VICE (2013) s04e09 Episode Script
The Future of Energy
1 This week on "VICE": The future of energy.
(alarm sounding) Energy by far is the biggest problem we face.
If human beings are going to sustain our civilization long into the future, we have to cut our addiction to fossil fuels.
It's a given.
Smith: How fast can this go? (laughs) Well, pretty fast.
The end game is to have a future where we can look ahead and say this is gonna be good.
Fusion is the perfect way to make energy.
It is definitely the energy source of the future.
You're gonna explain how you can build a fusion reactor in your garage.
Is this legal? (theme music playing) Crowd (chanting): Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! For the past four seasons, we've been reporting on the climate crisis that's threatening to destroy our planet.
This is about three feet of water on my street, Desbrosses, in New York City.
Lower Manhattan is completely under water.
Smith: There it goes! There it goes! There it goes! Whoa! The scientists have now started to realize that Antarctica is melting.
This is a "holy shit" moment.
Smith: It's worse than "holy shit"? The bad news is that climate change and global warming continue unabated.
But the good news is that humanity is finally waking up to this fact and staring the problem in the face.
Our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.
Smith: At the end of last year, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, our world's leaders reached a landmark agreement in the global effort to move away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy.
The task before us now is to find the solutions that will make those goals a reality.
There's still one more.
So what did we just do there? We released a heck of a lot of energy.
Again-- again, remember, power is energy over time.
So we released all that energy in an incredibly short time scale and that's what power is.
Smith: Coffee creamer turned into a bomb.
How did that happen? Wilson: Yeah, so the coffee creamer is sugar, sugar is a fuel, came from plants, came from corn.
Plants are sitting here photosynthesizing, making sugars out of the energy from the sun and we just released that energy from the sun Right.
in the form of a fireball.
That's the same reaction, that same chemical reaction, that a coal power plant uses, a natural gas power plant uses, but it all originally came from that sun over there.
So coal, natural gas, homemade bombs, uh, uranium Yes.
It's all energy.
Everything? Smith: In 2009, when he was just 14, Taylor stunned the world when he built a nuclear reactor in his garage and became the youngest person ever to achieve nuclear fusion.
So this is your infamous garage.
Yes.
Smith: I'm afraid, and I have an unnatural fear of radioactivity, so you're gonna allay my fears and you're gonna explain how you can build a fusion reactor in your garage.
The stars use all their gravity, uh, to combine hydrogen atoms.
I'm using very high voltage electricity to do the same thing inside this reactor.
Have you ever blown out the power grid? Oh, yeah.
So this lived-- Well So this lived at the University of Nevada for a very long time, and that's where I did a lot of experiments.
So when you went to the university, how old were you? Yeah.
I was 14, yeah.
So you're Doogie Howser of the of the radioactive age.
Physics department.
So, how hot can this get? Um, I mean, we're talking 400 or 500 million degrees is the temperature of the ions that are fusing.
Like the sun or something? Yeah, hotter than the sun.
So this can go hotter than the sun? Wilson: The ions that are fusing inside this, yes, yes.
And is this legal? (laughs) Yeah, I think so.
So you don't know.
Well, it is.
Now, if I started to enrich uranium or produce weapons-grade plutonium, then I think some people would be concerned.
So let's talk about enriching uranium and weapons-grade plutonium.
You have some things here, yellowcake or Yeah, you wanna take a look? Smith: Yellowcake is a type of enriched uranium.
It's a precursor to the more concentrated fuel used in reactors, and ultimately nuclear weapons.
So this is what the president and Congress and Iran are all fighting about, is exactly what you have in your garage out back? (laughs) Yeah.
Smith: How did you get it? So, I make a lot of yellowcake, from time to time.
You make your own yellowcake? Yep.
Just, you know, crush up some ore, chemically process it, and that's the So you go out into the desert, you get raw uranium Yeah, uranium ore.
and make your own yellowcake.
Yeah.
Can you take us to where you get the uranium? Yeah.
We'll go see where the ore comes from.
We're gonna start our own arms program here.
(detector buzzing) Wilson: This is a deposit of thorium and rare earth.
Smith: So this is a rare earth mineral.
Yeah.
And up in the hills, there's mines and old deposits of uranium.
They originated in some far off galactic cataclysm and they were deposited onto Earth.
So uranium is energy from stars that have landed on the Earth? Yes.
