QAA Podcast - Neon Green Energy (E363)

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

Maybe the solution to abundant, clean energy isn’t the one that could cause the annihilation of our planet? Sean J Patrick Carney of the Time Zero Podcast regales Jake, Brad, and Travis about the nuclear weird. We trace the radioactive thread connecting UFO sightings at missile silos, the ICE shooter's fallout map, and Big Tech's new romance with the atom. Sean dismantles central myths of the nuclear renaissance, walks us through the Devil's Scenario, and explains why Lue Elizondo owns a restaurant called Bombshells. Eventually we end up at Uranium glass parties to own the libs. It’s another upbeat and definitely not bleak episode of your favorite podcast.  Sean: https://timezeropod.substack.com/ https://www.instagram.com/socialmalpractice/  https://www.sjpc.work/ Brad: https://x.com/LoveAndSaucers   https://www.instagram.com/bradwtf/       Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast episode 363. Neon Green Energy. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky, Brad Abraham's, Travis Vue, and Sean Jay Patrick Carney. I want to believe. Something I've said more than a few times on this pod. This time, not about UFOs or the paranormal, though they may be tenuously related here. I want to believe in the idea of clean, abundant energy, to feel guilt-free when I pump my air conditioner in the 110-degree Austin heat. I don't want it to cause coal miners to get black lung in their 40s, or fracking injections to trigger thousands of earthquakes in places that never had them before, or offshore rigs to blow out crude oil,

coating birds so thick they can't lift their wings, or for clusters of childhood leukemia to appear downwind from aging oil refineries. This misery porn could go on ad infinitum. In my more optimistic, libed-out days, I used to think there was an answer for this built-free power. Nuclear. Its virtues have been spewed at and hammered into us by mainstream media, pop science, and politicians both left and right as our cleanest hope.

And it kind of, sort of seemed to be. But as my naive, boyish optimism waned, and my heart grew darker and heavier, I realized this hope is only true when viewed through the most narrow, myopic field of view, in context of a severely revisionist and sanitized history. I didn't truly grasp the how and the why of this until a mysterious evening exactly one year ago. I walked into a beloved bookshop, alienated majesty, for an immersive audiovisual presentation called Time Zero. It will have a complex tale of our nuclear history, from the Trinity Test to Three Mile Island to kids playing on uranium piles like dirt hills, with detours into David Lynch and uranium glass parties.

It traced how we built a civilization on an energy source inextricably linked to horrific violence that can't help but poison the people closest to it. Its past and present are also deeply weird and conspiratorial. The person behind this performance was Sean J. Patrick Carney. My first contact with him was three years ago when I received an email with the subject line, Ascended Masters. He wanted to cite my Mount Shasta QAA episode

and my doc Telosur bust in an academic essay. I've since known him as a writer, researcher, visual artist, composer, inner earth believer, and friend whom I just watched Assassin 33 AD with. which, if any of you haven't seen, I highly recommend it. Hell yeah. His work is concerned with histories of the American West,

and his podcast, Time Zero, examines the nuclearized world through cinema, literature, and contemporary art. I think these lenses are much better at capturing the feeling of such an unfathomably complex subject than pure science or policy. So take it away, Sean. Mainstream radiation. At 6.40 a.m. on September 24, 2025, Joshua Yan opened fire on an ice detention facility in northwest Dallas, then fatally shot himself.

He missed his intended targets and instead struck detainees, two of whom died. The next day, reporters noted something strange on Jan's abandoned Toyota Corolla, a black and white map of the United States speckled with dark plumes radiating out from southern Nevada. It was the Miller map, a fallout graphic showing everywhere that radioactive clouds from the Nevada test site traveled. See, between 1951 and 1992, the United States exploded 928 nuclear bombs at the Nevada test site, just an hour northwest of Las Vegas. 100 of those were above ground, with zero containment strategy for fallout, save for attempting to predict desert wind patterns.

Wait, this was all just an hour outside of Las Vegas? Yes, it was 60 miles as the crow flies or so. That is insane. So almost 1,000 nuclear bombs an hour outside Vegas. One every two weeks for 40 years. They were like, do you think we should go out a little bit further? You know that there was one kind of anxious guy being like, I don't know, guys. It doesn't feel like enough for one bomb a week.

I don't know, guys. He was immediately put in a refrigerator and sent to the test site. So they call the detonation's tests, but setting off a nuclear bomb is setting off a nuclear bomb. Plutonium rained down all over Nevada and Utah and then blew across the country on the wind. and the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years. Nevada is, in fact, the most nuked place on planet Earth. It kind of makes sense, doesn't it? It's one of the few places where smoking cigarettes feels good.

It's one of the only white castles on the West Coast. I mean, I think the signs are starting to tell us something. You could, in the 1950s. You could go and sit on a Vegas rooftop bar. They would announce the detonations, and you could go sit on the top. and have an atomic-themed cocktail at 5 o'clock in the morning and watch a nuclear bomb go off in our way. Oh, my God.

I've only done that in, like, fallout the video game. We'll get to that. So why did the ice shooter have a map of that fallout on his car? In 2017, Jan left Texas for a stint-trimming marijuana at a legal farm in Washington State near the Hanford site, a former plutonium production complex on the Columbia River. His parents later told authorities that he'd become convinced, convinced he'd gotten radiation sickness.

And Jan's not the only recent moment where nuclear has seeped into our feeds. In December, a gunman shot 11 people in a physics and engineering building at Brown University in Providence, and two days later outside Boston, he murdered MIT fusion scientist, Nuno Lerrero. Then three days later, Trump media inked a multi-billion-dollar deal with T-A-E, a nuclear fusion company, and online posters rushed to cast Lerro's research as a marketplace competitor to T-A-E. So after decades of cultural dormancy, the nuclear is suddenly everywhere. It's in shooting, big tech power fantasies, geopolitics, streaming. As anybody else clocked at radiation has seemingly

gone mainstream? Yeah, especially with fallout too, being like one of the most popular shows. Yeah. So you pair that ubiquity with the secrecy that's always surrounded nuclear technology, and you get conspiracy thinking that practically rights itself. And I feel like this is a good time to remind everyone that the Q in QAnon is nuclear in origin. So Q is, a DOE designation for nuclear secrets. It's the kind of access or clearance that J. Robert Oppenheimer lost in 1954 amid H-bomb hysteria and Red Scare politics. Funny enough, I have a brother, one of my brothers-in-law, one of my brother-in-law, one of my brothers in law? Attorney's General. One of my associates is an engineer on nuclear submarines.

And I don't know more than that. He can't tell us any more than that. But when we first met this like years and years ago and I was telling him what I did and I was explaining the podcast and I was explaining QAnon because it was very new then and people had no idea what it was. And I was explaining it to him and I was like, well, in Q, basically he claims he has like Q clearance and my brother-in-law like kind of sat up straight and he goes, well, that's a real, he goes, that's a real kind of clearance. And I was like, oh. And that was the first time I ever found out that I had anything to do with like nuclear stuff.

It's wild. Yeah. I mean, this is sort of the Department of Energy and kind of nuclear secrets and nuclear policy is frequently behind more things than we think that it would be. If you kind of scratch it stuff long enough, a lot of policy decisions and other things security are built around the nuclear infrastructure. So with all of this in mind, let's start in a place where secrecy, nukes, and high weirdness have been glued together for decades. And that's a missile field in Montana in the spring of 1967. Siloes and Saucers. My name is Robert Salas.

