nuclear power is no where near high risk. The chance of a meltdown is currently required to be 1 in 10 million, which is considered statistically improbable. Even if a nuclear reactor melted down, they are currently built to withstand a melt down and are extremely safe.
I was waiting for fusion reactions to be brought up, even thorium
Can you to a follow up video about nuclear fusion? Thanks!!
Biggest problem is people's fear of nuclear energy
It is a great disservice that the tiny quantity of high level waste is not mentioned. All high level waste generated in the past 60 yrs in the USA can be stored in a single football field
Any Electrical Engineers here😁😁
The animation is just TOOO CUTE!!! ☺️
0:14 Hmmmhmmm Crunchy atoms
are you INTP?
I think that if we choose to use nuclear products to harness energy then we are also responsible for it's proper disposal. The high cost of space flights permit us from just ejecting the waste into space but with time the costs of a space flight might become low enough that space disposable of nuclear waste just might become feasible enough that we can do it. But this seems the only logically sound option for the proper disposal of nuclear waste.
use thorium
no u