The Chris Cuomo Project - Nuclear Roundtable, Part 1 (with Michael Shellenberger, Jessica Lovering, and Heather Hoff & Kristin Zaitz)

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

In a special two-part episode of The Chris Cuomo Project in partnership with the Nuclear Energy Institute, Chris explores whether nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms of energy. Michael Shellenberger (founder, Environmental Progress, and author, “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All”), Jessica Lovering (co-founder, Good Energy Collective), and Heather Hoff & Kristin Zaitz (co-founders, Mothers for Nuclear) join Chris to analyze potential risks posed by nuclear power plants, clarify differences between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, understand how perceptions of nuclear energy are changing, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, and welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for following. Your comments are welcome, especially with what we have today. Now, you remember our mantra, right? Be a free agent. I tell you to wear your independence. Go to that store.

Get your free agent merch. Wear it proudly. Why? Because you're a critical thinker. And that's exactly what takes us to our topic today. Now, I grew up believing that nuclear power was everything we saw on The Simpsons, okay? We don't use it because it kills you, because it makes everything radioactive, it's too dangerous, it's too dirty, and it was just a waste of time and should be eradicated.

And I have believed that for a very long time. That is, until I started to do some research. And I started to think about why was I hearing that France was coming up so much with new nuclear? And then you're seeing it in Southeast Asia. And then you're hearing it about it in other big fossil fuel producing companies. And then I started to look to see that there's all this new technology that America actually was at the forefront with, not just with weaponry, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. I always thought they were like the same kind of thing. Of course, they're not. So here's what I did. I wanted to have a critical assessment of this. So I teamed up with the Nuclear Energy Institute, okay? And they decided to sponsor two

very important discussions with you and experts, okay? Some of whom were also skeptics once. One, is it more dangerous than other forms? Is it too dangerous to use? And why do we believe it's dangerous, okay? That's what we're going to start with. Let's get to the bottom of why this power is seen as so bad, especially when we're talking so much about the need for a transition away from fossil fuels to less of a carbon footprint. How does nuclear fit into that or not? But first, we have to deal with whether or not it's just poison in our midst, as so many of us have been told to believe. What's the truth? Let's get after it. Support for The Chris Cuomo Project comes from Sundays.

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where the breakdown is when it comes to nuclear power. Are you ready? Let's do it. You and I both grew up knowing that nuclear power is different than coal, oil, or gas because it is too dangerous and too scary, because if anything goes wrong, everything in our generation will glow. Why did we believe that? Well, I think the big reason, maybe the main reason, is just the association with nuclear

weapons. Those of us that grew up in the 1970s or 80s, I mean, really anybody, either baby boomers or Gen Xers, just grew up in a period of genuine fears around nuclear war with the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, those fears and the risk of nuclear war significantly declined. And so you see in public opinion research and elsewhere that those people that were of a particular age are more scared of nuclear energy because of its association with nuclear weapons. But is that a wrong thing? When we talk about nuclear weapons, we don't like them because they make everybody radioactive. And it doesn't just kill a group of people. It then kills people

for the next 30 or 40 or 50 years. So why was it wrong to attach that fear to that potential? It wasn't wrong. Nuclear weapons are terrifying weapons. They are really one of the most plausible scenarios of the destruction of human civilization, if not the death of the human species. I mean, we're a very resilient species, so you never know. And there was actually a debate, I mean, really over several decades of whether or not humans could survive nuclear war. But the conclusion of the debates was always the same, which is that you would never want to risk it. You know, there's some questions even whether you would alter the climate significantly if you had a conflict between

Pakistan and India, because you would kick up so much atmospheric dust that you would cause global cooling using the same mechanism that people are proposing to cool the Earth to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change. But really, between the United States and Soviet Union, the scenarios were just insane. I mean, it was just bombing all of our cities and facilities. I think the issue of radiation is related to this. Nuclear weapons are basically very big bombs. They also could leave behind a radioactive wasteland.

