Tech Won't Save Us - Nuclear Won’t Meet Tech’s Energy Demands w/ MV Ramana

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by MV Ramana to discuss the tech industry’s push to have nuclear energy power its data centers and why the reality of nuclear power isn’t as great as its promoters often make it seem.MV Ramana is a Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Langdon Winner wrote The Whale and the Reactor and Do Artifacts Have Politics?. Timothy Mitchell wrote Carbon Democracy.Microsoft made an agreement to try to restart Three Mile Island, but it’s not a done deal yet.Data centers are fueling fossil fuel use, despite claims about nuclear and renewables. Leaked documents in October confirmed Israel has nuclear weapons.Support the show

The tech industry and many of these obscenely rich people who are sort of pushing it are deeply concerned that things like climate change will lead to people asking them for larger social and economic changes. And that is going to affect them adversely. So I think for them, trying to pretend that there has to be a technological solution is part of trying to preserve their wealth and their position in society. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is M.V. Ramada. Ramada is a professor and Simon's Chair in Disarmament, Global, and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He's also the author of Nuclear is Not the Solution, The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change. It won't be news to many listeners of this show that there has been a

lot of talk about nuclear power recently in the tech industry by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and others that are looking for new energy sources to power their data centers and all of the energy that they're demanding for the generative AI boom that we've been seeing over the past couple of years. As the energy demands of these companies have been increasing, there have been questions as to whether this goes against the pledges that they have been making for many years to make us believe that they care about climate change and that they're reducing their emissions. Meanwhile, what we've seen in the past few years is their emissions steadily increasing, not to mention their energy demand and their water use as well.

One of their solutions to that has been to say that they are investing in other forms of energy that will be less emitting in order to mitigate the impact of this massive energy demand that their data centers and other operations are creating. But naturally that leads me to wonder whether they're really serious about this or whether this is another distraction that we need to be paying attention to to understand the real impact of what's happening here. When I hear these tech companies talking about nuclear energy, on the one hand, I think, okay, this almost makes sense, right? These are very large corporations. They have a particular view of the world and what our future is going to look like, one

where we use massive amounts of additional energy to power all of these technologies that they want us to adopt, not to mention this vision that they have of merging our brains with machines and kind of living in simulations and all these sorts of things, right? So you can see why they want us to be consuming all this power and why they might see, you know, massive centralized facilities as the means to achieve that. But then there's also a piece of me that's very skeptical as to why they're doing this. Because yes, we see the massive energy demands, we see their emissions going up, we see that they're not meeting the climate targets that they told us they were going to meet. And meanwhile,

as we see stories about the amount of fossil fuels that they're using increasing and the amount of fossil fuel investment happening in the United States hitting levels that we haven't seen in many years, they're talking about nuclear energy as if that is something that is going to come online in a very short amount of time to meet the energy demand that they have right now and to mitigate and reduce the emissions that they're creating in this moment. Yet, what we know is that that nuclear energy is not going to come online anytime soon, if it's really going to come online at all. And so this feels to me like a distraction. And so I wanted to talk to Ramana because he is an expert on these things.

He's been looking into nuclear energy for a very long time and brings the kind of skeptical perspective on this that I think is really welcome on a show like this one. So I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Ramana. We dig into not only the tech angle of this, but talk about nuclear energy more broadly and the bigger concerns that it presents as we think about the path forward and the energies that we should be using in the future as we know that we need to bring our emissions down in order to meet the challenge of the climate crisis. So if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues

who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these critical conversations that dig into the impacts of the tech industry. You can join supporters like Matt Rush from Victoria, British Columbia, Sophia from Toronto, Andrew in New York and Greg in Philadelphia by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ramana, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you, Paris. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I've been listening to us for some time now and it's a great honor to be among the people you're interviewing.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you're listening to the show and, you know, hopefully that you enjoy it. If you keep listening, I'm sure that that's the case. There's too many podcasts out there to listen to something which you don't like. You know, obviously you will know that there's been a lot of talk in Silicon Valley recently about nuclear power and nuclear energy and the need for something like that. So that is part of the reason why I wanted to have you on the show today. And we'll dig into, you know, a number of aspects of nuclear power based on the research and observation of this industry that you've been doing for quite a long time now. But I wanted to start by asking you a more general question, which is, when did

you start looking into nuclear energy itself? You know, how did this become an interest of yours? And what caused you to see it in the way that you do today? So my training is in physics. And while I was doing my PhD, I became politicized. I became much more active in various political and social issues. So I was looking for things I could do where I could apply my physics training to problems that are more relevant to society. And to cut a long story short, a serendipitous meeting led me to start working on nuclear weapons in South Asia. And so for some years, I was looking

at missiles and nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan. And that led me to start thinking about the nuclear energy institutions in India, because it's the same institution that promotes nuclear energy in India that's also responsible for making the weapons materials. And so one thing led to the other. And my first book was on nuclear energy in India. It's called The Power of Promise. And at some point, I thought I had done enough as a researcher on India, and I started thinking more broadly about nuclear energy globally. And this was during the period in the first decade of the century when there was much talk about something

called a nuclear renaissance. The Bush administration had passed the Energy Policy Act in 2005 that put in place a lot of incentives for utility companies to build nuclear reactors. And other countries like the UK was also doing something similar. And so it seemed interesting for me to think about what the experience in India, which has also been a very early entrant into the atomic age, would tell us about nuclear power elsewhere. So I started looking at that. And that was shortly after that was when the accident at Fukushima happened, the three reactors that melted down in 2011. And soon after that, a colleague of mine was chatting on the stairwell and he was like, oh, this is going to be the end of nuclear power. And some part of my brain immediately said, no, that's not going to happen.

