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The Nobel Week Dialogue is an open, cross-disciplinary meeting, bringing together a unique constellation of Nobel Laureates, world-leading scientists, policy makers and thought leaders focused on Exploring the Future of Energy. Topics include renewables, nuclear energy, fossil fuels and climate change. The event took place the day before the award ceremony for the 2013 Nobel Prize winners.
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Nuclear has many options of which Thorium is one and we need to meet the irrationality with education. |
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The event gathered amongst others Dr. Fatih Birol, Director at the International Energy Agency, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Deputy Director International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Anna-Karin Hatt, Energy Minister of Sweden, global business leaders Carl Henric Svanberg, Chairman of BP and Volvo, Hans Vestberg, CEO Ericsson, top academics and many Nobel Laureates focusing on exploring the future of energy.
This open, free-to-attend event lays the foundation for a rather unbiased discussion on the world energy outlook and is well worth a closer look. For example Nebojsa Nakicenovic (IIASA) pointed out that continued emissions have ensured that most of the options for limiting climate change to 2°C by the end of the century will now require some form of large-scale carbon capture and storage. This ought to lead us to a strategy that minimizes any risk of not being able to develop a scalable clean energy portfolio, this would be the “all the above” strategy. Then Carl Henric Svanberg (BP and Volvo) says that while renewables are the fastest growing portion of the energy market, if you extrapolate out current trends, non-hydro renewables will only cover six percent of the world’s energy needs by 2030. Interestingly, the session “The promised land of renewable energy” ends with a nuclear discussion mentioning Thorium (@ 36:00 min). David Gross, a Nobel Laureate, says nuclear is pretty renewable on a human scale, and that the debate and government policy is more governed by irrationality than rationality. Elisabeth Rachlew (RIT) responds that nuclear has many options of which Thorium is one and we need to meet the irrationality with education. |
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A discussion on ‘The Future of Nuclear Power’ with panellists: Steven Chu, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Elisabeth Rachlew and Carlo Rubbia and moderator: Chris Llewellyn Smith
As a Twitter commenter put it "Carlo Rubbia is rocking the discussion on nuclear power with a wealth of technical detail and background knowledge."
His presentation at ThEC13 is the most popular video on our ThEC13 Videos site. The many interesting talks are available at Nobel Week Dialogue. Anna-Karin Hatt (Session 1 at 09:00) The challenge of our energy future - our window of opportunity Fatih Birol (Session 1 at 18:20) Overview of emerging energy challenges Carl-Henric Svanberg (Session 1 at 34:40) Energy scenarios and timescales Panel Discussion (Session 1 at 46:20) Assessing current energy outlook Günther Oettinger EU Energy Commissioner (Session 1 at 1:25:00) The EU’s energy policy: an enabler to meet current and future challenges |