your stock in trade is white guilt. your vision of justice is payback. whitey is because while you're public to your pedal to racial hatred. that makes you a racist, very evil you accuse me of. i read your screed on a summer speed, you might like one. there's a special place in hell for those that lead others astray. say hi to teddy kennedy and hitler when you get there. that's a nice one. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> i think we're ready to get started. hello and welcome to a book passage. thank you for coming and joining us on such a lovely, gorgeous day. don't get that very often in

june, so thank you so much for joining us. i distinguished historian, journalist and writer, richard rhodes won the pulitzer in 1986 for his seminal work, the making of the atomic bomb pick his latest work which were suffering today, "energy: a human history", explores the ways in which transitions and energy production over time have shaped the course of human life over five centuries. as we witnessed geopolitical struggles and political debate over energy around the globe, his work provides us with much-needed context to understand how we got to our current energy landscape. with a signature precision and awe-inspiring scope of vision, richard rhodes revises with an infallible blueprint for the future of energy and of human life. he is the author of 25 fiction and nonfiction books, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the national book award and the national book critics circle award and has received fellowships from the

ford foundation, the national endowment for the arts, the john simon guggenheim memorial foundation and the alfred p sloan foundation. he tested a nuclear energy in front of the unit senate and appeared as a host and correspondent for document was on public televisions frontline and american experience series. i am honored to welcome such prodigious scholars richard rhodes to book passage. [applause] >> thank you for coming out on this gorgeous day. it's a little cooler down where we live. which means that summer has or will he started have our cold, foggy days yet. i got interested in this particular book as a kind of spinoff from all the years that a written about nuclear weapons. i've done totally four launch a

nuclear history over the years, and the truth is i ran out of nuclear history, at least where bombs are concerned some friends as well as going to the next volume and i said i have to wait ten years until there's more history, which looks as if we are getting it with president trump and north korea. but i was interested in the whole problem that we are now dealing with of global warming. and wondered as i did when i wrote the making of the atomic bomb if i'm if we go back to the origins of all of these developments, there were alternative ways that got lost or at the very least though some kind of depth of knowledge that would help us with our present dilemma because it really is a dilemma as a think all of us understand. more than just politically. it's a limit in terms of this is the largest energy transition

that we are facing now in the history of our species. i guess if you don't count the fire, that maybe qualifies even more, but -- and i would perceive is obviously i really fraught question because people are so very divided on it and, indeed, some have decided to do the ostrich thing and stick the heads in the same epic and it isn't even happening. but as you'll see in my book it's not the first time. people have always had trouble changing their customs and their technologies to something new and, therefore, different and, therefore, suspicious. so i i just want to give you aw examples from the book, and you will find many more in the book, but the book begins in england.

queen elizabeth the first, the english had been burning wood for us far back as i'm sure they could remember, the wood came from the rich forests all around london, and all across the country. it was a temperate place and a place with lots of trees grew, but as woodmen cut trees farther and farther away from london, and this is a repetitive theme for energy supplies are concerned, a, and more expensive to transport the wood all the way to london, until the word out to the point where it was too expensive for working people to be able to afford the wood they need for their fires. that was a real dilemma because english homes in those days by large didn't have germany's. there was a hall -- a hole in the ceiling, which it sounds pretty primitive and almost tribal but that's the way they

let the smoke from the wood fires dissipate. or more typically they let it drift to the rent and out an open window. even whether worth chimneys, i have an illustration in the book of one, the chimneys typically didn't reach above the will fly to the snowdrop is just a place where smoke was under the particular cover could maybe find its way out if the wind was blowing right. well, that was okay with wood. they like the smell of wood. they believed it was healthy to breathe woodsmoke, and they believed it hard and the rafters in the house, so it was okay. but when they begin to reach the point where they could no longer afford wood for their fires, the alternative was coal from newcastle up the other side of the country. and bituminous coal, as anyone hears old enough to remember, is dirty and it smells sulfurous

and it's difficult to breathe the smoker in fact, it was so different from what that elizabethan preachers concluded, and i mean this seriously, that it was literally the devils excrement, because it was found in layers underground. it was black and dirty, and we diverted it smelled like sulfur. so clearly the devil was a giant figure had to deal with that someway and evidently it just got pushed around to the margins of hell. that didn't encourage people to want to board in their home, obviously. this is one of the recurrent themes of energy. transitions from one energy source to another are very slow. we can to think that if we could just run away await our hands d build some windmills we will be okay, but it turns out that there are all sorts of resistances, both ecological and

