Have you heard the news? We're in a clean energy revolution. And where I live in Berkeley, California, it seems like every day I see a new roof with new solar panels going up, electric car in the driveway. Germany sometimes gets half its power from solar, and India is now committed to building 10 times more solar than we have in California, by the year 2022.
你们看新闻了吗? 我们正在进行 清洁能源革命。 我住在加利福尼亚州伯克利市, 几乎每天我都会看到新的 太阳能板被装在屋顶上, 电动汽车停在车道上。 德国一半的电力 来自于太阳能, 印度计划在2022年完成 的太阳能板数量, 是加州的十倍。
Even nuclear seems to be making a comeback. Bill Gates is in China working with engineers, there's 40 different companies that are working together to try to race to build the first reactor that runs on waste, that can't melt down and is cheaper than coal. And so you might start to ask: Is this whole global warming problem going to be a lot easier to solve than anybody imagined? That was the question we wanted to know, so my colleagues and I decided to take a deep dive into the data. We were a little skeptical of some parts of the clean energy revolution story, but what we found really surprised us.
甚至连核电 都重返舞台了。 比尔·盖茨正在中国 和工程师们合作, 他们来自超过 40家不同的公司, 互相竞争,尝试建造第一个 以废材为原料的反应堆, 永不融化, 比烧煤还便宜。 所以,你可能会问: “全球变暖问题 是不是比大家想象中 要更容易解决?” 这也是我们想知道的, 所以我和我的同事们 开始调查数据。 之前我们对能源革命 中的一部分故事 有所怀疑, 但是最终的发现 却让我们大吃一惊。
The first thing is that clean energy has been increasing. This is electricity from clean energy sources over the last 20 years. But when you look at the percentage of global electricity from clean energy sources, it's actually been in decline from 36 percent to 31 percent. And if you care about climate change, you've got to go in the opposite direction to 100 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources, as quickly as possible. Now, you might wonder, "Come on, how much could five percentage points of global electricity be?" Well, it turns out to be quite a bit. It's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants the size of Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant, or 900 solar farms the size of Topaz, which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world, and certainly our biggest in California. A big part of this is simply that fossil fuels are increasing faster than clean energy. And that's understandable. There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy, and they need modern fuels.
首先,清洁能源的 使用率一直在升高。 这是过去20年间, 清洁能源的总发电量。 但是当你看到 全球范围内 清洁能源总 发电量占比时, 事实上,这个比例 从36%下降到了31%。 如果你在意气候变化, 你一定要尽快做出改变, 使用纯清洁能源电力 越快越好。 现在,你可能会问, “拜托,全球5%的 电力能有多少?” 事实证明还蛮多的。 这些电力等价于 60个核电站的产量, 每个都有加州核电站 “ 代阿布洛”的大小, 或900个“托帕石”大小 的 太阳能发电厂, “托帕石”是世界上最大 的 太阳能发电厂之一, 当然也是加州最大的。 主要原因仅是 化石燃料 的使用率在逐年增加, 要比清洁能源的速度快。 这是可以理解的。 因为还有很多贫困国家, 它们还在把木材、粪便和木炭 作为 主要的能源材料, 他们需要现代燃料。
But there's something else going on, which is that one of those clean energy sources in particular has actually been on the decline in absolute terms, not just relatively. And that's nuclear. You can see its generation has declined seven percent over the last 10 years. Now, solar and wind have been making huge strides, so you hear a lot of talk about how it doesn't really matter, because solar and wind is going to make up the difference. But the data says something different. When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind, you see it actually barely makes up half of the decline from nuclear. Let's take a closer look in the United States.
但是,还有另一件 事情正在发生, 那就是有一种 特定的清洁能源 的使用量的 绝对值正在下降, 而非仅仅是相对占比。 那就是核能。 你会发现, 在过去的10年里, 核能的发电量 已经下降了7%。 当前,太阳能和 风能正在飞速发展。 所以你听到了很多言论, 表示核能下降不是问题, 因为太阳能和风能 会弥补这一缺失。 但数据却告诉我们 事实不是这样的。 当你把所有由太阳和风 创造的电力总量相加时, 你会发现这仅弥补了 核能发电缺失的一半。 让我们来看看美国,
Over the last couple of years -- really 2013, 2014 -- we prematurely retired four nuclear power plants. They were almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels, and so the consequence was that we wiped out almost as much clean energy electricity that we get from solar. And it's not unique to us. People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader, but when we looked at the data, what we found is that, in fact, California reduced emissions more slowly than the national average, between 2000 and 2015.
