Science Friday - Book Club Finale, Floating Nuclear Plants. Oct 30, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Pushing Boundaries In Fantastical Fiction The Science Friday Book Club has spent all of October immersed in short stories by Indigenous, Black, Chicanx and South Asian authors. But at the end of the day, where do these stories fit in the bigger picture of fiction writing in 2020? In the final conversation of this fall’s speculative fiction focus, SciFri’s Book Club joins writer and ‘New Suns’ editor Nisi Shawl in a conversation about the expanding footprint of writers of color in science fiction and fantasy, and the ways both science and science fiction can be re-imagined and redefined when you look outside of the perspectives of white, Western authors who have dominated these genres in the past.  Shawl suggests broadening what stories we call science fiction. What happens when we think of writing, or even religion, as forms of technology?  SciFri producer Christie Taylor and Journal of Science Fiction editor Aisha Matthews join Nisi Shawl in front of a live Zoom audience for this conversation about the diverse and dynamic future of science fiction. Shipping Nuclear Power Out To Sea When the Green New Deal was proposed last year, it called for the United States to become fully energy independent, moving to 100% renewable energy sources within the next decade. It specifically mentions solar and wind power as two alternatives the country should invest in. And it conspicuously leaves out nuclear power.  But the nuclear industry is fighting to be part of the renewable conversation. While it’s been innovating at a slower pace, there is one old idea that engineers say still holds water: floating nuclear power plants.  Ira talks to Nick Touran, a nuclear engineer and reactor physicist from Seattle, Washington about the advantages of shipping nuclear out to sea, as well as some newer technology keeping nuclear power in the renewable energy conversation. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, can floating nuclear power plants be part of a carbon-free energy solution? The first, the Sci-Fright Book Club is back for the final conversation about New Sun's original speculative fiction by people of color. You've been reading and listening with us all month. You've helped us stretch the boundaries of what science fiction is and joined us in imagining diverse futures. And this week, we talked to the book's editor Nisi Shaw about why that work matters. Producer Christy Taylor, unofficial captain of team book club, hosted the interview with a live listener audience on Zoom. Take a listen. With the Science Friday Book Club, the premise is pretty simple. We pick a book, we read it, and then we talk about it with other book nerds and maybe some scientists for a few weeks.

This season, we picked a collection of short stories called New Sons, original speculative fiction by people of color. And in this book, we've got aliens, we've got transdimensional horror stories, we've got reanimated dead tearing apart conquistadors, and simple ghost stories about letting go of our past. Here to talk more about this collection, the making of it, and why we should all keep seeking out new sons, is Nisi Shaw, speculative fiction writer and editor of New Sons. Welcome Nisi.

Glad to be here. It's good to have you. On the scholarly side, we've also got Aisha Matthews. She is managing editor of the Journal of Science Fiction and Literary Programs Director for the Museum of Science Fictions Escape Velocity Conference. Welcome back, Aisha. Hi, Christy. Good to be back.

Good to have you. Nisi, I'm going to start with you because you edited the collection that has been sort of the star of Science Friday for the last month. This is a collection that explicitly centers writers of color. Why did you say yes to this particular project? Because it's a burgeoning area of science fiction and speculative fiction of all sorts. It's a movement, you know? It's happening.

Say more about that. Like, what is the shape and arc of this movement? Well, I am 65 in a couple of days, and I've been writing speculative fiction of one sort or another and attending conventions for decades. And up until about 10 years ago, I could go to a science fiction convention and shake the hands and greet every single person of color that was at a convention. There would be a thousand people there and there would be 10 people of color. And then that changed, that changed so dramatically.

And there were all these authors, there are all these readers. We would call ourselves sometimes unicorns because we were supposedly rare, but actually we were not there rare, but we were like suddenly visible. You wrote in your afterward to this book. If the new sons, and we'll talk a bit more about this metaphor to Octavia Butler a little bit later, but you wrote, we've been here a long time. We've been shining a long time. So it's not that people haven't been writing or telling these stories.

