Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is nuclear power worth the risks?

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Daniel and Kelly talk about whether we need nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions, and whether it can be done safely.  https://www.smbc-comics.com/soonish/lostchapter/index.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I take it all. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming it?

I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. No such thing. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

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Yes, we do. But they don't always. always help when you need them the most. What do you mean? What happened? Well, there was that snowstorm that slammed the East Coast a few weeks back, and that knocked out the whole electrical grid. It would have been nice to have solar, but solar panels don't work super great when it's snowing. And I guess they also don't work that well when they're covered in snow, right?

I never thought about that. Do people who live in snowy places need to get like solar panel wipers, like windshield wipers for your car? Not quite. And ours are up on a roof, so we can't just sort of like, you know, wipe it off with our hands or something. And I think most people just wait for the snow to melt. I don't know.

Didn't you create like some mini humans out there? You could send up on your roof to wipe them off? I assume you're talking about my children. We're not so desperate for power that we're willing to risk their lives for it. I don't know. When my kids' iPads run out of charge, I am very desperate for power. I can't parent without them anymore. So I might even climb up there myself.

I see where you're coming from. We fortunately were able to charge our iPads in the car. we were okay. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I find myself needing more and more energy every day. And I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm a parasitologist who's adjunct with race university,

and I also like power. Do you ever wish that you could just plug yourself into solar power? Like, why do we still need to sleep? Why can't we just recharge the way all of our devices do? Yeah, right. That would be like an upgrade of coffee. I like it. Electrified coffee, exactly.

It just seems so much more reliable. You know, those days you have like insomnia or whatever you're like, I wish I could just plug in and charge up. Today I overdid the coffee and I'm feeling kind of jittery. So if I could just plug into a solar panel and get nice, steady power without overdoing it, that would be pretty solid. Well, maybe someday in the future. Well, welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.

in which we try to plug your brain into all the crazy ideas of the universe. We like to explore the deepest, darkest questions about black holes, the biggest hottest questions about neutron stars and what's going on inside the sun, all the way down to the tiniest little particles that make up me and you and your coffee. We explore all of it, we don't shy away from any of it, and we break it all down for you. My friend and co-host Jorge can't be with us today, so we're very happy to be joined by one of our regular co-hosts. Kelly, thanks again for joining us today.

Hey, thanks for having me here. I love being on the show, and I am particularly excited about this topic. It's a super fascinating interface between human behavior and technology, which I just love. You wish that humans sometimes were easier to predict and control like technology? Well, you know, that would be boring, but yes, it would be nice. But one thing that we can rely on humans for is that we seem to always need more and more energy. Our lives have more and more devices in them. We rely on expensive devices to do things for us.

It seems like the future of our civilization is one that consumes more and more power. Yes, and people in other countries would like to approach Western levels of energy usage. And if that happens, we're going to be in a bit of trouble. We're already in a good bit of trouble. As we look around on this planet, we notice that it can't really sustain our lifestyle at this level for much longer. I was reading the UN Climate Change Report, and it's pretty alarming stuff. That's not light reading. not light reading exactly. According to that report, a lot of the changes we've already seen in the

climate are unprecedented in the last thousands or a few hundreds of thousands of years. So the earth is heating up. The sea levels are rising. Things are going bonkers. We just can't continue in this direction. Yeah, the more you watch the news or pay attention to the weather channel, the more depressing this stuff gets as time goes on. And if we're going to slow it down, we're going to have to make some pretty big changes to our behavior. Yeah, I think one goal is to keep the earth from overheating. You know, as we pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, it acts as this global blanket, keeping the sun's energy inside, rather than letting the Earth radiated out into space. So the more CO2 that we pump into our atmosphere, the warmer the

earth gets. It's already risen by almost a degree relative to historical levels as of 2012. And there was this prediction that if we wanted to keep it from rising another degree, up to two degrees above typical levels, and there was a certain amount of CO2 that we could afford to pump into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we've already pumped more than half of that into the atmosphere. So we have this like shrinking window to avoid basically total disaster. And I wonder sometimes if we're going to be able to pull it off, if we sort of as a species are going to be able to stand together and say like, hey, let's solve this problem. Let's do something about it. Yeah, you know, we're going have to do something drastic and the longer we wait, the more drastic that thing is going to have to

be. And so we got to get moving on that. We definitely do have to get moving on that. And of course, science and technology seems like an excellent direction. Like we're developing new technologies, we're pushing this kind of stuff. It's the kind of thing that humans only seem to respond to when it's like really in crisis. You know, I wish that we could like look at these things further in advance and prioritize these things before we're in crisis mode. But it's sort of like the professor with a thousand things going off at once. We only seem to have the attention span for the most urgent crisis. Foresight seems to be a pretty massive weak point for humanity as a whole.

Exactly. And one crucial area, of course, is production of that energy. If we want to keep consuming this much energy to power our iPads and our phones and to watch our screens, then we need to figure out a way to generate that energy that doesn't further heat up our planet. That doesn't cause like wildfires and sea ocean rises and all this sort of stuff. And one of the great things about the, you know, possible solutions to this problem is that there's technologies we already have that we could use. So it doesn't even necessarily require some like world changing fundamental new technology. We have some of the tools now.

We just need to commit to implementing them. Does that make you more optimistic that we're going to solve this problem like because you can see the solutions ahead of us or less optimistic because now it's like a political question. It's just a question of whether humans will stand together and do this. I always find it hard to be optimistic in the face of politics, but I think if you give up hope, then you really don't get anywhere. So, yes, I'm optimistic. We need to make better use of these technologies. And a lot of the technologies you're talking about have been ramping up quickly, things like wind and solar, which are clean and renewable and excellent sources of power. But there is another technology, which has been around for decades, which produces reliable electricity and doesn't emit any carbon.

and for which there's huge amounts of fuel readily available, but it's not one that people typically think of when they think of like clean energy or green energy. And of course, I'm talking about nuclear power. And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question. Is nuclear power worth the risks? Yeah, and it's a particularly complicated form of energy. There are definitely environmental groups who,

despite the fact that it produces zero carbon, are still completely against it because of some of the other side effects, like what do you do with the waste and how is that going to contaminate the environment? So it's a particularly complicated but promising technology. Yeah, I think it's really fascinating how it sort of splits the politics. Like if you are a pro-environment, are you against nuclear because of the potential waste and risks, or are you pro-nuclear because it is zero-carbon? It's really fascinatingly skewers all. all of these questions. And what's interesting is most people when you ask them don't sort of kind of feel one way

or another. They feel very strongly pro or very strongly against. It's a technology that doesn't have a lot of people in the middle. Yeah. And I think that the general sense out there is that nuclear power is risky, that it's dangerous. People have seen Homer Simpson operating that nuclear power plant on the Simpsons. They've seen Blinky the three-eyed fish. They just get the sense that nuclear power is like out of our control.

