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00:00My basic work is done with pencil and paper, even today.
00:30In those days, in 1931, there was no computer, and I didn't need a computer.
00:44I need, first of all, peace of mind.
00:50I need a minimum of disturbance by other duties.
00:55I need to be able to work at my own pace.
01:00Nobody must set me a deadline that you have to discover it by the 1st of July.
01:08And then you work on it hard.
01:11You really have to go into the details.
01:15You have to know lots of details.
01:21And then, one day, for me usually, when I'm taking a bath in the bathtub, there comes
01:29the enlightenment.
01:31Now you have the main idea.
01:34And once you have that idea, then the rest is not easy, but the rest is straightforward.
01:41You go through a lot of calculations, but it is then clear you have the right answer.
01:48And this quadrupole interaction is written in terms of the boson variables, and you have-
02:07First, you understand the problem.
02:09First, you see what it is all about.
02:12There are two parts to it.
02:13Yes.
02:14Then you sit down and do the algebra and try to get more deeply into it and use the approved
02:27methods of theoretical physics for it.
02:30So we have this model which seems to unify the spectra of heavy nuclei, the nuclear properties
02:37of heavy nuclei going from vibrational to rotational.
02:39Yes.
02:40On the other hand, we know we have the geometrical models of Bohr where he tries to explain heavy
02:46nuclei in terms of rotating, vibrating quadrupole liquid drop with quadrupole degrees of freedom.
02:55Let me say that Michael Kirsten worked on this with me from the Weizmann Institute.
03:00Yes.
03:01You probably know him from other-
03:02Oh, he's a student of yours?
03:03He was a student of mine, yes.
03:04That's right.
03:05That's right.
03:06So, okay, so-
03:07Last night we were trying to count my students and more and more come out of the woodwork.
03:15Right.
03:16And then, when you then don't get a really definite result, only at the very end you put
03:25it on a computer.
03:26So, he was here last year for-
03:28I know.
03:29Yeah.
03:30Right.
03:31That goes far ahead in my story because nobody ever thought of computers back in 1931.
03:40But nowadays, many of the young people are inclined not to think about the problem, but-
03:49and not to do the analytical work, but just put the problem on a computer.
03:55And then what comes out usually is hash, which means nothing.
04:18In 1938, the great question at the time was what nuclear reactions make the energy in the stars.
04:27Everybody agreed that it must be nuclear reactions in the stars.
04:34Everybody agreed there must be lots of hydrogen there, lots of helium, and some other elements.
04:41So, I sat down to look at other possible reactions.
04:48And I found very soon that most of the chemical elements of low atomic weight would not do.
04:58They couldn't make any useful reaction.
05:01And so, I was just about ready to say, it must be the combination of two protons, which gives the energy for all stars, when I came to the element carbon.
05:17And once I came to carbon, then suddenly it worked.
05:22Not only is there lots of carbon in the stars, of course, much less than hydrogen, but still quite a large amount.
05:33But with carbon, I have found that there could be six successive reactions, which had the effect of making two, no, four protons combined into a helium nucleus,
05:50which is a process in which an enormous amount of energy is set free.
05:57And then in the end, the carbon would come out of it just as it had entered in the beginning.
06:06So, the carbon, which is available, but not in very large amounts, only acts as a catalyst.
06:17It is reproduced. It doesn't disappear.
06:20And what you really use up is hydrogen.
06:23And as I told you earlier, hydrogen is really the most abundant element in the sun and in all similar stars.
06:33So, this was obviously the solution.
06:36And this is the work for which I later on, in 1967, got the Nobel Prize.
06:44Professor Peter, your solution of the problem of the energy source of stars is one of the most important applications of fundamental physics in our base.
07:02Having led to a deep-going evolution of our knowledge about the universe around us.
07:13On behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, I extend to you our most hearty congratulations.
07:23And now, I have the privilege to ask you to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics from the hands of His Majesty the King.
07:33It turned out much later on that in the sun, our first idea, namely the combination of two protons, is the main process.