Where did everyone come from, I guess, or what has changed? Oh, a few things changed. There are a couple of organizations that got involved in promoting the process. of people of color in the speculative genres. I helped to found one back in 1999, the Carl Brandon Society. We got together and decided, you know, we need to support this, and we need to expand it, and that's what we did. There is an organization called Connor Bust,

and Connor Bust raised money and then gave scholarships to people who wanted to attend convention I should say that in the world of speculative fiction, the gathering together virtually now or physically of people of like mind was always really important. And it was something that was out of reach financially for many people of color because of class and economic issues. And it was also out of reach in certain ways because sometimes you would go to this space and it would be. feel really unwelcoming. Really unwelcoming. So there are a bunch of people who decided to change that.

I should also mention race fail, which was an online controversy that sort of surfaced all these issues. People saying that, you don't need to put people of color in science fiction stories. You don't need to hear from them because they have nothing to say. They don't care about it. Well, I think that's a great pivot to the question I was going to ask next, which is, what do we lose when we don't have the voices of people of color being published in books of science fiction? What perspectives get left out? What ideas don't come to the surface? We don't know. And that's the point. We don't know what we're missing. If the field is just blindingly white, well, then we are blinded by what's coming in.

to our senses. We are overwhelmed. We're dazzled and we don't know what we're missing. Aisha, I introduced you as sort of the scholarly presence in the room because you publish journal articles about what you see in science fiction. And you have already, we've talked about this already, but the ways in which, for example, inhabiting a body gets read differently when the writer is a person of color. Talk a little bit more about how this plays out. And what else you see in books like New Sons that we might not see in a Robert Heinlein story. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think the nature of embodiment for people of color, like the rise of intersectionality is an idea looking at these axes of identification has really highlighted how we all walk through

this world so differently. And I think there are a lot of people, as we've talked about in the past, that have this vision of a future that has, in its advancement, become very, monochromatic. And so I think the beauty of anthologies like this is, A, reminding us, as Nisi So rightly pointed out, that these stories and these writers are here, but also really giving voice to the sensation of being a person of color, imagining a future in which these people of color, our technologies, our cosmologies, our spiritual beliefs are built into the technological presence. I think that is what makes so many of these stories so interesting is it really resists the traditional idea of science fiction, which is very digital technology. And I think

this book makes an excellent case for the fact that there are so many other technologies, spiritual, social, all of which can really enrich our lives. You noted at one point out, Like writing is a technology, for example, just the idea of putting words down in a visible form. Nisi, I think you have a response to what Aisha just said, but I wanted to add in a piece you wrote a while ago, you wrote that science is easier to define than fiction. And I wanted to throw that quote into this question that Ayesha just posed. Yeah, science is a way of approaching the world. It is not necessarily confined to test tubes.

friend of mine, Kim Stanley Robinson, he was a guest of honor at a science fiction convention called Wiscon, and his guest of honor speech was all about social technologies. And I think that this is an important idea of a lot of the writing that comes out of people of color, out of the African diaspora, you know, the various Asian diaspora, is that the way that a culture is constructed, the way that a community works is a form of technology. It is a way of approaching the world and using the tools of observation and testing that are given to us by science. Am I right?

I think so. I think that's a really fun question to explore. And actually, before we go to that, we have a question from an audience member. Joanne from Montclair in New York had a really interesting question just about identifying who wrote these stories. After reading this book, I was wondering this collection of stories and they're all identified as being written by people of color. I was wondering if there's anything within the stories and how they're written or whatever that makes them identifiable as such. For me, the answer was no. A good story is a good story as far as I'm concerned.

But I'd like to hear your opinions on that. I can answer that as I was putting this together and reading the stories, I wasn't focused on finding a common thread between them that identified them as the work of people of color. I would agree with you that a good story is a good story. What I did find was a couple of things. There was a strong tendency in all of the, these stories to question the normal narrative of colonialism. And that was something that I saw over and over again. And the other thing is, again, not so much from the stories, but from the authors,

