Jack Steinberger Interview

I think the energy question is the most threatening question to our society. And I'm just shocked how little is going on compared to what should go on to find a solution for the future. I can't remember when I was your age. But in my lifetime the population has tripled and the energy use has gone up by a factor of almost 10. And all of our well-being these days is based on this energy which we use. And so this cannot go on if we keep on increasing the population and increasing the energy use as we have been doing. The known resources of energy and 80% of the energy which we use now is fossil fuels. These fossil fuels will be gone in about 60 years. So what will people do then? Right now their whole life depends on using up this fossil fuel. When the fossil fuels are gone people will have no choice but to adjust in some more reasonable way. But my fear is that the thing will happen so rapidly, the catastrophe will come so rapidly. Everything now depends on our using, I mean the ability for people to survive in our society depends on the use of this energy. And when it's not there and it will happen rather fast that it will disappear. Well it is happening rather fast and to make a reasonable replacement it takes time. You can't do it in 10 years, it takes at least 30 years or something like that, maybe more. What are the options? Yes, I see no way of extending these renewables so much. One renewable which is now pushed very much is wind energy and another one is solar panels. And they have a problem namely that wind energy can only have the windmills in the best places where you can put windmills. They operate about 40% of the time and what you do the other 60% of the time if you don't have any fossil fuels. And I ask myself the question of what can you do if you want to get rid of the use of fossil fuels and leave some fossil fuels maybe for your children or for my children. And there I see a difficulty with wind and solar panels which are very much promoted these days because I don't know how to store electricity and these things produce electricity directly. But I don't know how to store it for the time when the sun doesn't shine or when the wind doesn't blow. And nuclear energy is for me not the best alternative because also uranium is in very limited supply. So people don't know how long they can go with uranium if they want to really use nuclear. And it has some other problems for instance people haven't managed to figure out how they want to store the nuclear waste. And there are some problems with possible use of nuclear facilities for making nuclear weapons. So I prefer nuclear to fossil fuels but if I really want to find a solution I'm not focusing on nuclear. I have nothing really against nuclear energy and in any case nuclear energy for me is much better to use than fossil fuels. I'm not afraid of nuclear accidents because we've had nuclear energy around for quite a while and the number of people who have been killed for me and I think you can make the argument quite clearly is much less than the number of coal miners who have died in producing coal or also in oil wells. People get killed and I'm not afraid of nuclear accidents compared to other things, people, the accidents in whatever you do. There is a problem around, well there is more than one problem. One problem with nuclear is that uranium which is all nuclear plants now use in the first place uranium. Some of the uranium is power plants and produce plutonium which you can also use but it starts with uranium. And this uranium is limited and as best I know it's really quite limited. Another thing is nuclear waste. How do you store it? And people propose that I think you could store it but nobody wants this nuclear waste in his backyard and countries haven't been able to solve that problem. To the extent to which uranium is limited people have been proposing to make thorium breeders. There is much more thorium apparently and you can breed proper material using thorium in breeder reactors. I'm focusing on the only thing which I know and that is so called thermal solar energy where you heat up some fluid to a high temperature with solar energy and you do this in the deserts. And a few percent of the desert would be enough for the energy for the whole world as we now use it. And you store it overnight. You store the heat in some way. And there are technologies for storing the heat. It's not absolutely convenient but it's possible. And then you have 95% of the time when the sun shines in the desert you have electrical energy when you convert this heat to electrical energy with some kind of steam turbine. And right now this technology is known. You can do it. And with presently known technology it costs about twice as much as fossil fuel electricity production. But in the future fossil fuels will be more expensive. And this technology will certainly improve because very little has been done to explore it until now. So that I think it could easily be foreseen that if one really would try to explore this technology that even within 10 years it would be cheaper than present fossil fuel. But people are not really pursuing it. I don't really know why. I think it has a very good reason and it isn't that expensive. It costs some money. But compared to all the money we spend on energy production it's a trivial amount that would be necessary to really explore this technology in a reasonable way. Yes for me, for Europe, the thing which would be the most beneficial is the development of this thermosolar technology. And well I mean for the world but Europe included. But this particular project for Europe which is absolutely clear to me should be done which is not being done. This desert tech industrial initiative was really proposing is that in the African deserts, in North African deserts, we install some pilot power plants to test different technologies and transmitting them to Europe. Transmitting the energy they produce to Europe and as nearly as I can tell this would require an initial investment of the order of 30 billion Euro. Something like that because you can't make very small ones because to transmit it to Europe you need transmission power lines and you can't build very low power lines across the oceans and over long distances. You have to make it worthwhile, you have to have a certain minimum and I think a 30 billion project to make maybe 5 gigawatts of solar power which you transmit to Europe would be a minimum size project and you would get most of your money back. Because the 5 gigawatts over 20 years is quite a bit but it's not being done. But such a pilot project using different technologies would be a very clear step in the right direction. Well I think right now with the limited resources which have been put to its development mostly in Spain, the cost is about a factor to more than fossil fuel costs now. And the cost is about one half for the concentration of the solar energy into thermal