Yes.
(laughs) We're out here in the high desert.
Yeah.
And right there, there's a power plant.
So let's talk about power.
Let's talk about our insatiable thirst for energy.
Yeah, well, energy, by far, is the biggest problem we face.
I mean, whether it's, you know, having clean water supplies, fresh water supplies, abundant food supplies, geopolitical instability, all these things come back to how we use energy, how we get energy, whether we dig it up from the ground or we use it, uh, you know, from the heavens above us.
And, uh, this is the way we typically produce electricity now, in this case natural gas.
We dig it out of the ground or suck it out of the ground and burn it to produce electricity.
And how much longer do we have of burning things? Not very long.
Why? Our Earth can't take it and we don't have very much of it left.
Right.
If human beings are gonna sustain our civilization long into the future, we have to cut our addiction to fossil fuels.
It's just-- it's a given.
And how do we do that? Well, all this can be done by using a combination of technologies like renewable, grid storage, and nuclear power.
(bell tolls) Smith: Now, to better understand the energy landscape as it stands today, we met with Nobel Prize winner and former secretary of energy, Professor Steven Chu.
The incumbent way we make electricity is still dominated by fossil fuel.
And it's transitioning from coal, which two decades ago was the dominant source of electricity, to some mixture of natural gas and coal.
Coal is about twice as bad as natural gas for carbon emissions per unit of electricity.
We're swimming in natural gas, but you also have to remember that it is a transition fuel.
We still have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuel for climate change reasons.
The good news is, in the United States, we happen to be blessed with amazing renewable resources.
We could, by two or three decades from now, easily be 50 percent renewables.
Smith: Now, one of the people pushing forward with alternative energy is Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who's leading the charge in solar energy and energy storage, and as CEO of Tesla Motors, makes the most popular all-electric car in America.
Hey, buddy.
How are you? Good to see you.
Good to see you.
How fast can this go? Well, pretty fast.
It's, uh, zero to 60 in 3.
2 seconds.
Making electric cars cool is step one.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, if you had a car that was long-range, but it didn't look good and it wasn't fun and it didn't handle properly and it didn't have great electronics, and all these important attributes that people value We had to change the perception of an electric car.
You know, we wanted an electric car to be something that was sort of fun and sexy, not something that was kind of dull and boring like a golf cart.
So you're known as a very smart guy.
You're known as an inventor, industrialist, capitalist.
How did you get there? You know, when I was a teenager and going through college, I thought about, what are the important things that we have to solve as a species in order for the future to be good, and sustainable energy was one of those things, obviously.
At the time, I was thinking of it more from the standpoint of we'll run out of oil to dig out of the ground, and if we don't find a replacement, then civilization would collapse.
The end game, uh, is to have a sustainable energy future, a future where we can look ahead and say this is gonna be good.
Smith: A key ingredient to Tesla's success in the car market is their cutting-edge battery technology.
And the company is using this technology to solve one of sustainable energy's biggest problems, the actual storage of the energy once it's been harvested.
This little product we call the Tesla Powerwall.
It's designed to work very well with solar systems right out of the box.
You can actually go, if you want, completely off-grid.
You can take your solar panels, charge the battery packs, and that's all you use.
(drill whirring) Smith: Now, Powerwall batteries are already being installed in homes across the US, and stacked together, these batteries have the potential to replace power plants, and eventually take entire countries off the grid.
We need about two billion of those to solve global energy from a storage standpoint.
Which is a lot, but it's roughly comparable to the number of cars and trucks on the road.
You open-sourced your technology, a lot of your patents, a lot of your technology.
Yeah, all of our patents.
All of your patents.
Why? Yeah.
If the future is bad because we're generating too much CO2 and not transitioning to sustainable energy, then, um, I'm part of that future.
Yeah.
Why would you want to be last man alive on a sinking ship? Right.
Smith: And Musk isn't just pioneering how renewable energy s stored, he's also helping to change how it's generated.
He and his cousins founded SolarCity, a leading manufacturer of solar panels.
What happened in the last five years with solar power? I mean, it's just sort of grown leaps and bounds, and where did it come from? Musk: Really what's happened with solar power is actually relatively steady advances where things have gotten better by five to ten percent a year, but you add that up over a decade or a decade and a half and it becomes very significant.
And the key threshold for solar is to try to get below the cost of fossil fuel energy.