In 1967, I was a first lieutenant station at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana. I was a missile launch officer. One night in March, 1967, Salas was about 60 feet underground in a control capsule built to take an apocalyptic hit and still be able to turn launch keys. From bases like Malmstrom, crews monitored what are called flights of Minutemen, intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, spread across the prairies in Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Around 8.45 p.m. that night, all 10 missiles in Salas's flight suddenly went offline.

Years later, Salas would tell a version of the story that turned to malfunction into UFO cannon. Moments before the missiles went dark, a security guard, topside, called down about strange lights near the gate. Salas brushed it off until, minutes later, the guard called again. This time he was screaming into the phone saying, looking at an object, a red glowing object, hovering just above our front gate. And just as Salas hangs up to alert command, the board crashes. Our missiles began going into what's called a no-go condition or unlaunchable. Essentially, they were disabled.

Salas says his superiors ordered silence afterward. When he went public in the 1990s, he didn't lead with aliens, but over time his account hardened into an accusation, that the government was hiding. UFO information and exploding exotic technology for weapons. Salas has appeared multiple times on coast-to-coast AM, not that there's anything wrong with it. Definitely not. His name sounded familiar, and I realize he's at like every UFO convention.

And I've seen him speak before. But it's funny, I quickly looked him up to jog my memory. And in the personal life section on Wikipedia, it says that, according to Salas, he admires Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. and that he seeks to model himself after them. So insider trading. So take this with a grain of salt.

So last year the Wall Street Journal reported that an internal Pentagon review traced the Malmstrom shutdown to the test of a secret electromagnetic pulse device, an EMP, which they say also produced a brilliant atmospheric orange light. And officials never told operators about the test, they say, because it confirmed something that they didn't want leak to the Soviet. which is that EMPs, like the kind created by an incoming nuke exploding, would have incapacitated our ability to retaliate. And so while the Air Force never endorsed Solace's UFO link,

they didn't exactly suffer from it either. Starting in the 50s, the Air Force knowingly ceded UFO disinformation around the Nevada test ranges and the mythology that grew up around Area 51. Richard Doty, yes, Brad, that Richard Doty, later acknowledged feeding UFO researchers bogus stories as part of OSI operation. And I want to be clear, this doesn't explain every sighting, but it does help to steer attention towards saucers and recovered bodies and away from the real classified story, which is a massive taxpayer-funded buildout of nuclear weapons and later domestic surveillance.

And it creates this perfect double bind. If you point out defense incentives, you're covering up the real UFOs. If you debunk the alien tech angle, you're doing PR for the deep state. It's like we're living in the LXIX files, which are the Roman numerals for stuff. 69. Sort of in both. All right. You get going to pull.

Bom shells. If you rewind the U.S. nuclear timeline, our UFO lore rwines with it. In January 1945, the Hanford complex, the place ice shooter Jan thought poisoned him, decades later, was producing plutonium for the world's first atomic bombs. A Navy radar operator Bud Clem later said an unknown intruder appeared on radar. Fighter scrambled, but a glowing red fireball outran them. In 1947, Roswell Army Field was home to the 509th Bombardment Group, the unit that had two years prior dropped the bombs on Japan. And that July, 1947, personnel were sent to investigate a crash in the desert, now a foundational American UFO story.

In September 64, near Vandenberg, Lieutenant Robert Jacobs later claimed his team filmed an object shadowing a missile test and firing a beam that knocked a dummy warhead off course. And a few years later, Solace's 10-minute men go offline in Montana. and what follows are decades of cannot confirm or deny events and need-to-know situations. Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union foment a culture of extreme secrecy around nuclear production facilities and atomic weapons. Information vacuums around literally existential topics breed speculation. And if we fast forward to 2025, the documentary Age of Disclosure, previously covered by Fred, prominently platforms Lou Elizondo, former Department of Defense employee and current proprietor

a bombshells American canteena in Buffalo, Wyoming. And Brad, I wanted to ask in your reporting, did you happen to check out the logo for bombshells? Which, of course, listeners can't see, but I've got pulled up here. Do you want to describe what we're looking at? Jake, do you want to give us a description here? Sure.

It's like a propaganda poster. It's on a white background, inexplicably hanging from two paper clips. Like, look at the top. It's like those two tiny little paper holes. Paper holders. What's the point? Did you put those on, Sean?

No, that's, I think you could order this as a poster, but it's just a poster that has the logo on it. Yeah. Yes, but inexplicably, it also has like, like these graphics of the paper clips holding the poster in imaginary space. Oh, we're not even on the image and I'm melting away. Okay, so the title is bombshells. It looks AI.

Is it not? Is this before? It does. It looks AIA. It looks very AIA. looks AI. This is a woman in a she's wearing long leggings and... Those aren't leggings.

Those are pantyhose with garters. Oh. That shows what I know. Okay, pantyhose. She's got like a military an officer's cap on. She's saluting. She's in a very short cut kind of like a military dress. It's like half uniform,

half dress. You know, 1950s like USO style. And she is sitting on an atomic bomb. One of three being dropped. Actually, probably one of four because it looks like the fourth has exploded in the background because there's a giant mushroom cloud. So these are the three following bombs.

She's riding on the last one. And it's got the angry face painted on it, like the 8-10 whart hog, you know. Yeah, it's got the angry face with the teeth. And at the bottom, it says American Cantina. You know, I believe that the model of the bomb that she's riding on it, appears to be the little boy uranium gun type device, which is what they exploded over Hiroshima, and also after which one of the rooms at the Mothership Comedy Club is named. Those are called Little Boy and Fat Man. They're named after the bombs that we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Classy. Joe Rogan names his comedy rooms after the two. I assume because people bomb in them. I don't, but you wouldn't want that to happen. I don't know. It's interesting. Yeah, everybody loves going to the 9-11 room at the comedy at the comedy club, because that's where, yeah, that's where like two towers, towering comedians fall over. I don't know. I'm going to go. So my interest in Elizondo is nuclear-related. He's a major evangelizer of this idea that nuclear technology attracts extraterrestrial and even extra-dimensional attention. Here he is on Washington Post Live in June 2021.

That is one of the concerns we have from a national security perspective, that there does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sightings and our nuclear technology with nuclear propulsion, nuclear power, and generation, or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, the same observations have been seen overseas in other countries. They two have had the same incidents. So that tells us this is a global issue. Now, in this country, we've had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities.

And I think to some, they would probably say, well, that's a sign that whatever this is is something that is peaceful. But in the same context, we also have data suggesting that in other countries, these things have interfered with their nuclear technology and actually turn them on, put them online. So that is equally, for me, just as concerning. I think that there is certainly at this point enough data to demonstrate there is an interest in our nuclear technology, a potential to even interfere with that nuclear technology. So, I mean, yeah, this is the Star Trek first contact principle. Is that the Australians, they're noticing that we're getting closer to warp technology, which, of course, nuclear, I assume is the first step towards that. And as soon as we achieve warp drive, then the Vulcans will come down to make their presence known. We can only hope.

So by offline, Elizondo, of course, means the missiles are effectively taken out of commission. That's what happened at Melmstrom in 1967. And by put them online, he's invoking the nightmare inversion, nuclear weapon systems mysteriously turning on. Journalist and occasional coast-to-coast AM host, George Knapp, has repeated a Russian version of that story. in October 1982 incident at a Soviet ICBM base in Ukraine where NAP says, a UFO appeared over the facility in the missiles, which are aimed at the United States, suddenly powered up. Launch codes are allegedly entered and operators cannot stop the sequence. Then, as abruptly as it began, the system shuts down. And stories like this can make nuclear technologies feel like a cosmic revelation.