culture. in the case of the elizabethans, the smoke was terrible, you couldn't breathe it, it made you sick. so their homes were not set up to burn this, but in addition there was this kind of cultural blowback from the pulpit saying this stuff is awful. there was a general, i found a general attitude toward digging things out from underground. this was how milton, paradise lost, which a court talk to her, talks about the evil they came when men started digging gold out of the ground and so on. well, what was the solution? two problems, the technological solution was the second part of the problem. the first solution was the fortuitous fact that elizabeth died i think in around 1599, 1600, and her successor james vg

of england to james the first of the scots had never had a dense is force with england. so they had already cut down all their trees 100 years ago and had started burning a somewhat better quality coal. it was still bituminous but it wasn't quite so cfius, sulfur as down in england. so when james the first moved to london, he brought with him his custom of burning coal and when baking started burning coal, of course everybody said that king is burning coal, we can all burn coal, , and that's what began to happen. however, they had to back fit all the houses in london with chimneys. there are accounts from the date of someone writing about a village outside london saying really had about three chimneys and every house has a chimney. and again, that's the recurring

theme, to jump forward to almost the present, when london had its killer fog in the early 1950s, when so much smoke and fog was mixed up together and the people come something like 3000 excess deaths in december and january of 1952, for example, the solution was to switch to gas, first propane that was imported, and then when rich supplies of natural gas were discovered off the coast of england, both sides of the country, then they switched to natural gas but because natural gas is so much more energetic than coal gas, gas made by roasting coal using the fumes that come off as a gas source or heating and cooking, natural gases about twice as

energetic. .. this book and of our history in this regard. how hard it is to supposition from onesource of energy to another .let me tell you another story. this has to do with lighting. i'm sure you've heard the claim by the oil industry oil saves waves. the theory is when carl drake discovered or found a way to drill for oil in pennsylvania in 1859 when whaling had pretty much begun to give me the number of whales

worldwide, that they replacement of whale oil from lamps with kerosene made from petroleum enabled though whales not to be hunted in such numbers andso on, it's not true . two things team to have saved the whales. one, there was a much more common fuel for lamplight in thosedays and whale oil . whale oil was too dispersed to use but for lamps and also to make kind of a big cattle. it's actually kind of lax. the whales carried in the space in its head and i think probably by eating it, warming it and cooling it changed their natural buoyancy. anyone knows you got to be able to adjust your sale or

you will drift to the top or sink to the bottom so the whales have the same problem and the case as it's called, melville has this belief, i think a case in the head that contains this beautifuloil, this liquid . it seems to be there for the purpose of enabling whales to adjust its buoyancy but that was the finest ofoils . it didn't have an odor or the other things people use were everything from vegetable oils like olive oil and grape seed to palo for candles. if you've ever smelled palo burning it's not a crazy smell to have at your house but also for other choices . so basically, whale oil was for people who were wealthier and the rest of us got by with whatever wecould put

together in the way of oil for lamps . the best kind of oil during the 1830s and 40s and 50s when the whale hunting was at its height, when whalers mostly from nantucket even then were knocking off 10,000 whales so that as they headed up the north atlantic they moved on the east coast to south america and eventually went around the horn and hunted up the west coast of south america andthen as the whales kept retreating , this intense hunting across the middle of the pacific basically around the equator. and then around the sea of japan, this was exactly how the process went from 1830 to 1860. finally into the arctic ocean. that far away but again, it's

this interesting kind of continuity. as they hunted farther and farther away from home, it costs more and more to deliver the whale material. they would be out there for two years which was early on a difficult whale hunt but 5 to 6 years and of course that meant a lot more cost for the people who were on the ships and bankrolled . but that was where the replacements for a whale oil were people who couldn't afford this expensive material was turpentine extracted from southern pine trees. there was a huge fine forest of broadleaf pines all the way from the carolinas to texas. someone said at the time that whales went from north carolina to texas and never could touch the ground which was about right but these trees would be much the way a maple tree is except it

wasn't the sap they were tapping, it was the liquid bandage that trees produced in the form of basically kerosene. they would destroy the tree like this and cut a hole down the bottom of the tree so that the liquid would drain down into a natural basing which would be scooped up and taken off to be refined. this material mixed with some grain alcohol and a little bit of menthol to kill any order that had became the standard material for lamps all through that era. and much more than whale oil was what people use to life their house. so the decline in whales came frankly because the hunting fell short but the other part of this decline came because the navy during the civil war was really gutted knocking

