Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy?

19:47 "5 years from now we'll blow you away." I'm still waiting.

19:47 "5 years from now we'll blow you away"... Its almost 2017... the world has yet to have been blown away by "renewables" lol.

The Renewables guy only put forward data from California to support his argument that combining renewables can provide a reliable baseload. It just doesn't work out for allot of places in the world, like the UK, which doesn't have the solar and hydro resources that America does. Nuclear works the same anywhere in the world. Also, the Nuclear guy didn't have time to elaborate on Thorium, molten salt reactors, recycling nuclear waste, etc, which would take away most of the concerns about safety and nuclear weapons.

"In 5 years you'll be blown away at what these renewable energy supplies can do over nuclear energy" I'm here 11 years later, yet to be impressed 😅

That's a hardcore twist on that graph. "We have to find something where nuclear will have the highest bar, and lets use length of construction." Never mentions that the long construction time is a direct result of government delay.

They made this a debate between renewable and nuclear. The only debate is between nuclear and coal. Everyone agrees that renewables are good but realistically they aren't 100% feasible. Something needs to fill the gap and there are two choices, nuclear and coal. In my opinion nuclear is the clear clean choice.

"We've analysed the hour-by-hour energy demand IN CALIFORNIA"... I'm pretty sure that California is not a representative sample of the ENTIRE PLANET...

Anti-nuclear guy resorts to heavily massaged data and bad science to try and crowbar his ill-informed ideology into the realm of fact, with little success. Embarrassing to watch.

That guy followed "Be aware of the propaganda" right up with his own propaganda. "Poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years" -> It's pretty bad when TED posts a debate when so many people have no clue about the topic.. But yeah, obviously there just are some words that affect the audience's mind in a certain way, and "poison" definitely is one of them.

2019, still waiting for renewables to blow me away. In the mean time, we could've built a bunch of nuclear power plants. Whoops.

"Beware propaganda", proceeds to spread propaganda of his own.

It was stated that it takes a long time to build a nuclear power plant. 90% of the time he stated it takes was the result of having to get and wait for permits. It has been made artificially expensive to build and maintain a nuclear power generator because of having to pay huge fees just for the paperwork. Its the same reason why I can't generate my own power for my house. In my city it will cost more than $8,000 in legal fees and permits to set up my own solar panels and power storage. This is an artificial cost created to keep me connected to city utilities and shelling out more money every month. You can't complain that something costs too much when you're the reason for the problem in the first place. Thats a logical fallacy.

I would absolutely love to hear his explanation for the rolling blackouts in California in 2020 (ten years later) if there is enough renewable energy

Nuclear guy: "facts numbers facts numbers facts" Other guy: "WHAT ABOUT EXPLOSHUNS"

This is exactly the kind of informative and reasonable debate that this issue needs.

This is a stupid debate. It's not nuclear against solar and wind power. It's both things against coal and oil. In 1985 in Denmark the parliament stopped all talk of nuclear power in Denmark, as huge demonstrations were against nuclear power and for wind and solar energy. What do we see today? We buy as much nuclear power from other countries as we ourselves produce in wind power. So, nearly 30 years have passed and wind power is still a very small part of our energy consumption even though we have the greatest wind power fleet in the world compared to country size. So, 2 nuclear power plants could have supplied cheap power for the whole of Denmark during these 30 years (after being build) leading to much less CO2 pollution. People don't understand the problem. Wind energy is one of the biggest investments in this country and still it is very small scale and very expensive. I am all for wind power, but we need 2000 wind turbines to cover 1 nuclear power plant, and Denmark is way to small for all these wind turbines, not even taking the cost into account.

Who’s watching this for school work ?

Meanwhile we still haven't implemented either of these ideas. The infighting here is disasterous. I personally am all for nuclear, but every minute we spend saying, solar is better, no nuclear is better, no wind, no tidal, etc. is another minute coal laborers die, communities near coal plants suffocate, and the earth bakes. do them all! if we find we can power down nuclear plants later in favor of better solar, AWESOME, but we need a HUGE source of power NOW.

Our Civilisation’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

We are Still waiting to have our minds blow away,