It's something maybe humans shouldn't dabble with. And, of course, it's connected with nuclear weapons, which, you know, might end humanity and ruin the planet. So in general, I guess that people are uneasy with the idea of nuclear power. And I've also concluded that The Simpsons are partly to blame for our current climate change issues. Because so many people are watching it on their screens. Well, I did when I was a kid. I guess I haven't recently. But anyway, maybe we should talk to Matt Groening about a PR overhaul, although maybe he's not in charge anymore.

Yeah. Well, it's true that. that Monty Burns is not the most sympathetic figure when it comes to running a power plant. But I was wondering what our listeners thought about this question, about whether nuclear power is an excellent source of fuel for the future because of its zero carbon output, or whether it's something risky and dangerous that humans should shy away from to avoid polluting our planet with radioactive waste that would last for tens of thousands of years. So as usual, I ask people to volunteer to answer difficult questions without any preparation.

So thanks to everybody who volunteered, and if you would like to participate for a future episode of the podcast, please don't be shy. All you have to do is write to us to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. So think about it for a moment before you hear these answers. Do you think nuclear power is worth the risks? Here's what people had to say. Well, we certainly are aware of several high-profile incidents that have happened with nuclear power stations, including Chernobyl. which cause the public to give pause in supporting nuclear power. But I believe we can't rule it out as a source of energy

given the rising demand for energy of humans and the increasing need for us to stop using fossil fuels to a climate change disaster. Nuclear power is definitely worth the risk, especially fusion reactors, as they produce only neutrons and some gamma radiation. Nuclear power has benefits of producing large amount of electricity. and the risks are the safety hazards which I think can be taken care of as long as the parties involved take the precautions and the waste the radioactive waste is the reason why we need to be moving towards more sustainable powers but are the current limitations of resources we cannot so I think it's worth the risk for now but if you're talking about nukes no I think nuclear power is for sure worth the risk I haven't looked into this much but from what I've seen I think nuclear power

is definitely worth the risk. It's clean. As far as I know, you really just have to worry about waste. Definitely, yes. I am a big believer in nuclear power because it's a clean source of energy. And history shows that we haven't figured out yet how to don't have accidents with that. But we did that in aviation, for example. We have a very safe commercial aviation and market. So I'm very confident that we'll get there on the nuclear as well. I think so, because it's better than killing the planet with fossil fuels. And I don't see there's a lot of option to generate constant power without nuclear until fusion takes hold anyway. I'd imagine that it certainly is worth the risks.

I mean, if by risks you mean like natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, then I don't see those happening too frequently. I think they could be, you know, have some preventative measures put in place for those. And I think it's definitely worth the risks. So I actually found these responses to be pretty uplifting. A lot of people seemed like they were generally in support of nuclear power, although maybe your audience is a particular subset of the world. So maybe it's not representative of the general public.

There was one, nah, in there. There were a fair number of optimistic responses. There was one person who said, especially fusion reactors. And so we had meant fission. But let's go ahead and talk about what is the difference between the two of those? What kind of nuclear power is running a lot of the power plants that are going today? Yeah, I was also a little surprised that our listeners are so pro-nuclear, but maybe that comes from their faith in science and their fascination with technology.

But you're right, there's a huge difference between fusion and fission. Specifically, fission is something we can do today. It powers the world partly. We are able to harness this nuclear process and use it to pull electricity out of the hearts of atoms. But fusion is something in the future. Fusion is something we have not yet tackled. And speaking of the core physics of it, remember that fission is when you take a big, heavy, unstable nucleus,

like a uranium atom or plutonium, and you split it apart into two smaller nuclei. And when you do that, you release energy. Conversely, fusion is the opposite. You take light nuclei. like hydrogen or helium and you push them together and when they fuse together to make something heavier, they also release energy. And that seems kind of confusing because you might think, well, what releases energy? Is it breaking things up or is it pushing things together? The answer

for complicated nuclear physics reasons is that it depends on what you're pushing or what you're splitting. If you're taking really light elements like hydrogen or helium, then pushing them together, fusing them releases energy. If you're taking really heavy elements, anything heavier than iron than splitting them up releases energy. Funny story. I memorized those definitions in reverse once, and it took a lot of work to get them straight in my head afterwards, which was really important because Soonish included chapters originally on both of these topics.

So I had to get it right before the interviews started. So I'd walk around the house, and Zach would be like, Fusion, go. And I would define it. And then later in the day, he'd be like, fission, go. And eventually we got it right. But actually, to this day, I try to avoid using those terms because I'm worried I'm going to blow it again. But we all have our things. Yeah, well, I actually worked on fusion research myself back in the 90s when I was a young future scientist.

And I was trying to figure out what kind of physics I wanted to do with my life. I thought, hmm, fusion seems promising. It's around the corner. It's going to save the world by providing abundant energy so cheap you wouldn't even have to charge for it. That was back in the 90s. And, you know, 30 years later. So fusion is sort of still around the corner. It's something that's been promising and maybe been 30 years away for 50 years now.

So it's a little bit frustrating that we don't yet have an ability to harness this incredible source of power. The thing that fuels our sun and all the stars out there, it would provide cheap energy. The fuel for it is just water produces almost no dangerous radioactive elements. It would be wonderful. But unfortunately, it's not something we know yet how to get to work. And if you want to hear more about it, we have a. couple of episodes about that, including ones about the huge reactor in France, ETER, ITER, that they are currently building, and they are hoping will provide energy that the thing cost about

$10 billion dollars. I think there are some private companies that have recently made some pretty exciting strides also in far more compact and therefore more affordable models. But, but yeah, as you suggested, it's the technology of the future and may always be thus. Exactly. And there's some companies here in Southern California, some of them who have spin-offs from UCI faculty who has some really clever ideas that might make fusion work. The problem we're facing with the environment, though, is that we don't need a solution that's 20 years from now. The crisis is so imminent that we really need something very, very soon to help us draw down our use of energy sources which produce more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So really, we need to focus on things that we can turn on almost immediately. And fission, of course, is something we know how to do.

We've been doing it for something like 50 years. The typical process in most of the reactors in the United States comes from fission of uranium. Uranium is something which just like exists all over the world. We had an episode recently about uranium. Is it on Uranus? And we talked about how uranium is actually all over the solar system. It's one of the more prevalent elements in our solar system. It's in the ground.