There's some debates about that, but it just, again, it doesn't matter. It's terrifying. And so I think the first thing you have to understand is that we've known really since the, since before the invention of nuclear weapons, that if we invented them, that we wouldn't be able to get rid of them because the two sides that had them, both the incentives to cheat and any disarmament talks would be so high. And also because of two countries that had nuclear weapons capability went to war, the first thing they would do would be to construct nuclear weapons. So the association itself, because, and of course, nuclear weapons work by being scary.

That's what deterrence is. It means to scare away your opponent. Right. But they're scary for good reason. So why would you ever want nuclear power? Right. So one of the most interesting paradoxes in technology is just that the nuclear weapons are so dangerous and nuclear power plants are so safe. I mean, there's hardly any activity in human life that's safer than nuclear power. That sounds like a huge exaggeration, but if you just go look at all the things that humans do, nuclear is by far and away one of the safest. And that's comparing it to natural gas. That's comparing it to the chemical industries. You know, nobody, there's just been so much research on this, tons and tons of research by governments, by independent agencies.

The worst accident by far was Chernobyl in 1986. And this is an accident where literally the melted fuel was outside of the containment and part of the fire. And so it's this radioactive material and particulate matter is going into the atmosphere and we can measure it super well. That's one of the amazing things about radiation. You can measure it at very low levels. And so we see it go into the atmosphere. We're able to see what happens. We see an increase as expected in thyroid cancers, which is nobody wants cancer, but if you had to get one, that would be a pretty good one to

get because you can replace the thyroid with a thyroxin, a medical supplement. Right, but nobody cares about the fix. What Chernobyl does and is doing once again with the streaming series that's out about it, which I watched and it completely renewed my absolute panic surrounding this, and it completely renewed my absolute panic surrounding this, is coal, oil, gas, wind, solar, not blowing up my thyroid, and that the friendlies say Chernobyl killed 100 people, but when you look at the effects of disease, specifically cancer, they net it up to thousands.

And all those other energies, they can't do anything like that. So why ever see nuclear as safe when its potential is so much more than the other ones? So just on the actual death toll, if you interview, as I did, Geraldine Thomas, who's the head of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, who captures the thyroid tissues for people that had been affected and has studied it for decades, independent scholar at Imperial College London. She says an estimate of like 200 people over an 80-year period killed by Chernobyl, and that includes the roughly 50 first responders who died, mostly of fire and radiation exposure putting out the fire. But we did not see an increase in any

cancers other than thyroid cancer. And that's important. In other words, the way to say it most accurately is if Chernobyl had any impact on cancers, it was too small to measure against the normal rates of cancer, which, you know, if we're being honest, a third of people will get cancer. Many people die of cancer. So to affect those levels would take a lot. So it's not to say that Chernobyl had no effect. It's just to say it was grossly outweighed by the other causes of cancer. But why take the risk? The argument is, why take the risk? You know, you don't have to worry about that. I mean, coal, you know, dust, dirty, whatever, miners by the dozens on a regular basis get trapped in mines and killed. Sure, but that's it. It's finite.

Why take the risk with nuclear that can keep killing people for a really long time beyond any accident? No other power offers that kind of risk, so just stay away from it. What's wrong with that argument? Well, it really can't kill people for a long period of time. In other words, there's not going to be any additional harm out of Chernobyl after the initial accident. So it's not like there's continued exposure today. And the main argument would be a public health argument. So according to the World Health Organization, somewhere around 6 million lives a year are shortened by air pollution.

That's probably the most accurate way to say it. Of those, about a third from just breathing the wood and dung smoke from fires in poor countries, the rest from mostly coal, but also vehicle pollution in rich countries. Again, it's not like people are dropping dead from it, but it just contributes to overall exposure. It's like smoking cigarettes. There's not been good comparisons. It was safer to be a Chernobyl cleanup worker than it is to live with somebody who smokes cigarettes. So secondhand smoke even is more deadly than having helped to clean up Chernobyl. I think the way to think about it is like, you know, you go out in the sun and let's say you fall asleep in Mexico on the beach and you get burned. Done it. Yeah. That's a bad thing

for you, but it's not like you can be like, well, you're going to get cancer now. So it's accumulated exposure. It's just, you know, it's just dose dose makes the poison and it's the same way with radiation. So, yeah, I mean, I suffer from very sensitive skin. I have to be very careful going outside. And so people that were exposed to Chernobyl, it's not the same. It's not as bad as the chronic exposure to high levels of pollution. So the people who benefit the most from nuclear are the people that are replacing their dirtier sources of power. replacing their dirtier sources of power. The climate scientist James Hansen calculates that nuclear actually saved two million lives by preventing the burning of fossil fuels.

