Translator: Amanda Chu
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Around the world,
people look to California for leadership
when it comes to clean energy
and climate change.
In 2006,
we were one of the first states to pass
aggressive climate change legislation,
and our emissions
have come down ever since.
Last year, we passed legislation
that requires that by 2030,
we get half of our power from renewables.
And our per capita energy consumption
is some of the lowest
in the United States.
Now I've been in California for 20 years,
all of that time
as an environmental activist
and 10 years of that as an energy analyst.
And so, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit
that I never actually questioned
any aspect of that story I just told you.
All the facts I mentioned are correct;
they just end up painting
a really misleading story.
So what do I mean?
Well, we do get a lot of power from solar.
Last year, we got 10%
of our electricity from solar,
but it was actually
more solar energy than we could use.
This spring,
we actually had to cut off the power
from our solar farms
so it wouldn't overwhelm the grid.
And we've been adding more and more
clean energy in aggregate terms,
but you can see that since 1990,
the percentage of power
from clean energy sources
has actually declined from 51% to 46%.
What about emissions?
Well, emissions did decline,
as I mentioned, since 2000,
but the interesting thing is
they actually declined
less than the national average.
And I mentioned before,
the climate legislation in 2006.
Well, here's the funniest part -
our emissions actually declined
four times faster
before we passed that climate legislation.
Well, what about energy consumption?
Well, the truth is
that our low per capita energy consumption
is a result of a couple of main factors.
The first is that our energy prices are
much higher than the rest of the country,
so our energy intensive industries
had to relocate elsewhere,
things like manufacturing and factories.
And then the other reason is
that we live in a really
temperate climate,
and so we just don't need
as much heating and air conditioning
for our buildings and homes
as other parts of the country.
In other words, in California,
we're not actually leading
the clean energy revolution,
we're losing it.
Why is that?
Well, to understand the reason,
we have to go back in time
exactly 50 years,
to a very special moment in American
and, I think, in human history;
and that's the rise of nuclear fear.
Now most people don't realize
that in the 1950s and '60s,
a lot of environmentalists
were actually pro-nuclear.
I mean, the Sierra Club argued
for nuclear power plants
as a way to not have to build
hydroelectric dams,
which require covering up
a lot of the landscape
and doing a lot of damage
over a lot of areas.
In 1966,
there ended up being a really big debate
inside the Sierra Club,
which was a very
powerful organization back then,
really the main environmental
organization in the state.
And the debate was over whether or not
to build a nuclear power plant
just a half an hour away from here -
Diablo Canyon.
The most eloquent advocate
for building Diablo Canyon was this man,
Will Siri.
He was a Biophysicist
at the University of California, Berkeley,
and a member of the Sierra Club
board of directors.
He was also a pretty amazing mountaineer;
here he was in the Himalayas.
He and his buddies almost
starved to death in the Himalayas.
Back then, you had to be
a badass mountaineer
to be on the board of Sierra Club.
(Laughter)
But Siri didn't just like nuclear power,
Siri loved it.
He wrote, "Nuclear power is one of the
chief long-term hopes for conservation."
What did he mean by that?
Well, cheap, affordable,
and abundant power, he argued,
was essential to allow people to move
to the cities, to get jobs in the cities,
and that would allow the countryside
to return to grasslands and forests
for endangered species to come back.
And if you're going to have
all those people and have all that power,
it had to be clean.
And if you didn't want
to do hydroelectric dams anymore,
you're really just left
with one main alternative,
and that was nuclear.
Now, Siri had some very fierce opponents
inside the Sierra Club;
maybe the most important one was this man,
David Brower.
He was the executive director
of the Sierra Club,
and he made the opposite argument to Siri:
"If a doubling of the state's population
in the next 20 years
is encouraged by providing
the power resources for this growth,
California's scenic character
will be destroyed," he argued.
In other words,
the problem wasn't
about cities and countryside,
it was just too many people
coming to California.