And the reason it's not going to happen is because the nuclear industry is a very powerful industry, politically powerful, has lots of money, and they will find a way to survive. And one way that they have survived is by promoting these new nuclear reactor designs. They're called small modular reactors, advanced reactors, things of that sort. And so for the last 10 odd years, I've been arguing why these reactor designs are not the answer to nuclear power. Anyway, all this was sort of my academic and non-academic work has been revolving around that. And at some point, it made sense to think about writing a book about it. My initial idea was, look, all of the problems with nuclear power are well known, you know, the high cost, the challenge of radioactive waste, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I'm just going to focus my book on explaining why it is that companies and governments are still investing in nuclear power, even though they know all these problems. Verso, my first editor at Verso, Nicole persuaded me that I have to rehearse all of the arguments against nuclear power, because there's a new generation of people who just don't seem to be aware of it. And I think she was right. Of course, she's an editor, and I'm just a writer. So that's how the book sort of transpired. So it seems to me based on what you were saying, with this kind of renewal around the Fukushima period, and a lot of talk about new kinds of nuclear reactors, small modular and things like that emerging after, you know, that potential crisis that the nuclear industry faced then, it feels to me like a lot of the tech industry's

interest in that and a lot of their kind of embrace of this also comes after that period as well when there's the positioning of nuclear not as being, you know, these old kind of big reactors that we know about, but there's these new nuclear technologies that are coming on stream and Silicon Valley is ready to pick that up. Would that be like a proper understanding of that? I do agree. Yes. I think there was a kind of overlap between a period that had to do with Fukushima and these new reactor designs being promoted. But also, I think with the crash of 2007, 2008, and the capital that is sitting in the Silicon Valley area looking for things to invest in. And as you might know, they picked on sort of the climate problem as the one they were

going to fix with their technologies. It was on all different fronts. It was about renewable energy technologies, but also energy efficiency and all of these monitors that were supposed to look at how you use your energy and try to optimize it, stuff of that sort. And much of that, I'll just mention in passing, was that some of these energy efficiency stuff, for example, got quickly switched into data collection and surveillance capitalism. So it fit very well into that. But nuclear energy was among those things. And so for the last 10 years or 15 years, there has been interest among some tech people in nuclear energy.

And that's kind of speeded up a little bit in the last few years. As I was saying, that's part of the reason I wanted to talk to you, right? We'll get into these bigger issues with nuclear, but I just wanted to ask you briefly before we do that, what you make of what has been going on lately? Because over the past year in particular, we've been hearing a lot about nuclear energy from the tech industry as they've been building these massive data centers to power their AI ambitions and many of them are saying that

nuclear is essential to that right it is essential to powering these major infrastructures that they're building and now companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are making investments in nuclear projects and saying that this is going to be key to powering these facilities. What do you make of how rapidly that's developed and how vocal the industry has been in this embrace of nuclear energy over the past year or two? Yeah, I think none of these companies were in any way critical of nuclear energy earlier either. And the fact that Amazon and Google and Microsoft would announce these, I think the timing is important.

If you think about it, yes, there's more and more press and media coverage about the enormous amount of energy and water and other resources that they use. There is a growth in movements that are opposing these, which you have covered in your show. And I'm pretty sure, we don't, of course, know what is going on inside their boardrooms. None of us are going to be there when they make these decisions. But I'm pretty sure they are very aware of this and they are sort of concerned about it. And they have a model to think about, which is the cryptocurrency industry. A few years ago, there was a lot of headlines about crypto industries and how their data mining is using up lots which talked about the climate impacts. China actually stopped data mining, partly for

environmental reasons. And so that was what I think the big tech companies are concerned about, that they will get regulated in ways that they don't want to. And so they're trying to get ahead of this. And I think nuclear offers a good option for them because they can take advantage of the enormous amount of lobbying and PR effort that the nuclear industry has put in to try and redefine their technology as somehow clean and green and the way to go forward. Right. And so why not take advantage of all that lobbying effort? So I think that's how the tech industry probably ended up at. Now, is it going to actually help them? Even if you look at their announcements,

they talk about this in the 2030s, right? And at the same time, they say, you know, demand is going really fast. We want to set up all of these things very fast. And they better set these up very fast because this is a bubble, which is probably going to burst anytime soon, right? And so there's a clear mismatch between the timeline in which they want the energy and when nuclear energy can deliver. The fastest probably will be in the case of Microsoft restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, whether that happens or not, because there is no precedent for that kind of restarting and the cost estimates for restarting and changing the equipment, making sure everything works, finding new workers and so on, it's going to be pretty high. And it's not clear that Microsoft or Constellation is actually willing to pay that kind of money. And of course, Constellation, the moment initially they said it's all going to be private money, Microsoft is going to fund. But then Constellation went and has asked for a loan from Department of Energy.

And so there's a lot of moving parts here. But I think the most important thing also is that the timeline is really far for nuclear energy to contribute anything. And the last thing I'd say is that the amount of money people are talking about, in particular, Amazon is the only one that just put some amount on the table. It said it's funding some fraction of a $500 million investment route for X energy. Now, even if it's $500 million, that's a drop in the bucket when you think about what it takes to set up a new nuclear reactor, or even to license one of these things, it probably will cost them about $2 billion of R&D money before they can actually get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve construction of one of these energy by Amazon, Microsoft and Google is like, okay, but they need all of this energy now. And there are all these stories about how actually like the amount of fossil fuel investment that's happening in the United States right now is at like record levels for recent years for power infrastructure and stuff. And that it's not just

that existing fossil fuel plants or whatnot are not going offline, but they're actually investing in building new ones. And it feels to me that every time we hear the tech industry talk about nuclear, it's a PR move to make us think that they're relying on, as you're saying, what has been branded clean green power, when actually there's a lot of fossil fuels that are going into powering these things now because nuclear is not going to be available if they even follow through on these things for quite a long time. Absolutely.