And all of this, I stress, is before you get to the question of climate change. So if you're at all concerned about climate change, I think you can't solve that problem without nuclear power. We'll get to that, but I don't want to let you out of the hole yet. So when people talk about energy disasters, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Japan, Three Mile Island here in Pennsylvania, which led to a panic here in New York where I am with Shoreham and people wanting to get rid of all the nuclear facilities. My father, my brother, both governors of New York, both dealt with huge public push. To this day, even though nobody ever talks about nuclear power in America anymore,

it's like not part of our dialogue, even though we have somewhere around 15 to 20% of our power is made by nuclear in the country. Gallup, most recent poll, almost half of us strongly or somewhat oppose nuclear energy. Why doesn't that end the debate? The big name disasters or nuclear? People are almost 50% against it.

It's got to be bad. I mean, the interesting thing is that, well, first of all, it's important that support for nuclear has actually gone up, and it's gone up among Democrats over the last several years. And I'll take some amount of credit for it in terms of making the case to progressives on climate change reasons, on environmental reasons for increasing support of nuclear. But they are still disproportionately against it as compared to people on the right. So you must suffer that as well. Yeah. And we should talk about that because I think that it's interesting. Like, why would progressives be more against nuclear than conservatives? And that's a very

interesting question. Because it's bad for the environment and they're more green. Yeah. Well, the irony is that nuclear is the best for the environment. So if you're concerned about the environment, you should be very pro-nuclear. But you know that most people in our generation, many, many will be like, like what has this guy not seen this simpsons i mean every time we're going to talk about there being a disaster that has to do with energy in a movie it's always nuclear nobody's ever going to pick natural gas as the boogeyman for the setting in the town where the reactor is good if it's going to go it's going to be a reactor it's going to be nuclear because it's all this radioactive waste that you can never get rid of. And they put in the ground and who knows what's going to happen. And that's crazy. We've learned that lesson. Let's waste issue. Yeah. I mean, if you watch the Simpsons, nuclear waste is liquid green. It's crazy. It's what we refer to as nuclear waste. The waste that

everyone's afraid of is the used fuel. It's solid metal. There's a tiny amount of it. You have to remember that this amount of uranium in my coffee cup can provide all the power that I need in my entire life. And so when you store the used waste on a football field, it would only stack 50 feet high, all of it in the United States. Does it ever go away? Well, like many things that in our lives, including all the heavy metals, all of the lead in your solar panels, all of the nickel and lithium in your car batteries, never goes away. And it's actually always toxic. So there's just a lot of things that humans use that never go away. The difference with nuclear is that we keep it safely monitored

because we're so paranoid about it in comparison to these other heavy toxic metals that just go into the natural environment. But the radioactive for a thousand years, the word radioactive, it gets attached to no other energy and and it is a full-stop word. Radioactive? F it. Can't mess with that. What do people misunderstand? Well, I think the first thing people misunderstand is that we're bathed in radiation every day.

It's coming from the atmosphere. It's coming from the earth. There's actually some new science suggesting that we need radiation to be healthy and to survive when you eat a banana you get a dose of radiation when you fly on an airplane you get a lot of radiation so we know that radiation is not this super potent toxin that if you're exposed to it then somehow you get cancer in fact we use it to treat some forms of cancer in terms of overall exposure to, the research now shows that because solar panels require so much rare earth minerals, that the whole life cycle process of making