在过去的几年里, 尤其是2013,14年, 我们过早报废了 四个核电站。 它们的发电量几乎全部 被化石燃料发电取代了, 所以结果就是 我们放弃了 几乎和太阳能发电量 相当的清洁能源。 而且,我们在 这件事上并不唯一。 人们认为加州是使用清洁能源 和保护环境的先锋州, 但是当我们查看数据, 我们发现,事实上, 在2000到2015年间, 加州的减排速度 是低于全国速度的。
What about Germany? They're doing a lot of clean energy. But when you look at the data, German emissions have actually been going up since 2009, and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.
德国的情况又怎样呢? 德国人在使用 很多清洁能源。 但是当你查看数据时, 会发现德国的排放量, 自09年 开始就持续升高, 而且一定没有人会告诉你, 他们计划在2020年 实现他们的气候承诺。
The reason isn't hard to understand. Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time, which means that when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing, you still need power for your hospitals, your homes, your cities, your factories. And while batteries have made some really cool improvements lately, the truth is, they're just never going to be as efficient as the electrical grid. Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out, you lose about 20 to 40 percent of the power. That's why when, in California, we try to deal with all the solar we've brought online -- we now get about 10 percent of electricity from solar -- when the sun goes down, and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and their TV sets, and every other appliance in the house, we need a lot of natural gas backup. So what we've been doing is stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain. And that worked pretty well for a while, but then late last year, it sprung a leak. This is Aliso Canyon. So much methane gas was released, it was the equivalent of putting half a million cars on the road. It basically blew through all of our climate commitments for the year.
原因并不难理解。 现在太阳能和风能提供了 大概10%到20%的电力, 这意味着当阴雨连绵, 风平浪静的时候, 你依旧需要给医院、家庭、 城市、工厂提供电力。 虽然近来电池领域 有了些巨大发展, 但真相是, 它们永远做不到 输电网那样的高效率。 每当你把电输入 电池并使用它, 你都会丢失20% 到40%的电量。 这就是为什么在加州, 我们正在尝试 太阳能的完全使用- 我们现在能够从太阳能 获得大约10%的电力- 当太阳下山时, 人们下班回家, 打开空调和电视, 和其他家中电器时, 我们仍需要大量 天然气储备。 所以我们一直以来做的, 就是把天然气贮存在山脊里。 这个计划的确在 一段时间里成功了, 直至去年它发生了泄漏。 这是阿灵所峡谷。 大量的甲烷被释放, 相当于五十万辆 行驶汽车的排放量。 就这样,它就轻松 打破了那年排放预算。
Well, what about India? Sometimes you have to go places to really get the right data, so we traveled to India a few months ago. We met with all the top officials -- solar, nuclear, the rest -- and what they told us is, "We're actually having more serious problems than both Germany and California. We don't have backup; we don't have all the natural gas. And that's just the start of it. Say we want to get to 100 gigawatts by 2022. But last year we did just five, and the year before that, we did five."
好吧,印度的情况又怎样呢? 有时,你是需要实地 收集真实数据的, 所以我们几个月前去了印度。 我们会见了政府中 所有跟太阳能、 核能及其他能源有关的高级官员, 他们告诉我: “我们这儿的 问题, 比德国和加州更严峻。 我们没有后备贮藏, 也没有那么多天然气。 然而这只是问题 的一小部分。 举个例子,我们想在2022年, 产生一千亿瓦特的电量。 但是去年我们却只 产生了五十亿瓦特, 前年,我们也只 产生了五十亿瓦特。”
So, let's just take a closer look at nuclear. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has looked at the carbon content of all these different fuels, and nuclear comes out really low -- it's actually lower even than solar. And nuclear obviously provides a lot of power -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During a year, a single plant can provide power 92 percent of the time. What's interesting is that when you look at countries that have deployed different kinds of clean energies, there's only a few that have done so at a pace consistent with dealing with the climate crisis.
所以,让我们好好 研究一下核能。 联合国气候变化政府间协商组织 调查了不同燃料的碳含量, 结果表明:核能有比 太阳能还要低的碳含量。 而且核能明显 有更高电产量。 一天24小时,一周7天。 一年间,核电厂有 92%的时间都在工作。 有趣的是,当你关注那些 使用着各种 清洁能源的国家时, 只有一小部分跟得上 解决能源危机的步伐。
So nuclear seems like a pretty good option, but there's this big problem with it, which all of you, I'm sure, are aware of, which is that people really don't like it. There was a study, a survey done of people around the world, not just in the United States or Europe, about a year and a half ago. And what they found is that nuclear is actually one of the least popular forms of energy. Even oil is more popular than nuclear. And while nuclear kind of edges out coal, the thing is, people don't really fear coal in the same way they fear nuclear, which really operates on our unconscious.