07:51But in the bigger stars, the more luminous stars, like Sirius, there the carbon cycle is the dominant nuclear reaction which makes the energy.
08:06I'd like to welcome everybody.
08:22And I suppose you'll know many of the people here.
08:26There's Eli Bergman next to me, Bishop Burt.
08:30I have come to Washington for a regular meeting of the Board of Directors of Americans for Energy Independence.
08:39A private group of which I am the chairman.
08:44Then Rod Hills.
08:46AFEI is devoted to contributing to a solution of the energy problem in the United States.
08:55The group works together with Congress in many cases and also for many other influential people who are somehow related to the energy problem.
09:12And I have visited a few laboratories and come to the conclusion that it is technically feasible for this country to get energy independence in a not too distant future.
09:34My first point is that there are two separate energy problems.
09:44One is the problem of getting enough liquid fuels to drive automobiles, planes, etc.
09:55And the other is to get enough total energy.
09:59And these two energy problems are very seldom distinguished.
10:05And I think it is very essential to distinguish them.
10:09The second, I think, is much easier solved than the first.
10:13I have often said, and I will say it again, that the use of oil for making electricity is a sin.
10:23You see, we could save two million barrels a day from the industrial heat.
10:29We could save two million barrels on the automobiles.
10:33If you add all this together, we could, by substitution, mostly by substitution of other fuels, and then by conservation, save about nine million barrels a day, which is more than what we import now.
10:53Therefore, for the first time, in my knowledge, I have come to recognize that energy independence for this country is a real possibility.
11:07If we really put our mind to it, then we could eliminate all oil imports to this country by these three methods, substitution, synthetic fuels, and conservation.
11:25I got interested because I saw things coming just a little bit before the Arab oil embargo of 1973.
11:40Just before then, the production of oil in the United States reached a peak.
11:50And there was already in the spring and early summer of 1973 an oil shortage in many states of the Union.
12:02I happened to live at that time in one of them, the state of Washington.
12:07It was hard to get gasoline already in the summer of 1973.
12:12This is why the oil embargo was afterwards so effective.
12:18The United States was not prepared.
12:21So I concluded this is a most essential matter for the economic health of the United States and likewise of the whole world.
12:37The only thing I could find out about shale was this one particular deposit called the Green River Oil Shale area.
12:44Which is a very...
12:46It's a massive one, right?
12:47It's a massive one and it's one of the most important...
12:51But I couldn't find information on any other...
12:53So I thought that I ought to study it.
12:58I ought to find out how much energy is available and what kind.
13:05It's the one I know about.
13:09And what can we do to get ourselves from the oil-based economy to a new economy in which we have other sources of energy.
13:24The one thing that I had trouble finding any current information on was coal.
13:28I could find lots and lots of information that was about seven or eight years old and not very much that was new.
13:34Well, let's have a look at it.
13:37I was born in 1906 in Strasbourg in the Alsace.
13:43It was part of Germany at that time.
13:49We left when I was six years old and went to Kiel, of which I have a vague memory.
14:00Then when I was not quite nine, we went to Frankfurt.
14:05This is where I grew up from the age of nine until twenty.
14:12I went to school in Frankfurt in the Goethe-Gymnasium, which was a very good school, although I didn't like it at all.
14:26They made me study Latin and Greek, which I found uninteresting, instead of mathematics and science, which I wanted to know.
14:37My university days were very happy because at last I could do what I wanted to do.
14:52In München there was a very famous professor of theoretical physics, Sommerfeld, who had done a great deal of research on his own,
15:04but whose main fame was in training the most excellent young people, many Nobel Prize winners.
15:14There were Pauli and Heisenberg, two of the most important figures in the birth of quantum mechanics in 1925 and later times.
15:29I was terribly lucky because just as I was starting with Sommerfeld, just as I was starting what nowadays in America would be called graduate study,
15:47the papers by Heisenberg and Schrodinger came out.
15:52Schrodinger put Heisenberg's theory into a form much more suitable for calculation.
16:00Once you had Schrodinger's formulation of quantum mechanics, you really could calculate, you could calculate anything.