And some of the cloud business that these companies have is actually with fossil fuel companies and trying to figure out how to reach at more difficult to reach, you know, gas reserves and so on and so forth. It's a very good talk to hide a very dirty reality. Yeah, it's so perverse to think about it. There are other aspects I want to talk about, but first I want to dig into the broader critique that you lay out of nuclear energy, right? And so if I am thinking about the types of things that I have heard in recent years from defenders of nuclear energy, they will say that while it might be expensive to set one of these things up, it'll last us for

decades. It's a baseload of power that works regardless of whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, you know, those sorts of arguments, and that it's incredibly safe outside of the occasional major incident that might happen. And even then, some of them will say, we overstate the impacts of those major incidents and that there's not so many issues. I know that there are a number of issues laid out in that kind of a defense, but I guess to start, how would you respond to those sorts of claims by defenders of nuclear energy? And what do you see as being the biggest concerns with the construction of this type of power? That's a great question. And I've talked to lots and lots of groups, and I find that what is of the greatest concern varies from individual to

individual. Some people are concerned about the accidents. Some people are concerned about the waste. Some people are concerned about the high costs. And so there's no one answer to this. But I think we have to take a comprehensive look at all of these different problems before we evaluate. And, you know, in general, I would say that if you weigh the costs and risks associated with nuclear power, they completely outweigh any benefits that one might get. So if you're thinking about the costs per se, it is true that the argument they would make is a nuclear reactor costs a lot of money to build, but it's going to be operating for a long period. And so over that period, we can recoup all those costs. But if you take any economic calculation, there are standard models for how you calculate this.

And the usual metric that they use is something called the levelized cost of energy, where you look at the costs and also the times when those costs are incurred. And you calculate some kind of a discounted cost and you divide that over all the electricity flows and you find what the average cost is. And there's a Wall Street company called Lazard

that has been doing this for all kinds of power sources in the US. And they have consistently demonstrated that nuclear is the most expensive among all the standard sources, even after doing this, assuming 60 years of operation, et cetera, et cetera. And this is true, not just in the case of the United States, true in other countries as well. And so there is no question that the cost is high. The other thing which I think one should remember is that because the argument is about nuclear energy

being used as a solution to climate change, there is another factor which is extremely important, which is time. You know, all the climate scientists tell us that we need to reduce our emissions right now, just as the tech industry needs its energy right now. And a nuclear reactor takes a very long time to build. So the average nuclear plant takes about 10 years to build. Going between the time you start pouring concrete into the ground to the point where you start supplying electricity to the grid. But of course, you can't start constructing a nuclear reactor the next day. You have to go through some environmental clearance processes. There must be some kind of a safety evaluation of the reactor design. You have to

find a community that is willing to live near one of these nuclear plants because they are the ones who are going to be most at risk in the event of an accident. And so many of them have a history of opposing these kinds of facilities. And last but not least, raise the tens of billions of dollars you need to build one of these plants. And so that whole process can take five to 10 years. And if you look at the empirical record, that's typically the timeframe between when a country or a utility decides to build a nuclear plant to the point where it starts generating electricity. This is not to mention the fact that many plants are abandoned halfway through construction. So anyway, the timeline is very long and therefore it's not a very feasible way to try and deal with the climate crisis because of the high costs and the long time

periods. Now, the other set of arguments are about whether, if you were to take the point of view that, you know, I'm willing to pay the high costs and so on, whether we should use this. And those are questions about desirability and that question of accidents, the fact that nuclear reactors will produce radioactive waste that we don't have a demonstrated way to deal with, and the fact that the technology to make nuclear energy is very closely associated with the technology to make nuclear weapons as well. And so if you're thinking about using nuclear power to solve climate change, you have to talk about expanding the source of energy into lots and lots of countries, many of which don't have any nuclear power experience at this point. And some of them will probably use this ability, this capacity that they gain to make

nuclear weapons. And we have to ask ourselves, is that a desirable goal? Those are the kinds of questions we have to deal with. I'll just say one thing, because we brought up this question of new reactors and so on and so forth, and the argument about what you mentioned about accidents being rare and the impacts being an accident is. There are always going to be uncertainties. We know it's low, the probability. It doesn't happen every day. But when it happens, it can be pretty catastrophic. And the way that the nuclear industry and its supporters try to deal with that second aspect of it is by underplaying the consequences, usually by actually borrowing sort of a standard technique

used by the tobacco industry way back, which is to introduce doubt. And the tobacco industry used to say there's a lot of doubt, uncertainty about whether smoking causes cancer. In fact, they also say that there are some benefits to smoking that are not included when you try to evaluate it. The nuclear industry says exactly the same thing. They say radiation is overblown. It's not really so harmful at low levels. It's perfectly okay. Some would even go as far as saying a little bit of radiation is actually good for you. But the science is pretty clear on this, just as in the case of tobacco smoking, exposure to radiation is going to increase your risk of not just cancer, but a whole bunch of other diseases as well, cardiovascular disease,

et cetera, et cetera. And from a public policy point of view, you should be taking a precautionary perspective. You should say, even if there's some uncertainty about the impact of radiation, because of the doubt about it, we should actually avoid low levels of radiation exposure to the extent possible. And if you take that perspective, there is no doubt that, you know, these accidents are hugely harmful. Yeah, that gives us a really good overview, I think, of, you know, a lot of the issues that exist with the arguments that are made for nuclear power. But I want to drill down into them a little bit further, right? And I wanted to start with the question of cost and time. Because, again, like, I feel like the general