Well, a few years later,
one of the Sierra Club's top advisers
even went so far as to say,
"Look, even if it's clean power,
it doesn't matter."
This is Amory Lovins.
And he said,
"It'd be little short of disastrous
for us to discover a source
of clean, cheap, abundant energy
because of what we would do with it."
Now, you might be wondering what happened.
Well, obviously, you know
that Diablo Canyon exists.
But here's maybe
the most surprising thing:
In 1966, 1967, and then again in 1969,
the Sierra Club Board of Directors
and their membership
voted in favor of Diablo Canyon,
and support during that time
actually grew.
In the final vote, it was three to one
in favor of building Diablo Canyon.
Well, after this loss,
David Brower left the Sierra Club in 1969.
He founded a new organization
called "Friends of the Earth."
He knew that he had to do something
different than what they had done before
to stop nuclear power.
And he remembered back to 1962,
when a young activist
named David Pesonen came to him,
and they worked out going to
see a different nuclear power plant
that was being proposed
in Northern California.
Here is David Pesonen
and his friend Hazel Mitchell.
David Pesonen came back
to the Sierra Club Board of Directors,
and he said, "Look,
I think I can stop this plant,
but we're not going to just do it
with the conventional
conservation arguments and tools.
We're going to have to make
a really different argument;
we're going to have to argue
that nuclear power plants
are similar to nuclear weapons."
And the Sierra Club Board of Directors
was pretty upset by this.
I mean, almost everybody on it
was, like, not willing to go there.
I mean, they all knew
that nuclear power plant meltdowns
could potentially be very bad,
but they were not like
nuclear bombs going off.
Pesonen, though, was undeterred,
and he actually ended up
leaving the Sierra Club.
And very shortly after,
he and Hazel Mitchell produced a report
that said that if this
nuclear power plant went forward,
it would create death dust,
a kind of fallout,
that would poison the milk.
And they organized local dairies,
and in the process of doing that,
they discovered an extraordinarily
powerful invisible force,
and that's the fear of mothers
that their children might be poisoned.
This finally affected
the Sierra Club as a whole.
By 1974, the head
of the Sierra Club was saying,
"Our campaign stressing
the hazards of nuclear power
will supply a rationale
for increasing regulation …
and add to the cost of the industry …"
This is from an
internal strategy document.
In five years,
David Bower's fear-based strategy
had done, outside the Sierra Club,
what he had failed to do inside of it,
and that was to make the organization
and, really, the rest
of the environmental movement
anti-nuclear.
Now the Sierra Club at the time
found a strong ally
in the young new governor of California,
Jerry Brown.
And between 1975 and 1978,
they would kill
two major nuclear power plants
with multiple reactors on them.
David Pesonen had a ballot initiative
that was in the works,
and Jerry Brown used that
to pass the legislation
that effectively outlawed nuclear power,
with the exception of nuclear power plants
already under construction,
including Diablo Canyon.
Later, when one
of the historians came back
and was asking questions
about what went on
with anti-nuclear activists,
he interviewed this man, Martin Litton,
who was one of the first ones
to photograph Diablo Canyon from the sky.
And he asked Martin,
he said, "How worried were you,
actually, about meltdowns?"
Martin said,
"I really didn't care
about possible nuclear accidents
because there are too many people anyway …
(Laughter)
I think that playing dirty
if you have a noble end is fine."
At the time, Jerry Brown
had two very close political allies.
The first is a very famous
Hollywood actress named Jane Fonda -
there she's in the middle
and her husband Tom Hayden on the right.
And in 1978,
Jane was approached by the actor
Michael Douglas with a screenplay.
He said that you
might be interested in this.
She was very interested in it.
In the next year, in 1979,
this film came out:
The China Syndrome.
The China Syndrome is a political thriller
about a nuclear power plant
that almost melts down
due to corporate greed and corruption.
The plant itself looks
eerily similar to Diablo Canyon,
there's an earthquake -
you get the idea.