16:10However, Sommerfeld also taught us, and that was his strong point, taught us rigorous mathematics as applied to physics.
16:22He taught us how to solve differential equations, which is about the basis of any theoretical description of physical phenomena.
16:36And I believe I got a better training in mathematical physics than most students get nowadays.
16:47Sommerfeld had promised me that he would see that I would get a Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship.
16:56This was a very useful type of fellowships given by the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled young scientists to go to other countries.
17:09and I was permitted thereby to spend half a year in England with Fowler, a famous theoretical physicist in statistical mechanics,
17:26and then another half a year in Rome working with Fermi.
17:34Fermi was only three or four years older than I, but he was already very famous when I went to him.
17:43And he taught me something which Sommerfeld had never taught me.
17:48Namely, he taught me to look at problems lightly, to look at them just with my mind,
17:59and with very little pencil and paper, with very little mathematics.
18:04The story is told about him from his later time, that students would come to him with a problem,
18:12with a problem, and have an extremely complicated solution of that.
18:19Fermi would sit down and look at the solution and say,
18:23I don't understand that.
18:25You can't.
18:27It would take me days to go through all your mathematics,
18:32but let's see what the problem really is.
18:36And then, in 20 minutes, he would explain to this doctoral student just how to solve the problems,
18:44on which the doctoral student had spent half a year.
19:06There were tremendously high predictions of the oil consumption and energy consumption by the year 2000.
19:17In those predictions, everybody has given up.
19:20Now everybody is aware that our energy consumption cannot increase very much.
19:27I am coming on Sunday, this coming Sunday.
19:33In Europe or Japan, for instance, there is very little waste of energy.
19:41And there is very little one can do to reduce the energy consumption.
19:48In most countries, in Europe, there is no abundance of coal.
19:57There are essentially only two countries in Western Europe that have coal,
20:02and they don't have any special abundance.
20:07So, the coal road is open to Europe only to a limited extent.
20:16And for the same reason, even more, Europe cannot make synthetic fuels.
20:26There is not the raw material, namely coal, to make synthetic fuels from.
20:33There is even less shale oil, which is, for the United States, one of the most useful substitute fuels.
20:43So, that, I am afraid, leaves just one source of energy, which is available to all countries, and that is nuclear power.
20:55Well, why did all this happen? May I have the first slide?
21:00Now, for the United States, I believe there can be a program which could be very successful if people really put their minds on it.
21:13And that is the production of petroleum, first, energy conservation, second, making of synthetic fuels, third, much more use of coal, and fourth, abundant use of nuclear power.
21:32It shows that before the year 2000, oil production would reach a maximum and would then decay without any stopping.
21:46Now, the next slide gives a very similar curve.
21:50In fact, this curve here is just the same as I have projected.
21:57The other curve is the import of treasure, gold and silver, from the Americas to Spain around 1600.
22:11That went exactly the same way.
22:16And at this point, Spain went bankrupt.
22:21This is just the point where we are now.
22:25So, our problem is not to go bankrupt in energy.
22:31What can we conclude?
22:33First, the energy crisis is real.
22:37It is not something concocted by the big oil companies.
22:42The oil companies surely profit from the crisis, but they are not the cause of it.
22:48The cause are these curves.
22:50There just isn't enough oil.
22:52Actually, this is not a crisis.
22:57It is a permanent condition, one which we and our children will have to live with all our lives.
23:07In April of 1933, about two months after the Nazis took over power, I was teaching in Tübingen when the first anti-Jewish laws were published by the Nazi government.
23:25And they said that nobody could hold a position in any of the federal government or the state governments who had at least one Jewish grandparents.
23:47Now, I had two Jewish grandparents, so it was perfectly clear that I could not hold any state position in Germany.
23:57Since I wanted to be at a university and wanted to do science, scientific research and teaching, it was clear that I would lose my job.
24:12And this very soon happened.
24:16So I packed up in September of 1933, I left Germany for Manchester.
24:27I had a very happy time in Manchester, especially because one of the other people there, in a similar position as I, was Rudolf Peierls, who had been in Munich as a fellow graduate student a couple of years earlier.