explanation that I've received about nuclear power in the past, you know, if I've just been interacting with the way it's generally reported on and things like that, and I think many people will be familiar with this, is that, okay, yeah, they're very expensive to build, right? But then once they're built, it's this clean and cheap source of power. Why wouldn't we want something like that? But I think you outline very well and very clearly in the book how that is not really how this works. There's the initial upfront cost, but then the operating cost of these things is not like zero, right? It actually does have quite a significant operating cost. And then when you look at what it takes to build one, the projected costs often get completely blown out. They often end up being

way more expensive than predicted, which makes this difficulty of like, you know, actually producing the energy at a cost that's like reasonable when compared to other forms of energy, even more difficult. But you said it often takes a decade to get one of these things. But I think our experience is that it often takes much longer than that because of delays and overruns and all that kind of stuff. So I wonder if you could just pick up on that a little bit more. Sure. So the basic point I should say, why is a nuclear reactor expensive? The nuclear reactor isn't expensive because it is trying to use a hazardous technology to just boil water. That's ultimately what it is doing. And the purpose of designing a nuclear

reactor or the main driver of all the priorities that the nuclear reactor designers has is to make sure that these radioactive training that operators have to go through. And all of that translates into high construction costs and also very necessarily rigorous methods of vetting the manufacturing and the operating process. Now, the operating costs are also a function of this challenge. The average nuclear reactor operator is a pretty well-paid position. And if you look at just the costs of operating nuclear reactors, even if all of the debt has been paid off after many, many years of operation, you will find that the cost per unit of power is of the order of about $30 per megawatt hour in the United States. And this used to be not a problem for the nuclear industry because the main competitor to nuclear power were fossil fuels,

primarily coal or gas. In those cases, the cost of fueling them was what was going to dominate the cost, the cost of the coal or the cost of the natural gas. Now, in the last decade or decade and a half, that has completely changed for two reasons. One is the cost of natural gas came down because of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. But the other was the fact that we had these new technologies, solar and wind energy. They were actually old technologies, but they'd become much more affordable in the last decade. And their costs were declining very rapidly, the manufacturing costs. Now, what's interesting about solar and wind energy is that once you set up your wind turbine or put up your solar panel, there's zero fueling cost, right? The wind comes for free and the sun comes for free. You probably have to spend a little bit of money on the maintenance,

you know, on the solar panels, for example. Somebody probably has to go with the squeezy and sort of clean it up and stuff of that sort. But it's essentially the marginal cost of running those plants is very low, close to zero, whereas a nuclear plant can never be that cheap, right? And so there was, in the United States, a bunch of reactors that were shut down precisely because they could not afford to compete in electricity markets. The reactor that Microsoft wants to restart, TMI, the Three Mile Island Unit 1, was precisely that kind of a reactor. In 2019, the utility that was owning it decided that it was not making enough money, and they

shut it down. And so nuclear power in that sense has failed in not just the high cost of construction, but also in competing on electricity marketplaces where you have to bid on the basis of marginal costs. The last thing I'd say is that you mentioned the high cost overruns and the time delays, and they are kind of baked into the system. And the reason is, if a nuclear company were to actually give a realistic estimate of the cost of building a reactor, how long it is going to take, and so on, most people would probably say, no, thank you very much, right? And so they have to underbid, they have to pretend that somehow

all of these problems that have been seen with earlier construction projects will be magically solved because they have some new way of doing stuff. So in the case of the nuclear reactors that were built in the United States, the AP1000 reactors, that magical thing was supposed to be something called modular construction, which sounds fancy, but it's actually the way that we do all kinds of manufacturing. If you think about how an apartment complex or an office complex is built today, they don't bring bricks and, you know, wood and carpenters to the site. They basically make everything in factories and bring it to the site and just kind of plaster it together. That's essentially what is being done in the nuclear

business as well. And the claim from Westinghouse, the company that designed the nuclear plant, was that this kind of modular construction would solve all these problems and they will be able to make it up and build a reactor really fast. And for many years on the Westinghouse website, they used to have a little animated video that shows sort of different parts of the reactor, sort of like Lego blocks coming together. And then, you know, it'll say month one, month two, month three, and 36 months, suddenly the reactor is done, right?

In the real world, nothing of that sort happened. It took about three times as much, lots of problems, things didn't fit the way they were supposed to do, things didn't work, and then they had to send them back to the factory. All of the problems that were seen with earlier reactors were seen at the construction site, but also at the factory site. And so these sort of magic technologies never seem to work the way they are supposed to be doing on PowerPoint slides. Yeah, we're definitely used to those kinds of stories on this podcast. It's also funny to hear

you talk about, you know, the competition on the energy markets. And, you know, a lot of the people I feel like who promote these sorts of things are very like free market people, you know, want to have the most efficient thing, but will not accept that, oh, maybe the nuclear is actually non-competitive and, you know, is not keeping up with these other forms when you think of cost per kilowatt hour, megawatt hour, or what have you. I was struck, you know, hearing you talk about the cost overruns and the time overruns and these growing questions. You know, if we think back to like the post-war period and the couple decades after that, I feel like there was a lot of energy in North America and Europe, at least, behind

building out nuclear power, making sure that we were able to do that. You know, a lot of visions of like a future why we were so enthusiastically behind nuclear for a few decades there? And then for the last few decades, it seems that that has really fallen off. Great question. I'd start with the second part first. So the simple answer to why the construction boom sort of died out and all of those projections about the possibility of accidents. They hadn't seen that there would be public opposition in some cases. It's not usually a huge factor, I would just say as an aside. I wish that energy policymaking were more democratic and they really took people's opinions into consideration. They don't, but there have been a few occasions where people power has been so important and so overwhelming that they had to stop construction of some of these plants. So that's sort of the short answer to why the expected growth didn't

happen. The other side of why was there this expectation? I think there are a couple of explanations for that or a couple of contributing factors. One is the legacy of the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the people who worked on that and also the spread of nuclear weapons to a number of other countries, the most powerful countries in the world at that point, all of which embarked on nuclear weapons programs or were affiliated or in military alliances with nuclear weapon states. So those are the countries where you typically saw them establishing nuclear energy programs. And I mean, I'll just as an aside also say that if you look at the distribution of nuclear reactors today, the vast majority of them are in countries with nuclear weapons or in countries like Canada, which are in military alliances with nuclear weapons. Something like, you know, more than 80 percent of the reactors will be in these kind of countries.