It's in the water. It's in the moon. It's in asteroids. and it's also on Uranus. And we only giggled a little during that episode. We were so good. We were very much like adults. But of course, there are challenges with fission.

The uranium that we find in our planet, the stuff that we dig up and purify, is mostly uranium 238. The 238 there tells you how many protons and neutrons together are in the nucleus. And U-238 is fine, but it's not really great for fission. It doesn't really like to split apart and release. energy the way other versions of uranium do. Specifically, uranium 235, which has three fewer neutrons, but of course the same number of protons, so it's still uranium. U-235 is great for fission. It splits apart nicely, it produces more neutrons, it's excellent. But it's like

less than 1% of the uranium you find naturally is U-235. And herein lies, in my mind, the biggest concern with this technology is that enriching the uranium to get more of that 235, a little bit of that process gives you great fuel for reactions. A lot of that process gives you the stuff that you need for nuclear bomb. And it's hard to know if a country is doing just a little bit of enrichment or a whole lot of the enrichment. And that's one of the big problems with nuclear power, in my opinion. Because you're not in favor of every country out there getting nuclear bombs and tossing them at each other. You know, it makes me a little uncomfortable. Me as well. And you bring up a really interesting point, which I think we should dig

into, which is the difference between a nuclear reactor and a nuclear bomb. A nuclear reactor or a nuclear chain reaction is when you have a uranium atom, which splits, sends off more neutrons, which then triggers other uranium atoms nearby to split and produce more neutrons. And the crucial thing there is nearby. You need enough uranium in a sort of a dense enough package, and when these neutrons fly out, they hit more uranium and they can trigger more reactions. So if you have enriched your fuel to like 5% uranium 235, then you could have this sort of self-sustaining nuclear reaction that produces energy and keeps going.

It's sort of like ignition. You know, like when you start a fire and then it's hot enough that it burns the wood next to it, which is then hot enough to burn the wood next to it, you don't have to keep starting the fire. So that's the nice thing about a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. A nuclear bomb, however, is something much more dramatic. Yeah, so I think with the way I understand it, if everything goes wrong in your nuclear reaction at, a power plant, it might blow apart and you'd get an explosion, but very quickly that would end the reaction. But in a nuclear bomb, you've got so much of the right kind of fuel in such a compact area that it has time to undergo a lot more reactions before it blows far enough apart

that it can't react anymore. And so you can get like an explosion at a nuclear power plant, but never anything like a nuclear bomb explosion. Would that be fair to say? Yeah, exactly. You can't really make a nuclear power plant blow up with like a mushroom cloud. You can do a lot of damage and you can kill a lot of people and you can spread radiation everywhere, but you're not going to get an actual nuclear explosion the way we get them in nuclear weapons. And you're right. In order to do that, you have to enrich your fuel much, much further. So you get much more fission going on much more rapidly. Because that's really what an explosion is. It's a very rapid release of energy. So rapid that the energy release sort of takes over and you get these like supersonic shock waves through the

material. So that's how fission work. We're harnessing the power of the atom. We're breaking it apart and releasing some of the energy that's stored inside of it. If you like, you can think of the atom as sort of like held together by springs and what you're doing is like unhooking those springs. So then the bits like fly off and have a lot of energy when they come out. One of the problems with uranium 235 though is that when the neutrons fly out, they're going a little bit too fast. Like uranium 235 likes to get split at half by a neutron, but it likes to get split and have by neutrons that are not going too fast. So you need something to sort of slow down those neutrons so they're going just the right speed that they trigger more U-235 in order to split.

And so that's called a moderator, something to slow down those neutrons. And most of the reactors we have here in the United States and most of the ones produced around the world are things called light water thermal reactors because they use water as a way to moderate these neutrons because water is great. It like just taking a little bit of energy out of the neutrons and letting them continue on to trigger another U-235. Fun fact, my understanding is that the light water thermal reactors are common because we got a lot of experience with them with naval submarines, because it was just sort of a convenient design to put on submarines when we were starting to try to use nuclear power

to run those. And there were other designs that were being tested at the time, but because we got the most experience with that one while making it compact for submarines, that historically is sort of why we've explored this design more than some of the other designs. Well, there's other designs that might work well, too. It turns out there's a really large variety of ways that you could build a nuclear reactor. And the ones that we have come from sort of weird policy decisions that date back to like the early ages of the atomic era.

As you say, one reason is that people wanted to put them on submarines. So you wanted to have a plentiful source of water and you could use water as your moderator. Another reason we have these reactors is something I would actually put in these sort of negative column for these reactors, which is that the U-238, which is most of the fuel, right, even if you enrich your fuel so it's 5% U-235, you got a lot of U-2-38 in your fuel rods. What happens to that? Well, it doesn't fission. What happens is that it gets transmuted into really dangerous radioactive elements that

last for like tens of thousands of years. So they don't produce anything useful, but that U-2-38 does get turned into other really nasty stuff. And some of that nasty stuff, like plutonium, is great. for weapons. And so early on, the Department of Energy really liked this particular technology using this very inefficient source of fuel because the other part of the fuel could be turned into weapons-grade fuel. And so now we're sort of like stuck with this technology, as you say, we do it because it's the one we're most familiar with, even though the reason we chose it

is not really the reason we would choose today. Stuff gets complicated. Exactly. So while nuclear power has great benefits because they can produce this electricity from the heart of the atom and uranium, everywhere, we're unlikely to run out of it very soon. There are, of course, serious risks of nuclear power. And we've talked about weapons as a potential risk, but of course, another risk is if something goes wrong with the power plant, you get radioactive waste in that area. And this water design that we've talked about has some benefits, it's got some negatives, but a lot of the problems that we've had with nuclear reactors have been about the water. Is that right? Can you explain why water causes problems sometimes? Yeah, water seems great, but the problem is that to keep

water a liquid, which is what you need to do in order for it to moderate your reactions, you have to have it at very, very high pressures because the stuff gets really hot and you don't want it to turn into steam while it's still inside your reactor. Now you have this very dangerous fuel and it's being moderated by this very high pressure water. You have to build your reactor with like very thick steel pipes to avoid this thing exploding and you have to actively pump the water through. Like if your water pumps fail or the water jams or the water leaks out, or something, then you're not moderating the reactor anymore. So it's a real critical safety flaw if your reactor requires active pumping.

Because then if you lose power or something goes wrong, then things just get worse rapidly. And that's the source of most of the sort of more famous disasters in the nuclear power sector. Three Mile Island was caused by jams in one of the hatches that let the water flow. In Fukushima, of course, there was a tsunami and it knocked out the water pumps. And so it couldn't cool down the reactor core. In Chernobyl, of course, this water boiled and exploded. And so all of these problems really are traced to having water at very high pressures, which is very difficult to maintain long term.