off whale ships. some of several hundred of nantucket's lease were captured and burned by these leaks, these clippers that the southern navy used. they would fly a union flag to confuse the whalers when they got up close, they take the people off the ship, drop the people off at the next harbor they could come across. so the oil started with the kerosene hunt game rather later. by 1865 or so, the whales were pretty much gone. there was a low-level whaling continued almost up until today. some of those here who like to work with cars will recall that the transmission fluid that was used for many years in automobiles was actually beautiful whale oil. it was just a lovely oil in

race cars especially. you can find the oil cans that say to the authorities and even the 40s, let's see. the gate scene however and the fluid that was made from suddenly dropped out of sight and here's where the oil did save the day, lighting. dropped out of sight when the northern armies blockaded a navy, blockaded the harbors down in the south. their ships couldn't get in and out, these are ships were generally harbored in some other country and they were attacking northern shipping. they couldn't get in and out and therefore they couldn't move the turpentine north so suddenly there was a total loss of the standard material

earning fluid and was around the same time as they were adapting the drilling that was used for salt from the ground and why did people need all that salt? they understood there was no refrigeration . they had to reserve the soul or it would not just a way, that's the way most food was preserved and bacon and a lot of things other come from. so there was a technology for drilling oil prior to their because it had been soaked off the surface of creeks where it was down from underground into a blanket which was then rung out into jugs or jars. and sold for ligaments and all sorts of uses, drenching petroleum was considered a way to deal with a lot of

parasites. there were people who had to deal with that. there were native americans who used the oil for purposes but killing foroil meant there was an inordinate supply of oil . when the oil started becoming available it didn't stop. the first oil well that he drilled, he just looked down and there was oil sitting there but they had to have some place to put it, they didn't have enough barrels and for awhile they were scrambling over the eastern half of the country , they were using beer barrels, whiskey barrels, any kind of barrels to get their hands on and it was never enough and then they dig trenches in the ground, put the oil in there. finally, they got enough barrels going that they were able to move this petroleum

to refineries that were typically at least asfar away as pittsburgh and sometimes farther . but then of course the pipelines were eventuallylaid and that was another new technology . one of the things that drake said early on in an adventure of his was it's really hard to convince people to make something that's really an improvement in their lives and there was with oil once it came to refining oil and kerosene, kerosene became the standard fuel for lighting. not gasoline, gasoline was so volatile that it was a waste product for refineries and they would either dump it out on the ground or typically in those days for a lot of waste products, dump it in the nearest sewer. they didn't know what to do with it, it had no value to them. petroleum was used for two things, making lighting materials and to use for lubrication.

when the electric light came along in 1880, the oil industry, most of their product was going into lighting. although there were a lot of people who weren't ready, this strange little bowl with a bang inside. one of them, many people complained they were too bright . when you think about the kind of lighting you got from oil and gas plant which of course was the technology of the time orfrom an oil lamp, an electric ball was blinding and these were 20 watt bowls . and of course, what finally save the petroleum industry was the development of the

automobile but even then, there was a real contest between 1919 15 about what kind of fuel was going to be used to run automobiles. mostpeople don't realize this . the original model t has a fuel gauge next tothis. will that will turn the carburetor to deal with grain alcohol . because ford had this dream that cars would run on farmer produced grain alcohol. they would support the farmers, he had been afarm boy himself, hated farming, it was hard work and he thought this would improve the life of rural communities . so he kind of encouragethe use of alcohol . then came the problem of the all these early automobile engines were all low compression and they could

work fine with the gasoline of the day which was basically what we call white gas, it didn't have anything in it to improve octane rating and the octane was typically about 50. when today are gasoline is from 87, 92 or three with alcohol mixed with gasoline you can get pretty standard 100+ octane so it clearly was an answer to the engines which was knocking three ignition of the vaporized fuel. which was a serious problem but unfortunately, there was a kind of battle going between ford and general motors in the 20th century about who was going to dominate this totally new and incredibly expanding market . there were like 3000 automobiles and by 1930 there were billions. that's an enormousand quick transition . and general motors approach was we need to have a higher

octane engine, more powerful engine so wecan build bigger cars. people want bigger cars, they become a prestige item . ford was much more interested as i said keeping something that would be smaller, more efficient so general motors began the search for some way to increase the octane rating of gasoline and although alcohol was obviously one solution, mister kettering was the scientist doing the research didn't think there was enough alcohol production in the united states to meet the demand and in any case, he went to work and after a lot of rather complicated work describing in some detail in the book, i found it fascinating how they found their way to the right material, they came up with