The name of the film actually came
from a kind of outlandish scenario.
The idea was that
if there were a meltdown,
the hot melted nuclear fuel would melt
all the way through the Earth to China -
(Laughter)
you can see where I'm going.
There's a couple of problems with this.
The first is that China is not actually
on the other side of the Earth
from California,
it's actually much closer to Madagascar,
but I don't think "Madagascar Syndrome"
did well in focus groups.
(Laughter)
The second problem is
that it's physically impossible,
that's just not what nuclear fuels can do.
But Jane Fonda tapped into the same thing
that David Pesonen had discovered
17 years earlier,
which is the fears of mothers.
So there's an extraordinary
moment in the film
when it sort of breaks out
of a normal feature film
into something approaching a documentary,
where she shows ordinary mothers
becoming politically active
to stop a nuclear power plant.
Well, here's the plot twist:
Just 12 days after China Syndrome
comes out in the theaters,
there really is a
nuclear power plant meltdown.
It's at a nuclear plant called
"Three Mile Island" in Pennsylvania;
one of the reactors melted.
And very quickly after this,
Jane Fonda and her husband
Tom Hayden and Jerry Brown
and a set of other folks said,
"This is a major opportunity."
And so they organized
a series of rock concerts
with just the biggest stars of the day -
"No nukes."
And you can see they're doing
the same thing in this poster
that David Pesonen wanted to do in 1962,
which is to tie together
nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs -
you can see the mushroom cloud
in the background.
On stage at the first concert
in Washington DC,
they actually put on stage
a former soldier who had been wounded
during a nuclear bomb test
right before they put on stage
a pregnant mom who was worried
about the impacts of Three Mile Island.
The film had an extraordinary effect
on how the media
covered Three Mile Island.
I mean, the screenwriter for the film
actually said that
the New York Daily News editor,
after he heard about the meltdown,
said, "Who here has seen China Syndrome?
You, you, you.
You're assigned to cover the meltdown."
The film is about
what could have happened.
There's not actually a meltdown in it;
it's the fear of a meltdown happening.
But here we had a full meltdown
and the coverage was very similar -
it was about what could have happened.
Well, part of the reason for that
is that really nothing did.
I mean, you had a full reactor meltdown
and there was no harmful levels
of radiation released -
if you were standing
near the plant at the time,
you would have gotten less radiation
than you get from an x-ray.
The two million people
in the surrounding area
got something, on average,
like 1/6 of a chest x-ray.
So it didn't actually have to do
with what happened,
it was having to do with what we imagined,
and that the imaginary
of the nuclear weapons
was tied up with that.
Several months later,
a few miles away from here,
the governor came, and they spoke
at the "No Nukes" concert
against Diablo Canyon.
He got a standing ovation
for a minute afterwards,
and he led the crowd in chanting,
"No on Diablo! No on Diablo!"
At the time,
Jerry Brown, the Sierra Club
and other anti-nuclear groups said
that we didn't need nuclear power
because we could use energy efficiency
and just reduce how much
electricity we consumed,
to the extent that if
there was still need for power,
we could meet it with solar panels
and wind turbines.
That was what was happening publicly,
but behind the scenes,
something different was happening:
The Sierra Club and Jerry Brown
were working closely with the coal company
to build a coal plant.
The same historian interviewed
all the key actors at the time.
"The governor said,
'I want the Department of Water Resources
to build a coal plant.'
So we embarked on the planning
of a coal plant … a dreadful prospect."
Even back in the 1950s and '60s,
people still understood
that coal was our dirtiest fossil fuel.
You can see what happens
if you just total up
all of the nuclear reactors
that were going to be built
but were killed
by Jerry Brown and his allies -
today we would be getting 88% of our power
from clean energy resources,
instead, we're getting just 46,
and you can see the impact on emissions -
they're twice as high
as they would've been
had we built out all that nuclear.
Jerry Brown was reelected
for a third term in office in 2010.