And there's a built-in narrative accelerant. Uranium, the radioactive element needed for everything from small modular. reactors to hydrogen bombs is technically alien in origin. Uranium was forged in stellar catastrophes long before Earth even formed and got mixed into the raw material that became our planet. It embedded into Earth's nascent rocky crust where it lay dormant for billions of years until we learned to dig it up. In the disclosure ecosystem, these provide ready-made scripts. Elizondo and his cohort flirt with the idea that aliens are here to warn us away from nuclear technology or to bait us into using it. They also float a

second even more convenient premise that governments have recovered non-human tech, folded it into weapons, energy, and transport systems, and hidden it from the public. It's cinematic and elastic, permitting endless reinterpretation and, importantly, a certain disavowal of responsibility for the technologies. But if you want jaw-dropping cover-ups, you don't need interstellar stakes. For the last 80 years, the nuclear weapons and atomic energy industries have been directing a disaster film in real time. And is that House of Dynamite?

Yeah, they've been working on it for 80 years. It's incredible what they've achieved. I mean, I remember this happening in real time. When NFL Game Day went from using sprites to using polygons all of a sudden, there was a massive jump in the technology. I mean, we went from, you know, we went from Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation Entertainment System. But like all jokes aside, I see people say this all the time, is they'll say, look at, you know, look at our cell phones,

look at how quick technology jumped from, You know, the 1950s to how it is now, you know, you don't, and they use that basically as, as a reasoning for, for the government folding in, you know, gifted alien technology and then repackaging it and, and selling it at a premium to, to its citizens. It's beautiful. The touch screen, remember? What happened? What happened?

Before there were buttons. And then all of a sudden, it was a screen. And there was a keyboard on a screen, nothing raised. I just had to trust my thumbs. It was crazy. Miff me with that. Not bad. Grown.

Over the last year, we've seen a full court press for the return of atomic power from an unlikely alliance. The Trump administration, Democrats, big tech, and green startups. They pitch it as a panacea. Clean baseload power that can meet climate goals, stabilize the grid, and keep data centers humming. I mean, that does sound pretty great, right? Yeah, I can't see anything. wrong with that. All sides are on my end. It's perfect. I mean, it's like, I can't believe we've done this before. And of course, I want to be clear that I get the appeal for anybody who's nuclear curious.

Like, I want an energy fix too. But what we're being sold is another techno solution built on this time four central myths. So myth one is that nuclear power is green and clean. It's true that the white clouds rising from cooling towers or water vapor and not CO2, the mess is everything nuclear depends on before the plant runs and everything it leaves behind after. So if we start at the front end, uranium, it's been disproportionately mined on indigenous land from the Congo during the Manhattan Project to the Navajo Nation during the Cold War to Havasupai sites near the Grand Canyon today. On the Navajo Nation alone, there are at least 500 abandoned uranium mines. Dust and runoff still moved through the air and communities were basically never warned about the risks.

In some places, people even built earthen homes with contaminated material. Man, so just like homes out of like, you know, uranium dust? Yeah, so when a mine bails, right, they leave tailings behind these huge mountains of sand. And if you build earth and architecture, pulverized, smashed dirt makes excellent Adobe, right? I mean, of course you're going to fill up your truck bed. It's a free way to build your home. And you have no reason to think that there's anything wrong with it. Why would they leave it there if it were dangerous, right?

So the 1979 church rock uranium spill on the Navajo Nation dumped 94 million gallons. of radioactive waste in the Puercco River. It's the single largest release of radioactive material in U.S. history, having unleashed more than three times the radiation emitted from the Three Mile Island meltdown, which happened just a few months earlier. And yet, most people have never heard about it. Yeah, I hadn't heard about it until hearing your presentation and listening to your podcast, which is shocking considering the devastation that it wrought.

Yeah, this picture you've included of these uranium slurry pods. It's like one of the scariest things I've ever seen in my life. It just looks like two pits into hell. Yeah. So those are from a drone photograph by Shayla Blatchford, who's a Deney activist and artist and has a great project called Anti-Uranium Mapping Project. And there are other artists like Will Wilson and all of these people that I talk to on the Time Zero podcast who have documented this stuff and tried to raise alarms and raise awareness.

But you can't see these things from the highway, right, when you're passing by. But then you get above them in there. I mean, it's terrifying. And that's what broke open. The berms on those broke and went into the river. Oh my God. Just absolutely devastating. And the hazards were not a mystery.

European uranium miners' lung disease was documented by the late 1800s. And by 1932, uranium mining cancer was an officially recognized occupational disease in Germany and Czechoslovakia. So this is a decade before the industry arrives on Navajo land. And modern uranium companies sell themselves as high tech. And you know, I can get into all that if people want, but the core fact doesn't change. Ripping a radioactive element out of the ground is extremely dangerous, and the timelines are geologic. The half-life of uranium is 4.5 billion years, which is the approximate age of planet Earth.

So it will be, you know, habitable just shortly before the sun swallows the Earth. I mean, it's also like, and I feel like this term, people use this term a lot, right? Like half-life, and it's, and it's, that just means that it's half as radioactivity. Oh, right. Right. So in 9 billion years, it'll still be 25% as radioactive. And it's just sort of like, these are timelines that like are impossible to comprehend. And this idea that we're kind of like, oh, yeah, I mean, we'll manage this stuff.

It's like, dude. I mean, what are you talking about? In addition to the front end, then there's the back end. And this is another thing that people never want to talk about, which is high level nuclear waste. And the United States has produced tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel. and we have absolutely no permanent disposal site. It's literally sitting at the plants. A bunch of it is in temporary pools, like water,

and some of it's in concrete casks. I bet that water's like nice and warm, though. Well, they're rewracking them because they run out of space. So they're filling it beyond, and then, yes, they heat up. The water is evaporating, and if they overheat, they explode, basically and create, like, you know, like they can fission, essentially. And oftentimes, nuclear plants are near major bodies of water, the Great Lakes, major rivers, the coasts, they need a lot of water to stay cool.

Besides the fact that this waste is just sitting there, there's literally nowhere to put it. No one has anywhere to put it. Everything that nuclear waste touches becomes contaminated too. And you can imagine on these chains how much stuff that actually is. And just imagine raw chicken hands in the kitchen, but like nobody's invented soap or trash cans. And the anthropologist Joseph Moscow calls this a derangement. Nuclear nations are promising disposal tech that will exist someday. Just trust us, while fantasizing about institutions stable enough to manage waste for tens of thousands of years,

when nothing humans have ever built less on that scale. Not even Gobeckley-Tepe, Brad. I know you like Quebecly-Tepi. And that was buried. That lasted a while. That was, I don't know, 4,000 years maybe it lasted? No, it's, it's, I think that is like older than agriculture, but it is still backfilled and nothing on it. Like, we don't know anything about it.

There's no, like, the point is that, you. You can't warn people. You can't actually properly store something that long. And so, you know, but you think, like, surely, tech visionaries like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, they've outlined innovative solutions for the nuclear waste that their cutting-edge facilities are going to produce, right? I mean, it would be illegal if they hadn't.

Yes? Yes. No. And so even before you count mining, milling, enrichment, transport, and round-the-clock security, nuclear plants are carbon-intensive to build. For atomic power, carbon neutral requires increasingly liberal definitions. If you want the full version of the Iranian story, I go deep in Time Zero episode four, which is called waste landing.