But some of these problems have technological fixes, and some of them don't. Like, you could avoid a Fukushima-type accident by having a way to cool the reaction down, even if the power goes out because those water pumps that got knocked out depended on the electricity. And now there's designs to cool the reaction down that don't require electricity and would work passively. But something like Chernobyl, like you had a technical problem. But the real problem was the, you know, autocratic government, which didn't tell the people that there was a major problem until Sweden detected nuclear material in the air,

at which point the USSR had to say, oh, my bad. And so some of these things technology can solve, and some of them are just problems with humans. And those problems are harder to solve, I'd say. They are harder to solve. And if you imagine a future where we have, like, a lot more nuclear. power, then those risks are multiplied because humans make mistakes. They inevitably will. Yeah. And so we've got these complicated cost-benefit analyses that we need to do. And so let's take a break. And afterwards, let's talk about whether or not we really need

nuclear power. Do we need to take these risks? rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own mark to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

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to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. Okay, so nuclear power has this great ability to help us deal with the climate change issue, but it has all of these problems that we talked about, like risks of the creation of nuclear weapons, help us understand this cost-benefit analysis better. Do we really need this technology? We definitely need something, right? We are currently burning a lot of coal and a lot of natural gas

to produce the energy that we use, and that just can't go on much longer unless we want to totally fry the planet. So there's a pretty broad consensus that we need to move to a carbon neutral production of energy and also our transportation sector. Those are two things that are really driving climate change right now. And so decarbonizing the world energy grid and the transportation system is a huge priority. And the first question to ask is like, well, do we need nuclear at all? Can we just do it without nuclear? Can we just do it with like solar panels and with water power and with wind power? And that's really attractive.

It would be awesome if we could. right solar panels are getting cheap and wind power is getting very efficient and so it's nice to imagine that you might just be able to like put nuclear power on the shelf and say we don't really need it we can just rely 100% on renewables on these things which are green which don't produce any carbon which don't require any sort of external fuel source that would be a fantasy and they're definitely picking up a lot of the slack you know my husband and I have wanted to get solar panels for a long time and for almost a decade I guess we've been together for 13 years so for about 13 years years. Every year we checked the cost of solar panels. And of course, our, you know, income increased over

those 13 years as we got out of grad school. But like, recently we decided, oh my gosh, it's dropped enough that we can afford it. And solar in about the last decade has dropped by like 90%. So it's becoming much more feasible and wind has dropped by like 70%. But, you know, is that going to be enough to pick up all of the slack and to make up for all of these nuclear power plants that are going offline and are being replaced by coal? What do you think? So people are doing a lot of studies about exactly that question. How cheap can this get and can it really provide all of the energy that we need? And what's clear is that renewables will be the major chunk of it. Like 80% of our energy should come from wind and solar and water power in the future. The problem, of course, with these

technologies is that they're pretty variable. I mean, they depend a little bit on the weather. You've got a cloudy day, you're not getting solar power. The wind just doesn't blow. You're not getting your wind power. So they're not as steady as things like burning coal where you got a pile of it, you need some energy, you just burn some coal. And that variability is important, right? Because if you got a snowstorm, that's exactly when you need the energy, right when your solar panels aren't producing it. Absolutely. But now I'm hearing the space advocates in my ear yelling, well, what about if you put the solar panels in space where they're safe from weather? Yeah, we had a really fun episode about space-based solar power, which on one hand sounds ridiculous, like putting solar

panels in space and then beaming them down to the earth and it's actually a lot less ridiculous than you might imagine though people still disagree about whether it'll ever be economically feasible to have these satellites out in space but we heard from somebody who claims that within 10 years they would have a facility up in space providing all the power that Australia needs we shall see but there's a lot of skepticism for those sort of very elaborate strategies and the issue is of course economics like if you had infinite money then none of this would be a question. I mean, you could provide all of the energy you need using wind and solar if you just like massively overbuilt. If you said, we're just going to build 10 times as many solar panels as

we need and 10 times as many wind farms as we need so that even if there's just a little bit of a gust of electricity or just a few photons are creeping through, then we're going to be able to provide the energy. The issue, of course, is the economics. If you really overbuild, then you're paying a lot of money to produce electricity, and you're also generating a lot more than you need. So this problem of variability is a serious one, and we'll probably limit these renewables from ever providing more than maybe 80% of our needs. That's still pretty good, though. But yeah, that's not getting us all the way. It's not getting us all the way. And so the question really is, what do we do for that extra 20%? Actually, this is an interesting story here. There's a lot of arguments about this kind of thing

in literature, and I was reading a paper from a professor at Stanford who was claiming that you could get to 100% renewable power, even with just like pretty simple battery technology that we have today. And then I found another paper that like totally demolished that paper. I was reading the paper and I was cringing. I was like, ouch, I would never want to read a paper like this, taking apart one of my own scientific results. It was painful. Then I discovered that this whole thing ended up in court.

You know, often people in science just like disagree with each other. But the Stanford guy who had his paper like totally dismantled in public by. another paper. He sued the authors of that paper, claiming that they had defamed him and ruined his reputation. Whoa. I feel like if you're going to sue someone, you better be a hundred percent sure that you were right. Did he win or did he lose? No, he lost. It turns out he was just suing them as a way to like intimidate them to try to shut them up. And he ended up suing them and also the National Academy of Science. It was totally crazy. And he ended up having to pay like more than half million dollars in their legal fees. So this stuff gets heated. You know, people are talking

about this stuff and they get up in arms. But the question that he raises is an interesting one, which is like, why can't we just use batteries? Why can't we build enough wind and solar so that we on average get the right amount of energy? And then we just have a bunch of batteries so that we bank it when we produce a little bit too much because it's an extra sunny day. We store it for those days when it's cold and dark. And you know, if we could make this technology really dependable and get batteries to have incredibly long lives, then we could also move to the moon and do fine during those two week long nights where it would be really nice to be able to store up the solar power that you got near the equator. Anyway, you know, I'm not one who's currently waiting

for the technology to let me move to the moon. It's not the way I listen to technology news, but that's good to hear that that's an aspiration of yours, Kelly. Well, you know, the moon doesn't have any interesting parasites, so I'm not going to be moving there either. But, you know, I know there are people who are excited about it, so I'm rooting for good battery power for there are tardigrades on the moon though did that count as a parasite one no and two they they're probably dead i would guess i'm rooting for the tardigrade empire living on the mood but back to the question of batteries you know it would be great if we had batteries that could do that and currently we have the kind of battery technology that would let you store energy for like one day or two