Smith: Today, solar panels are half the price they were just six years ago, and dropping fast.
And even though solar is just beginning to take hold here in America, SolarCity CTO Peter Rive told us that it's already undercutting the traditional, fossil-fuel-driven utility system.
In, you know, about 16 states across the country right now, you can buy solar power direct off your rooftop at a rate that is lower than what you're buying power from the utility for.
So we're already there.
Customers can sign up with no money down and start saving money.
We sign up a new customer about once every two minutes right now, and our goal is to try to get to a million customers by 2018, so there's still a lot of work to do.
SolarCity, we're just kind of dedicated to the cause, and we see this as a multi-decade problem and we just can't slow down.
Solar and wind are going great.
They're gonna have at least a couple decades more of progress where the prices will plunge.
Wind is now about five percent of the total electricity generated in the United States.
Hydro is six and a half percent.
I think wind will pass hydro in the next couple of years.
Smith: And some countries have already made renewables the centerpiece of their energy strategy.
Denmark has 14 offshore wind farms and in 2014 broke a world record, powering an average of 40 percent of the country on wind alone.
Claus Poulsen heads operations at the Anholt wind farm, one of the largest in the world.
Smith: Now, 400 megawatts is enough to power about 368,000 homes.
And it's only a fraction of the wind power that's being harvested in Denmark.
And on the windiest days, these turbines have generated enough electricity to power the country's entire grid.
It isn't though we can go instantly to 100 percent renewables, or even 80 percent.
There are going to be days, weeks where the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.
We will still need backup power.
And so right now almost 20 percent of our electricity is generated by nuclear.
Our fleet of nuclear power plants, most of them built, um, in the '60s and '70s.
Unless we replace them, they will disappear.
Smith: Nuclear power is the largest single source of carbon-free electricity today, and there are two ways to produce it.
The current method of harvesting energy is through nuclear fission, which involves splitting atoms apart.
Now, this type of reaction not only fuels conventional nuclear power plants, but also is what powered our early atomic weapons.
But the downside of fission is that the fuel is highly radioactive, and the reaction can be hard to control, as we have seen just recently in 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.
How does nuclear energy enter into that debate on the environmental side, because there have been environmental problems, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl I looked at fission as a technology as, you know, something we came up with in the 1950s to produce electricity on the grid and how can we fundamentally reinvent that, right? Right.
So how do you do that? You design a reactor that are these sealed, compact, modular units that produces power from fission, from the splitting of uranium, whether it's decommissioned weapons, spent nuclear fuel, a variety of solutions.
All this stuff, we don't know what to do with.
All the stuff we don't know what to do with.
You take it Take it and produce electricity from it.
Smith: In the United States alone, there are around 67,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants and three billion metric tons of uranium waste, which is extremely difficult to dispose of safely.
What are we doing with all the pits of nuclear weapons? Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff.
So it's a molten-salt reactor, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe.
In the event of an accident, you can actually just drain the core and the reaction stops.
These reactors run for 30 years without refueling.
(applause) How big is it? Um, very small.
I mean, you're talking for a few tens of megawatts, something that's no bigger than three meters in diameter for the reactor module.
So three meters, so this-- this big around circle? Yeah.
And have a reactor Yes.
that can power Tens of thousands of homes.
Smith: Now, these small modular reactors are not only safe and compact, but they actually eat up the radioactive waste from weapons and old reactors.
And they leave behind only a tiny fraction of the new waste created by today's plants.
And all of these factors would make them easy to deploy to power communities around the country.
In five years, we could have a prototype, a proof of concept, of that reactor that we can go and manufacture.
And that's what we need to make a difference, that's what this technology represents.
For me, my holy grail is nuclear fusion.
Smith: Fusion is the nuclear reaction that has powered our sun for billions of years.
The fuel is virtually limitless, and produces no carbon or toxic waste.
With a fusion nuclear reaction, energy is actually created during a high-speed collision of atoms combining.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the premier fusion facility in the United States.
Fusion is where we're going to.
Fusion is the energy source we need if we're going to exist thousands of years as a society in the future.
Smith: We're looking at making a star or a sun, in a very contained way, here on Earth.
Now, isn't that dangerous? It's actually not dangerous.
It only happens for a brief split second.
There's no chain reaction, and so there's no runaway there's no meltdown, nothing like that.
The problem is, it's really hard to do, and that's why we've built this facility, the largest laser facility ever built.