the introduction of lead into gasoline which for all the pollution problems followed over the next six decades where he finally pulled a out of gasoline in the 1970s , was a direct result of a contest between two large structures that were trying to dominate the new market. let's move forward to the present. i've given you a few highlights because i want you to buy thebook . today as i said we really are facing the largest energy transmission of all time and we're facing it with the same kind of complex feelings, technological challenges and everything else that goes with energy transitions on every scale all through history with the steam engine and so on. one market that i use in the book and i used just for

myself to indicate where we are going if we don't make this transition successfully is that in 2015, august 2015 and the northern iranian city of bosch are, the heat index on one day in the august meeting temperature and humidity combined was 165 degrees . i looked in my cookbook to get a sense of what 165 degrees would mean and i found that it's the temperature of a freshly roasted chicken. that's what we are looking at . not of course throughout the world but the increasingly challenging weather. i just saw an estimate that the loss of productivity in the united states by 2100, if the temperature increase is

between three and five degrees fahrenheit, which is what two or three degrees celsius, will be something like 30 percent of our national productivity.so we obviously have to finda way through this . i'm pretty optimistic, already contributors of the book have described me as may be too optimistic but i don't think so. we are a really clever species and i don't think we want to destroy ourselves or the world we live in anymore than we already have so i think the possibility is there that we can find our way it's not going to be the dream of the really green perhaps of the environmental movement. we can do it all through that and the reason i say that is this small was built around the graph i found one day and the work of an italian

physicist and futurist named caesar marchetti. he worked on institute focused on energy issues primarily. he and his colleagues looked at 3000 instances of energy transitions over the past pieces of energy transitions over the past 150 years. and found that once the new energy source reaches one percent of the world market, that's a fraction of the world market, it typically takes about 100 years for that source to reach 50 percent of the world market for a major energy source. i don't think we have 100 years. to me that means that we're going to have to use everything we've got. by that i don't mean coal. i don't mean, well, petroleum

i would find a way to make a battery . i think they're already working it back. it's interesting the early electric cars, that was another way automobiles that they were popular with women because the internal combustion engine would tear the arm of a strong man and most women couldn't do it in those days but the electric cars didn't require cranking. so women bought electric cars in large numbers. i lost that thread, where was i going? class c years, yeah. it's still a loss, i'll find it. electric cars, i know what i was going to say. batteries in those days for those cars, granted they were smaller and lighter machine

would typically take the car about 30 miles. we are not much better now with our batteries and wewere 100 years ago . so it's a really challenge to see how we are going to reduce our use of petroleum but setting that aside for a moment and i that we certainly can't continue with cole, that's pretty obvious. natural gas, for people who are opposed to nuclear seems to be the right transition fuel along with renewables. it's only about 50 percent or 50 percent as co2 polluting of the atmosphere as coal. it's not exactly an ideal compromise either. i think the answer is going to have to be a major reliance on nuclear power and every renewable that we can use to fit into the places where they fit best.

remember, the renewables have a wonderful advantage that the energy is basically free or the cost of building the system that collects it on the other hand, it is very dilute and its intermittent. as the sun goes down and solar just is no longer of use until the next morning, the sun goes behind the cloud. so it's wind in a similar vein. nighttime is evidently not a time that it varies in intensity and we now know how intermittent it is during the day. so that's a major problem which you can measure in terms of what's called the capacity factor of these various forms of energy. capacity factor for solar and wind power is typically around aware between 50 and

30 percent meaning they operate 50 to 30 percent of the time.nuclear today is in the united states and around the world is about 93 percent so it's a source of baseload power that you can rely on 24 hours a day and i just today noticed that the new york times, i think apple as well is talking about their desire to move to 100 percent renewable. they qualify that by saying i don't think we can do that. is also trying to figure out how to assemble a suite in a private energy source that could run 24 hours a day. which may require additional technologies like that. battery storage, demand response programs meeting the life journey is off when the power goes down or even. i happen to think nuclear power is a good, viable and

marvelously clean source of energy forthe world . you may disagree and you may have heard things about that but take a look again at what it is and how it works and where it's located. ichanged my mind about nuclear as i was writing the book . because the people who develop nuclear energy were the people i was knowing and meeting and talking to. they were decent, morally responsible senior scientists like hans bader and richard feynman and many others. and i finally had to conclude a newmore about it than i did . and ultimately that's the way we make our decisions about these things. and my conclusion was i had to take them seriously. well. so the real challenge today is this is the last thing i'll say before we do the