核能发电看起来 是个很好的选择, 但是潜藏一个巨大的问题, 我保证你们都知道, 那就是人们并不欢迎核电。 在一年半以前, 有一项不仅仅 针对美国或欧洲, 的世界范围民调。 他们发现 核能发电是最不受 欢迎的 发电方式之一。 甚至石油都比 核能发电更受欢迎。 相比煤炭只是 更受欢迎一点点。 人们害怕核能和害怕 煤炭本质上是不同, 但正是这种害怕在 不知不觉中 影响我们。
So what is it that we fear? There's really three things. There's the safety of the plants themselves -- the fears that they're going to melt down and cause damage; there's the waste from them; and there's the association with weapons. And I think, understandably, engineers look at those concerns and look for technological fixes. That's why Bill Gates is in China developing advanced reactors. That's why 40 different entrepreneurs are working on this problem. And I, myself, have been very excited about it.
那我们究竟 是害怕什么呢? 其实有三个原因, 关于担心核电站的安全性: 害怕它会融化并伤害人体; 害怕伴随而来的废料; 以及核电和军事武器的联系。 由此,我认为, 工程师已经了解这些疑虑 并在 尝试寻找技术上的解决方式。 这就是为什么比尔盖茨在 中国 研发更先进的反应堆。 这就是为什么40个企业家 在着手 研究这个问题。 对于我来说,这是 一件令人激动的事。
We did a report: "How to Make Nuclear Cheap." In particular, the thorium reactor shows a lot of promise. So when the climate scientist, James Hansen, asked if I wanted to go to China with him and look at the Chinese advanced nuclear program, I jumped at the chance. We were there with MIT and UC Berkeley engineers. And I had in my mind that the Chinese would be able to do with nuclear what they did with so many other things -- start to crank out small nuclear reactors on assembly lines, ship them up like iPhones or MacBooks and send them around the world. I would get one at home in Berkeley. But what I found was somewhat different. The presentations were all very exciting and very promising; they have multiple reactors that they're working on. The time came for the thorium reactor, and a bunch of us were excited. They went through the whole presentation, they got to the timeline, and they said, "We're going to have a thorium molten salt reactor ready for sale to the world by 2040." And I was like, "What?"
我们做了一个报告 《如何降低核能价格》。 具体来说,钍反应堆 带来了光明的前景。 所以当环境科学家 詹姆斯・汉森 问我想不想跟他去中国, 去看中国先进的 核能发电项目时。 我就欣然接受了邀请, 我们和麻省理工,还有 加州伯克利的工程师一起。 我的想法是: 中国人能够改良核电, 就像他们改良 其他东西一样, 先开始在流水线上 拆分小型核能反应堆, 然后把它们像iPhone和Macbook 一样装上船并运到世界各地。 我可以在伯克利 的家里放置一台, 但是事实上却是不同的。 演说令人激动, 鼓舞人心, 他们正在研究 复合反应堆。 当讲到钍反应堆的时候, 我们中很多人都十分激动。 演讲快结束的时候, 他们讲到了时间线。 他们说: "我们的钍盐熔融反应堆, 将在2040年 准备好走向世界"。 我的反应是 “啥?”
(Laughter)
(笑声)
I looked at my colleagues and I was like, "Excuse me -- can you guys speed that up a little bit? Because we're in a little bit of a climate crisis right now. And your cities are really polluted, by the way." And they responded back, they were like, "I'm not sure what you've heard about our thorium program, but we don't have a third of our budget, and your department of energy hasn't been particularly forthcoming with all that data you guys have on testing reactors." And I said, "Well, I've got an idea. You know how you've got 10 years where you're demonstrating that reactor? Let's just skip that part, and let's just go right to commercializing it. That will save money and time." And the engineer just looked at me and said, "Let me ask you a question: Would you buy a car that had never been demonstrated before?"
我看向我的同事们, “抱歉, 你们能加快一点速度吗? 因为我们现在好像 正面临着气候危机, 而且,你们的城市污染 貌似也很严重啊。” 然后,他们回答我, 类似说: “我不知道你之前是否听说过 我们 钍反应堆的项目, 但是我们缺少三分之一的经费, 而且你们的能源局 似乎不是很愿意 把你们测试反应堆 的数据全部给我们。" 我说:“好吧, 我有一个主意。” 你们不是有十年时间 用于展示反应堆吗? 让我们直接跳过那部分, 然后我们直接市场化。 这样能够节约我们 的时间和金钱。 然后那个工程师 就看着我说道: “让我问你一个问题, 你会在没有看过产品展示 的情况下买一辆车吗?”
