Page 49 - 4921

much the better, but my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't
give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges.
Let's look first at the burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. What you need to do
there, seems like it might be simple, but it's not, and that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out
the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. Now we have some pilot things
that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level, but getting up to that full percentage, that will be very tricky, and
agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term
issue. Who's going to be sure? Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than
any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? This is a lot of volume. So that's a tough one.
Next would be nuclear. It also has three big problems: Cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is
high; the issue of the safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these
human operators, that the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. And then what do you do with the waste? And,
although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. People need to feel good about it. So three very
tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on.
The last three of the five, I've grouped together. These are what people often refer to as the renewable
sources. And they actually -- although it's great they don't require fuel -- they have some disadvantages. One is
that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. This is energy
farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of time more area than you think of as a normal
energy plant. Also, these are intermittent sources. The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and,
likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way
of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. So, we've got big cost challenges here, we
have transmission challenges: for example, say this energy source is outside your country; you not only need the
technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere.
And, finally, this storage problem. And, to dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types
of batteries that get made -- for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything -- and compared
that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses, and what I found is that all the batteries we make now
could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something
that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. It's not impossible, but it's not a very
easy thing. Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of
what you're using. If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery.
Now, how we're going to go forward on this -- what's the right approach? Is it a Manhattan Project?
What's the thing that can get us there? Well, we need lots of companies working on this, hundreds. In each of
these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. And a lot of them, you'll look at and say, "They're crazy."
That's good. And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. Bill
Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. Vinod
Khosla's investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm
trying to help back that. Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is
actually taking the nuclear approach. There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. And innovation
really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all
that surprising.
The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium -- the one percent, which is the U235
-- we decided, "Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238." It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it
for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the
advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material's approach,
this looks like it would work.
And, because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. You actually burn
48