they kept telling me, I've written this, but I have no idea how to get it published. I don't think it's going to sell. No one is going to want this. So I don't know that that's something that is in common with the stories, or if it's something in common with the authors being told that the stories were to be suppressed. And kind of to add to that, to your point, I second the notion of the colonial legacy, kind of being at the center of these, because it seems in so many ways, whether it's an alternate history or whether we're looking in a far future that has the consequences of colonialism and capitalism. It seems that all of these stories kind of touch on or intersect with the idea of Western rationality and varying levels of challenge to that. So given that rationality in

and of itself has often been an instrument of enlightenment, an instrument of Western thinking, I think it's really interesting to see how far reaching the effects of this colonial past truly are. And I think it's highlighted in a way in this anthology that might easily be overlooked by certain people who don't know what to look for. Last week we talked about the shadow we cast through time, which is a story by an Indian writer, Indra Das. And that was a story that was literally about colonizing another planet, but there are already people there, these aliens, or this fungal, polonial organism that the human settlers just decide to adapt to, right? There's no hostile war with the other species. It's, it becomes a symbiasis instead, which felt very different from

other stories I've read about humans going to other planets. I often have encountered stories where there's at least a moment where it seems like there might be interspecial war. And in this case, it felt very much like, well, this is here, but they were here first, and we're just going to have to like figure out how to live on the same planet. A lot of what I see in that vein is with Tobias Backel's story, which opens up the anthology and with, let's see, the one by Stephen Barnes. Oh, yeah, come home to atropos. It's all about being colonized rather than being the colonizer. So there's that, too. Yeah, interesting question.

We have to take a short break. When we come back, more with speculative fiction writer Nisi Shawl and the Journal of Science Fictions Aisha Matthews. This is Science Friday, and I'm Christy Taylor. We're continuing our discussion of this fall's Science Friday Book Club pick New Sons, original speculative fiction by people of color. This discussion was recorded on Zoom with a live audience, and my guests are Nisi Shal, editor of the collection and a speculative fiction writer and Aisha Matthews, managing editor of the journal of science fiction and director of literary programming for the Museum of Science Fiction's Escape Velocity Conference.

I do want to take a moment and stop and ask about genre because Nisi, again, as you said, science is easier to define than fiction. So I'm assuming you're implying that fiction is hard to define. If we're going to talk about whether a story belongs in the fiction category or even in the science fiction category, how do we start to weigh that and doesn't matter? Like, should a story just be a story? Should a good story just be a story? All's fiction, as an ex of mine used to say, is speculative. It's all stuff that you're just wondering about it.

Unless you're a journalist, you're not reporting what actually happened. So all fiction is speculative. But what I think makes these stories more speculative is that they are sort of questioning and looking differently at things that are accepted wisdom for the world. So they're speculating on sort of the underpinnings of reality. Honestly, one of the stories in the collection, the Robots of Eden, kind of spoke to me to that for the listeners who maybe haven't read it, the idea of a world in which they've created this sort of brain that operates to override emotional responses and to keep you kind of

of healthy. And one of the main characters who is also a writer of fiction talks about Adam and Eve having what they did by biting the apple was creating fiction. In this idea of, at least how I interpreted it, was this idea of empathy and the human experience being so much of what we're putting into fiction. And so in that light, I would see speculative fiction as new ways of learning to emote an empathy. hypothies fundamentally, whether we're looking at technology, family and kinship, which, you know, rises again and again. Yeah, just kind of trying to resolve that, I think is really what speculative fiction comes down to. We have a question actually about Robots of Eden from Andrew Stone, who's in Albuquerque. He said that he read Robots of Eden and he was very moved. He said, it's the only fiction that contains its own book inside of it. And with one in five Americans on some kind of mood stabilizing drug, isn't this a story that's kind of about now? All science fiction is about now. I mean, because that's where we are. We can't actually write

so much about the future. We can speculate about the future, but where we're speculating from is now. So yes, yes, you're right. And I also say, I mean, it seems like the idea of rationalism in opposition to emotion is kind of something that is a historical challenge. And so as we face as a country, particularly in America, a very divisive kind of political environment, I think it's really the question of how to, as I said, kind of how to emote in new ways, how to empathize in ways with beings or people who we would believe have nothing in common with us. And I think in many ways, part of what television does is shows us and normalizes new configurations that would otherwise have been really hard to get people to accept.