24:49He was a very stimulating physicist.
24:56In addition to that, he invited me to live at his house.
25:00He was married and had a baby just at that time.
25:04And occasionally I had to take care of the baby while the Peierls' parents went out for the evening, but that was very rare.
25:13But the important thing was that Rudolf Peierls was full of contact with present day physics.
25:23And he knew much more than I did what problems were actually important and in the mind of the people who were working most actively.
25:36And so at Manchester, sometimes together with Rudolf Peierls, sometimes alone, I did a lot of work on two subjects.
25:48One was nuclear physics and the other was, well, what one would now call quantum electrodynamics.
26:00In particular, on the question, what does an electric quantum, a gamma ray, do in making pairs of electrons?
26:15Together with Heitler, we developed the theory of the way how such electron pairs are produced by gamma rays.
26:28And that theory is still the basis of all experimental investigations and is very important for present day physics, both experimental and theoretical.
26:46Well, as I said, we also went into nuclear physics and that I did together with Peierls.
26:53Nuclear physics was just beginning to become a science.
26:58Until that time, it had been an art.
27:02Lord Rutherford had started it back in Montreal in the early days of the century.
27:10But until that time, it had to be done with the particles which nature gives us, namely alpha particles which come out of radioactive nuclear like radium.
27:23Now, for the first time, accelerators became available.
27:30One particular invention was that by Cockroft and Walton.
27:37This particular Cockroft-Walton accelerator is in Los Alamos and was considered a sufficiently important invention to receive the Nobel Prize.
27:50And it really marked the beginning of real experimental nuclear physics because for the first time it was possible for physicists to get the particles they wanted, at the energy they wanted and on the target they wanted.
28:11We learned many things about the nucleus at that time.
28:22The one point which interested Peierls and me the most was an experiment done by Chadwick and Goldhaber on the disintegration of the deuteron by gamma rays, that is, by electromagnetic radiation.
28:40But then there was the question of the mechanism of this disintegration of the deuteron by the simplest mechanism, namely just letting an electric field act on the proton.
28:55Chadwick told Peierls and me on the visit, you will surely not be able to solve that problem.
29:03So, of course, the next thing we did when returning home was to work on that problem, and in a few weeks we did have a solution, which, by the way, is still right.
29:18And we then went on to discuss in more detail how the deuteron is held together by nuclear forces.
29:29It consists of one proton and one neutron.
29:33And that is really the basis, the basic force in an atomic nucleus.
29:43Many of the anti-nuclear people keep asking the question, what if?
29:50For instance, in connection with the Three Mile Island accident, they like to ask, what if there had been a meltdown?
30:02And people have been conditioned to believe that a meltdown is an ultimate catastrophe.
30:11Well, there was no meltdown.
30:14By means of the automatic safety devices in the reactor, a meltdown was prevented.
30:24And also by one action of one of the operators.
30:31But the Presidential Commission, which investigated the Three Mile Island accident, came to the conclusion that even if there had been a meltdown,
30:43probably there would have been very little radioactivity released to the public because the radioactivity would have sunk into the ground,
30:54and the Earth is an extremely good medium to filter, to filter anything from the outside.
31:04After all, the common way to get clean water is to filter the water through sand or Earth.
31:17The anti-nuclear people like to picture a nuclear accident in the most gruesome colours that you can imagine.
31:29A thing which has a chance of once in a hundred million years is presented as if it were trouble which we should expect from any reactor within the next year.
31:48So, and they know this very well.
31:52They know very well that they are dishonest, and they are dishonest in making these presentations.
32:01Well, the Three Mile Island accident, and I do want to call it by the right name, it was an accident.
32:10It was quite substantial accident, and we don't want to see it repeated.
32:17The accident started because the pressure valve didn't seat back into its seat as it should have,
32:28but it mostly was due to the operators who did not realize what was happening.
32:35They did not realize that this valve was open and that water was coming out at a great rate into the reactor building,
32:46and then other parts.
32:49Pure foolishness.
32:51Automatic gadgets worked like a charm.