Right. And so there's this historical overlap with nuclear weapons and geographical overlap as well. And the people who are involved in making nuclear weapons, some of them have a feeling that they are contributing to something bad. But whatever they are doing ought to be also converted into some good cause. And that is one reason why a lot of physicists, even now, think about nuclear energy as a solution to all of our problems, because they feel that this technology, which is so powerful, and it is very powerful, has to have some good use, right? They just don't think about what else comes with that powerful technology. So the argument that you hear often about how nuclear energy is a very concentrated source of energy is also precisely the reason why it has all these problems.

The fact that you have reactor accidents is precisely because a lot of energy is being produced in a very small volume. And there are some occasions when that energy cannot be controlled and you can have a nuclear reactor accident, as happened in Fukushima, as happened in Chernobyl. So the two of them go hand in hand. But in many countries, the institutions that are responsible for encouraging nuclear energy or promoting nuclear energy are also the same ones as are involved in nuclear weapons. The United States is the best example. The US Department of Energy is that one. In India, I mentioned the Department of Atomic Energy, and so on. So there's a lot of these overlaps, which I think in the 50s to the 70s, really led to all of these projections about how nuclear energy was going to grow. And when it met reality, I think that just came crashing down.

That makes a lot of sense. And I was wondering as well, you know, you talked earlier about how India was, you know, a really early adopter of nuclear. What have we seen on the other side of this, you know, outside North America and Europe with the adoption of nuclear energy? I know that China had a lot of goals to build a lot of nuclear plants, but I believe I read in the past couple of years, they have scaled those back quite significantly. I wonder what you see, you know, kind of beyond, I guess, like the wealthier parts of the world, what we've seen with nuclear adoption there and how that has gone for the countries that have, you know, really tried to make that a big part of their power source, I guess. Yeah, the number of countries outside of the West or the global North in a way that have adopted nuclear energy is very, very small. China today, I think, should be considered as part of the global north. I mean, it's not a developing country the way it was in the 1950s. China is also unique because it was the first, quote unquote, developing country to acquire the nuclear bomb. It first tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964. And of course, the United States knew even before that it was that it was having all these plants because they have spies all over the world. And so that was actually responsible for a lot of effort on nuclear

non-proliferation and the setting up of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and so on and so forth. And yes, you're right. Even today, China is the biggest constructor of nuclear plants within its own country. It's not been very successful at exporting nuclear plants, although it has plans for doing that. The only country to which it is exported is Pakistan, with whom it has a long history of nuclear, quote-unquote, cooperation, including probably giving them designs for nuclear weapons. But China is not just building nuclear plants, it is building everything. It's building coal plants, it's building solar, wind, and so on. And if you look at the scale at which it's building out renewables, they vastly outstrip how much nuclear energy is being built. So nuclear energy today only contributes about 5% of China's electricity. And both wind and solar contribute much more than that. I think wind is more than four times how much nuclear

contributes, if I'm not mistaken. But the Chinese case, I think, you have to, why are they building these when they already are making the cheapest solar panels and the wind turbines in the world? I think part of it has to do with the domestic political economy. In China, a lot of decisions are driven by large state-owned enterprises. In the case of the nuclear power, those are something called the China National Nuclear Commission, CNNC, I forget the exact expansion of that. And then another one called China General Nuclear, CGN.

And those are extremely powerful entities. And their whole raison d'etre is to build nuclear plants. And so if you think about President Xi and him sort of, or somebody high up in the Chinese government, how are they making decisions? They're probably going to look to all of these institutions to tell them what to do. And you can imagine what CNNC is telling them. So I think it's mostly a question of domestic political economy and trying to understand what is happening rather than some kind of objective consideration of the cost of building nuclear plants or the risk associated with it. Yeah, that makes perfect

sense. And I believe what I had read is that they had intentions to build a lot more nuclear, and they've kind of reined in those plans, especially as they've been building out so many renewables and seeing how much better that seemed to be working for them, right? There's another piece of this, which you had mentioned in your answer earlier about the proliferation and the safety aspects of this, right? And you wrote in the book that it kind of doesn't make sense to be pro-nuclear energy, but anti-nuclear weapons because of how nuclear energy enables the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons technologies. Can you expand on that piece and why these two technologies are so intimately linked? Yeah. So at the technical level, the reason these two are

closely linked is because all nuclear power plants will necessarily produce plutonium. Plutonium is one of the materials that can be used to either fuel a nuclear reactor or to make a nuclear weapon. And historically, many countries have followed that route to making nuclear weapons, most importantly, the case of India, which I mentioned. The other material that connects nuclear energy and nuclear weapons is uranium. Now, in Canada, we don't use reactors that use enriched uranium. Uranium in nature consists primarily of two kinds of uranium, one called uranium-235 and uranium-238.

They just differ in the number of neutrons. And for the purpose of fission, it's the lighter element, the uranium-235, that is important. In most reactors operating around the world, so-called light water reactors, the uranium that has to be used has to be enriched in uranium-235 from what is found in nature. In nature, it's about 0.7% of all the uranium that is uranium-235. For a nuclear reactor to operate, that has to go up to about 3% to 5%.