So I think speculative fiction just pushes that envelope a little further and tries to normalize things that, to us, seem way out there. But so did, you know, cell phones 100 years ago. So it's really, you know, a matter of how quickly we adapt to that impending future. I want to talk about Octavia Butler, whose work as an early black science fiction author, helped create some of the space that other writers are now expanding into today. Nisi, the title of new sons is a reference to a quote of Octavia Butler's. There's nothing new under the sun, but there are new sons. How did Butler lead to the work that we're seeing today?

What lineage would you draw in connecting her to what we can read now? She was just so focused and so determined to get her. her stories out there, that she was going around creating legacies wherever she went, really, and deliberately and consciously. I don't know if you realize this, but Octavia and I were actually friends. So there's that sort of personal connection, too. I'm jealous. Iisha, you're a Butler scholar. I mean, you obviously made a choice based on her work to focus on. her. What do you attribute to Octavia Butler's influence in the work that you see coming out now? So besides the broader Afro-Diastphoric influence, I see the most in Butler's work in the discussions of hybridity and change.

She, you know, her work is just so in the type of cognitive estrangement that we talk about of science fiction, this hybridity is so. astranging to us. It kind of puts us at a distance. And yet her constant insistence is that change is the only way for humanity to survive into the future. And so I think as we look at, you know, environmental, you know, climate change, all of the things that are coming, this idea that we will have to adapt. And I've seen a lot more writers looking at what that adaptation looks like and really living in the discomfort of what it means to let go. So I guess if I had to sum that up, I would say really like the discourses of post-humanity. She has advanced those greatly by just helping us imagine and really redefine for ourselves what we're holding on to in the term human and what we might be able to part with.

As a writer of science fiction, Nisi, is this what you set out to do is, you know, are you trying to predict the future or are you, you know, what is the importance that you see in, in the work you're doing? I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm trying to extrapolate hope, actually, is what I personally am trying to do, is create

these blueprints. Someone has compared science fiction stories to thought experiments. You know, if you keep going in this direction, where will you wind up? Maybe in the world of altered carbon, maybe not,

We have a question from Jennifer. It seems like a lot of the stories in the book were more fantasy oriented than science fiction oriented. I've read a lot of science fiction. I wondered if the whole thing is just muting together and if there's really a difference from sci-fi to fantasy like it used to be so different. What a great question. I think that there is a tendency to label something as fantasy if there are certain elements in it, despite the presence of science elements.

The example that I will use is Nadiokora for his novel Lagoon, which has an alien invasion. There's like spaceships and stuff, but there's also incidents where, like, say, a road, becomes haunted and rises up and eats the people who travel along it. Another example of my novel Everfare, I was really, really trying to be hard crunching the numbers as to, you know, how much loft you get in this dirigible and, you know, what kind of fuel can you use to go this amount of distance.

But I had people also putting their consciousness into cats, right? cats. That sounds great. So the idea that there's a dividing line between fantasy and science fiction, to me, calls into question the idea of a dividing line between science and non-science. And the science that I use does allow for people to put their consciousness into cat bodies. One of the other things we talked about over the course of last couple weeks was the term

of speculative fiction and why it's useful. And at least in my study, I've seen speculative fiction as kind of a larger umbrella that encompasses science fiction, horror, fantasy. So I would generally speaking say that science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction. And so in the sense where science fiction kind of has the supremacy, particularly because it has historically, you know, portrayed science and white guys using it. You know, speculative fiction has a little more flexibility in traditional boundaries. So rather than throwing out the definition of science fiction, attention to speculative fiction might be a way to kind of elide that problem. That's where we have the ability to incorporate those.

fantastic elements into a traditional science fiction. And I just want to add that there are elements that are used in science fiction stories that have no basis in the extrapolation of current scientific knowledge. One example, faster than light travel. There are so many stories of intergalactic empires where they're knit together by people traveling faster than life. That's fantasy. Are you calling that magic?

I mean, is that what we should say, that Star Trek is a magical show? You know, that is why I am concerned about these terms and why I'm so glad that someone's asking about it. So I have, I think, one more question for both of you, and that is maybe two questions, but the first is just what's on your recommendation list for things we should read if we want a experience unconfined by genre that still manages to stretch our perceptions of what reality can be, especially by black, brown, or indigenous writers. Excuse me as I turn to my book show.