report is even more complicated than dealing with global warming because much of the world now finally beginning to develop the point where people who have lived at the marginal level of mere survival meaning africa and much of asia as well, one kind of like or something like that kind of life we and the rest have enjoyed and take for granted means we've got two big problems at the same time. one is to deal with global warming which means basically the harmonizing the energy field and 2, to deal with the understandable and appropriate desire of other people to live as well or almost as well as we do. we really can't and honesty and with any moral justice denied him and say you

africans stay in your tense or whatever. not fair. they wouldn't do it anyway. china is an example of a country that is just rolling enormously into a middle-class life. they are planning to build 30 nuclear reactors in the next 10 years and many more after that for the same reason, to supply the energy that their people need in order to survive. you can chart energy against that and find that the more per capita energy, the longer lifespan. up to about 70 years and it levels off. countries either above the 70 year mark tend to be places like norway where it's so cold and they have to have heating in the wintertime . in the united states, for whatever reason we use so

much energy, probably more than we need. i think we are moving away from that but energy is life is the message of that graph and what i hope you will find in this book, that's what i think were a lot of interesting and often amusing stories like the devil's excrement but i think you will find here how the west has done this thing over the last 400 years. and has reached a point where the new challenge is now to deal with other countries regionally but throughout the whole world. at challenge. [applause] >> any comments or questions? >> first of all, thank you for the board. i have questions about how optimistic you are and i've

taught eric molding, climate change and i have, i struggle with trying to give a positive message to students about these, there's so many obstacles so i'm curious about your take . >> i've written about technologies that are wealth and nuclear weapons that are certainly world destroying, potentially. i've been struck with how we find ways to workaround this problem . in the case of nuclear weapons, in 1945 everybody who was intelligent thought they were a technology which continues and as soon as another country, there would be a nuclear war and we all die. the literature of the time, oppenheimer felt that way and i talked to feynman one time when i was working on the book and asked him about that

early period and he said i was sitting in a bar in the square and he said bars a lot, hedidn't drink . but he was a good-looking guy. but i was sitting in a bar in times square looking out on the crowds going by and i thought you poor fool and in two or three more years when russia gets the bomb we're all going to be dead and we don't know it. he was wrong. they were all wrong fortunately though in fairness to where we are with weapons, we survived by the skin of artie. giving all of the potential for accidents and the potential for miscommunication. the many close calls that were in the cold war, many of which we haven't yet heard about i could name two or threethat were very close calls in the . so i think that what we're going to do or at least i pray this is what we're going to do is go this problem once

we get past this terrible opening stage where so many people like our president are just in denial about the whole thing. many others have turned it into kind of a political battle betweenrepublicans and democrats that democrats , i'm not extremely liberal but i'm amazed the democratic party is not more opposed and when i say i'm pro-nuclear, people assume i'm a rightwing republican . so we have a lot of cultural change to get through but at the same time i think there's a good deal of effort to move beyond this and accepting these different technologies and finding a way to think beyond our local situation into the largest possible context. so you're optimistically pessimistic, i'm optimistic.

my wife told me years ago, don't be a hell in a hand basketguy when you get older . i thought she was right. >> yes. >> do you have any optimistic view of a nuclear energy of the safety issue and the disposal issues? >> disposal. i about that in this book because i learned something people have heard again and again and it's somehow not solved and it's simply not true. it's a political problem to be sure because evil, this country especially are so focused and they don't want it in their backyard. but right now, the finns are digging the first commercial waste storage facility in an island off the baltic on the coast of finland which will take nuclear waste, clad in

copper and put it inside the casing of a particular kind of clay which absorbs heat and then drop it down into a solid granite bedrock area about 1000 feet or so below ground.that's going to stay there, that's not going to be a problem. even if it didn't stay there and somehow came back to the surface, one of the things that i'm sure anyone here knows that is that we contact the cost of things as we move down through the years. so for example if there's something that's a problem for our generation, we just pass that danger to thenext generation because we assume they are going to know more and have more possible

solutions . that's just a standard kind of accounting practice as i understand it. so it's hard for me to understand people are worried that somehow a little bit of nuclear waste on its way back, it wouldn't. even if it were contaminated in a local area and i don't imagine that that's something that would disturb solid granite, we have to facility in new mexico which i visited , it's called the waste isolation pride plant. the state of new mexico bar them from taking any commercial nuclear waste but it's being used as a permanent storagesite for military weapons waste . and it's basically tunnels dug out four kilometers belowground in a giant bed solid crystalline salt that's been there for several mere million years through an