And this is done today using a technology called centrifuges, sort of like washing machines, where they try to exploit the mass difference between these two kinds of uranium to separate out these two. But the same technology can be used to concentrate the uranium-235 to much higher levels, which are needed to make nuclear weapons. So for a nuclear weapon, ideally, you would like the uranium-235 level to be in the 80 to 90 percent range. But the same technology that moves from 0.7% to 3% to 5% can also push it up to the 80% to 90% range. And that is precisely why we've seen a lot of coverage and a lot of concern about Iran's nuclear program. Iran has this uranium centrifuge technology. It is enriching uranium. They claim that they're not interested in nuclear weapons, that they're interested only

in enriching uranium in order to build research reactors and other kinds of reactors with this enriched uranium. But a lot of people don't believe them. And I mean, I don't think that we actually know what's happening in there. There's not enough transparency. And the only kinds of source of information often end up being the CIA or some entity which I'm not particularly willing to trust. But on the other hand, we cannot also be sure that nothing is happening there. So anyway, but that tells you why the technologies are so closely related.

The other way in which historically this connection has played out has been through the training of people. So coming back to Iran itself, the way that it set up its nuclear energy program goes back to the 1970s, when the Shah of Iran decided he was going to build a bunch of nuclear plants. The United States was overjoyed with that because they were hoping to sell lots and lots of reactors. And the bunch of Iranian students came to MIT. And they gave a bunch of money to MIT, which then set up sort of, you know, extra faculty members and so on to teach these people. And those people are the ones who went back and started Iran's nuclear program. Now, at that time, you know, the Americans thought it was a great idea for Iran to do it.

After the Iranian revolution, they, of course, Iran fell on the other side. And so now they became very concerned about it. And but these are the people who have gone on to populate Iran's nuclear program. And this kind of connection of personnel is something which you see in other places as well, including Pakistan and other countries. So that's another connection. I mentioned already about the institutions, about the geographical overlap. I'll also mention that, you know, in the public discourse, one thing that we see among promoters of nuclear energy is a claim that these are very different. They will say, oh, you know, you should not confuse a nuclear reactor from a bomb. It's not going to explode.

It's not the same thing. Now, of course, nobody's saying it's the same thing, but there are all these connections. And what's important is that during the periods when the nuclear industry is in trouble, especially financial trouble, this connection will actually be rolled out as the reason why the government should subsidize it. So we saw this in the United States as soon as Trump came to power the first time in 2017. And immediately the nuclear industry's answer was, okay, let's appeal to Trump for money by saying this is a national security imperative, right? The other argument they used to just use was jobs, because Trump wasn't supposed to do that. And we can expect the same thing happening again now.

And the UK as well, they were making the same kind of arguments when they were trying to refurbish the Trident submarine. So it's a very odd thing that the nuclear industry will try to hide away from, but when they want it, they will actually trot out that argument. Yeah, that was really striking to me as well when I was reading the book, right? How they try to downplay this connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons until it comes to the moments when they need that kind of political support. And all of a sudden it gets played up. And, you know, the fact that these two technologies are very intimately linked and you want the, you know, capabilities and the capacities that come with having nuclear power so that you can also support the nuclear weapons industry or, you know, the

nuclear weapons that you have is very important. And I feel like the point that you made about Iran is so telling, right? How it's okay for some countries to have nuclear weapons and others not, depending on the geopolitical alliances that they have. And, you know, we've had all this discussion over the past decade about restricting Iran's nuclear capacities, not wanting them to get a weapon. But meanwhile, the Saudis also have nuclear power and have pretty explicitly said that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, then they're going to develop one quickly as well because they have this technology. But, you know, because they're within the US Western umbrella, that's completely okay, right? And it's not something that we're freaking out about and trying to make a big deal about and all this kind of stuff.

The even bigger elephant in the room is Israel, which has nuclear weapons, but you know, the United States will never acknowledge it publicly, because that means that a whole bunch of laws will get triggered to not export military equipment to Israel, which they, of course, don't want to do that. Yeah, as we are seeing to sort of tragic consequence in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere. Such a good point. And it struck me, I think that there was a document or some reports that were leaked recently that I believe showed or like had kind of the Israelis or the Americans admitting

that Israel has a nuclear weapon. And, you know, that just had to kind of be like swept away. Let's not talk about it. Yeah, I mean, that's a long and solid history. We can talk about it at another time, maybe. Yeah, absolutely. There's another aspect of this that, you know, kind of comes to mind, right? We've been talking about the broader impact of nuclear energy and who is supporting it. And it struck me as interesting, and it has for quite some time, like not just reading your book, that a lot of the biggest supporters of nuclear energy and a lot of the people who advocate for it also seem to have connections to fossil fuels. When I think of governments that are advocating for nuclear energy, they're often governments that are kind

of like petrostates and have some connection to that. Whenever the issue of climate change is brought up or the need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels. All of a sudden, you start hearing a lot of talk about nuclear energy and the need for nuclear energy and why this is the way that we're going to solve the climate crisis. What is in that connection? Why is it that these supporters of fossil fuels are so big on nuclear energy? What's the connection there? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are sort of two aspects of this. One, I think, is it's like what we talked about the big tech companies. There's an element of greenwashing going on there. And we see that here in Canada with Alberta and Saskatchewan sort of talking much about nuclear power when they are the most fossil fuel dependent provinces here.

And we, I mean, in other places as well, there's sort of, you know, in Australia, for example, there's a debate going on right now about the conservatives want to build nuclear plants, but they also are the ones who are most reluctant to phase out coal there. So that's, there's an overlap, which is, I think, has to do partly with how they want to greenwash. There may also be an underlying ideological element there. So there have been studies about what leads people to support nuclear energy and oppose nuclear energy. And one of the insights, at least in North America, has been that people's disposition towards whether they think society should be hierarchically organized or more communitarianly or egalitarianly organized sort of influences.