And if you want the waste story, that's episode eight deep time. The second myth here is, unlike solar or wind, nuclear power is always on. I don't know if you all saw Billy Bob Thorin's viral windmill rant from Landman. I did not. No, no, but I would like to. We've got to roll that beautiful bean footage. Please, Mr. Oilman, tell me how the wind is bad for the environment. Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete

or make that steel and haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fucking thing or winterize it? And it's 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don't get me started on solar. solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery. Okay, like, this is so patently false. It's like beyond untrue. Like, windmills typically offset their carbon footprint in, like, a matter of months.

So Billy Bob's rant, you know, written probably by Taylor Sheridan or his proxies. It makes for really good TV, but it is absolute petroleum propaganda. Like, renewables, we're told, are a granola fantasy. Oil and gas are realistic and dependable. I love that even our, like, TV shows now are, like, Like, you dumb live, these windmills are worse for the environment, actually. I mean, I'm a landman watcher. I don't know, not a lover, but I'm a landman watcher faithful.

And it is, it's one of the blackest-pilled shows I've ever seen in my life. I mean, it is, it is dark. I guess we got to, I guess I got to watch it. I was like sort of vaguely aware of its existence. Yeah. Always vaguely aware of Billy Bob. Like, I'm always curious where he's at, you know, make sure he's not too close. Make sure he's not too close.

Like physically you mean to you? Yeah. So I want to be clear. Like wind and solar, I've been outside. Like they're variable. That's true. Like the sun sets, wind fluctuates. And grid planners have a name for the mismatch between when solar peaks and when evening demand spikes.

Right. And you guys can see that I've got a chart on here. It's called the duck curve because it's shaped like a duck, right? Sun's high in the day, but people don't use as much energy. oh, sun goes away, what do we do? But treating not always on as a fatal flaw is a rhetorical trick because nothing's magically always on. Not coal, not oil, not solar, not nuclear. Every energy system depends on infrastructure, maintenance, supply chains, planning. It needs to be turned on. The real question is reliability at the grid level. And as places like Germany, a major industrial nation have shown,

renewables are reliable if you build for it with transmission, storage, and smarter demand. And this is where the United States is embarrassingly behind. It has nothing to do with feasibility and everything to do with economic incentives and a total lack of political will from both parties. Our privatized system rarely produces energy innovations, instead rewarding both dangerous shortcuts and inefficient bloat so long as those produce profits. And that's where the nuclear renaissance becomes a very convenient macuffin. Atomic startups soak up attention and policy bandwidth while fossil fuel companies keep selling themselves as the bridge in the meantime. And the longer that renewables are cast as unreliable, the longer that bridge keeps printing money. Which brings me to myth number three,

nuclear power is actually very safe. So Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Would you guys want a nuclear power plant like, I don't know, like a mile from your house? Well, you know, I've lived in Orange County, which is pretty close to San Clemente. So. you know. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up 50 miles from one from the Big Rock Point plant, which Ronald Reagan was doing ads for before he was the president. There's a great ad of him selling Michigan, this nuclear power plant. I lived like, yeah, 30-minute drive from Pickering plant in Ontario. And we did a school trip there once when I was in elementary school. And there's people fishing, you know, with the runoff water from the plant because the water's so warm, the fish really like it. And I'm sure, like, that water's, like,

technically like not radioactive, but just as a kid looking at that, it's like, that doesn't seem right. That's very Simpsons. Truly, yes. We were as far away from any kind of nuclear plan as possible because my was one of the scientists who built the bomb. Wait, what? Jake, every story you're bringing up here is like... This is a reveal.

And he and his team begged Truman, like, not to use it. They were like, you know, they were told that it was being built so that it could be used as a threat and they signed this petition basically i'm you know i'm sure i'm sure sean you know all about it they signed this sure you know begging the president to not use it or at the very least to to let the opposition know what kind of devastation that this would this would reek and um of course they ended up dropping the bomb and he like totally like radicalized and like quit science and and became like a weird artist for the rest of his life so my family was like very anti-nuclear we'll probably have to cut all this out because it reveals like probably a little too much personal information,

but I do have a personal connection to the, to the atomic bomb, which is pretty crazy. We'll just change that again to colleague. Yeah, yeah. My very elderly colleague, my very mature colleague. Well, that's, I mean, that's where the bulletin of atomic scientists, this like academic institution comes out of based in Chicago is a lot of people after the Manhattan Project who are kind of like, yeah. So the idea, though, you know, Jake, not to point a finger or anybody else, but your peasant-like fear of atomic energy is the only...

I am peasant-like, and that's not an insult to me. To me, I am one of the commoners, and I'm proud of it. So that's apparently that's the only reason we don't have a mesh network of small modular reactors powering autonomous economic zones all over this great country. And that's very seriously, though, the vibe that you'll hear from nuclear startup enthusiasts is they raise VC round after VC round. The problem isn't safety. It's you. It's your ignorance. It's your irrational dread, your failure to appreciate abundant energy. And a very slick version of this argument is making the rounds on business TV.

Here's Mark Nelson, who's the founder and managing director of something called Radiant Energy Group on CNBC. Many people think that meltdowns created the anti-nuclear movement. That's not the case. Meltdowns confirmed to the anti-nuclear movement that they were right and converted a lot of people who were previously pro-nuclear or neutral. Because there was already an anti-nuclear movement based on fear of nuclear weapons and opposition to abundant energy,

it was able to reinterpret and add public fear to otherwise sensually benign accidents like Thurmanisland. I don't think the opposition is ever classified as being against abundant energy. I don't think that's something that people don't want. Also, that guy's mustache is very wrong. I thought that we were watching like an SNL skit at first. I was like, well, if you want to, you know, if you want to, you know, if you want people to sort of like believe, you know, what you say about nuclear energy, you got to like stop dressing like you're in a school play.

But like, yeah, the phrase, yeah, opposition to abundant energy. That's a real great rhetorical move. It's like my opponents who hate puppies and rainbows, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This guy doesn't like drinking water. It's that phrase. It's this opposition to abundant energy. But the one that really sticks in my craw, I think, is essentially benign accidents, like Three Ma Island.

And calling a nuclear meltdown benign is like beyond galaxy brain. And you'll notice, too, like the dangers that Mark Nelson and other people's worldview totally erases. and that's the uranium extraction and remediation on the front end and the back end, which is radioactive waste that has absolutely nowhere to go. And further troubling, NPR reported in February that the Trump administration had effectively obliterated environmental and worker protections for new reactors. The article read in part, NPR's review of the rules found substantial changes that experts warned had the potential

to undermine safety, security, and environmental protections at the new reactors. the orders slash hundreds of pages of requirements for training guards and securing nuclear material. They also loosen protections for things like groundwater. Groundwater. Well, protections were very tight. In total, the new orders cut 750 pages from the earlier versions of the rules, according to NPR's analysis. That means roughly two-thirds of the original pages were eliminated. It's just incredible.

Basically, it's just like, when you build a new nuclear reactor, you don't have to think about groundwater. I don't know how else to more explicitly be like, these people want to kill you. Yeah, but we all, you know, don't we all have like rid of water filters at home? Sure, I've got my burkey. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to. Yeah. There's another coordinated message that you're going to be hearing a lot of. You know, coal power plants, uh, because of their emissions, they cause a number of deaths every year, far more dangerous than nuclear power plants. So that was Elon Musk, and here's Bill Gates. You know, news. Nuclear has actually been safer than any other source of generation.