32:55Should we eliminate the operators altogether?
32:59Obviously, this would be impossible.
33:05What is needed instead is a much better interface between man and machine.
33:13Lots of data are constantly collected in the reactor, and some of these data are not displayed properly to the operators.
33:22In many cases, the display covers only what is needed for a normal operation.
33:28For instance, the temperature stops at a maximum of 600 degrees Fahrenheit.
33:35But during the accident, the temperature went to 2,000 degrees, which was very well recorded by the thermocouples inside the reactor, but not shown to the operators.
33:50That's crazy.
33:52One of the NASA people suggested that at every nuclear power station there should be a computer simulator of a reactor.
34:02The operators would have to train on this simulator at least once a week, and this would also solve another important problem, namely that the operators get terribly bored.
34:19I came to Cornell in February of 1935.
34:26I found the people extremely friendly, extremely hospitable.
34:33They really embraced me, and they made me part of the family.
34:38Within a few weeks, I felt that I belonged.
34:43So I began writing a long review paper about nuclear physics, which was very quickly accepted before it was fully written by the Reviews of Modern Physics,
35:04and Physics, which is a very prestigious journal which gives general papers reviewing a whole subject in physics.
35:13Instead of one paper, it became three successive papers, and they later on became the textbook for most of the young physicists in America, as well as other countries, to learn nuclear physics.
35:33It was a very happy time in research, although politically in Europe it was not a happy time at all.
35:42Of course, I followed the events in Europe at the time.
35:48Fission was discovered late in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Strassmann in Berlin Dahlem in what was then called the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.
36:05The findings of Hahn and Strassmann were most peculiar, and nobody quite understood what to make of them until Hahn's lifelong collaborator, Lise Meitner, and her nephew Otto Frisch explained just a week or two later what was happening.
36:28And Hahn's experiments showed very clearly that under the influence of slow neutrons, uranium would split into two more or less equal parts and release an enormous amount of energy in doing so.
36:47They then began a feverish activity in several of the major scientific countries of the world to actually confirm and make use of this chain reaction.
37:04There was a big project in Germany, in England, and in the United States, and very soon Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt pointing out the possibility of making a weapon from uranium and the danger that might exist if Nazi Germany got such a weapon first.
37:32Of course, I thought very hard whether it was right to make an atomic bomb, and I was fully aware that an atomic bomb would have unprecedented destructive power.
37:49I discussed it for a long time with my wife.
37:53In contrast to some members of the project, I did tell my wife what we were after.
38:01I never told her any of the details, how it was to be done, but she knew that we were trying to make an atomic bomb and that this would have destructive power at least a thousand times that of the biggest bomb used in World War II.
38:21She was somewhat against my joining, but was aware just as I was of the danger that the other side would get it first, and therefore she more or less consented to my joining.
38:40Well, our specific project started in the summer of 1942 with a very small group of theoretical physicists who assembled under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer in Berkeley.
38:58And because Robert Oppenheimer knew New Mexico very well, he and General Groves, who was in charge of the overall project, decided that this was the place where we should do it.
39:13After some deliberation, they chose Los Alamos.
39:18The climate was very agreeable, and the only thing we didn't have was water.
39:25There were lots of very high-class scientists here, but we were terribly busy.
39:34We didn't have an awful lot of time to think of matters outside of our work.
39:41We did have the normal kind of social gatherings.
39:48We had occasionally some big feast, a dance where everybody came together.
40:00Most people got drunk. I did not. I don't like that.
40:05But outside of work, we had quite a good time.
40:12It was a terribly hard period of work.
40:19I don't think I have ever worked so hard in my life, before or after.
40:27Because not only did we need to solve some scientific problems, but in addition, we needed to do it on a time schedule.
40:37It had to be ready when the material was ready.
40:42And strangely enough, it was ready just about at the right time.
40:49So plans were made for an actual test of the weapon in mid-1945, in July 1945,
41:04which was done south of here in the desert in a proving ground,
41:12which was known as the Alamogordo Proving Ground.
41:17Half the laboratory went down there into the field into very primitive conditions to actually assemble everything.
