Oil

It's a professorial paradox to be sure. Naturally, there's a lot of ground to cover. To be "sustainable" is to possess the capacity to endure. Sort of broad-sounding, no? For clarity, if we look to the secondary definition of the term, Wiktionary lists the meaning as "able to be sustained for an indefinite period without damaging the environment, or without depleting a resource; renewable."

This modern definition of the term certainly narrows things down for us, yet 'sustainability' remains a dense subject matter. And a sticky one. When talking about issues related to the topics of energy, environment and economy, there are many differing viewpoints out there. For the topic of energy in particular, unraveling the knot of policy roadblocks, technological limitations, and environmental issues only complicates things further. In today's hyper-polarized media climate, sorting out the issues– and deciding where you stand– is a challenge for most people.

And if sustainability is hard to learn about, just imagine what it's like to teach people– young people, at that– how to better understand and develop a sustainable economic infrastructure in world with so many highly unsustainable systems in place. How do you tell them what they need to know when so much of the information that contextualizes each issue is either inaccessibly technical or under-informed and biased?

One man is offering solutions, and Beyond the Light Switch is helping to animate his commendable efforts in public education. Professor Greg Möller, Ph.D.  teaches a course called Principals of Sustainability at the University of Idaho, and he's using footage from Beyond the Light Switch to help disseminate information on sustainable energy use. Dr. Möller's using what he calls "an experimental pedagogy" and incorporating new technologies in order to teach his students about what it's going to take in order to turn our current energy economy into something that's sustainable on a global scale.

To that end, Dr. Möller has created a 10-chapter, multi-part series of 'doculectures' on all things related to sustainability– everything from waste management to electric generation. Anything that can and should be made sustainable, really. The series is still a work in progress, with the doculecture chapters falling under the umbrella of Dr. Möller's online course. Each doculecture is available for viewing on Vimeo now. 

For Chapter 6 in his series, titled Energy Sustainability, Dr. Möller  drew upon footage from BTLS to help put our current use of fossil fuels, alternative energies, and the power grid into perspective for his students. BTLS and the Braintrust are incredibly pleased to be part of a growing curriculum committed to energy education. Here are some additional doculectures from the series that Dr. Möller  picked out as especially interesting to fans and followers of Beyond the Light Switch: 

Three decades after the one-two punch of Three Mile Island (1979) and the Chernobyl disaster (1986) decimated the public image of nuclear power, and the American nuclear industry is still working hard to win back the public's trust. Moreover—and as David Biello points out in Beyond the Light Switch—they’ve actually done pretty well so far. In the American Nuclear Society's own words, "The nuclear industry's commitment to safe packaging and security has produced a safety record that would be difficult to match."

The ANS website goes on to describe their success in further detail, specifically citing their safety record when it comes to the transportation of radioactive materials: "Over the past 40 years, about 3,000 shipments of spent nuclear fuel have navigated more than 1.7 million miles of U.S. roads and railways.  Of all this travel, no radioactive materials have been released resulting from an accident or any other cause.  During this same period, there have been about 98 million kilograms of spent nuclear fuel shipped worldwide, with no record of any release of radioactive material."

And the public has taken notice. Stewart Brand, lifelong environmentalist and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog,  goes on record as a pro-nuclear convert in Beyond the Light Switch. Brand points to the growing threat of climate change as a major factor behind many former nuclear foes' reevaluation of nuclear power’s potential low-carbon benefits. It seems a lot of people are ready to rethink nuclear and—surprise!—the government is on board, too. In this week's State of the Union Address, President Obama singled out the efforts currently being undertaken by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to improve the efficiency of our existing nuclear plants.

Obama's praise of Oak Ridge was followed by the obligatory promise of breaking our nation’s longstanding dependence on foreign oil—check out this clip from The Daily Show for further [read: hilarious] contextualization. But Obama also stressed the importance of redirecting taxpayer dollars toward "tomorrow's" energy resources. This led to the other obligatory energy economy ‘shout-out’: green job creation. In this year's SOTU, President Obama set the new goal of generating 80% of America’s electricity from clean energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear…by 2035. An ambitious challenge, sure…but building that much nuclear generation isn’t going to be easy. Nuclear may now be considered green, but it’s still expensive to build, and strong federal support is going to be vital.

There's one other big problem standing in the way of a nuclear renaissance; remember how the nuclear industry spent the past 30 years working to try and clean up their tarnished image?