days but you know sometimes it goes dark or still for weeks and so what you really need if you're going to like reliably produce energy using just renewables is battery technology that can hold weeks worth of energies. And it's just not something that we currently have. No, when we got our solar panels, we asked if we could get batteries to hold us over through the storm rather than buying the generators, which were estimated at $15,000. And the solar panel guy who would have been selling us the batteries was like, no, it's way too expensive. And you guys lose power for six days at a time. There's no way your batteries are going to cover that. And I was surprised that the battery power wasn't even that good, which seems like a pretty low bar. But anyway,

hopefully we make some progress there. Yeah. And again, it's a question of economics. Like you could if you poured a huge amount of money into it, but we just don't have the technology to make this feasible at that scale. And I think that's really fascinating because batteries are so important, not just for cars, but also for phones. So there's a huge economic pressure to being able to produce longer lasting batteries and more efficient batteries. But batteries are a difficult We recorded an episode last year about why we don't have electric powered airplanes yet. And the answer is because it's difficult to store all that energy in a lightweight form. And battery technology is moving kind of slowly.

But there are promising directions people are exploring, you know, avoiding using things like rare earth metals, using just iron and air and water. A bunch of people trying to innovate in this space. But again, you know, what we need is something soon. It's possible that battery technology will be totally transformed in six months. when somebody comes up with a great idea, but we can't really rely on somebody being a genius six months from now. We need something like tomorrow that we can use to reduce our CO2 emissions. So what are some other right now options that we could use?

There are a few other carbon neutral non-nuclear options that we could explore. You know, one of them is producing hydrogen gas. Hydrogen doesn't have carbon in it, right? You can think of producing hydrogen as sort of like a chemical battery. You take the extra energy that you have and you use it to split water. So electrolysis, you split the hydrogen and the oxygen apart from each other. And then you store this hydrogen. Hydrogen, of course, is a great fuel.

You can burn it. You can put it into a fuel cell to generate electricity. Sort of like a longer lasting way to store your energy. So why aren't we doing that? We are doing that. We have some of that technology, but it's not ready to scale up to like 20% of our energy grid. you know, fuel cell technology is not really there. Like, you don't see a whole lot of fuel cell cars out there on the road and for a reason.

Also, hydrogen, very, very dangerous, right? Like, we all remember the Hindenburg, you know, hydrogen is extremely volatile and ramping up our energy grid to use a huge amount of it would, of course, come with its own dangers. Yeah. Okay, so what about things like biofuels are a really fascinating idea because while they do emit CO2, there's this cool cycle. like when you grow corn in order to turn it eventually into ethanol, you're pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is then released again when you burn the ethanol. So while it's not reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere, it isn't adding to it either, right? So it's a hydrocarbon, but it's not a fossil fuel, right? You're not digging up carbon from underground, which has been sequestered for millions

of years and releasing it anew into the atmosphere, which is what happens when you burn coal. So biofuels are cool because you're pulling CO2 out of it. the atmosphere before releasing it again. That's an improvement. Sometimes I feel like we've gone so far that nothing short of removing some of the carbon dioxide that we put up there already is going to do the trick. But it's funny. As an ecologist, I feel like when you suggest this, this is one of the suggestions that actually

makes people the most angry. So the suggestion is that we could capture that carbon that's already been put in the atmosphere and store it. And the reason it makes people angry is that it seems to remove the responsibility of changing your behavior to things that are more responsible. And so it makes people mad, but I sort of feel like maybe we need to do this in concert with more responsible things like biofuels and maybe nuclear power. But I'm actually not super up to date on the different methods people are proposing for carbon capture and storage. Are you up to date on the methods? Yeah. So there's a lot of different

technology in both of those areas, biofuels and in carbon capture. For biofuels, you know, one thing is just like produce ethanol from corn. And that's all right. But it's not. But it's great because you're still feeding it into a gas power transportation system, right? And you can't run cars on 100% biofuels. You know, it just doesn't work. You need like 10, 15%, which means the rest of it is still gasoline. So it sort of prevents the electrification of the transportation grid. And people also argue about whether biofuels really are carbon neutral. You know, for example, if you're going to turn corn into biofuels, then you need to make more farmland to produce that corn, which means you're chopping down forests to make more farmland, which releases CO2.

So there's a really complicated calculation there about whether these biofuels really are carbon neutral. And about 10 years ago, there was a huge push to do microalgae-based biofuels, like to take algae, these tiny little plants and genetically engineer them so they produced ethanol, like insert into them the proteins they needed. So on a biochemical level, they could like fabricate fuel, which seemed really awesome. And so many people got involved in startups. People I knew in grad school, like, jumped onto this. They thought it was the energy of the future. But it hasn't really worked out because it's really difficult to scale that up and to make it efficient. Algae are such a pain. When you get them at high densities, they release toxins to fight with

each other and they just don't cooperate the way you'd like them to. Carbon capture is the same. It's exciting the idea that you could like pull carbon out of the atmosphere, but it also is really expensive. You know, one strategy is to try to scrub emissions. Like you're at a coal plant and you have something on the smokestack, which like pulls the CO2 out of those emissions. The way it does is by running it through this vessel that has a liquid solvent that can absorb the CO2. And then you take that solvent, you release the CO2 somewhere else in a safe way that you can capture and then you can like just store it underground. But again, that's like removing or reducing the CO2 from emissions. What you'd really like to do is just like suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere itself, right?

The sort of make up for the mistakes that we've made so far. That technology exists. but it's really expensive. And so until somebody improves that or we have no other cheap option, it's not going to be the option that we go to. You might almost rather just like overbuild your solar or wind farms than do a lot of carbon capture. Yeah. When carbon capture also seems a little scary,

because like do we understand what's happening well enough to be able to like know what rate we should be sucking it out of the atmosphere? Could things we didn't predict happen? And I don't know, Whenever you're doing large-scale tinkering, things get a little dicey, maybe. Exactly. Do you trust engineers with the fate of our planet? I'm not sure.

I really believe in their models. And then another non-nuclear carbon neutral option is hydropower. And there are some countries like New Zealand and Norway that have like beautiful fjords and lots of waterfalls that have a significant fraction of their energy coming from hydropower. And that's great. But, you know, Iowa doesn't have a whole lot of hydropower. And Kansas doesn't have a whole lot of hydropower. So it's not like a general solution for the whole grid. Well, and as an aquatic ecologist, there are environmental implications to damming things up as well.