You know, coal plants, coal particulate, natural gas pipelines blowing up. You know, the deaths per unit of power on these other approaches are far higher. I don't like how his arms are crossed, is he's telling us that. He looks shady. He looks a little bit like he's trying to sell you some bonk. And here is Sam Altman. You know, like a lot more people have died of air pollution than nuclear. reactors, for example. But we worry, most people worry more about living next to a nuclear

reactor than a coal plant. So we have three kings. So far telling us not to worry. Dream blunt rotation. Yeah. So sure, like coal pollution is absolutely a slow cumulative harm and it kills a lot of people. But this is total sleight of hand. They want you to hear anti-nuclear and translate that as pro-coil. And of course, that's nonsense. Like opposing nuclear doesn't mean you're fine. with coal deaths. It means you want to replace both with cleaner renewables that don't require violent uranium extraction or impossible waste timelines. They're invoking a bogus moral equivalence to make dissent feel irresponsible. And that's like accusing someone who wants safer airplanes of being pro-car crash. So you're concerned about airline safety. Well, I don't want to die.

It is imperative to underscore that Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, were not worst-case scenarios, not by a long shot. A French safety assessment modeled a severe accident where the reactor pressure vessel actually explodes, releasing everything inside. And so in this study, half of northern France and large parts of Germany became uninhabitable. That's just with one reactor? That's if just the reactor vessel burst, which has never happened before. But if it did, half of northern France, large swaths of Germany, you can never live in them again.

And the economic cost of this, just in the immediate aftermath, there's something like five trillion euros, which is like, I mean, that's not even like a, what does that figure even mean? But that's five times what it has cost over the last 15 years to the date that we're recording of the Fukushima meltdown. And I want to be clear that this hypothetical, it's not dreamed up by anti-nuclear activists or alarmists, right? This came from the very pro-nuclear French government, whose grid runs on 70% nuclear power.

So they're the one saying that this is what's going to happen. happen. Oh, God. So when somebody tells you that nuclear is very safe, what they usually mean is the probability of disaster is low enough that they're willing to roll the dice, especially if the consequences land on someone else, somewhere else, later. Only human beings would be like, we're going to bet on the safe thing that if it goes wrong, it opens like a portal to hell, essentially.

I mean, it's like, yeah, this thing doesn't release me CO2, but if it breaks. They're like, if it fails, you do realize it is going to open a portal to hell and like huge swaths of the planet will be uninhabitable for centuries to come, right? And they're like, but it's a small chance, right? And so, you know, this kind of like this banking on it, like not playing out in your own timeline. You know, subscribers may remember the story of Malincrot, uranium, and St. Louis from Devin O'Shea's recent episode, nuked in the Midwest, right? It's this idea of like, well, it's probably not going to happen to me right now. And, you know, I don't know about you guys, but if Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman are all telling me that something is good.

I assume they mean it is good for them. Yeah. You know, a key trick across the board here is mystification. If you're made to feel too simple to get it, you'll stop asking questions. And that brings me to myth four. The technology is simply too complex for you to understand. And you've seen this move with crypto, right? You drown people in jargon, so they stop asking what the thing actually does.

And the same pattern has emerged in the renewed push for nuclear energy. Proponents lean into futuristic pitches for insanely expensive to build technologies that, at the end of the day, boil water to make steam. And if it doesn't scale, it's never the industry's fault. It's your cowardice or the government's bureaucratic hurdles. But, you know, I want to be clear. This is the United States. When is public disapproval or regulation reliably stopped something lucrative?

tobacco, the Iraq war, oxycontin? Come on. Public sentiment in like Congress do not stop stuff from happening that makes money. Yeah, it's insane. They've gone back to now that cigarettes are safe. I've lived through that the cigarettes are dangerous, to the vapes are better, to that we don't know what's in the vapes, to the vapes might be more dangerous than the cigarettes now. And cigarettes might be the safer alternative.

Popcorn lung. Yeah. Imagine if you could popcorn lung your local water ecosystem through, a, through water vapor. But atomic power is not alien level technology. Its premise is simple enough for just about everybody to wrap their head around. Nuclear plants use uranium as fuel. And inside their reactor, atoms split in a controlled chain reaction.

And that releases heat. That heat turns water into steam and that steam spins a turbine. And the turbine makes electricity. The engineering is elaborate, yes, but the basic idea is not. In short, nuclear is an extremely expensive, tightly controlled atomic tea kettle. And I wanted to ask if you all have heard about small modular reactors. Oh, yeah.

If you've heard anything about SMRs. Yes, I hear about them all the time that this is the future. And nearby Austin at Texas A&M University, they're trying to build some and spin them up. They're trying to build those ones underground in a pit. And then when it's sort of like, I guess outlives itself, they're just going to like put some dirt on top of it to bury it and go to. And then dig another hole for another one. Getting closer to the groundwater table does seem to me. Like, yeah, that seems good.

Yeah, they should just save everybody time and start building them directly on top of the Earth's core. Yeah. Or you could do like General Electric and push the Japanese to build it on a cliff in an area that's prone to, I don't fucking know earthquakes. And I don't know, see what happens there. Maybe that saves a few dollars, though, you know, in the fiscal quarters. You know, so funny I've been thinking about as we've been recording this, is like there's like you never see like a 2012 like style disaster movie about like nuclear reaction

like a nuclear explosion like of course they did the amazing like Chernobyl series on HBO but like you never see like a big popcorn flick about like it's always like something it's never anything man made unless it's like AI or technology right they'll let like AI be the bad guy kind of but it's always like an earthquake or like a tsunami or a meteor hits you know or a big volcano or something But like I've never seen a like a disaster movie that's like all the nuclear power plants like fucking, you know, somebody hacked them and they're all like, you know, they're all going to blow up at once. I wonder if that's intentional. If like the government is like, well, hey, what if it was a volcano? I understand.

Well, back in the 70s, there was the China syndrome. Yeah. Yeah. Jane Fonda, Jack Lemma, who was nominated for Academy Awards. It's very popular. But right. But in my lifetime, I seems like that the nuclear sort of disaster flick is sort of been. faded away. It's not something as common or it just doesn't feature anymore at all. Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder why that is. Yeah. The China syndrome came out, I think it was like a few weeks before Three Mile Island. Whoa, that's crazy. I'm surprised more conspiracists aren't on that one. Well, Joseph Mosco, who I mentioned before, who wrote The Nuclear Borderlands, this book called The Future Fallout, this anthropologist, he's at University of Chicago. I interviewed Joseph for the podcast, and he writes a lot about that, you know, that desire of a to see their country obliterated again and again, and how, though, after the fall of the Soviet Union, you see this massive drop-off of nuclear-related films.

There are very few that have anything to do with that because that anxiety kind of is replaced by whatever, like, climate, natural disasters, things like that. But that it absolutely did sort of disappear from the consciousness, which is what's so kind of interesting about the last maybe few years, that it has really, really kind of feels like it's back. Right. So back to SMRs or small modular reactor.

These are sold as futuristic factory-built plug-in-play power plants. It's like an Ikea-fi atomic energy. But the basic idea of SMRs is not new. Small reactor concepts have been around for decades, and they were largely sidelined because they didn't make economic sense. What's new is the marketing and the money. SMRs are catnip for venture capital, and they pair really neatly with these special economic zone crowd.

So you've got these private microgrids as mini-fifdoms, less about energy autonomy than autonomy. from any kind of government oversight. And the kicker here is that small doesn't mean less waste. There's a team of researchers from Stanford and University of British Columbia, and they did this case study, and they found that most small modular reactor designs would increase the volume of nuclear waste needing management and disposal by factors of two to 30.