And as soon as he came in,
he and his allies in and outside
of the administration
had their eyes set on closing
San Onofre and on Diablo Canyon;
they did it through a series of measures,
both regulatory and legislative.
And I mentioned before
that emission declined faster
before 2006 than they did after.
Well, the reason for that is the closure
of our second-to-last nuclear power plant,
San Onofre.
You can see that emissions
had been declining from 2000 to 2010;
from 2011 to 2014, they went up.
All of this starts to challenge the idea
that you don't need nuclear power
to reduce emissions
or substitute for fossil fuels,
and that's not a particularly new idea.
One of the most humanitarian members
of the Sierra Club board,
also happened to be one
of our greatest photographers at the time,
had it just right:
"Nuclear energy is the only
practical alternative that we have
to destroying the environment
with oil and coal."
In 2014, I finally visited Diablo Canyon.
The misinformation campaign, the fear,
really had worked on me.
When I was like 12 or 13 -
I still remember, it's maybe my first time
ever thought about nuclear power -
my sister told me they had been building
a nuclear power plant in California
near earthquake faults,
and I immediately thought
if there was an earthquake in California,
it would be like a nuclear bomb going off.
I didn't believe that by the time
I was at Diablo Canyon in 2014.
And I knew that it wasn't
producing air or water pollution,
but I wasn't prepared for just the
absolutely spectacular sight that I saw.
That, by the way,
actually is a humpback whale
breaching out of the water.
I swear to God - I didn't
Photoshop that in before this talk.
(Laughter)
That plant sits on
about four football fields of land,
an extraordinarily small amount of land,
and it produces power
for three million Californians.
One of the state's top marine biologists,
a man at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, published a report.
An extraordinary thing jumped out at me:
He said the tide pools
around Diablo Canyon
are some of the most pristine
on the west coast,
and the reason is really easy
to understand why -
they don't allow school bus loads
of school children
to go tromping around on the tide pools
and touching the anemones
and grabbing the starfish -
don't get me wrong,
I love taking my kids to the tide pools,
but they cause more damage to them
than a nuclear power plant.
(Laughter)
After seeing this,
I felt like it wouldn't be fair
to just see what I think is one of the
great nuclear power plants in the world,
I needed to also see one of the worst.
And so, I decided to go to Fukushima,
and I interviewed everybody that I could.
And one of the people
that was the most critical
is a guy who has spent a lot of his career
investigating nuclear
power plants in Japan,
sort of a probability risk assessor.
And he sort of hated everything;
it's why I loved him.
(Laughter)
And he wrote the most scathing article,
report, about Fukushima,
so of course I want
to spend time with him.
I had a little bit of trepidation
when we were drinking beers,
and I asked him,
"What did he think of Diablo Canyon?
Everyone's worried that it'll be
something like Fukushima over there."
And without missing a beat,
he just goes, "That's a great plant."
And I said, "Why do you say that?"
And he goes, "Because
the people there care."
And it just struck me
that it had nothing to do with the kind
of machinery or where it was located,
it was about the people,
and it was about the culture.
And I started to wonder, you know,
Is this something
we could actually tell people,
that people would start to understand?
Diablo Canyon is now
supposed to be closed by 2024, 2025.
I've been traveling around the country
for the last ten months raising awareness
that we could actually end up losing
half of our nuclear power before 2030.
If that happens,
then half of the emissions reductions
that we're supposed to get
from the EPA's Clean Power Plan
won't happen.
That's not to mention
the asthma and the premature death
from just the regular pollution.
I've been working with
the climate scientist James Hansen.
Here we are in Illinois, visiting
a couple plants that could be closed,
and it was very nice.
The Wall Street Journal
ended up writing a story about it.
And then that night,
we got a little boost of support
from another really famous
Hollywood actor,
Robert Downey, Jr.
He said, "It's like half the people
who were saying 'No nukes!'
are now realizing nuclear
is the best way to go
for energy for the future.