And of course, as you can imagine, the people who are more hierarchical think better of nuclear power. They're also less concerned about climate change, maybe because they think they can escape the worst of it, sort of like the Peter Thiel types. And anyway, so there's, I think, that connection. But there's also a material connection in many cases. In the United States, for example, the utilities that own nuclear plants, they are all some of the utilities with the highest market capitalizations, simply because a nuclear plant is such an expensive enterprise. So they all have market

capitalizations in the tens of billions of dollars. And if you look at their portfolios, they will invariably have large amounts of fossil fuels as well, coal or natural gas or both. So they are not in any rush to actually completely phase out all of these fossil fuels because it is going to have a material bearing

on their financial interests. And they are not really interested in that. And so nuclear, in a sense, offers them this opportunity to say, oh, we are concerned about climate change. That's why we are planning to build nuclear reactors and small modular who is, you know, a scholar on technology who I really respect. And he has this book, The Whale and the Reactor, and of course, has talked about this in other work that he's done as well. And it's essentially, you know, part of what he talks about is how having a technology like a nuclear reactor basically requires a political system of a certain type, right? Because in order to manage this technology,

in order to run this technology, you need this kind of very centralized political system in order to make it work. And I feel like that is something that is often left out of these discussions as well, right? When we're thinking about the types of energy that we're setting up, the types of technologies that we're relying on, it's not just this question of like, how green is it? Or what else is going on there? But also like, how is it actually constructed? And what type of society are we creating by choosing to, you know, invest in this particular type of energy technology or what have you? Absolutely. I mean, Langley-Winnes, that particular essay that you're talking about

is right on the dot. The essay is called, Do Artifacts Have Politics? And he argues that they do. And I think the other scholar I would like to bring into the same conversation is Timothy Mitchell, who has talked about the role of coal and historically how it has actually led to the sort of growth of democracy. Because for the first time, workers found that they could organize and stop production, stop various things from operating. And that gave them a kind of political power to stop society, which then meant that they could make demands and be heard. And he contrasts that with the case of oil, where you don't need

miners to go underground. Actually, the oil just kind of comes out. And in fact, the challenge for the oil industry is to make sure that there's not too much of it, because then the prices will tank. But oil, because it flows through pipes and so on, the role of workers is far more limited. Their power is much more limited. Nuclear fits exactly into that same picture. It requires far fewer workers, very concentrated. And also, historically, I'll mention that Maggie Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister, used nuclear power and, you know, made sure that all the nuclear power plants in the country were fully fueled and they could operate for many, many months before she went into the last stages of the fight with

the coal miners, Arthur Scargill, and so on and so forth. So it is a very political technology, even when you think about just pure labor politics. That's so fascinating. I'll make sure that we put a link to that in the show notes so people can check it out. We started by talking about the tech industry and the tech industry's interest in nuclear technologies. And of course, part of that comes with this idea or promoting this notion that they are going to create these new nuclear technologies that are going to solve all the problems

that we've had with nuclear technologies of the past, and that this is going to allow basically this renaissance of nuclear that will be able to power their data centers, but also this very energy very energy intensive vision of society that they have, right? And some examples of that are like small nuclear reactors, or reactors that have different formulations than the ones that we use today and are supposedly going to be so much better, right? But I feel like we've been hearing these promises decade after

decade, and they're not really realized. So what should we make of these promises from the tech industry that they are going to revolutionize nuclear technology? And is it something that we should really be banking on, given the pressures that we face from the climate crisis and so much else? Now, to your audience, I think I can just say it in one word, no. So these small modular reactors and all these other reactor designs that they talk about, most of them are really old designs. And this is because in the 1950s and 60s, as we talked about, there was this complete flowering of sort of interest in nuclear technology that every scientist and engineer and their brother were inventing some new reactor design all the time.

And so there were lots and lots of designs out there. Some of them were constructed. Many of them were not constructed. And those that were constructed often, many of these designs were shut down over a fairly short period of time. And eventually, for multiple reasons, one or two reactor designs have come to dominate the reactor fleet around the world. Now, what the tech industry is doing and what many other nuclear engineers are doing is to take one of these old designs and they kind of modify it a little bit. There's a new alloy that they have found. There's a new kind of steam generator, blah, blah, blah. And they say, OK, now we have this new design, right?

You know, if I had a few hundreds of thousands of dollars and a bunch of graduate students, I can design a new nuclear reactor. It's not a big problem, right? You just take one of these and you do some modeling and stuff of that sort. That kind of stage of design is a very preliminary stage. When this design has to actually be constructed, you would have to go through a regulatory process. Hopefully, the regulator is sincere in trying to make sure that there are no undue risks to the public because of this. A good regulator would ask them a lot of hard questions, right? How would this reactor do if there's an earthquake? What happens if there's a fire? What happens if the worker makes a mistake and presses this button instead of that? What happens if there's a manufacturing defect? And trying to answer these questions and doing so in a believable fashion would require these

companies to actually spend immense amounts of money to do the R&D, to do the testing of the different materials, do all the modeling that is required. The tech industry does not want to spend that kind of money. They have the money to do that, but they don't do that. And so just to give you a ballpark number, the small modular reactor design that's furthest along in the regulatory process in the United States is something called NuScale. And they have spent over $1.8 billion,

roughly a third of which has come from the government. So that's a kind of order of magnitude we should be thinking about, $2 billion, something of that sort. This is before the construction starts. So the tech industry, what you're typically seeing is venture capitalists putting a few tens of millions of dollars at most and then saying, okay, then they go and try to get public money. So this is what Bill Gates has done with his Natrium reactor design,

Xenergy, the company that Amazon is investing in, is doing exactly that. They've all got tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Energy. We are seeing similar sorts of things happening in Canada as well, but on a much smaller scale because Canada and everything is smaller here. These are really designs that are quite far away. But what is interesting, of course, is that for the tech industry, they think this buzzword of innovation will solve all these problems. But these are problems actually of physics and chemistry. It doesn't matter whether it's Bill Gates investing in it or some other company.