internal ocean that used to cover much of the central part of the southern united states and its so large it reaches from southern new mexico all the way up into western kansas and there's so much space in it that we could easily store all the world nuclear waste for 1000 years. i don't think we're going to take nuclear waste from the country but my point is once something is embedded in this salt and the salt is there, the fact it's their tells you with dissolved, once it's embedded in the salt, this interesting quality of being a semi liquid in terms of its physical behavior and it pleases the containers which is this 35,000 alan barrel, freezes the containers in coverage and take massive material but when my wife and i went to the tunnel , only

five years before to get the places in these rooms that had been carved out toput the space in , what we noticed immediately was the ceiling and the wall and the floor work for inward as the soul was already beginning to try to fill in that space. but there are plenty of options for disposing of nuclear waste. and even more to the point, we proposed what's called spent fuel which is fuel that has been run through a reactor for a couple years and contains about 95 percent uranium that could be reused. we've just buried. because uranium to be cheap these days. the russians have been building all their weapons materials ever since the collapse of the soviet union. in fact, in the late 90s, scientists had the brilliant idea of offering questions by their you do 35 from their

nuclear warheads that they were doing. and then blended it down into reactor fuel. and so to american power companies for the use our reactors andfor many years , the program finally ended when we got all the remaining fuel that the russians i think we're still burning about 20 percent of our nuclear power from russian warheads area is exactly wonderful because it will never be available to make warheads again. it's a decision you and the department still could be retrieved and recycled so we don't presently recycle the so called spent fuel for part of the reactors. wedid, we would have tens of thousands . of fuel available to us from this power source. it's a good power source.

but as far as things like the shema, the, i'll never understand why the japanese backupgenerator for that system in the basement . they knew they had tsunamis from time to time. our reactors as i understand it artistically our generators are typicallyon the third floor . they don't get. but those were early design reactors, they were actually american designs although where the generators was a japanese decision but despite what you may haveheard , there were no deaths of evil to radiation off the campus as it were. outside the room themselves. >> there were several workers injured in the explosions and so forth and i think one or

two died. no course we are going to get , you think about the kind of explosions and damage that occur with oil refinery explosions and other sources of energy also. now, there's no energy at one percent say, percent sure. that's what i say i think were going to need it all. judiciously parted out according to what the situation is. offshore wind is a reliable source of energy, rick. in a lot of offshore wind. the kennedys don't try to prevent it from being within view of cape cod, which you may recall happens and where we need a good baseline on power, i'll never forget taking the stage from paris down through it off to somewhere in southern france. the train was 150, 200 miles

per hour through these endless fields, was just beautiful. in france is very they were 80 percent nuclear.the carbon on there at all and every 25 miles long the brown river was, whether it was the river, we need to nuclear power stations. and in another 75 miles. they had really, they never had a serious accident. most of the energy from nuclear. countries that had decided to kind of registers that they wanted like italy, either electricity from the french or the germans as well these days. so that's my take on that. but it's not the only solution. >> different question about nuclear power.

you have to erect, iran, libya, north korea. if they miss those power plants? >> as far as i know, the with the exception of which never quite got there, countries that go nuclear don't get their uranium from nuclear power. it's not a very reliable source. it tends to be physically because it's been run so long it's got a lot of upper traces of plutonium and we just don't want that way and nobody else, one bomb makes the network.the whole idea back in the eases with the development of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty is in the 1980s was to give the deal for countries that have

not gone nuclear was if you pledge not to develop nuclear weapons, we would share peaceful technology. what's interesting is that the cia estimated around the turn of the 21st century that there were probably 40 countries in the world that had the technological and scientific base. and all those countries we have what, nine? north korea has 10, i think? most countries that have option option not to do it and the reason i think they have is because when you come , nuclear power you are the target for all the other powers. you are a danger to other nuclear powers regardless of how small your country is . here is this impoverished country that's living on the thin edge of starvation and now they've gone nuclear and

suddenly they are in the middle of a seriousdiscussion of what do we do now? on the other hand , it may finally break the wall of standoff between the united states and north korea about whether we are going to develop south korea. so that's the balance that obviously kim jong un has been calculated for a long time. the others are the rogue states out on the edge, that the major power that could change? if mister bolton has his way and we have a war with iran , i imagine it would go boom. it's pretty clear that saudi arabia has made a deal long ago with pakistanand other states that support pakistan developing nuclear weapons , that they will probably take

steps if they need some. saudi arabia has built a missile for their use that is basically an intermediate range ballistic missile that has no conceivable purpose without a nuclear warhead. so it's 10,000 pounds of dynamite on top of a multibillion-dollar missile. so it's been a calculation that as usual, it's a political calculation about whether one should go nuclear or not but it's not easy. we tested a bomb in the 60s to see if reactor grade plutonium made a good weapon and it didn't . they couldn't get a viable yield out of the thing and it was physically hot which means you've got to deal with getting rid of all that he and all warhead that is the biggest, you could put it on a shelf. yes.