Smith: To find out exactly how humans are actually making miniature stars on Earth, we talked to Mark Herrmann, the director of the facility.
So this is literally the future, so much so that they actually shot "Star Trek" here because it's the most advanced facility of its kind in the world.
So they were saying, "Well, it'll look something like this going forward.
" Maybe you could explain to us where we are and what we're actually seeing? Herrmann: Sure.
So we're in the world's largest laser.
The laser bay itself is actually the size of three football fields.
And we use all that space to concentrate the energy to heat up this tiny target to the conditions found in nuclear weapons and in order to try and achieve fusion.
So this whole facility is all about getting that energy in the right place, with the right intensity, to squeeze on that fusion capsule and implode it into fusion conditions.
Smith: Can you make a fusion reaction? We do make fusion reactions all the time, right.
We don't make fusion reactions that give us out more energy than we invested to, uh, create it.
So you don't have ignition? We don't have ignition, right.
That's the research program we're doing right now.
So that's the goal.
That's the goal.
Is to get to ignition where you get more energy out than you're putting in.
Exactly right.
Smith: Now, once ignition is achieved, we will be on the first step of generating virtually unlimited emissions-free electricity.
And the hope there is if you can do it once, if you can demonstrate how to make it work, right, we can get more efficient.
The analogy is the Wright brothers, right.
Smith: So the Wright brothers have flight, 60, 70 years later we're in space, so very rapid.
What was the "We're flying" moment for fusion? It would be, you know, the first thermonuclear weapons back in the 1950s.
If an atomic bomb was the glider, this is the first engine.
Yes.
And now what we're looking to do is get to Apollo? Exactly.
Smith: Now, because it's the holy grail of energy, countries all over the world are working together in the race to get us up to Apollo level.
And ground zero for that effort is a massive construction project in Southern France.
So we're here in Provence, the South of France, uh, and that massive project over there is called ITER, which is going to be the largest and most expensive science project ever made.
Now, instead of using laser technology, this $16 billion project uses magnetic fields in a giant doughnut-shaped structure called a tokamak.
We spoke with the director general of the ITER organization, Bernard Bigot.
Now, basically this sort of developed world is all together to fund this.
How many countries? And so this is the future of energy right here? We're standing in the future of energy.
When's it ready to go? Smith: Now, ITER is essentially a larger version of a working fusion generator in Great Britain that's called JET.
It holds the current record for fusion energy produced.
The operations at JET are overseen by Dr.
Steven Cowley.
We're here inside the practice facility.
This is a mock-up of the real machine.
And the plasma, which is the hot fuel in the form of an ionized gas, will be sitting basically here, filling up this space.
And each fusion reaction will add heat to the plasma, and if you get enough of that, it will start to burn.
That will be the fusion burn that we've wanted for so many years.
(alarm blaring) Electronic countdown: Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
(alarm blaring) Right here you can see the exhaust system of the plasma here, and touching at the top here.
The plasma's right inside here.
There's gonna be a day that you're sitting in the control room, and the plasma, the fusion fuel inside the magnetic cage, begins to burn.
It begins to do so much fusion that it sustains itself, essentially no energy going in, half a gigawatt coming out.
That moment will be one of the great historic moments of science, ever.
Fusion is the perfect way to make energy.
It's clean, it's safe, it doesn't produce CO2.
It is definitely the energy source of the future.
The world is firmly committed to a low-carbon future, and that has the potential to unleash investment and innovation in clean energy at a scale we have never seen before.
So I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world.
Eventually, we are going to have to move to sustainable energy.
The question is, really, between now and then, how much carbon do we put in the environment? How much damage will we do in the meantime? Exactly.
Chu: This is the time we start acting, and start really pushing, really saying, this is an issue, it's got to be solved.
Wilson: Fundamentally, we can take all the uses of energy today and do them without using fossil fuels, whether it's development of renewables, development of storage, development of fusion.
It's potentially a big crisis, but it's also potentially a big opportunity for change.
Smith: Now, what we learned in making this documentary is that humanity already has the technology to make clean and virtually limitless energy.
And with enough effort, we can actually meet the goals that are laid out in the Paris agreement.
[crowd chanting.]
But what we have to do now is keep pushing our politicians and our energy providers, as well as using our purchasing power, to make sure that we speed up the adoption of renewables and speed up the process towards fusion, so that we can actually implement these solutions before it's too late.