energy and the other half is divided more or less equally in the transmission networks. By the way the transmission, how to do it is known, the technology, nothing has to be invented and it's not likely that anything very much better can be invented. But the storage is not known. It has not been really explored in an adequate way and also the best medium for what you heat up, the material that's best also has to be studied more. What do you do for the energy for transport? Which is, by the way, as best I know, the energy used for transport now is maybe something like 30%. It's not the bulk but it's a good fraction clearly. You need energy but you also need coal. If you don't have any coal I don't know how to do it. But there is carbon around and CO2 for instance and with energy you can convert CO2 into methane but it's not very cheap in energy. It takes a lot of energy to make a given amount of energy in the CH4. You lose a lot of energy. So what the method is of using thermal solar for making a transport fuel I've not tried to study but it's a good question. Clearly it's a problem. Ten years ago, maybe it's a little less than ten years, especially in Germany a big mediatic goal by some ten of big companies like Siemens and two of the four big German electricity producers. Something they call desert tech industrial initiative which was very much covered in the press where they proposed to really explore this technology just getting energy from the desert to Europe. I'm sorry I'm focusing on Europe. I live in Europe. In fact they've done nothing in the ten years since. How can they be convinced and come out to the press with a clear conviction that something here should be done? But it's not happening and I don't know why. It's clearly a fault of our economic and of our political systems because I think we should do it and we're not doing it so it's somebody's fault. Our governments now are national. We don't have a global government. It would be easier if we had a global government because if you are German and you do something it costs you some money. But one of the problems is that different countries have different perspectives. If you're an American you want to keep up what you've got in America which is the most flagrant misuse of energy anywhere. If you're in China you want to increase the well-being of the Chinese who are much more poor now than many other parts of the world which can see themselves improving their conditions using present resources. And clearly these problems don't help but I think nevertheless the problems are there and the challenge is there and we should be capable of facing it but we're not. Well for me Fukushima made no impression. I mean here was a tsunami, the good lord sometimes does something which was unexpected and there was an accident. About 10,000 people got killed just with the onrushing waters and as best I know not even 100 people got killed because of the radioactivity produced in the nuclear accident. So for me Fukushima has no impact on how I view these things but the Fukushima thing has been used by the nuclear fobs, the people who are afraid of anything nuclear and has been used very successfully. But in my opinion in an irrational way they just use the fear of people to make them now afraid of the nuclear because here something happened which was clearly unpleasant. Mrs. Merkel the Chancellor who is a physicist and who I think therefore understands what the real issues are followed the anti-nuclear fobs in a decision for Germany to get rid of nuclear energy stations of nuclear power plants within a rather short year which is fairly expensive for Germany because to replace it costs some money. But what was said at the time when the government decided this is they will try to replace it by renewable energies. On the other hand and they knew it at the time when they made this mediatic statement this is not possible to use possible renewable installations and what they are doing in fact is using coal and gas newly created power plants to replace the nuclear power plants. By the way my guess is that even so they have agreed to get rid of nuclear power in that rather short time they won't do it. They will decide later on when they see how expensive it is to replace it to keep some of these nuclear plants a bit longer. But for me it was clearly a bad decision but Germany made it given the pressure from the large part of the population which is afraid of nuclear and why didn't the French do it. And the French their nuclear power installations are much bigger than the German they are more like 70 or 80% I don't know the exact number and so it would be much more expensive and almost unthinkable for the French to do it. And so they couldn't get themselves to it's inconceivable to really just bang bang get rid of that. I think that the two are different and one thing is to want energy and another thing is to want nuclear weapons and I am not afraid of nuclear energy because it makes it more easy to make nuclear weapons. I think people who want nuclear weapons Iran right now wants nuclear weapons and I think they have every right to want nuclear weapons given that they are threatened by other nations nuclear weapons. But I think their nuclear energy policy has no bearing on the work they are willing to do to try to make nuclear weapons. Ok I am very concerned about the threat posed by nuclear weapons and for me the only solution and this is held by I think this point of view by essentially all of the physicists I know. The only solution is to get rid of nuclear weapons globally and this would be possible and I think the country which really is responsible for what goes on in the world is America. America has maybe the largest arsenal and it insists that nuclear weapons are essential for it's security. American government is very much dominated by the Pentagon and one example was for instance Obama now when he stood for his first election he came as a famous Prague speech where he came out for global nuclear disarmament. Very clearly and in fact he has done very little. If America in my opinion if America would push for global nuclear disarmament I think other countries would have to follow even Russia. Russia is the most interesting other case of people who insist that they want nuclear weapons. Right now it's for Russia the only remnant of the Soviet superpower status. In other armaments they no longer can make that pretension. But even Russia in my opinion would go along and there is no question in my mind that China or India. China has nuclear weapons because America has them and because Russia has them and India has nuclear weapons because China has them and Pakistan has them because India has them. So if America insists on getting rid of them all the countries will follow. I think people can convince themselves if they really want to get rid of nuclear weapons that they can do it. I am Jack Steinberger. I am a physicist and I am 91 years old.