a solar panel results in significantly more radiation exposure than nuclear power. So the continued low level radiation out of these used fuel rods is, I mean, it's just a giant nothing burger. This effort to bury it has to be understood as kind of a psychological reaction or even a religious reaction to return this material to the underworld. It never made any sense to me. It was something that the industry, which has just really been reactive. I mean, it's just a bunch of engineers who are dealing with what in many ways is a spiritual problem. And what I mean by that is that the power of nuclear is so awesome and massive, and it's such a radical event in human history. It did come very early. I mean, we knew that it would happen in the early 20th century, but when it happened, it was shocking. I mean, we're going to have a new Christopher Nolan movie out this year about Robert Oppenheimer, who was the creator of the bomb. And we treated it almost like a spiritual event because it's so wild that you could do what we

were able to do. Prediction alert. That movie that Christopher Nolan is doing, Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. will both be nominated for multiple awards for their performances. No doubt about it. I mean, it's a big- I'm telling you. I am aware of the production

and of the quality of the performances because I know someone involved. And that movie is going to go from something that people know nothing about because Oppenheim, probably as many people will recognize the word from a police song, you know, where he talks about Oppenheimer's deadly toy, as they will from history. But it's one of those ones that once you see it, it's going to blow you away. And part of that is the lesson. From its inception, nuclear has been too scary to stomach for a lot of people. And it's going to be an interesting frame of reference for people when they see that movie.

You mentioned here, though, hey, you know, we don't need as many rare metals when we're doing nuclear. here though hey you know we don't need as many rare metals when we're doing nuclear but one of the knocks on it is mining for uranium the fuel for nuclear reactors is very energy intensive the net energy created via nuclear plants may be offset by the energy required to build the plants and mine uranium what about that no that's that's absurd. That's not true. And there's no science that supports that. In fact, it's quite the opposite. By the way, we have this measurement. It's called energy returned on energy invested, which means how much energy does something require like a nuclear plant to build and all the things to go in and how much comes out. And nuclear is by far the highest, something like 75 to 1. The real problem is actually renewables because of the low energy density of sunlight and

wind. So energy density is something that should be taught in all high schools, but it's a very simple idea, which is that this amount of uranium can provide me with all the power I need in my life, whereas it'd be many train cars of coal, or to get that similar amount of energy from solar panels and wind, you'd have to cover huge amounts of the landscape with those energy sources. And even then the energy returns is very low. And that's also the reason it's so clean. So no air pollution, no water pollution from nuclear, nothing comes out of the plant, just the used fuel goes in, comes out the other side. You store it safely.

From an environmental perspective, this is exactly what you would want. Solar panels, we have no end waste solution to them. Wind turbine blades are being just buried because you can't recycle or decompose them. I think it's a Cinderella of energies. It's the one that people thought was dirty and it turned out to be the cleanest and the most beautiful. But yeah, it has this fascinating, I mean, it's really you need like the Greek mythology to understand the technology having this two sides to it. One is this terrifying weapon and the other is, in my view, and I think many others, the key to sustainability,

the key to human beings shrinking our environmental footprint. Two more swings at your head. One, cost. Man, these reactors cost so much. Three Mile Island, you know, it took them like forever to build it. Cost billions even back then in 70s, 80s dollars. And it was only open for three years and they had to shut it down. It's too expensive to build these things.

Nothing is as expensive as building a nuclear reactor. Yeah, I mean, I think the best argument, if I were to make it for my opponents, against the cost of nuclear would be the outrageously high cost of cleaning up the Fukushima accident in 2011. You know, the estimates vary between $200 billion to $300 billion. The estimates vary between $200 billion to $300 billion. So then you have to ask yourself, well, then why are the Japanese doubling down on nuclear power right now? Why are the Japanese irrationally in love with nuclear power? On the contrary, the public opinion in Japan has tilted back towards nuclear.

But after Fukushima, the vast majority of Japanese wanted to get rid of nuclear forever. It's the only country that's been bombed by a nuclear weapon and here they are rushing to open up their nuclear power plants again is it because they're economically irrational no it's because nuclear is so cheap that it's much so much cheaper than the alternative of imported natural gas imported coal it's the only way they can meet their climate change targets. And so the fundamentals on the cost is that there is a higher upfront construction cost if you have the same construction crews building the same kinds of plants over and over again. And if the plants are big enough to power, let's say, two, three or four million people or more, then over time, the cost comes down because the cost of operating is so low compared to the cost of construction. And then these plants can last

for a very long time. You know, let me say one other thing about the age, Chris, because I think it matters. People worry about the older plants. The fact of the matter is the older plants in France right now are the ones that have performed better. They actually had less corrosion and rust in the pipes that had to be repaired. They were actually, the original old ones are actually doing better. They require maintenance, but nuclear power plants are functionally immortal. I mean, you may eventually have to replace the containment domes, which are what protect the plants from the environment, and then also potentially the reactor vessels. But basically, all of the parts can be swapped in and out.