So what about the other reactors? There's a reactor that's coming online now, they're starting to sell it. It's a high-temperature gas reactor. It can't melt down. But it's really big and bulky, that's part of the safety, and nobody thinks it's going to ever get cheaper than the reactors that we have. The ones that use waste as fuel are really cool ideas, but the truth is, we don't actually know how to do that yet. There's some risk that you'll actually make more waste, and most people think that if you're including that waste part of the process, it's just going to make the whole machine a lot more expensive, it's just adding another complicated step.
换作反应堆呢? 有一款即将完成的反应堆, 现在,它即将开始售卖。 这是一个高温气体反应堆。 它不会融化。 但是为了安全性考虑, 它的体积巨大且笨重。 而且没有人认为它会变得 比其他反应堆更便宜。 那个把废物当燃料的反应堆 是 挺炫酷的,但真相是, 我们还不确定要怎样实现。 有风险还会产生更多的废料, 大多数人认为,如果算上 反应过程中的废物的话, 这台机器其实相当昂贵, 过程反而变得更加复杂。
The truth is, there's real questions about how much of that we're going to do. I mean, we went to India and asked about the nuclear program. The government said before the Paris climate talks that they were going to do something like 30 new nuclear plants. But when we got there and interviewed people and even looked at the internal documents, they're now saying they're going to do about five. And in most of the world, especially the rich world, they're not talking about building new reactors. We're actually talking about taking reactors down before their lifetimes are over. Germany's actually pressuring its neighbors to do that. I mentioned the United States -- we could lose half of our reactors over the next 15 years, which would wipe out 40 percent of the emissions reductions we're supposed to get under the Clean Power Plan. Of course, in Japan, they took all their nuclear plants offline, replaced them with coal, natural gas, oil burning, and they're only expected to bring online about a third to two-thirds.
事实上, 真正的问题是我们应该 在 核能问题上走多远。 我的意思是,我们去了印度 并问了他们核电项目的相关问题。 政府说在巴黎气候会议之前, 他们打算建造 30个新的核电站。 但是当我们到印度, 采访当地人, 甚至查看了内部文件, 他们说现在只建造了5个。 而且世界上绝大部分, 特别是那些富裕国家, 他们没有建造新 核电站的想法, 反而在谈论拆毁 那些还未达到 使用年限的核电站。 德国正在给邻国施压, 让他们拆毁核电站, 当我们谈到美国, 我们可能在未来15年间 失去一半的核反应堆, 这可能增加40%的排放量 那些本应由清洁能源计划 承担的减排量。 当然在日本,它们把 所有的 核电站都报废了, 并全部由煤炭, 天然气和石油代替, 而且他们只计划重新使用 其中的三分之一到三分之二,
So when we went through the numbers, and just added that up -- how much nuclear do we see China and India bringing online over the next 15 years, how much do we see at risk of being taken offline -- this was the most startling finding. What we found is that the world is actually at risk of losing four times more clean energy than we lost over the last 10 years. In other words: we're not in a clean energy revolution; we're in a clean energy crisis. So it's understandable that engineers would look for a technical fix to the fears that people have of nuclear. But when you consider that these are big challenges to do, that they're going to take a long time to solve, there's this other issue, which is: Are those technical fixes really going to solve people's fears?
当我们查看 这些数据的时候, 把它们加起来, 未来15年内, 中国和印度会建 多少核电站呢? 又有多少面临 被报废的风险呢? 答案令人震惊。 我们发现世界正面临着 失去四倍于过去十年 清洁能源丧失量的危机。 换句话说,我们并不在 进行清洁能源革命, 我们正处在清洁能源危机中, 所以考虑到人们对核能的恐惧, 工程师们 正在寻找技术 修复是完全可以理解的。 但当考虑到 这些巨大的挑战, 解决是需要 花费很长时间的。 另一个问题是: 这些技术修复真的能够 解决人们对核能的恐惧吗?
Let's take safety. You know, despite what people think, it's hard to figure out how to make nuclear power much safer. I mean, every medical journal that looks at it -- this is the most recent study from the British journal, "Lancet," one of the most respected journals in the world -- nuclear is the safest way to make reliable power. Everybody's scared of the accidents. So you go look at the accident data -- Fukushima, Chernobyl -- the World Health Organization finds the same thing: the vast majority of harm is caused by people panicking, and they're panicking because they're afraid. In other words, the harm that's caused isn't actually caused by the machines or the radiation. It's caused by our fears.