41:29I went down together with about 50 other people just before the explosion actually was to take place.
41:41And the sound you just heard was not an atomic explosion, but merely an explosion of ordinary explosive,
41:50which is constantly being used here at Los Alamos to further investigate the perfection of nuclear weapons.
42:01The test went very well, and it was followed then very briefly.
42:03The test went very well, and it was followed then very quickly.
42:21The test went very well, and it was followed then very quickly in early August by two drops
42:35of atomic weapons on Japan, the first on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki.
42:50In spite of knowing perfectly well what would happen, we all were very shocked.
43:00And we all felt that it was alright to use this to end a war, but it was terribly dangerous
43:11to have these weapons around at the beginning of a future war.
43:18Even untold destruction could be brought on cities and on the population of the countries
43:27involved.
43:30Nowadays, the spirit in the United States is in favor of an unlimited arms race.
43:38This doesn't do anybody any good.
43:40It only makes war more likely.
43:43It only makes it more uncertain what the destruction would be, and it could, combined with other
43:52doctrines of using the weapons, it could actually lead to a first strike.
43:59I think our present policy is awful.
44:02I think it has to be reversed.
44:05We have to ratify SALT II.
44:07We have to have treaties of limitation which follow upon that.
44:14After the war, I left Los Alamos.
44:19The laboratory continued, but I wanted to come back to Cornell University where I had been
44:26before the war, refusing an invitation from another university.
44:33Physics very soon became very exciting, and in my mind the most important thing was to return
44:42to pure scientific research, which after all was my love before the war and has remained
44:50my love all the time.
44:52From time to time, you observe in the sky a star which bursts out with enormous amounts of light.
45:11One of those stars is believed to have been the star of Bethlehem.
45:16One such star was observed by the Chinese in 1054, and one star was observed by Kepler in the 16th century.
45:32Well, these stars have light maybe one milliard as much as that of the sun.
45:45In one single year, they emit as much light as the sun emits during all its life.
45:57It's almost unbelievable.
46:04By 1970, astronomers had discovered a new type of star, which is known as a neutron star.
46:14Everybody believed that neutron stars come about as the result of a supernova explosion.
46:23So the next project I got interested in, and that's what I'm interested in at the moment, is a supernova explosion.
46:33We believe that we have a theory of the supernova.
46:39A star of the size of our sun has a fairly quiet life for 10 billion years approximately, half of which is in the past and half is in the future.
46:54And then this star goes on a rampage and suddenly blows up into a big, much bigger star, a red giant.
47:04And then finally it subsides and becomes a white dwarf, which emits very little energy.
47:11But if you take a star 10 times as big as the sun, that is 10 times the mass, then after being a red giant, it does not become a white dwarf.
47:25Instead of that, it remains a red giant, and it uses up successively different types of nuclear fuel.
47:35Normal stars, like our sun at the moment, use hydrogen as the fuel and make hydrogen into helium.
47:44Then in the red giant stage, they make helium into carbon, and then carbon into still heavier elements.
47:53And finally, the last nuclear reaction of this type is one which makes silicon into iron.
48:01Now once you have made iron, you cannot go any farther.
48:07Any further nuclear reaction would consume energy rather than produce energy.
48:14The sun, of course, produces energy from its nuclear furnace.
48:19Now what happens when you no longer can produce nuclear energy?
48:26What happens is that the center of the star collapses under the influence of gravitation,
48:33which is no longer opposed by any nuclear energy production.
48:38And this collapse takes place in a terribly short time.
48:44The center which is involved in this has about the same mass as our sun.
48:50And this collapses in about one second from a size about equal to that of the earth
48:59of the earth to a size of about 30 kilometers in diameter.
49:06Now this is, of course, a fabulous thing to happen.
49:13It happens at tremendous velocity, and because of this very sudden collapse,
49:20there is an equally sudden and still stronger rebound.
49:26And in this rebound, a shockwave is generated which goes through the entire star.
49:33This shockwave is what we are presently working on.