So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, so these are supposed to be better, but... 30 times as much waste. But it's somehow better? Uh-huh. Yes. It boggles of mind. Now, I want to be fair, energy startup, Oklo, which is owned in part by OpenAI Sam Altman. They recently launched their Aurora Powerhouse Small Modular Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory.

So that was a big deal. But with nuclear fuel and short supply, right now it's running on natural gas. Oh, okay. The small modular reactor. It's running on the anti, the anti-nuclear nuclear reactor. at the Idaho National Laboratory, which famously had two meltdowns in the beginning of the first nuclear disaster. Now, the other salvation technology here is nuclear fusion, right? And this involves heating fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius.

Always smart. That's hotter than the sun. And see, the problem is that when you do that, it can't touch anything. Right. Because it explodes everything. So they're trying to figure out how to use to suspend that, maybe plasma, I don't know. So they have to chase this power source that scientists. it's this running joke that it's always 30 years away. For now, though, it definitely remains more

science fiction promise than a climate plan. And, you know, all of this is to say, it's oversimplified. I really go into this in a two-part episode seven if you want to know more about nuclear energy. But all of this is to say that the next time that you're with well-meaning people whose hearts are in the right place and they're talking up nuclear as a climate fix, I hope that you do feel empowered to push back a little bit. Because the fact is nuclear isn't green or clean. It's a volatile chain front to back and the stakes are absolutely enormous. Machines fail. Meltdowns are inevitable, especially in privatized energy economies where the incentives to cut costs are legion and where the startups pushing this stuff very famously move fast and break things. That's their entire thing. And you know, the question,

will a truly catastrophic reactor bursting event like the one modeled in France happen? I don't know, but if your solution to climate change is boiling water with a technology that can render whole regions uninhabitable when it fails, you'd better have a reason you can't do anything else. And the thing is, we can. After 70 years, nuclear still supplies maybe a tenth of global electricity and only a small slice of total energy. What about in the United States, do you know, like roughly? Almost 20% depending on the year. Yeah, which is still, still seems like really low. It is really low. And there's a reason, I mean, you think about this. We've had, you know, commercial reactors come online in like the 1950s. So we're looking at,

like almost eight, right? The bomb, first bombs, 1945, a decade later, we have nuclear power. It's been 70 plus years. And this, if they wanted to, if this actually worked, they would have done it. Sure. Right?

Like, it's not, like, the fossil fuel lobby is, of course, powerful, but they're also adaptable. And if this really were going to integrate, they would have done, like, what Philip Morris did with Jewel, right? Like, you would adapt, you would integrate, you would become part of those things.

So, yeah. And I think that this is the part that people need to hear. Like, nuclear is not, quote, the future. It cannot physically scale quickly, cheaply, or safely enough to get us to net zero. And the basic way to think about this is that nuclear represents on one side a dinosaur industry looking for a bailout, and on the other, vampiric startups looking for a cash out. An atomic rugpole. Cool. I would encourage Mark Zuckerberg to try and build some kind of sun in his laboratories. He should tell like his assistants and stuff to like maybe like get out of the room. But but he

But he and his top level execs, I do think that they should. You guys should be working on minisun technology. I think less than 30 years away. You could do it tomorrow if you wanted to. They should do it at Bohemian Grove. Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's a good place. But, you know, we just learned that Conan O'Brien is a member.

I didn't know that. Yes, officially. The first Irish Catholic admitted. Yes. We're going to have to go in there and, like, kidnap him like they did Stephen Spielberg. off the Twilight Zone movie set. Conan rushing into a goblin's nest. Oh, man.

And here I thought nuclear was medium to medium bad at best. And I come to find out that it's really bad and it's not even powering that much shit, 10% worldwide. I'm assuming that we're still all gas, baby, all gas town all the time. We're pretty gassed up. Yeah, we're gassed, yeah.

Yeah, we're smoking that diesel. Think of the data centers. The big tech pitch for a nuclear renaissance is that electricity demand is about to explode. In the ignition is AI, a massive data center build out that they claim only atomic power can realistically supply. This is presented as a foregone conclusion, which glosses over an important fact. Even after the dawn of the internet, U.S. electricity demand stayed relatively flat for decades. efficiency gains kept pace with new technologies. You get better chips and cooling, LEDs, smarter appliances.

Historically, tech doesn't brute-for-scale. It miniaturizes and optimizes. Today's AI boosters, by contrast, seem weirdly uninterested in that tradition. Instead, we get a dominant energy strategy that's both myopic and dangerous. Bigger models, more compute, more everything, than a backfilled justification of inevitable demand. What they're pitching has the retro-futuristic Jetson's kit of the Fallout games, where abundant nuclear energy disincentivizes efficiency. In that atom punk world, there's no need to make things smaller or smarter.

You just dump more power into them. And that's why Fallout's future looks like America's past. Refrigerator-sized radios, chrome dashboards. And there's also a psychological pull, a future defined by nostalgia for a past glory. And it makes you wonder, is it really that surprising that Maga in Silicon Valley are completely aligned on this thing? I want to set the world on fire. So I want to be clear about something.

This imagined electricity demand is not on you, dear listener. The AI boom isn't being driven by regular people deciding to consume 10 times more electricity. AI is being embedded into everything by default. Search results, email, customer service, photo tools, social feeds, fitness apps, whether you ask for it or not. Yet you're already hearing consumer guilt. narratives that you're draining rivers by using chat bots or making Shrek sexy. As if your individual refusal to use chat GPT has any impact whatsoever on industrial scale

buildouts, it's the plastic straw ban all over again. At my, my partner's last... Your colleague. My, yeah, my colleague's last job. My colleague who I live with, at their last job, there was a new, like, woman who came in, she was, like, older than everybody else, like, brought in from some bigger company. company or whatever. And like the first thing she did was like, I want everybody to come up with like a list of like five ways like AI can improve your workflow. Like basically came in and was like, I'm going to teach you how to use AI. And like I think that that's kind of the majority is that it's just being pushed on everybody. It's just being pushed on us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you get blamed for it, which is pretty, pretty classic kind of like consumer culture. Gaslighting.

We didn't want this. We were perfectly happy with the funny videos that we were making. Let me say this. We were making funny videos for decades and decades, little ones, even the ones on your phone. Before AI came along, we didn't ask for it. We were perfectly happy. They pushed it on us. And we said it was bad at first.

They showed us Will Smith eating spaghetti. And we went, no, that's not right. That's not what he looks like. And they were like, well, hold on. wait a minute, we can make it look more like him. And here we are, you know, just a couple years later, and we're like, wow, it's him. I do admit, I did once send Brad, after we watched Assassin 33 AD, an image of Jesus crucified, but where it says in-ri, it says, poned above him, which I was arguing was the first shit post.

But with the AI, quote-unquote, demand, right? The mantra becomes, don't question the demand, but build for it. And this quietly aligns investors across artificial intelligence, data infrastructure, nuclear startups, both political parties, and the mining industries needed to feed them. And so if it's not chatbots and cancer research, what does all this compute actually for? The survivors will envy the dead. So I'm going to level with you all. Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman aren't just interested in making your life easier.