I was fine with that until we got into unconfined by genre because I experienced science fiction and speculative fiction and fantasy and all of those genres as unconfined. So I would recommend anything by Ted Chang, for instance, a neighbor of mine, a friend of mine, he wrote the short story that became the movie Arrival. And all of his short stories, all of his novellas are mind-blowing. They're very carefully constructed to fit within the parameters of science, though. And there was a panel on interstitial writing, you know, writing that goes between different genres that breaks the boundaries. And he told everyone that his writing was entirely stichial.

I love that. I would say in terms of two of the more prevalent authors that I've read that kind of fall into that space would be Nettia Cora for, particularly in Binty, the Binty series, and Nalo Hopkinson in Midnight Robber, in particular, as well as Brown Girl in the Ring. But very much, she does, both of these authors do such an amazing job of melding the magical, the inheritance of African religion into clearly technologically advanced societies. And I think if you're looking for ways to imagine, how essentially how things might have been either without colonialism or if it had had a different effect, I think a lot of those works by not being centered in America really give us, I think,

a wider perspective that is still very relatable to Americans, but a lot of things in America, I feel like, are often conscribed within the history of chattel slavery in a way that sometimes forecloses other possibilities. So by opening up to the diaspora, these authors are really giving us very generative new ways to look at science and techno-spiritualism as we've been talking about these past few weeks. Oh, excellent. Excellent. I love Midnight Robert. And I would add that another N-author, Nalo, Nadi, Nora. Nora Jemison. Yes. She went to an astronomy camp, and the science that she learned there was the basis for her fantasy trilogy, the Broken Earth series.

Yeah, we had her on. She was actually our last fiction book club, though that was about a year and a half ago at this point. We read the first in the series and talked about disasters. Just a quick reminder that I'm Christy Taylor, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. talking to speculative fiction author and editor Nisi Shaw and the Journal of Science Fictions Aisha Matthews about new frontiers in imagining the future. I have actually one last question from Paul in our audience who just wants to know what are some of the biggest takeaways

from this collection, New Sons, or even some of the individual stories, especially for readers who are not of color. People of pallor, as we say. People of pallor, yes. The takeaway would be there's so much out there and you get to experience it for the first time. And I would say, I mean, two of the things that I think this collection does well,

one of them is reckoning with what we'd call historical racial trauma. So in this moment, there are a lot of people, well-meaning people who want to understand the history of racism and obviously why I would point them to some more nonfiction books first. I think there's a way in which a lot of these stories reckon with the emotional toll that we're still paying. So a lot of people who can't see the connection between colonialism and today and the protests they see in the anger, I think, can find some answers to speculate on in here. And also the idea of the ghost story and different ideas of ancestral influence. these stories have a really good way of pointing us to different ideas of four mothers and forefathers, especially from the American sense and kind of what there is to be learned from them,

rather than treating them as the kind of stagnant pedestal upon which everything is built, looking at other ways that ancestors and history are just another part of the continuum of past to present. I really like that. And as Nisi said, every story is also a story about now. Absolutely. That's the end of our time. Thank you both for joining us today. Thank you, Christy.

Aisha Matthews, managing editor of the journal of science fiction and director of literary programming for the Museum of Science Fiction's Escape Velocity Conference, based in Washington, D.C. And Nisi Shaw, author of many books and stories, and editor of the collection, New Sun's, original speculative fiction by people of color, joining us from Portland. Join us also in future live recordings by visiting ScienceFriday.com slash live stream or signing up for our newsletter.