(alarm sounding) Energy by far is the biggest problem we face.
If human beings are going to sustain our civilization long into the future, we have to cut our addiction to fossil fuels.
It's a given.
Smith: How fast can this go? (laughs) Well, pretty fast.
The end game is to have a future where we can look ahead and say this is gonna be good.
Fusion is the perfect way to make energy.
It is definitely the energy source of the future.
You're gonna explain how you can build a fusion reactor in your garage.
Is this legal? (theme music playing) Crowd (chanting): Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! For the past four seasons, we've been reporting on the climate crisis that's threatening to destroy our planet.
This is about three feet of water on my street, Desbrosses, in New York City.
Lower Manhattan is completely under water.
Smith: There it goes! There it goes! There it goes! Whoa! The scientists have now started to realize that Antarctica is melting.
This is a "holy shit" moment.
Smith: It's worse than "holy shit"? The bad news is that climate change and global warming continue unabated.
But the good news is that humanity is finally waking up to this fact and staring the problem in the face.
Our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.
Smith: At the end of last year, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, our world's leaders reached a landmark agreement in the global effort to move away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy.
The task before us now is to find the solutions that will make those goals a reality.
There's still one more.
So what did we just do there? We released a heck of a lot of energy.
Again-- again, remember, power is energy over time.
So we released all that energy in an incredibly short time scale and that's what power is.
Smith: Coffee creamer turned into a bomb.
How did that happen? Wilson: Yeah, so the coffee creamer is sugar, sugar is a fuel, came from plants, came from corn.
Plants are sitting here photosynthesizing, making sugars out of the energy from the sun and we just released that energy from the sun Right.
in the form of a fireball.
That's the same reaction, that same chemical reaction, that a coal power plant uses, a natural gas power plant uses, but it all originally came from that sun over there.
So coal, natural gas, homemade bombs, uh, uranium Yes.
It's all energy.
Everything? Smith: In 2009, when he was just 14, Taylor stunned the world when he built a nuclear reactor in his garage and became the youngest person ever to achieve nuclear fusion.
So this is your infamous garage.
Yes.
Smith: I'm afraid, and I have an unnatural fear of radioactivity, so you're gonna allay my fears and you're gonna explain how you can build a fusion reactor in your garage.
The stars use all their gravity, uh, to combine hydrogen atoms.
I'm using very high voltage electricity to do the same thing inside this reactor.
Have you ever blown out the power grid? Oh, yeah.
So this lived-- Well So this lived at the University of Nevada for a very long time, and that's where I did a lot of experiments.
So when you went to the university, how old were you? Yeah.
I was 14, yeah.
So you're Doogie Howser of the of the radioactive age.
Physics department.
So, how hot can this get? Um, I mean, we're talking 400 or 500 million degrees is the temperature of the ions that are fusing.
Like the sun or something? Yeah, hotter than the sun.
So this can go hotter than the sun? Wilson: The ions that are fusing inside this, yes, yes.
And is this legal? (laughs) Yeah, I think so.
So you don't know.
Well, it is.
Now, if I started to enrich uranium or produce weapons-grade plutonium, then I think some people would be concerned.
So let's talk about enriching uranium and weapons-grade plutonium.
You have some things here, yellowcake or Yeah, you wanna take a look? Smith: Yellowcake is a type of enriched uranium.
It's a precursor to the more concentrated fuel used in reactors, and ultimately nuclear weapons.
So this is what the president and Congress and Iran are all fighting about, is exactly what you have in your garage out back? (laughs) Yeah.
Smith: How did you get it? So, I make a lot of yellowcake, from time to time.
You make your own yellowcake? Yep.
Just, you know, crush up some ore, chemically process it, and that's the So you go out into the desert, you get raw uranium Yeah, uranium ore.
and make your own yellowcake.
Yeah.
Can you take us to where you get the uranium? Yeah.
We'll go see where the ore comes from.
We're gonna start our own arms program here.
(detector buzzing) Wilson: This is a deposit of thorium and rare earth.
Smith: So this is a rare earth mineral.
Yeah.
And up in the hills, there's mines and old deposits of uranium.
They originated in some far off galactic cataclysm and they were deposited onto Earth.
So uranium is energy from stars that have landed on the Earth? Yes.
Yes.
(laughs) We're out here in the high desert.