So it's almost, I think the way to think of a nuclear plant is more like a hydroelectric dam or a highway system, something that will be around for a long time if you maintain it well. Another swing at your head, if you maintain it well. And there it is, Schellenberger. at your head if you maintain it well. And there it is, Schellenberger. You have to maintain nuclear facilities with a level of meticulousness and precision and all of these different safety protocols where the margins are so small, unlike any other form of energy, that if you get it wrong just a little bit, and you will because you're human

and you're about profits and not just careful and prophylaxis, so something's going to go wrong. And when it does at a natural gas facility or with a windmill, it falls down and natural gas is going to blow up, but you can put it out. But with nuclear, the margins are so small between disaster and just doing the job well. Too much risk. Yeah. I mean, the first half of what you said is correct. You need to maintain nuclear plants. A friend of mine works in the control room or worked in the control room of a nuclear plant in California. In fact, another friend there, they both were pregnant, going to work, had their kids there kids there their kids are nearby can you see them when you turn the lights off in a room you you do not okay um they're uh they understand science and but yeah

they're there they were at the nuclear plant with with their babies and their babies nearby so their babies have one head uh the babies are very bright they're very intelligent so maybe literally they shine like literally they're glowing when you say right you have to be very precise in this conversation shellenberger you with your radioactive friends so one of my friends she i asked her she changed jobs and now she writes the procedure manual and i asked her i was like you don't have the procedures already written and she said no we constantly are rewriting it in the same way that we're constantly training. And so this is one of these kind of everything, you know, every adversity is good for you, which is that the Three Mile Island accident was great for the nuclear industry.

They were arrogant. They were inexperienced, too. And the plants ran about 55% of the time. After Three Mile Island, they did better trainings, better procedures, better maintenance, and now the plants run 92% of the time. And so you're absolutely right. It should be maintained. Now, of course, you could say that about everything, including fields of solar panels have to be maintained. But you're wrong on the issue of does any little thing spell disaster? In fact, you have incredibly good

safeguards. Remember, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the safety regulator in the United States, their people, their employees work in the plants, and they have the right to go into any room in the facility at any time without announcement. It's really one of the best whistleblower systems in the world. And the systems have very good backups. The main event is really training, preparation, having a culture of safety, and good oversight, good regulation, and then not panicking when something goes wrong, because usually there's a very good solution to it. So in some ways, the fears around nuclear have been good for nuclear. It's created a culture of discipline. That's the kind of thing I think we need more of in the United States. There's obviously risks with anything, but when you

just look at the track record of nuclear's performance over the last 60 years, it significantly outperforms any other technology, including gas, coal, in terms of the normal functioning of fossil fuels is significantly more dangerous than the malfunctioning of nuclear. Why is the normal functioning of fossil fuels more dangerous than people glowing for a long time, and cancer and all of the other things that are associated with nuclear ruins the water, can't live there anymore? How is that in any way comparable to what we all are already dealing with with the rest of the energy industries? Right. Well, another way to answer your question is why are polluting fossil fuels more dangerous than our irrational fears of nuclear? Because our

fears of nuclear are irrational to a large extent. I mean, fossil fuels externalize their waste byproducts into the environment in the form of air and water pollution. So somewhere between around 4 million people a year have their lives shortened by air pollution. The number of people whose lives are shortened by nuclear power every year rounded to the nearest number is zero. And nobody glows from nuclear, although it is a funny story. I know that one of the scientists who was involved in the Manhattan Project, I discovered that decades later, he still had high levels of plutonium in his bones. And when I was doing research for my book, I kept searching for his

obituary, and I couldn't find it until I finally realized that he was still alive. So this idea that even plutonium, there was this idea that if you ingest a little bit of it, you'll plop over dead. These fears, they really come from science fiction. They really come from mythology. And so nuclear becomes a kind of receptacle for mythological fears that have no basis in science, but really have a long, long history, thousands of years of mythology behind them. You know who wants us to have a lot more nuclear power? Extreme Islamists and white nationalists, because they are perfect targets to kill huge amounts of people by bombing the facilities. Can't do that with any of the other energy facilities.