>> we're approaching in energy independence on the basis of hydraulic pressure. i wonder if you have perspective on why it took so long to develop early work? i understand in the 40s and 50s, how does an undeveloped for so long. >> i didn't look into that, perhaps i should have the book is what we know. what i do cover in some detail is the original discovery of oil in saudi arabia in the 20s and early 30s. happened but what a complicated business that was. we've been drilling now to 300, 400 feet depth and i suspect tracking at least in part has to do with when did it becomeeconomically reasonable ? i would assume that in oil prices and lots of other issues but i don't really

know a lot about it. >> you talk about nuclear, most of the nuclear facilities are based on designs over 50 years old. there are many, much better designs with less residue and so forth and the problem at this point is acceptance of nuclear power to push those designs forward. and i don't know if you talk about that, just for that instance, before you had directional drilling, until you had directional drilling, you have fracking because it was economic in terms of dealing with those nations . >> thank you. well, my recent memory, the last question, can you tell

me again? >> there is much newer technology but i don't know if you talk about that in your book . with this whole thing about pushing nuclear away, -- >> i think primarily because of what i would call cultural issues, political issues, nuclear power is almost no soldier and the impetus to proceed with the new design although there, there are young companies working on the various possibilities. small, modular reactions that can be pulled in a factory standardized and moved out to basically smaller regional or subsidized humor systems. good ideas like that but it's very difficult to put together capital in this country with the resistance to nuclear power that hazmat tested itself is kind of a

one-way ratchet of regulations. more and more regulations added on but none taken off until it gets to be, a good example, the chinese are planning to build some 30 reactors within 10 years. 12 or 15 years to get one reactor licensed through all the stages have to go through and of course that has many interests on all that money for that long period of time, it really gets in the way and this is intentional on the part of those who feel nuclear is a danger to the world. that's a long story and an interesting one and not at all the way the story you might imagine. included in the book and it goes back to the time when people were worried about overpopulation and people like paul elliott stanford, he still there. paul elliott, he was staying basically in the population bomb that is right off india

and china, they never made the chapter to start to, let's not sending medicine or food. all i . and that will increase the surplus population and as scrooge put it in a christmas carol, but time nuclear in the country was just developing as commercial and some leaders like alvin weinberg who ran oak ridge tennessee national laboratory that we still have was seeing the answer overpopulation and they were talking about, they were doing it about a busy argument that population will grow to eventually food supply dramatically, therefore we will all eventually run out of food so we were talking about 20 million by 2050. which is just not going to happen.

there are world population will press 10 billion. a lot of people to be sure but it's not 20 million. around 100 with the growth rate will be zero. and we will basically be a steady-state after that.why population off? call the population transition and it's the result of people who use to have lots of kids with the help of maybe one or two. coming into a world now where medicine of economic development makes it possible to have one or two children were three children and expected that all will make it. that happened consistently in country after country. it's now running through the entire world. that's why the population is

an antique idea that's irrelevant but at the time in the 60s when nuclear power was a major development in the united states, this idea the population bomb was going to kill us all we doright off india and china was very much ) and you mayrecall . those of you were my. recall that it was a real fear campaign where we're all going to die overpopulation but it hasn'thappened . and it's notgoing to . >> and we are in a place where we can deal much more realistically with the limited population of the world and therefore a potentially continual population and energy supply. that's one of the reasons i'm a little more optimistic than some others are. i still feel that people talk about overpopulation and it's

just not happening. i think that what happened of course is norman morlock and others came up with these kinds of brain props and proved rice and approved week and so forth and made it possible to grow for more food on a given area of land and then force the efforts by china and india and others to limit their population in other ways, some of themnot so benevolent . with their one child policy for a while, there was pretty rigorously enforced against people who maybe wanted more than one child. in any case, we've made our transition and makes the future look a lot more hopeful than i think it did around 1960, 1970. but that is actually the basis for the anti-nuclear feelings that came along later. it was concern on the part of people who were worried about overpopulation nuclear could provide more energy, that we