So it's not quite straightforward. Exactly. And then in another direction, like a sort of harsh strategy is just to say, hey, look, people, you just don't always get energy when you want it. Like, we're going to go at 100% renewable and it's going to be not always reliable. And maybe that's just the way we need to live. Maybe the issue is like us demanding that we always have power whenever we need it. Maybe that's just too much to ask. Well, you know, if you lived in a place like Siberia,

you'd probably be pretty happy about having reliable energy. But I suppose people can plan, you know. We know our power goes out here pretty often. So we have a wood-burning stove for heat during those periods. So I suppose people could plan for their power to get cut when renewables can't keep up. But that's an inconvenience that I think many countries would not be willing to absorb. Yeah. And you need power not just so your kids can play Fruit Ninja,

but also to do things like. emergency surgeries, right? It's important. And so it's not something that modern societies are sort of willing to stomach. We need like stable power when we need it. Okay, so we've just talked about options other than nuclear that might be helpful at some point in the future. Let's return to nuclear after this break. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

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My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

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With raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters,

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But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, so one of the nice things about nuclear is it's a no-carbon emissions option that is reliable. Tell me a bit about how many reactors we've got running and how much power they're providing right now. Yeah, nuclear is something that exists right now, you know, and it's a significant fraction of our energy budget already. Around the world is something between 5% and 10% of world. wide energy. And it varies a lot country to country. In France, for example, in Sweden, it's a huge

fraction of their energy output. Here in the U.S., it's about 20% of the energy grid is provided by nuclear reactors. And that's from, you know, something like 56 reactors in the U.S. are producing a huge amount of power. And it's very constant. You know, it runs rain or shine, wind or not. It's a very stable source of energy. So 20% in the U.S., to be honest, that's more than I would have guessed. And I saw recently France just announced that they're going to be doing a lot more nuclear reactors. They're going to be building more as part of their climate change mitigation strategy. What sort of like predictions or projections are people working with? Like how much do we need to increase nuclear power to be able to make a dent in this problem?

Well, when the UN makes its predictions for like how we can avoid overheating the planet by more than 1.5 degrees, that's the current target. They have a variety of different strategies here. but every single strategy they describe includes increasing nuclear power. The most conservative one increases nuclear power by 150%. And there are other scenarios where it goes up to like 400% increase. So the UN is basically counting on us increasing our nuclear production as a critical element to going to carbon neutral energy. So in my mind, if we're going to hit that goal,

it's going to be critical to get people to think differently about nuclear power. And maybe part of getting them to think differently is by convincing them we've figured out some of the safety problems. I know there are some advances in nuclear reactor safety. Can you tell us about some of those? Yeah, a lot of the issues people are familiar with about nuclear power, these explosions, having high-pressure water, and producing these very dangerous elements, which will take tens of thousands of years to decay. Those are not features of more modern designs of nuclear power plants. So Jorge and I had an episode a few weeks ago about molten salt reactors that can operate at much lower pressure, like atmospheric pressures, so that they don't have this danger of possibly exploding.

And also they have a passive safety system. You actually mix the fuel in with the molten salt. And then if the thing overheats, it melts a frozen salt plug. And the whole thing just sort of drains out and the reaction stops. So instead of needing active power to cool your thing, you need power to keep the thing going. And so if something fails, it's much safer because the whole reaction just sort of screeches to a halt. And you can also use different fuels than uranium. If you start with thorium instead of uranium 238, thorium decays into uranium 233, which is excellent for fission and much more efficient because you can like use all of the fuel rather than having part of it hang out and turn into these really terrible, long lasting isotopes that will poison the earth for tens of thousands of years.

It's still not pretty. I mean, you're producing things like cesium 137, which is super deadly, but its half-life is like decades instead of tens of thousands of years. So you don't have to build facilities which will, you know, survive any earthquake in the next 50,000 years. Yeah, and you're reading about some of these new technologies for making the reactor safer, like, to be honest, it's all pretty dry reading. But I think it's some of the most clever engineering solutions I think I've ever heard about. are being employed in some of the, or at least plans to being employed in some of these reactors, like the plug that just melts away and drains,

even if there isn't power to stop the reaction. Like, there's some really clever designs. Hopefully we get a chance to try some of these out. Yeah, and it's an incredible variety. In your book with Zach Soonish, I know you guys had to cut this chapter about nuclear power, but I encourage all of our listeners to go and follow. The link will conclude in the show notes that has really fun

and detailed dive into the future of nuclear technologies in all these different varieties. So the short version is that the kind of technology we're using today, these light water reactors, has particular disadvantages, but those advantages don't exist in every form of nuclear power. So there are safer, more stable varieties of nuclear power. And among nuclear engineers, they're pretty confident that we could build nuclear reactors, which are safe.

Yeah. And some of the designs that you just mentioned have their own safety risks that have to be mitigated, which are a little bit different. But in general, we are moving towards designs. that are safer and it's it's an exciting time but as we talked about an issue is that we need this stuff today like we can't just wait 15 20 years for these new reactors to get figured out and for the government to figure out how to make them safe and to regulate them etc we need this stuff very soon and one problem with nuclear power is that it's not quick you can't be like i'm going to build a

nuclear power plant and then have one running a year later it takes 10 years sometimes 15 years because of all the regulations. Yeah, and I don't think anybody wants to say we shouldn't be regulating nuclear power, but it does seem like getting nuclear power plants online requires a lot more licensing. That's a lot more expensive than, you know, what comparable people would have to do

or, you know, like what you'd have to go through to set up a new coal-powered power plant. And that really does seem to be stopping the implementation of a lot of these new technologies, which could make a big difference for climate change. They really could. And something I didn't appreciate it until recently, is that there's a big variation from country to country.

Like this kind of regulatory overload is a feature of the United States where basically every power plant is a one-off design specific to that location. And there hasn't been a lot of like streamlining and modularization of these nuclear plans. And other countries like in France, they basically build the same power plant over and over again. And so they get really good at it and it becomes cheaper. I read this hilarious description where somebody said, France has two types of reactors and hundreds of types of cheese. In the United States, it's the other way around.

It feels like we sort of lost out on the deal there, didn't we? Yeah, no, I'm definitely wishing I was French right now. But the United States is trying to address that. There's companies, I think it's called New Scale, is working on these tiny modular reactors that need to be less sort of made specifically to the location that they're going to, and they can just be sort of like plugged in. And they're small and cheaper.

and as your town grows, you can plug more of them in, sort of like plugging in new batteries. And so, like, recognize that this is a problem and people are trying to deal with it. It's just sort of slow getting there. Yeah, and it's going to take a while. It's not like something we can overhaul overnight. And unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time left. Meanwhile, other countries like China and India and Korea are building new plants. And they're also developing new styles of plants like thorium is going to be a big deal in China and in India.