And if you're looking for past interviews from our book club, our online discussion community or anything else, you can find it all on our website again, ScienceFriiday.com slash book club. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. We hope you enjoyed this season's book club. I know I've got a lot to chew on. And we want to hear about your experience with this year's book club. So please take a quick survey to help us improve this project.

over at ScienceFriday.com slash book club. Stay tuned for news about the next incarnation of Book Club in a few months. And of course, we'll keep talking about great books we've encountered all year long. When we come back, an old idea for building offshore nuclear power stations that might really cut down on carbon emissions. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. I'm Ira Flato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. With Halloween coming up, I'm going to bring up a subject that's really scary to a lot of people, nuclear power. You know the arguments for and against it. Nuclear plants are expensive to build, potentially risky to run. And we don't need them because we can develop enough green energy to do without them. And no one wants one in their backyard. Unless, of course, you live in France, where they happily draw most of their non-polluting electric power from nuclear power plants.

But on the other hand, if you want to do away with greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels, fracking and natural gas, and cut down on carbon altogether, perhaps nuclear deserves to be part of the discussion. One nuclear engineer has been thinking about an old idea to bring new nuclear power online, floating nuclear power plants, situated miles offshore. If it sounds crazy, be reminded that we have lots of floating nuclear power plants offshore already. We call them aircraft carriers and submarines running smoothly and safely for years, built in shipyards by highly skilled workers, and they live in no one's backyard. I wanted to hear more about this intriguing idea. So I invited him to fill us in. Nick Tehran, nuclear engineer and reactor physicist working in Advanced Nuclear in Seattle,

Washington, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Very excited to be here. Nice to have you. Tell me how you got interested in this idea of floating offshore nuclear power plants. Well, it really came as a natural result of just trying to understand what the major cost drivers of nuclear are and then starting to ask the natural questions of what could be done a little bit better. And this, of course, involves reading through the archives and seeing what's been tried in the past and then comparing to the modern context. And as I looked into it and was talking to friends and colleagues about it, it really became quite interesting because of this sort of confluence of various elements of it that would make it both more acceptable for the public as well as most likely more cost

competitive. People have been coming up with new ideas to innovate in the field of nuclear energy, but this is an old idea that we might be able to resurrect. Let's talk about it. The idea has been floated since the 1950s, but we never built one. Tell me about this proposed Atlantic generating station. Well, we did build several floating nuclear power plants, including something called the Sturgis, which actually powered Panama Canal for a little while, but that was very small scale. And so when it comes to large scale things, it's true. that the Atlantic generating station was the first big proposal of this. And what the issue was, was there was a big electric demand off the coast of New Jersey,

but there weren't very many good sites. And so somebody proposed, well, geez, can't we just put it on a floating platform of some kind? And a joint venture was formed between Newport News Shipyard and Westinghouse, and a huge amount of environmental work went into it. They studied all the different effects of the heat coming out of it, any different type of scenario that could happen at sea. And eventually they actually got a construction license to build eight of these things in cereal at a production facility in Florida.

Now, what ended up happening, though, was because of various economic factors like the oil crisis and increase in inflation, electricity demand flattened out. And so the customer went away. And so even though these things were pretty much ready to build and construct, nobody was there to buy one. Well, but you think it's time to think about them again. So I want to go through the pros and cons of them, for example. How do they float? Are they on a barge? Yes. There are a couple different concepts, but that particular design is basically just on a barge, and they built a large concrete barrier, sort of an island around it. There are other concepts that people are looking into,

such as folks at MIT that involve building it more like an offshore oil platform, something that can sort of float on its own and also not necessarily need a big concrete protection around it. A couple other concepts. The Russians just put one to work in a village in the Arctic Circle. And it is just sort of in a protected port. So it didn't, it's not far offshore. It just kind of came up to shore and it provides power to the local community there. What are some of the advantages of being floating on the water? Well, it does seem crazy at first, but really one of the biggest challenges in nuclear safety is assuring cooling to the whole system. And when you are out floating in sea, you have a great overabundance of cooling. And so it's very difficult to challenge your

ability to keep all the systems cool, which is necessary for the safety of the system. So from just a safety perspective, that's a big advantage. The other major advantage is that the construction environment in a shipyard is very controlled. It can be serialized at very large scale. And so you can get both improvements in quality as well as improvements in throughput. You can think of it sort of like Henry Ford assembly line for gigantic low-carbon power plants. Because that's one of the criticisms of American nuclear power plants is that everyone's got their own design. There's really no standardization, is there? That's right. And all the economic assessments going back many decades say, well, it looks like the way to achieve economically competitive