Well, even Sam. I mean, for big tech, the endgame is integration into the U.S. security state. Once you're hosting sensitive clouds, comms, logistics, and data pipelines, you stop being a company and you become a national dependency. Occasionally, these firms staged little morality plays. Google famously backed away from Project Maven after employee backlash over drone targeting. Then they turned around and last year celebrated a massive Pentagon AI contract. More recently, people have probably been able to be able to be able to be able to be. heard about this, Anthropic tried to wall off some military uses, and they got branded a supply chain

risk, and immediately Open AI was right there to step in. And this is a pattern. Every major tech company eventually integrates into military and police systems, even if a CEO performs discomfort along the way. I mean, even your doorbell is a cop at this point. Yeah, exactly. And now they're going to war with it. They're like, the first time AI has been significantly used to, like, blow up a school. Yeah, that was always the joke, too, was, you know, I'm sorry. My mistake, that was actually a school. And then that actually happened. I mean, it's, it's the perfect excuse for inadvertently launching a new crate. There's this whole trend of movies in like the 60s of the accidental nuclear launch or like the technology gone awry. And it's, we basically just like manifested it. We're like, well, what if we did

build the thing that, uh, what if we built the thing from strange love? I know, I, you know, when I, when I, I watched the original, when I watch the original Terminator movies, you know, I always thought to myself, like, who are the skulls, you know, that they're walking on, that they're crunching on with the big robot feet? Like, who was that, you know? And it's us. It's us. We did it. You know, you watch a movie like that and you're like, how could human, we'll never be stupid enough to do this? And we're literally like living in the middle of it. And of course, if you add nuclear back into this picture. picture, things get darker real fast because nuclear reactors do not just generate electricity, they also generate plutonium. And plutonium is what makes an atomic bomb in atomic bomb today. The U.S. can say it won't recycle reactor plutonium into weapons pits, and right now, as I understand, it mostly doesn't, but it can, and it has. And other countries have too. You will never have nuclear power without nuclear weapons. They're inextricably linked by design. And this is why this new vertical integration should be setting off alarms. The same circle of people keeps showing up across

AI platforms, nuclear startups, mining ventures, and defense contracts. Like Bill Gates is heavily invested in artificial intelligence. He's heavily invested in nuclear technologies. And he and Jeff Bezos own an AI powered mining company that is doing a lot of work in the Congo right now. Oh, God. Where there just so happens to be a bunch of uranium. Oh, boy. Oh, God. Is there any chance that they're not like evil guys and they maybe just think all this stuff is really, neat. Yeah, probably. Probably a little bit of both. It can be both and.

Yeah. Both and, yeah. It is possible to hold both in your mind at the same time. They're not building some neutral energy future. They're consolidating private control with the blessing of the departments of energy and defense. And of course, then comes the sci-fi security fantasy, missile defense. So Trump's Golden Dome is a rehash of Reagan's highly lampooned Star Wars initiative. Military systems like this that are going to shoot nuclear missiles.

of the sky are a procurement bonanza that siphoned money away from education, health, and the environment into the pockets of defense contractors and surveillance tech companies. Even Catherine Bigelow's A House of Dynamite, as goofy as it was, understood how worthless all of these systems are. Did you guys see that film, by the way? No, I haven't. Oh, it's actually, it's worth seeing. I don't think it's a good movie, and it's, the ending is so lazy, like incredibly lazy, but it does seem to get some things right, and it does actually come off as a critique of our capabilities. Yeah, and I'll get to this in a few,

but it basically kind of shows what plays out when, like, you know, human in the loop doesn't... What does it matter when we're talking about minutes? And so, of course, as we discuss, the military is incorporating artificial intelligence. They've definitely been incorporating into artificial intelligence war games, and a recent King's College London study that went pretty viral ran 21 crisis simulations with chat GPT, clod, and Gemini. And as the articles reported, the AI systems deployed nuclear weapons in 95% of scenarios.

95%? They employed de-escalation in zero percent of scenarios. And this is admittedly like a bit of an oversimplification. I mean, there's all these other factors. But the broad strokes are correct. I mean, the chatbots largely were like, somebody's going to nuke. And I guess they're right though in a way, right? Well, look, you guys, like these things want to kill us, right?

I mean, wouldn't you, I'm pointing this thing at a smoke detector, the back of a smoke detector and being like, what size battery fits? You know, what size battery fits into this? They must just look at all of us like, these fucking idiot. And they're the ones breathing the air, you know, they get all the, you know, they get all the freedom. We're trapped in the circuit boards. I'm not sure it's it works.

like that, but... Yes, that's exactly how it works, yeah. I mean, my interpretation here is grimly simple, and that's that, like, artificial intelligence doesn't share, I guess, like, our comforting myths about nuclear deterrence. Because nuclear deterrence depends on three things being true at the same time, and that's that there are rational actors, that we have accurate intelligence and that technology is seamless, and none of those feels remotely durable right now.

The machines look at deterrence, and they see a bluff that eventually, gets called. And it feels like people seem to know that. Before taking heat and pulling it down, Polymarket was literally letting users bet on how many months remain before somebody launched a nuke. And when you add in the fact that defense insiders can place polymarket bets and then behave in ways to profit off of them, things feel pretty horrifying. Oh, no. And when somebody does eventually fire another one of these things, despite all of this advanced technology, security domes, and lightning-fast global communications, it's probably going to be the end of the world. In nuclear war a scenario, the journalist Annie Jacobson presents this chillingly plausible sequence

of apocalyptic events. In the book, North Korea launches an ICBM at DC. That takes like 30 minutes to hit, followed by a submarine launch ballistic missile, which takes between 7 and 12 minutes, and that one targets the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo, California. This catastrophic double strike, a nuke hitting a nuclear power facility is known fittingly as the devil's scenario. They cancel each other out, right? Yes, exactly. It's good. The energy is incredible what's produced.

If you can capture it, that's what we got to do is we got a plan for smart capture in the devil's scenario. But technically speaking, I do want to let you guys know that the targeting of a nuclear power plant with a nuclear weapon is a violation of the Geneva Convention, which, I mean, thank God, right? Good, good, good. I'm glad there's a rule about that. Well, yeah, there's another thing I'm decreasing confidence in is international law. Right. I mean, it's like, I don't even know what these things exist for. So once a U.S. satellite detects an ICBM launch,

the president has like roughly six minutes to decide on a retaliation strategy via what Jacobson calls a Denny's menu of death contained in a satchel you probably heard of that's called a nuclear football that follows a president around. And misconceptions about America's missile defense capabilities abound, says Jacobson. The ground-based mid-course defense systems, so like our security dome, has 44 interceptor missiles, total. Those 44 missiles have a success rate of 55%. They can't stop submarine launch missiles. And ICBMs almost always carry dummy warheads.

So even if one of those 44 interceptors were actually to hit one of these several thousand warheads, raining down under the United States, which is described as shooting a bullet with a bullet, there's a decent chance that that specific warhead was a decoy. In short, as is evidenced in a house of dynamite, you know, not to spoil the plot too much, but the system is useless. That's sort of the inciting incident of the film as a nuke has launched and they try to intercept it and they're like, okay. And then they're like, wait, what the fuck?

It's like, dude, you can't shoot that out of the sky, you idiots. Darn, I had faith in the shooting out of the sky. method. There's no secret where all of our ICBM silos are. So it's a use them or lose them situation. That kicks in. The U.S. retaliates immediately basically with all 1,770 ready nuclear weapons. These are ICBMs, aerial bombs, submarine missiles. Russian satellites detect these missiles volleying over the North Pole, but they can't determine the North Korea destination. And even if we were to call Russia and explain to them that we weren't actually attacking them, why would they ever believe that? So needing to decide basically a means.

Immediately, Russia would retaliate, launching their own 1,710 deployed nuclear weapons. And within 72 minutes. Wait, that's 60 less, though. So. Yeah, they do have less. We do. There is a missile gap, and we are winning, which is very good. And within 72 minutes, so a little over an hour, 60% of the global population is annihilated.