Yeah.
And right there, there's a power plant.
So let's talk about power.
Let's talk about our insatiable thirst for energy.
Yeah, well, energy, by far, is the biggest problem we face.
I mean, whether it's, you know, having clean water supplies, fresh water supplies, abundant food supplies, geopolitical instability, all these things come back to how we use energy, how we get energy, whether we dig it up from the ground or we use it, uh, you know, from the heavens above us.
And, uh, this is the way we typically produce electricity now, in this case natural gas.
We dig it out of the ground or suck it out of the ground and burn it to produce electricity.
And how much longer do we have of burning things? Not very long.
Why? Our Earth can't take it and we don't have very much of it left.
Right.
If human beings are gonna sustain our civilization long into the future, we have to cut our addiction to fossil fuels.
It's just-- it's a given.
And how do we do that? Well, all this can be done by using a combination of technologies like renewable, grid storage, and nuclear power.
(bell tolls) Smith: Now, to better understand the energy landscape as it stands today, we met with Nobel Prize winner and former secretary of energy, Professor Steven Chu.
The incumbent way we make electricity is still dominated by fossil fuel.
And it's transitioning from coal, which two decades ago was the dominant source of electricity, to some mixture of natural gas and coal.
Coal is about twice as bad as natural gas for carbon emissions per unit of electricity.
We're swimming in natural gas, but you also have to remember that it is a transition fuel.
We still have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuel for climate change reasons.
The good news is, in the United States, we happen to be blessed with amazing renewable resources.
We could, by two or three decades from now, easily be 50 percent renewables.
Smith: Now, one of the people pushing forward with alternative energy is Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who's leading the charge in solar energy and energy storage, and as CEO of Tesla Motors, makes the most popular all-electric car in America.
Hey, buddy.
How are you? Good to see you.
Good to see you.
How fast can this go? Well, pretty fast.
It's, uh, zero to 60 in 3.
2 seconds.
Making electric cars cool is step one.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, if you had a car that was long-range, but it didn't look good and it wasn't fun and it didn't handle properly and it didn't have great electronics, and all these important attributes that people value We had to change the perception of an electric car.
You know, we wanted an electric car to be something that was sort of fun and sexy, not something that was kind of dull and boring like a golf cart.
So you're known as a very smart guy.
You're known as an inventor, industrialist, capitalist.
How did you get there? You know, when I was a teenager and going through college, I thought about, what are the important things that we have to solve as a species in order for the future to be good, and sustainable energy was one of those things, obviously.
At the time, I was thinking of it more from the standpoint of we'll run out of oil to dig out of the ground, and if we don't find a replacement, then civilization would collapse.
The end game, uh, is to have a sustainable energy future, a future where we can look ahead and say this is gonna be good.
Smith: A key ingredient to Tesla's success in the car market is their cutting-edge battery technology.
And the company is using this technology to solve one of sustainable energy's biggest problems, the actual storage of the energy once it's been harvested.
This little product we call the Tesla Powerwall.
It's designed to work very well with solar systems right out of the box.
You can actually go, if you want, completely off-grid.
You can take your solar panels, charge the battery packs, and that's all you use.
(drill whirring) Smith: Now, Powerwall batteries are already being installed in homes across the US, and stacked together, these batteries have the potential to replace power plants, and eventually take entire countries off the grid.
We need about two billion of those to solve global energy from a storage standpoint.
Which is a lot, but it's roughly comparable to the number of cars and trucks on the road.
You open-sourced your technology, a lot of your patents, a lot of your technology.
Yeah, all of our patents.
All of your patents.
Why? Yeah.
If the future is bad because we're generating too much CO2 and not transitioning to sustainable energy, then, um, I'm part of that future.
Yeah.
Why would you want to be last man alive on a sinking ship? Right.
Smith: And Musk isn't just pioneering how renewable energy s stored, he's also helping to change how it's generated.
He and his cousins founded SolarCity, a leading manufacturer of solar panels.
What happened in the last five years with solar power? I mean, it's just sort of grown leaps and bounds, and where did it come from? Musk: Really what's happened with solar power is actually relatively steady advances where things have gotten better by five to ten percent a year, but you add that up over a decade or a decade and a half and it becomes very significant.
And the key threshold for solar is to try to get below the cost of fossil fuel energy.
Smith: Today, solar panels are half the price they were just six years ago, and dropping fast.