nuclear is to pick a standard design, serialize it, and build a lot of them. And you would be building in a shipyard where they know how to build things that go floating out in the ocean and they have very good quality control. Precisely. And whereas a normal plant may be built in some

sort of remote area where people are coming in and building roads and living quarters and all sorts of things there. And they're even building the infrastructure needed to construct it that's temporary. But in a shipyard, It's much better because you can build these permanent facilities that are designed, you know, very heavy equipment that can do the whole construction,

not just of that plant, but all the plants that are coming in your order list. And as I said before, we already have these floating nuclear plants. We call them submarines and flat tops. So there's experience, I guess what I'm saying, there was experience in the shipyard building of how to put a nuclear power plant in something that floats. Indeed, that was the first thing we put a nuclear power plant in, really. I mean, all the plants that we use today, all the nuclear plants that are making electricity are descended from Admiral Rickover's original submarine-based design.

I remember the Nautilus. That's right. In a museum in the Groton, Connecticut now. What about storms, high winds, waves, how do you build it so they're protected? Great question. And that is one of the major new hazards that exists at sea but not on shore. and you have several options. The first option is to, when you're building a very expensive ship,

you can actually afford to build it to be very resilient against storm. So the biggest ship in the world, which is called the Prelude, is a floating natural gas processing facility. It's designed to withstand Category 5 cyclones off the coast of Australia. So you can make these things that can handle a pretty crazy weather event. And then if something really nasty, is coming in, you could, you do have the option that you could just unhook from your subsea cable and move to someplace where you may be safer. And then, and then you have this worst case scenario

where you would actually design in sort of a sink safe type scenario with a plan to go in and recover the material. So the engineers would basically design it so that if it did start being inundated by a storm, it would sink in a situation that would maintain cool ability, keep all the radio nuclides in until you could go down there and salvage the core. You point out that in October 1981, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported that the floating nuclear plant units can be manufactured with reasonable assurance that they can be cited and operated without undue risk to the health and safety of the public. And that seems to sum up what we're talking about. Exactly. And that was really, I had sort of heard of this.

venture, but until I wrote this little post about it, I hadn't really understood how far the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had gone in and studied it. And it really was this, the 1975 New Yorker article, which is a very long form description of it, really kind of made it clear how much they had done. And then when I went and read some of the environmental assessment reports, it was really impressive. So this has really been vetted in the 70s and 80s. So this is a, this is certainly an interesting idea. Yeah, because that was a very strong time for the environmental movement. And if they vetted it at that time where there were huge critics of how the government was regulating things, that speaks highly of it. Exactly. Let's talk about a timeline. Have you thought about how long

it would take to build one of these? Because that's one of the main criticisms of nuclear power, is that they're very expensive and they take eight to ten years to build. On this scale in a shipyard, would that be smaller and lower? Certainly the first several, as you're hashing out the design, would take around that kind of time frame. But the throughput that I think you could achieve in this kind of scenario is significantly improved. And this is maybe one of the most effective ways we can cut that construction timeline.

We could be talking about putting out gigawatt scale reactors on the order of two years instead of eight. And of course, that would take a lot of shaking down and a lot of success in the early units. But those are the kind of numbers we can. could start looking at. And so when you're talking about, hey, we have to replace not just all of our electrical generation in the world, but also all the transportation, the industrial heat, it's this massive amount of fossil fuel that we need to replace with something low carbon. And these

shipyard serialized large nuclear plants are one of the most exciting ways that I see that we could do that. So it would be like a production line, as you say, you would just be able to put them all out from this one plant or where a few of these plants like car assembly lines. Exactly. Yeah, and even the satellite image of the facility that's still there in Jacksonville, Florida, you can kind of see where they would have four of them under construction at once, and then one would float out, and then a new one would begin, and then they'd float another one out. As a nuclear engineer, if you look at the old plans, could you just dust them off, or are there newer designs you would make? Well, these plants are quite similar to some of the slightly improved designs that we have today from the big vendors like General Electric or West