India has a huge fraction of the world. Thorium Reserves. And so it's investing in that. And a question is like, can the U.S. do that also? Can we pivot and build new plants? Because in the last 10 years or so, we've just been retiring reactors. And when that happens, we end up replacing that with fossil fuels. And I think part of why we do that is because nuclear power has a horrible PR problem. And that's because when something goes wrong, it goes wrong in like a big way that all of us are scared about because we watched Captain Planet as a kid, and, like, the accidents have names that we remember, like Three Mile Island and Fukushima and Chernobyl.

But actually, you know, no deaths is ever, you know, the appropriate number of deaths for any technology is zero, ideally. But, like, the number for nuclear reactor accidents, the number of deaths is actually way lower than the global picture for coal. So, like, Three Mile Island, I think that was like zero deaths. Fukushima had a serious. impact on the community, but I don't think it had a lot of deaths. Chernobyl had a few thousand, again, way too many. But if you had warned people they could have gotten out of there

and you could have saved a lot of lives just with advance warning, which was available, but was just withheld by the government. But cold deaths, you know, you get all of these chemicals into the environment. You get arsenic, mercury, lead. And whereas nuclear waste can easily get contained in buckets and then stored far away from people. With coal-powered plants, we just spew the stuff into the atmosphere where we can't really capture it easily. And, oh, man, I can't remember the figures for how many people have died or estimated to have died from cold deaths. Do you happen to know those numbers? It's something like the number of people who have been killed in 60 years of nuclear power are killed every month by the coal industry and by natural gas.

And you're right. Like every time there's a nuclear disaster, it's like an airplane crash. It's on the news, people talk about it. Whereas, you know, they're like natural gas explosions all the time. They kill dozens of people. It just happens so often that we don't even talk about it. It's like car crashes versus airplane travel. Cars are much more dangerous than airplanes, but people are more scared of traveling on the airplanes. And so it's something of an emotional question. And I think we were joking about the Simpsons earlier, but that's really part of it is how it's been portrayed in the media. I think partly it's just been unlucky. Like the three mile island accident that happen in the U.S. It actually happened 12 days after the release of a movie, the China

Syndrome, that portrays the meltdown at a fictional plant. And I think because that movie introduced the idea in people's minds and then made them scared, and then there was an actual accident like two weeks later, it gave people the impression like, wow, this dangerous thing I just heard about can actually happen and poison the planet. And it sort of sparked the anti-nuclear movement. And that makes sense, you know, and the deaths that happened in response to a problem with the nuclear power plant, like, happen at that plant at that moment, whereas coal deaths are, like, way more dispersed and harder to, like, you know, wrap your mind around. But, you know, if you think about coal-powered power plants as contributing to global climate change

and, you know, increasing the frequency of things like tornadoes and wildfires and, you know, all these other things that also kill people, the number is hard to estimate, but it's a pretty big number. And so I feel like we need to have a big PR push for nuclear power plants to sort of explain these numbers and still let people make decisions because there's still complicated decisions that need to be made regarding, you know, weapons and stuff like that. But I do feel like people don't recognize that that nuclear power has a much better record in terms of, you know, death toll than things like cold power power plants. We've been talking about the risks of nuclear versus other sources, but really it's a question of like nuclear power versus

climate change. Like climate change is definitely going to kill thousands or millions of people. And so So in comparison, you know, how do we balance the certain deaths of nuclear power versus certain deaths from climate change? It's a difficult topic. It's really difficult because, you know, especially if you factor in governments that you don't trust getting access to nuclear weapons, that could up the death toll quite a bit. You're going up against climate change. These are difficult decisions that need to be made.

So I reached out to an expert in nuclear engineering and also in science communication to ask her, her opinion about how she thought we should talk to people and communities about nuclear power. Here's what she had to say. All right, well then it's my pleasure to introduce to the podcast, Katie Mumma, who is a graduate student in nuclear engineering. Katie, thanks very much for talking to us. Yeah, thanks for having me. So my first question for you is about the future of nuclear technology. In your opinion, what is the most promising technology for safe, clean nuclear power? I get asked this question a lot and I think people aren't expecting me to say that I don't have a favorite or most likely to succeed. I think that there's a lot of possibility for the

future of nuclear energy. And really, it comes down to finding a good team of people who can build a company or an organization and how well they can fit into the landscape of existing energy production and in the U.S., how well they can fit into the regulatory hurdles of getting a nuclear reactor licensed. And honestly, I think a lot of different technologies could succeed. And it's not going to be the technology alone that determines whether or not they succeed. So then what are the biggest hurdles to getting more nuclear plants up? Is it the regulatory landscape? There's definitely challenges there. At least in the United States, our regulatory system is not really built for advanced nuclear technologies. It's really been spun up to meet the existing reactors,

which are one kind of reactor that use light water, what we think of as regular water as as a cooling technology. But that's not the only thing. There's lots of other challenges. Cost is a big one, too. It does take a lot of money to design a nuclear reactor, to construct a nuclear reactor, and the cost of capital can be something that really holds reactors back if you need to spend billions of dollars up front and only start generating money or return on your investment 10 or 15 years later. That's the kind of thing that a small startup company can't necessarily do. So that's been a big challenge. And also just whether or not these technologies are valued by the countries or the states or the localities that they're being

proposed in. Nuclear energy is a low-carbon technology, but sometimes it's not recognized as having low-carbon values. Sometimes it's not recognized for being a baseload or a high-reliability source of electricity. And so countries can sort of support it by giving financial incentives, tax breaks. There are multiple ways of going about it if they support those values, those attributes, or they can choose not to do that. And in today's world, we see that it can be tough for our existing reactors to compete, especially with low cost natural gas, but that's a fossil fuel. So there's a couple different challenges, but cost, regulation, those are the some big ones, as well as community support. So given the pressing issues of climate change, can we bring nuclear power online

fast enough to provide the complement we need to renewables? Is there still time to build new nuclear plans to fill in that gap? Yeah, so I think there's some disagreement. Some people believe if we just dropped everything and went full speed ahead on nuclear technology today, then nuclear could be the bulk of our electricity going forward. I'm a little bit more of a pragmatist, and I like to say that nuclear energy is not going

to be spun up realistically in a significant amount in the next five, 10 years, but it can have a crucial role in that last third of decarbonization with electricity, but also with energy. There's so much industrial need for energy, transportation need for energy, cargo shipping, where those are gonna be some of the biggest challenges