The physics and chemistry doesn't change. So the reactor design that Bill Gates is pushing is something called a sodium-cold fast reactor design. The many reactors that have been built around the world, they've all suffered problems with sodium leaks and fires and all kinds of things. They also tend to be much more expensive because of the nature of the fuel that is required for it. So it's not going to happen anytime soon,

but allows them to portray this narrative of all this innovative capacity sitting within Silicon Valley and other places and being stymied by regulators, right? And you know, as well as me, that these people love to rail about regulation and how it's bad, how it's stifling all kinds of capacities. And that's exactly what they're saying in the nuclear case as well.

I'll just say one last thing, which is not quite related to this, but I think it's also a deep concern, which is that the tech industry and many of these obscenely rich people who are sort of pushing it are deeply concerned that things like climate change will lead to people asking them for larger social and economic changes. And that is going to affect them adversely. So I think for them, trying to pretend that there has to be a technological solution is part of trying to preserve their wealth and their position in society, right? And we don't normally see this, but occasionally you will see somebody mention this.

In my book, I sort of quote Sam Altman during an interview saying, oh, we have to have all this energy. If we don't, then it leads to all this crazy degrowth stuff. Now, why would he bring that up in a media interview when the interviewer is not even asking that? And he goes on to saying this is immoral, et cetera, et cetera. Because I think that's actually a concern for these people, which they don't usually articulate in the public. But one can be sure that when they go off on their yacht parties, they must be talking about, oh, these crazy people, they're talking about all this and, you know, what's going to happen.

Yeah, that's such a good point, right? And I think you can see that in the type of vision that they try to promote, right? Where, yes, we need all these tech in our data centers and our multi-planetary species and, you know, all these kind of tech visions that we have for what the future is going to be. And also not think about what that means kind of socially for everybody who's going to be subject to these technologies. To close off our interview, you know, you were talking about Sam Altman there. In January of this year, Sam Altman gave an interview with Bloomberg where he was asked about the climate aspects of what he's doing. And he basically said that we're going to need a lot more energy than we thought we needed in the past. And that was either going

to mean we need a breakthrough in nuclear technology, or we're going to geoengineer the planet, because there was no vision in his mind where we didn't pursue, you know, all this AI and stuff that he wants to pursue. So my final question to you is, if nuclear is not the solution, what should we be doing to tackle the climate crisis and to decarbonize our grids and to think about the way that we live to address these serious problems that we face? That's such a hard question because there's no easy answer, as you know. I'll start by saying also just there's one other way in which the nuclear industry really helps. You know, the old adage about

for a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The nuclear industry is very good at coming up with these kinds of quote unquote solutions to anything. So if you talk about extraplanetary exploration, there's a nuclear answer to that as well, right? So they sort of really feed off all of these things. But back to your basic question, I think there are two parts to that answer. One is to hit the harder part is actually saying, we really need large scale social, political, and economic change. We have to change the ways of how we live, how we produce, think about what is it that we want to prioritize, the kinds of things that Altman was railing about when he talked about degrowth, right? And so that's a very large

conversation. It's not often about technologies, right? Technologies can play a part in it, but one should try to think about those larger questions when even thinking about technology, what technologies will aid us in those kinds of transformations and what technologies are going to impede us. Nuclear is one of those technologies which I think is going to impede us in trying to move to a more sustainable future that lives within ecological parameters. And renewables do have a lot of positive features about them. They are cheaper today. They have a lower sort of impact in many ways. And the many of the arguments that you hear about renewables when it comes up, which you kind of briefly alluded to earlier about what kinds of source of energy, we'll all have to go back to the caves. And none of that really makes sense because there's vast amounts of renewable energy. The sun sort of showers us with energy every day. The questions are really sort of of a practical nature about how do we take a variable source of power and convert it into a system where we can have somewhat reliable electricity.

But what I would say is this is a problem that has been dealt with ever since we invented an electricity grid, because no plant, whether nuclear or coal or solar, operates all the time. They all have periods when they're going to be shut down. And the way that we deal with that is by having multiple sources of power and making sure that if one is not working, then something else is trying to fit in its place. And we can do the same thing with renewables. There are lots of people who model these things and show that in principle, 100% renewable energy

grid is possible. There are going to be costs associated with it. It's not going to be foolproof in that there may be always a small risk, as is present today as well. There are going to be momentary lapses. The other thing I should say is that renewables also have their environmental impacts. We've heard about stories about the challenges of mining for lithium or all kinds of minerals and how those run roughshod over the local concerns. And so we shouldn't be sort of thinking about this as a panacea, but you have to ask the harder questions about what do we want energy for? What are the uses we prioritize? What we don't prioritize? Without those conversations, we cannot be advancing solutions. It should not be the role of an individual researcher or an

individual government official to say how we should be ordering the world. This has to be a democratic conversation. And I don't think any one technology is going to save us. I completely agree about the renewable point as well, right? We need to understand what the trade-offs are for that too, so that we can have the proper conversations about how to do it properly, rather than just say, renewables are the solution to everything and ignore the downsides and the drawbacks of that as well. Romana, I really enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed being able to speak to you about it. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thank you so much, Paris. It was a real pleasure talking to you and also being

in a way in conversation with all the many others that you've actually been interviewing on your show. Thank you. solution. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.