拿安全问题来说吧。 尽管人们是这么想的, 但是真正让核能 听起来安全是很困难的。 我的意思是,看看那些 有关 核能的医药杂志, 这是英国《柳叶刀》 杂志的最新研究, 《柳叶刀》是世界上 最受认可 的杂志之一, 核能是最安全的发电方式。 每个人都害怕事故。 所以你去查看事故数据- 福岛和切尔诺贝利- 世界卫生组织在两次事故 中 总结出了同样的结论: 大部分的伤害是由 人民的恐慌造成的, 然而他们的恐慌 来源于他们的恐惧。 换句话说, 伤害并不是由机器 或是辐射造成的, 而是由我们的恐惧造成的。
And what about the waste? Everyone worries about the waste. Well, the interesting thing about the waste is how little of it there is. This is just from one plant. If you take all the nuclear waste we've ever made in the United States, put it on a football field, stacked it up, it would only reach 20 feet high. And people say it's poisoning people or doing something -- it's not, it's just sitting there, it's just being monitored. There's not very much of it. By contrast, the waste that we don't control from energy production -- we call it "pollution," and it kills seven million people a year, and it's threatening very serious levels of global warming. And the truth is that even if we get good at using that waste as fuel, there's always going to be some fuel left over. That means there's always going to be people that think it's a big problem for reasons that maybe don't have as much to do with the actual waste as we think.
那来自核能的废物呢? 每个人都在担心废料。 但是,有趣的是, 产生的废物, 其实只有一点儿。 这就是由一个 核电站产生的废料。 如果你把美国核电站 产生的 所有废物加起来, 放到一个橄榄球场地, 堆积起来, 只有6.1米高。 人们说废物会对人体 或其他事物产生伤害- 但它并不会,只是被堆积 在那里, 并有人监管着。 而且量并不大。 相反,我们没有控制 的发电产生的废物, 我们称之为“污染”, 一年内七百万人死于此, 而且它威胁着世界, 大大加重气候变暖。 事实上,如果我们能够 很好地把废物当成燃料, 世界上总会有剩余的燃料。 这就意味着总会有人 认为这是一个大问题, 因为我们可能没有能够 在预期之内 很好 的利用废物。
Well, what about the weapons? Maybe the most surprising thing is that we can't find any examples of countries that have nuclear power and then, "Oh!" decide to go get a weapon. In fact, it works the opposite. What we find is the only way we know how to get rid large numbers of nuclear weapons is by using the plutonium in the warheads as fuel in our nuclear power plants. And so, if you are wanting to get the world rid of nuclear weapons, then we're going to need a lot more nuclear power.
好,那武器呢? 可能最令人惊讶的 是 我们找不到任何例子, 没有哪个拥有核能的国家, 突然说,“哦”,然后 决定要制造一个武器。 事实正相反, 我们发现, 唯一能使我们 摆脱大量核武器的途径, 就是把弹头中的钚, 当成反应堆中的燃料。 因此,如果你想让 世界没有核武器, 就要使用更多的核电。
(Applause)
(掌声)
As I was leaving China, the engineer that brought Bill Gates there kind of pulled me aside, and he said, "You know, Michael, I appreciate your interest in all the different nuclear supply technologies, but there's this more basic issue, which is that there's just not enough global demand. I mean, we can crank out these machines on assembly lines, we do know how to make things cheap, but there's just not enough people that want them."
当我离开中国的时候, 那个请来比尔盖茨的 工程师曾把我拉到一边, 然后他说,“你知道吗, 迈克尔,我很欣赏 你能对不同 核电技术感兴趣。 但是有一个更基本的问题, 世界并没有足够大的需求, 我的意思是,我能在 流水线上 组装这些机器, 我们也知道怎样让它变便宜, 但是没有人愿意购买它们。
And so, let's do solar and wind and efficiency and conservation. Let's accelerate the advanced nuclear programs. I think we should triple the amount of money we're spending on it. But I just think the most important thing, if we're going to overcome the climate crisis, is to keep in mind that the cause of the clean energy crisis isn't from within our machines, it's from within ourselves.
因此,我们还是使用太阳能 和风能发电,保证效率。 我们需要加速先进的核项目。 我认为我们应该将 对核项目的投资翻倍。 但是我认为最重要的是, 如果想要解决气候危机, 就必须记住清洁能源 危机产生的原因, 那并不是由机器产生的, 而是由我们自己。
Thank you very much.
非常感谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)