Survivors face horrific radiation, as well as nuclear winter as ash blocks sunlight for decades a la the road, freezes water, kills crops. And then, if you survive long enough, when temperatures rise years later, billions of decomposing frozen bodies will thaw and unleash a second calamity, which is catastrophic plagues. Nice. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the communist Chinese, the survivors would envy the dead.

See, you know, presidents don't talk this bluntly anymore. I know. We should bring back this kind of presidenting. Mid-Atlantic kind of Yeah, mid-Atlantic Like kind of like Like Dark Souls dialogue Are you saying like Mark Wahlberg for president?

Yeah That's what you're saying? Hey look you gotta be president okay We gotta stay 4 a.m. Run club okay We gotta stay preyed up Gotta stay prayed up in the White House, okay? That's my Mark Wahlberg impression It'll get better, it'll get better

Now there's only one thing that could prevent Such an Armageddon. Brad, do you know? Oh, I know. Aliens? Yeah, UFOs. Yeah. Of course.

Thank God. I knew they were going to come into this at some point. Yeah, they're going to make sure that none of this actually happens, right? Yes. They'll turn it off. Uranium glass parties to trigger the lips. So we opened with weird fact patterns. A radioactive fallout map stuck to the car of a man who shot up an ice facility before killing himself.

Then days after. After an MIT fusion specialist was murdered, the internet immediately tried to stitch it to an eerily timed fusion company deal. The feed is starting to feel irradiated. Part of me is glad to see increased atomic awareness. Movies like Oppenheimer or something like a house of dynamite remind people that the atomic era never ended.

But the other part of me is worried that the disinformation obfuscation inherent to social media is producing a dissent filter. The atom is getting rebranded through a curious coalition, Silicon Valley, the White House, defense industrialists, but also plenty of well-meaning climate crusaders. They have different motives, but exhibit a consistently sensitive trait. Total contempt for anyone who asks basic questions about uranium extraction, waste, plant safety, military use, or who is supposed to manage cleanup on geologic timescales.

The Technosolutionist Center Left will call you a Luddite blocking clean energy features for AI. From what I can glean, the logic is that we need to create all this nuclear, waste to power AI to figure out what to do with all the nuclear waste. Some cynics will smear you as pro-coal, ignoring the fact that the Trump administration just obliterated environmental and personal exposure restrictions around nuclear plants. Yeah, it's the return of black lung for coal, right? Because they got rid of a bunch of regulations around there, too. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, when your family members get cancer and you suggest it's environmental, they'll call you paranoid, conspiratorial, and liken you to the ice shooter. The right will brand you woke, anti-America, naive about national security,

and you can already see the reactionary culture coming, uranium glass parties to trigger the libs, radiation chic wellness influencers, TikTok's romanticizing trad uranium mining. All the while, operators like Lou Elizondo will keep spinning UFO yarns around nuclear sites, aligning atomic inquiry with pseudoscience and conspiracy ecosystems. And that's how this filter works. In the same way that even suggesting JFK's public war with the CIA had some consequences, in the same way that that gets you lumped in with flat earthers or building seven hysterics, there's going to be a coordinated effort to paint legitimate critique of atomic power like it's Q&on sludge. And AI is going to make it so much worse. Synthetic clips, fake documents,

infinite noise. We're told that the future of sustainable, autonomous, and secure energy is nuclear. If the Trump administration actually believes this, then what exactly are we doing in Venezuela and Iran? Well, that's for like our pickup trucks. Here's the bottom line. Atomic power is neither safe nor sustainable. We do not need to increase energy output tenfold. And renewables already work at scale. What's missing is political will.

And if you doubt our capacity, just remember this. Before electronic calculators, microwave ovens or Velcro, a group of nerds on a group of nerds on a plateau in New Mexico built a space and time shattering nuclear weapon out of whole cloth in under three years. We can figure out battery storage. Oh, bravo. Yeah. Wow. Really, yeah, really unnerving stuff. You know, there's lots of things going on in the world to be worth worried about, and you just adds one more of my mind. So thank you. You're black pilling on nuclear power, really? I've had a few, yeah, a few friends that said, yeah, man, good job. I listened to the first episode, I'll get to it, dude.

I'll let you know. The production's great, man. This is a horrible time to be a podcast. It's a horrible time to not be pilled, like, in one particular way. It would be very comforting to believe that there's some powerful anonymous entity with some sort of nuclear intelligence security clearance for some reason who had the solution to everything. Right. Absolutely, yeah.

That there's some kind of answer to any of this and that it's not the usual. just kind of cynics working for the next fiscal quarter or to enrich themselves on a short scale. I mean, it's pretty disheartening, especially when you think of the scale of like unlocking a technology like that. I mean, you're unlocking the power of the sun and that what it is absolutely used for

is ending the planet. But what about cold fusion? It's not real. That's why they murdered that guy at MIT, right? Yes, that's a Nudal-Lerro, yes. It was about to unlock it. Yeah. well that didn't feel good

yeah this was Jake this was so dark you needed a therapy session in the middle of the episode yeah it's true I was like I was like all right man I was like I gotta go back to learning about like how horrible like nuclear energy is and he was like I'd like to be respectful

of your time and he let me go and yeah no great time bad time to be a podcast or great time to be in therapy No, but this is amazing, Sean. Thank you so much for bringing your amazing research. And people have to check out your series. What's the easiest way for them to find it?

So Time Zero is available wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're a reader as opposed to a listener and you want to see maps, works by different artists, and importantly, my citations. So where is this information coming from? Check out TimeZeropod.com. There's an essay version of every episode. too. Nice. And do you have a website as well with some of your artistic works and other writing? I do. You can check out SJPC.org. Those are my initials. Dot work. Or I'm on Instagram at social

malpractice. What happens when someone goes to shankarney.com? If you go to shoncarney.com, well, I don't know which one of them has it, but there's a couple different blues musicians. There's definitely a watercolor painter from New Jersey. Yeah, I think there's a yoga guy. There's a lot of Sean Carnies. but not one as knowledgeable and well-spoken as Sean J. Patrick Carney. Statistically speaking, there's probably like a nuclear influencer, Sean Carney, who's like a pro. Wait, that's a good. I should just become like a nuclear influencer. I feel like I can avoid all the pain. I feel like I can avoid all the pain if I just pivot that way.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second premium episode for every main episode that we put out. Plus, you get instant access to this whole archive of premium episodes. They're a bunch, like over 300, I think, already.

Right? Something like that. We've been doing this a long time. For everything else, we've got a website. That's QAApodcast.com. Sean, please take us out. Listener. Until next week, may the uranium pellets bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences.

So a lot of you have been asking about my diet. I start my day by drinking pure black coffee. Then I usually work out for about an hour or so. After working out, I eat something a little bit unusual. Gummy bears. Roughly the size of uranium pallets. Uranium pellets are the few used in nuclear power plants. And just like gummy bears, they're super dense.

Which just means they're small but have a lot of energy inside. One uranium palette, roughly the size of a gummy bear, okay, you get it by now. Has as much energy as 149 gallons of oil. 2,000 pounds of coal or 12,000 Big Macs. With one of this tiny little things, we can power a house for about two and a half months. That's unless you're being a total idiot living all your lights on while binge watching Netflix, blow drying your hair and using a blender. This means that we can create an insane amount of energy in smaller spaces,

which requires less land, which is great news for the environment. It also means that the waste it creates is tiny. If I were to get all of my life's energy from nuclear, my waist would fit inside of a soda can. Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. Don't ever drink soda. Sugar is like really bad for you.