49:37We have been able to calculate the energy which goes into the shockwave,
49:45and that energy is about equal to the total energy which the sun will emit during its entire 10 billion years of life.
49:57That energy is all in the shockwave which goes out through the star.
50:03We also have assumed throughout the calculation that we start from a spherical star with small rotation so that we get no asymmetries.
50:16One of the things that has to be done in the future is to see what such asymmetries will do to it.
50:23But we claim that the asymmetries are not needed to make a neutron star and to make the supernova phenomenon.
50:37The initial big bang in the beginning of the universe made only hydrogen and helium and nothing else.
50:56And so all the elements that we see around us, all the elements in this garden and in ourselves, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron,
51:10any other element than hydrogen and helium, was originally made in the supernova.
51:16And therefore it is terribly important that this material is distributed over the galaxy by the supernova explosion.
51:26You would not be alive if there had not been supernovas before the sun was made.
51:34I believe that at the moment we have sufficient natural gas,
51:44and it seems that in the last few years much more natural gas was discovered than oil.
51:54I believe that the real source of oil is in oil shale.
52:01It is obvious that we want to encourage coal production
52:07coal production and coal use for synthetics.
52:19And it is obvious, as we always have done,
52:22that we want to encourage the building of nuclear plants at the rate that is economically feasible.
52:36We should not wait for miracles on the solar side.
52:41You just get very little from the sun by any of the so-called soft technologies.
52:48There is no way that I know how you can use solar energy economically and with a large yield.
53:00Maybe I should add one more point.
53:05No technology comes in extremely quickly.
53:11If, for instance, fusion turns out to be feasible, which I expect during this decade,
53:19that doesn't make a fusion plant.
53:22And it doesn't make a fusion plant economically.
53:25It is almost certain that fusion will have a disadvantage.
53:30Namely, it is almost certain that it will be considerably more expensive than power from fission.
53:40And people will then have a choice whether they want to pay, let us say, twice as much for their power for the benefit of having less radioactivity.
53:56Twice as much still is cheaper than solar energy by any method that we now know.
54:03But twice as much is a lot because even fission power is not exactly cheap.
54:10So this at that time will actually be a choice.
54:16Today there is very little choice.
54:19The question is, you indicated that nuclear waste stored 2,000 feet beneath the surface would have an extremely long migration time to the surface in the order of tens of thousands of years.
54:33How much storage space is there at an appropriate location at that depth compared to the quantity of waste material that would need to be stored in a nuclear economy?
54:44I am happy to answer that question.
54:51There is almost unlimited space.
54:54There are many, many media which are suitable for the storage of waste.
55:03Shale and granite are among the favorites at the moment.
55:11Basalt would probably be very good as well.
55:14Salt is probably quite satisfactory if you have the right container in the center.
55:23I would estimate that of the three million square miles of the United States, at least half a million would be suitable.
55:36And something like a 10 square mile area is enough to store all the waste which will be produced until the year 2010.
55:51The key to nuclear safety remains people.
55:55Not enough bright young people go into nuclear power.
56:00This is largely due to the negative public attitude.
56:05The danger exists that the anti-nuclear people may have made a self-fulfilling prophecy.
56:15They have said over and over again that nuclear power is not safe.
56:21At present, I believe it is safe.
56:24But if the number and quality of people going into nuclear power declines, then reactors someday actually may become unsafe.
56:38Nobody can guarantee absolute safety.
56:42There is nothing in this world which is free of risk.
56:47And nuclear power is no exception.
56:49But the risk from nuclear power, in my opinion, is far less than from any other way of producing power and less than from most other industrial enterprises.
57:07And, of course, industrial enterprises, in turn, are far less risky than having industrial civilization come to an end.
57:18The risk of life in a primitive society is just enormously greater than it is in an industrial society.
57:29What people like myself are advocating is not an unlimited growth of energy consumption.
57:41Many of the anti-people accuse us of that, that we want unlimited growth.
57:49We don't.
57:50But we do not want decay.
57:53And if we don't do anything reasonable, then there will be decay, not just no growth, but decay, decline of everything that we are doing nowadays.
58:08So we do not want decay.