And even though solar is just beginning to take hold here in America, SolarCity CTO Peter Rive told us that it's already undercutting the traditional, fossil-fuel-driven utility system.
In, you know, about 16 states across the country right now, you can buy solar power direct off your rooftop at a rate that is lower than what you're buying power from the utility for.
So we're already there.
Customers can sign up with no money down and start saving money.
We sign up a new customer about once every two minutes right now, and our goal is to try to get to a million customers by 2018, so there's still a lot of work to do.
SolarCity, we're just kind of dedicated to the cause, and we see this as a multi-decade problem and we just can't slow down.
Solar and wind are going great.
They're gonna have at least a couple decades more of progress where the prices will plunge.
Wind is now about five percent of the total electricity generated in the United States.
Hydro is six and a half percent.
I think wind will pass hydro in the next couple of years.
Smith: And some countries have already made renewables the centerpiece of their energy strategy.
Denmark has 14 offshore wind farms and in 2014 broke a world record, powering an average of 40 percent of the country on wind alone.
Claus Poulsen heads operations at the Anholt wind farm, one of the largest in the world.
Smith: Now, 400 megawatts is enough to power about 368,000 homes.
And it's only a fraction of the wind power that's being harvested in Denmark.
And on the windiest days, these turbines have generated enough electricity to power the country's entire grid.
It isn't though we can go instantly to 100 percent renewables, or even 80 percent.
There are going to be days, weeks where the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.
We will still need backup power.
And so right now almost 20 percent of our electricity is generated by nuclear.
Our fleet of nuclear power plants, most of them built, um, in the '60s and '70s.
Unless we replace them, they will disappear.
Smith: Nuclear power is the largest single source of carbon-free electricity today, and there are two ways to produce it.
The current method of harvesting energy is through nuclear fission, which involves splitting atoms apart.
Now, this type of reaction not only fuels conventional nuclear power plants, but also is what powered our early atomic weapons.
But the downside of fission is that the fuel is highly radioactive, and the reaction can be hard to control, as we have seen just recently in 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.
How does nuclear energy enter into that debate on the environmental side, because there have been environmental problems, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl I looked at fission as a technology as, you know, something we came up with in the 1950s to produce electricity on the grid and how can we fundamentally reinvent that, right? Right.
So how do you do that? You design a reactor that are these sealed, compact, modular units that produces power from fission, from the splitting of uranium, whether it's decommissioned weapons, spent nuclear fuel, a variety of solutions.
All this stuff, we don't know what to do with.
All the stuff we don't know what to do with.
You take it Take it and produce electricity from it.
Smith: In the United States alone, there are around 67,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants and three billion metric tons of uranium waste, which is extremely difficult to dispose of safely.
What are we doing with all the pits of nuclear weapons? Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff.
So it's a molten-salt reactor, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe.
In the event of an accident, you can actually just drain the core and the reaction stops.
These reactors run for 30 years without refueling.
(applause) How big is it? Um, very small.
I mean, you're talking for a few tens of megawatts, something that's no bigger than three meters in diameter for the reactor module.
So three meters, so this-- this big around circle? Yeah.
And have a reactor Yes.
that can power Tens of thousands of homes.
Smith: Now, these small modular reactors are not only safe and compact, but they actually eat up the radioactive waste from weapons and old reactors.
And they leave behind only a tiny fraction of the new waste created by today's plants.
And all of these factors would make them easy to deploy to power communities around the country.
In five years, we could have a prototype, a proof of concept, of that reactor that we can go and manufacture.
And that's what we need to make a difference, that's what this technology represents.
For me, my holy grail is nuclear fusion.
Smith: Fusion is the nuclear reaction that has powered our sun for billions of years.
The fuel is virtually limitless, and produces no carbon or toxic waste.
With a fusion nuclear reaction, energy is actually created during a high-speed collision of atoms combining.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the premier fusion facility in the United States.
Fusion is where we're going to.
Fusion is the energy source we need if we're going to exist thousands of years as a society in the future.
Smith: We're looking at making a star or a sun, in a very contained way, here on Earth.
Now, isn't that dangerous? It's actually not dangerous.
It only happens for a brief split second.
There's no chain reaction, and so there's no runaway there's no meltdown, nothing like that.
The problem is, it's really hard to do, and that's why we've built this facility, the largest laser facility ever built.