to decarbonizing, getting all the way from 50% low carbon to 75 to 100 is a lot easier than going from 0 to 25 to 50 even. And I think that's where nuclear technology can really play a valuable role, but only if we continue to support it and work on it now, because this is a long runway. And if we don't support it now, then it won't be ready in time to help us with these long-term challenges. I see other countries, China and India, bringing nuclear plants up to speed much more quickly than it seems like we can do in the U.S. Is that a good role model for the U.S.? Should we be streamlining our regulations to follow China? Or is that like a potential hazard, something that might lead

to like another Chernobyl if things aren't managed accurately? What's the better model? Well, I do think there are just some differences that we're never going to square. We don't have a state-owned electricity system in the U.S., and I don't think we're moving towards. that. So I don't think we could ever even be a reflection, a one-to-one reflection of those kind of systems. But certainly there are a lot of criticisms in the way that the existing regulatory structure in the U.S. really sort of hampers innovation and makes it tough for these future technologies to even see a pathway to getting licensed. Obviously, regulations are super important, very pro-regulation. These are technologies that have the potential to be

dangerous, but there needs to be a pathway for them to succeed. And this is something that the U.S. is working on. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the process of developing a new set of regulations for these advanced reactors, but that won't be ready until 2024 at the absolute earliest. So certainly a lot of us wish that there was a way to speed this process up to give these technologies a fair chance to succeed because, like you said, there is a chance that the U.S. is too slow in doing this and maybe we'll build some of these in the U.S., but maybe Russia and China is going to run ahead of us. And I don't think that's a safety concern. You know, I don't want people to be afraid, oh no, a Russian reactor is going to be built in X country

or a Chinese reactor is going to be built in Y country. I'm not considering that a safety risk, but the U.S. does like to see itself as a leader in nuclear technology and a leader in the diplomatic benefits that come with sharing our domestically produced technology. So certainly I would like to see the U.S. continue to be a global player. But I'm also excited to see that other countries are running full steam ahead and exporting their own technology. Let's talk about the risk, then.

you're an expert in nuclear engineering, but you also have a lot of experience in science communication. How do we talk about the risk with the general public and policymakers who are not experts in a way that's fair and balanced and lets people address it without necessarily making them overreact to the scary side of it? So one thing that I'm a huge advocate of is the process of consent and even true participation from a community. So historically in the U.S., there's been a lot of decide, announce, defend type of building nuclear reactors. A company said, we're going to build it here, and we're just going to fight anyone who disagrees with us. We're going to fight any

activists. And sometimes the nuclear company won and sometimes the activists won. But pitting against each other like that is not how you make people feel like they're heard, like their concerns are valued. And it's a lot tougher. It's a lot tougher. It's a lot slower to actually try to work with a community from the start. But we know from studying how humans perceive risk that when people feel like there's an outlet for their voice to be heard, when they feel like they have the ability to ask their questions and even provide feedback that may be taken into account, that they have some control over the process, that they then turn around and feel more trust. They feel more secure. And so I think it's super important that

anyone deciding to build a nuclear technology really rethink their strategy of working with the community and even incorporating their feedback as a way to change the risk perception, which can be so hard for scientists because I'm not making any, you know, the reactors are already safe. Nuclear engineers often say, well, we just need to convince people it's safe. But really working with the community and keeping them as partners is going to be more effective in changing people's minds about the risk than trying to teach them principles of risk analysis or throwing a bunch of numbers at them and saying, why won't you believe me? So you're saying it's more of including them in the process and making them feel comfortable than like an educational process where

you want them to come to the same decision on their own. Yeah, I mean, there is some education there, but one of the real challenges is that oftentimes we view education as a one-way street. We have the answers. We understand the science and you don't. We're going to tell you what you need to know, and that is not a way that people's minds are changed. I think many of us can think of a time where we felt that we understood something better than our friend or our family member. And if we just told them what we knew, that they would change their minds. And it doesn't work like that very often. And so if we rethink how we can go from a one-way flow of information to a dialogue and actually recognize that people who've been living in a

community for years and perhaps their whole life may actually have something to teach the nuclear company, they may actually be able to provide useful input. If we open that flow back up and don't just collect public comments and then throw them in a box, but actually respond to them. That's what I'm saying. So there is still education, but it's two-way, I think. It's a real dialogue. That's a very cool way to think about it. So then last question, let me ask you to peer into your nuclear crystal ball. If you had to predict what the energy mix would be in the U.S. in 2040 or 2050, what do you think is the future? Are we going to have more nuclear? We're going to have less nuclear? The range of possibility is so large. I would really like to see

30 to 40 percent of our electricity mix being nuclear. I think it's harder to predict with energy. And honestly, I think the bounds are very large. I think that the reality is we may stumble flat on our face and that number could be close to zero. I also think that if we hit the magic spark with some of these technologies working right now, that we could see that number closer to France and see 50, 60, 70. But I think both of those are less likely and I'm going to put myself in the middle, this sort of 30 to 40 percent with the bulk made up by renewable sources. I don't think we're on the pathway right now to fully decarbonize even in that timeline. All right. Great. Thanks very much for sharing your ideas and your thoughts. Really appreciate it.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. What did you think about her comments, Kelly? I think she made a lot of really great points. I think nuclear power is something that you can't just sort of push on people or you can. But getting community buy-in is an important part of getting nuclear power in a lot more cities. Maybe you can push it on one city, but the push-back is probably going to make you less likely to be able to put a nuclear power plant, you know, in some other town. So I think she had some really good points about the way we need to move forward. And I think her prediction for how many nuclear power plants we might end up with were super

reasonable, which is a pretty rare thing for a prediction these days. And so, yeah, I think she made some great points. Yeah, I agree. It's something that seems like it has to be part of the mix. It definitely has its disadvantages. But there are improvements in technology. And the question is whether we can bring on a new generation of nuclear power plants fast enough to solve these problems, which are happening already today.

It's already sort of too late to be attacking these questions, and so we need today's solutions to yesterday's problems rather than tomorrow's ideas. So I think to wrap up what we know is that the future of energy production will be mostly renewables. We're going to need like 20% to come from something else. And so rather than burning coal, it seems like nuclear power would be a better option. Unless, of course, there's dramatic innovation in battery technology. or in carbon capture or in one of these industries.

So it'll probably be a big mix of all of these things. But I think without some dramatic change in the landscape, nuclear power is going to be part of it. I agree. It's at least something we should be talking about a lot more than we're talking about right now. Thanks everybody for joining us in that deep dive into the risks and potential benefits of nuclear power.

And thanks, Kelly, for joining us today. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun. Or as much fun as you can have when you're talking about global catastrophes. Hey, we got some Simpsons references in there. All right. Thanks, everyone. Tune in next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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