I think it's natural to reexamine
your beliefs as you age up."
And I thought back, when he said this,
to my own experience.
You have to have a reason
to rethink your beliefs.
Mine was concerns about climate change.
I couldn't figure out
how you double or triple or even quadruple
global electricity production
so that everybody
can be lifted out of poverty
while still reducing our emissions
for climate change.
And I started to wonder,
Is this how nuclear fear ends? -
as we start to care
and as we start to age up?
In the process of trying to save Diablo,
I met two really amazing women:
Heather Matteson and Kristin Zaitz.
They reached out to me,
and they said, "How can we help?"
And I asked them,
"What do you want to do?"
And they said,
"We want to talk to Sierra Club members
and parents who also are concerned
about the same things we are,
about pollution and their kids."
And so they started something
called "Mothers for Nuclear,"
and the focus has really been
both on climate change
but also on just the ordinary
air pollution impacts of nuclear power.
And, you know, as I've reflected
on it some more,
while I don't think it's ever justified
what they did when they tried
to link nuclear power to nuclear weapons,
I think it's understandable
that in the 1960s and the 1970s,
people had some concerns about this
totally new source of electricity.
We didn't have much information
about what would happen,
and there were some reasons
to be fearful of it.
But today, we have over 50 years of data
that all show the same thing -
nuclear is the safest way
to make reliable power.
This is just the most recent study
from the British medical journal "Lancet."
And you can see that most of the deaths
are actually from air pollution,
and that's why nuclear is the safest;
even when you look at the accidents,
the accidents result
in fewer deaths from nuclear
than it does from these
other energy sources.
And if you take just a rough estimate
using the Lancet numbers
to look at Diablo Canyon,
what you find is
that if Diablo was closed early,
it could result in over 5,000
premature deaths.
And reflect on that for a moment,
that our fears of this way
of making electricity
are actually putting us at risk,
they're putting our children at risk,
and the people that are the most affected
are poorer communities
that live near fossil fuel generators.
So after "Mothers for Nuclear"
had this big impact on NPR news,
listened to around the world,
I started to wonder,
"Maybe it'll be that nuclear fear
ends the same way that it begins? -
with the concern of mothers
for their children?"
At the end of June,
"Mothers for Nuclear"
and "Environmental Progress,"
we decided to have a march to speak out
and defend nuclear power in general,
and Diablo Canyon in particular.
So we march through the streets
of San Francisco; there's about 100 of us.
It was one of the most
joyful experiences of my life.
We were singing and chanting.
I couldn't believe there were
that many people that agreed with us.
There was a friend of mine,
Gwyneth Cravens,
who wrote a beautiful book
about nuclear power about ten years ago,
who's also a famous novelist,
writes for The New Yorker.
She agreed to do
civil disobedience with me,
and so we sat in at Greenpeace, 
Sierra Club, and NRDC.
When we were sitting there,
a bunch of students
from UC, Berkeley, of course,
(Laughter)
sort of spontaneously
decided to sit with us.
And then, once the students sat down,
of course everybody else
wanted to sit down.
They're all flashing the V sign.
I thought to myself,
"Is this how nuclear fear ends? -
where the students come first
and then everybody else follows?"
There was a very sweet moment at the end
where two of my friends from Australia,
who are just beautiful people,
and we had just been up swimming
in the river with their kids.
Their daughter just
ran out of the crowd into my lap.
That's Abbie right there, five years old.
She wanted to be a part of the singing,
she wanted to be a part of the joy of it,
and I have such mixed emotions
about it, still.
There was a time when everybody
was sort of staring at us,
and this crowd and people
were both smiling, and I was happy,
but I looked up, and there was Heather,
just on the edge of the crowd,
and she was smiling too,
but her eyes were wide and they were red
and they were starting to fill with water.
And that just struck me right then
that we're going to overcome
these irrational fears
by tapping into an invisible force
that's more powerful than fear,
and that's love.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