never saw what they saw as the serious basic problem of overpopulation. but there was this bread for it before between people in favor of nuclear energy that they were getting population and that kind of way into the environmental problem. soyou can see the evidence for what i'm seeing . that's like. >> you have any views of when the carbon problem becomes irreversible and your reading and you discussed two people -mark if you have varying estimates on when they. if there's any kind of craze i deadline. >> i think the world governments have decided that we'd like to stay below two degrees celsius which is what four or five degrees fahrenheit. we're at something like 1.5 right now. the question is, things have

slowed a little bit. they'll find it interesting grass there. i said we get these hundred year cycles of one energy source and then another. if you project those into times in the immediate future, you see that we should probably, we will have a percentage of a development for example renewable sources . less than one percent of world energy by now. there's expecting them to get there and that means according to this model that is going to be natural gas and nuclear power. that will be our primary sources of energy, for the next 50 years or so. until some of these other, the market in greater percentage of the total. what after the oil in the 1970s, this chart only rose.

and energy sources that were under declined by law. energy sources that were in increase like nuclear power level off even more. and suddenly we seem to have all these different energy going along basically where they were as a percentage of the total in 1975 or 1980. whether that's going to go back to the previous pattern seems to be a pretty basic pattern for energy over hundreds of years . the people at the doctor mark a looked at 3000 instances of energy transmissions over the past 150 years. found a pattern that was independent of economic changes. independent of wars, independent of depletions.

it was really funny about the wayour society works . what marchese does social learning, we learn to deal with these kind of energy and its base by the capacity of the human brain. not by scientists slowed to. >> so i have no way of knowing where it turn out but we are in a much betterplace . we're on right now and that's not great either. >> a similar question in a different way. when you look at the problem of climate change, part of it is the rate of energy transition the other half is the change in environment and crossing tipping points the change in albedo area so is this kind of unique situation where there are additional geophysical factors that especially if you look at

global scale, require a sort of different rate of transition in the past and i'm wondering efforts and are all to be sure it is mine. >>. >> there's always the possibility of something we didn'tanticipate. and we worry about it a lot these days . if all the ice is melting in the north and south poles, then there's a sudden change let's say to the, which the current crisis. suddenly northern europe is the temperature that would be how warm weather. in the south korean. thatwould be a big change and there would be a real disaster. those things are always , and again , it's true that we have laid them in place with a lot of political action and

international and military control. but it's also true that one or two go off, they all go off one way or another. so we live on kind of thin margin that that's where i think our species has always been. i mean, if you follow the tracing back to africa of a lot of bloodlines, you find thatthere was a problem . we're very small population and it seems to have been the basis for all us. i sort of wonder what happened there and we watch out, somebody's got in real trouble and almost didn't make it. >> then i think of course there's the closest reason for all of us contributing whatever we can for others to understand that this is not simply an argument for

republicans or democrats or nuclear power people, it's about the future of the world . in the fundamental reason is because human technology if you will have enlarged to the point where a wide scale nuclear war is pointing to another example is global warming. another problem is our young people think it's a problem.have to deal with those over 70. it's a challenge. >> the u.s. navy and other needy has been putting bases all over the world powered by nuclear plants. that's where we arecurrently . once held nuclear power back from commercial maritime

economics? >> that's a good question because the russians have had commercial nuclear power for a long time . i don't know. you would think it would be an obvious thing to do. it's certainly an expensive powerplant shift but i suspect the russians haven't because they have a more centrallycontrolled economy and couldn't just order one up . >> .. they have a beautiful record operating power systems well

ever since. i think that's probably as much as we should do and i'll sign books for you. if you have anything else want t to say, just mention it. [applause] [applause][inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv wants to know what you're reading. send us your summerdy reading lt @booktv on twitter, instagram or on facebook. booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> next on booktv "after

words," mohammed al samawi talks about escaping death threats and the war in yemen with the help of interfaith activists around the world. he is interviewed by "washington post" religion reporter julie zauzmer. "after words" is a weekly interview program with relevant guest host interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. >> host: it's so great to be talking with you today. i was so moved by your story and so impressed by the way you told it, a book that talked a lot. i think will teach readers a lot about the muslim world and about how all of us learn our faith and learn prejudice and can unlearn it, and most importantly it's truly an inspiring story of ordinary people taking on remarkable responsibility and going to great lengths to help somebody else. i think he will challenge all of us to think about whether we