Smith: To find out exactly how humans are actually making miniature stars on Earth, we talked to Mark Herrmann, the director of the facility.
So this is literally the future, so much so that they actually shot "Star Trek" here because it's the most advanced facility of its kind in the world.
So they were saying, "Well, it'll look something like this going forward.
" Maybe you could explain to us where we are and what we're actually seeing? Herrmann: Sure.
So we're in the world's largest laser.
The laser bay itself is actually the size of three football fields.
And we use all that space to concentrate the energy to heat up this tiny target to the conditions found in nuclear weapons and in order to try and achieve fusion.
So this whole facility is all about getting that energy in the right place, with the right intensity, to squeeze on that fusion capsule and implode it into fusion conditions.
Smith: Can you make a fusion reaction? We do make fusion reactions all the time, right.
We don't make fusion reactions that give us out more energy than we invested to, uh, create it.
So you don't have ignition? We don't have ignition, right.
That's the research program we're doing right now.
So that's the goal.
That's the goal.
Is to get to ignition where you get more energy out than you're putting in.
Exactly right.
Smith: Now, once ignition is achieved, we will be on the first step of generating virtually unlimited emissions-free electricity.
And the hope there is if you can do it once, if you can demonstrate how to make it work, right, we can get more efficient.
The analogy is the Wright brothers, right.
Smith: So the Wright brothers have flight, 60, 70 years later we're in space, so very rapid.
What was the "We're flying" moment for fusion? It would be, you know, the first thermonuclear weapons back in the 1950s.
If an atomic bomb was the glider, this is the first engine.
Yes.
And now what we're looking to do is get to Apollo? Exactly.
Smith: Now, because it's the holy grail of energy, countries all over the world are working together in the race to get us up to Apollo level.
And ground zero for that effort is a massive construction project in Southern France.
So we're here in Provence, the South of France, uh, and that massive project over there is called ITER, which is going to be the largest and most expensive science project ever made.
Now, instead of using laser technology, this $16 billion project uses magnetic fields in a giant doughnut-shaped structure called a tokamak.
We spoke with the director general of the ITER organization, Bernard Bigot.
Now, basically this sort of developed world is all together to fund this.
How many countries? And so this is the future of energy right here? We're standing in the future of energy.
When's it ready to go? Smith: Now, ITER is essentially a larger version of a working fusion generator in Great Britain that's called JET.
It holds the current record for fusion energy produced.
The operations at JET are overseen by Dr.
Steven Cowley.
We're here inside the practice facility.
This is a mock-up of the real machine.
And the plasma, which is the hot fuel in the form of an ionized gas, will be sitting basically here, filling up this space.
And each fusion reaction will add heat to the plasma, and if you get enough of that, it will start to burn.
That will be the fusion burn that we've wanted for so many years.
(alarm blaring) Electronic countdown: Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
(alarm blaring) Right here you can see the exhaust system of the plasma here, and touching at the top here.
The plasma's right inside here.
There's gonna be a day that you're sitting in the control room, and the plasma, the fusion fuel inside the magnetic cage, begins to burn.
It begins to do so much fusion that it sustains itself, essentially no energy going in, half a gigawatt coming out.
That moment will be one of the great historic moments of science, ever.
Fusion is the perfect way to make energy.
It's clean, it's safe, it doesn't produce CO2.
It is definitely the energy source of the future.
The world is firmly committed to a low-carbon future, and that has the potential to unleash investment and innovation in clean energy at a scale we have never seen before.
So I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world.
Eventually, we are going to have to move to sustainable energy.
The question is, really, between now and then, how much carbon do we put in the environment? How much damage will we do in the meantime? Exactly.
Chu: This is the time we start acting, and start really pushing, really saying, this is an issue, it's got to be solved.
Wilson: Fundamentally, we can take all the uses of energy today and do them without using fossil fuels, whether it's development of renewables, development of storage, development of fusion.
It's potentially a big crisis, but it's also potentially a big opportunity for change.
Smith: Now, what we learned in making this documentary is that humanity already has the technology to make clean and virtually limitless energy.
And with enough effort, we can actually meet the goals that are laid out in the Paris agreement.
[crowd chanting.]
But what we have to do now is keep pushing our politicians and our energy providers, as well as using our purchasing power, to make sure that we speed up the adoption of renewables and speed up the process towards fusion, so that we can actually implement these solutions before it's too late.