house, or even from Kepko, the Korean nuclear vendor just signed an MOU with their shipyard folks in Korea. And so perhaps the APR 1400, which is a Korean design, is the most appropriate one to put on a ship for the very near term since they're so ramped up. We would probably want to take one of the designs that's currently being offered by the vendors and adapt it for a ship. might we take some of the French designs? They seem to have adopted the idea that, you know, one design and make many plants out of them. That's right. They're one of the best examples of showing that if you do serialize your production,

you can decarbonize your entire electric grid on the order of 15 years. There are other countries, right? There aren't the Russians looking into building these in other countries? Absolutely. The Russians actually just completed building one, and it just went into operation. I think earlier this year, the academic Luminos off, which is a relatively small one,

but still it's probably the best example of one of these things actually working. The Chinese are working on some floating reactor designs, and as mentioned, the Koreans just signed a memorandum of understanding, so they're starting to talk between their nuclear people and their shipyard people about getting into this business as well. When you hear people talking of resurrecting nuclear power, they're talking of building smaller modular reactors instead of these larger ones. What's your opinion comparing the two ideas?

Well, the small modular reactors are actually kind of a very similar concept in that they say, well, we see that these large mega projects are just running behind schedule and are very difficult to construct on budget and so on. And so they decide, well, maybe if we can build these reactor components in a factory and then rail ship them to where the customer wants the power, then you could use the controlled environment of a factory to build these modules and move around. And so they're hoping to get economies of mass production and they're hoping to do so in a way that will actually do better than economies of scale, which are what has traditionally driven nuclear power plants to be very large. Now, the shipyard idea is to say, hey, it's not one or the other. Why don't we get both economies of scale and at the same time achieve economies of mass production by using this huge factory of a shipyard? So they're actually quite related concepts. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You know, when you talk with nuclear power experts, it always comes down to money.

how much cheaper one form of energy is than the other. And right now, wind and solar produce energy very cheaply. So what is your argument about the cost analysis of building these nuclear plants? Well, certainly nuclear construction needs to improve in order to stay in the game because it's true. Wind and solar have fallen in price dramatically over the last just 10 years. Natural gas, the fracked fossil fuel is still at sort of record low prices. And so nuclear needs to do better.

And the argument basically is that while wind and solar generators, the turbines and the panels, have absolutely, you know, decimated in costs. There's still a system cost associated with them because, you know, in the winter, there's a lot less sun than in the summer. And in that night, of course, there's no, you have to have energy storage systems, whether that be pumped hydro or huge lithium batteries or some other kind of technology to deal with the intermittency. And so there's all these people out there doing energy systems modeling.

And a conclusion that I'm seeing more and more is that as you go to very deeply decarbonized systems, when you're actually getting rid of your fracked gas fossil fuel backup systems and replacing them with something low carbon, well, it turns out that if you have a low carbon firm energy source, whether that be nuclear or geothermal or even fossil with carbon capture, if that ever works, that that system as a whole is significantly cheaper than the system that's just 100% intermittent renewables plus huge batteries or energy storage. When the Green New Deal was proposed last year, it emphasized wind and solar power, but it left out nuclear. If we aim to be using 100% renewables in the next decade, do you think nuclear power has to be

part of that discussion? I believe if we're serious about decarbonizing at that scale, then there's no choice but to have nuclear be part of the discussion. We talk about decarvanizing in 10 or 15 years, but as someone who spends a lot of time looking at energy infrastructure and the scale of this problem, I can tell you that it is extraordinarily challenging to decarbonize at the rate that we need to. And I'm not talking about decarvanizing the next megawatt, but I'm talking about the whole system, which includes, again, the low-carven, energy storage type and energy shifting technology. Nuclear in the United States makes more than half of our zero carbon electricity. And so it's already the climate champion in this country. And because it can run at night and through the winter at full power,

it just absolutely has to be part of the overall story alongside the incredibly good wind and solar facilities. Well, Nick, I want to thank you for being part of this discussion. bringing up this intriguing possibility about nuclear power. Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Nick Turan, nuclear engineer and reactor physicist, working in advanced nuclear in Seattle, Washington. If you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

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And have a safe and fun Halloween. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.