Too big a risk. It's actually quite the opposite. Nuclear facilities are absolutely big a risk. It's actually quite the opposite. Nuclear facilities are absolutely terrible terrorist targets. There was a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant in France where they fired an RPG at the plant and it had no effect. These containment domes, one time the U.S. government rammed a jet plane into a reinforced concrete wall, which is the same sort of engineering of a nuclear plant's containment dome. And the plane just blew apart.

People can go onto YouTube and watch the video. So it is a terrible target because they are so reinforced that the weaponry would bounce off of it. You know, if a terrorist were to try to break into a nuclear plant, it's not clear what they could do. They'd have to somehow kill everybody on site, which is very difficult because there's about a thousand people on site. You know, around the perimeter of nuclear plants are snipers, often former special forces. There's nothing really to steal if you go to a nuclear plant without harming yourself.

So it's hard. Like, there's not really any scenario for it, which is why if you see a James Bond movie as it relates to nuclear, it's always like a briefcase of nuclear weapons, not a briefcase of nuclear fuels. It's also just an incredibly, you know, well-guarded industry. It's the only industry that has cameras

24 hours a day, seven days a week on all parts of the plant. But aren't all those security measures and snipers proof that this is dangerous? Well, I think there's too many of those. I aren't all those security measures and snipers proof that this is dangerous? Well, I think there's too many of those. I don't think you need all those snipers, personally. I think it's a lot of additional regulation that was imposed on the industry by people that really hate nuclear power. So no, I guess I don't think that. I mean, it's notable. It's interesting. You know, you've had some guys that have shot up substation,

electrical substations, causing blackouts. There's a lot of concerns of increasing vulnerability of the electrical grid. I mean, objectively, it's not my view. I think most people would agree the much greater vulnerability of electrical grid systems, including natural gas power plants, than there are with nuclear power plants. Last question. gas power plants than there are with nuclear power plants. Last question. Schellenberger, do you believe that the relevant people in your life would allow you to move them near a nuclear plant?

Would you live near a nuclear plant? Actually, I would love to live near California's nuclear plant. It's on the central coast. It's on the ocean. It's one of the most spectacular marine environments in California. I would love to be there. Many of my friends are nearby. My wife would have no concern about it, but she doesn't want to be on the central coast because it's too far away from most people. But no, I think I would love to be near a nuclear plant more than any other plant and honestly, more than any other industrial facility. I live, I can see a major oil refinery near my home in Berkeley, California. I can see it in Richmond, California. And it has regular air pollution problems, toxic events, a lot of complaints by the communities that grew up around that plant. So significantly greater air pollution risks near an oil and gas facility.

But no, I would love to live near a nuclear plant. I think most people should, you know, if only because they're usually in very beautiful places, they're in communities that really care about the plants. They're very in touch with what's going on at the plant. So yeah, for me, you know, nuclear, I think over time is just going to be viewed as kind of no big deal, a very normal thing. You mentioned the HBO miniseries on Chernobyl. I wrote a criticism of it for Forbes called Why HBO Got Chernobyl Wrong. And it was so absurd. First of all, they were comparing nuclear power plants to nuclear weapons.

And then they went further and power plants to nuclear weapons. And then they went further and they even exaggerated what nuclear weapons could do. And it was a horror movie. You know, the guy's gone on and made this movie, The Last of Us, about zombies, which is a terrific movie. But I just think it's another indication that nuclear just became a kind of scapegoat for a lot of our fears of modern society. And understandably so, because of its association with the weapons. But I do think that the power plants have just been mistreated and misunderstood. And really, it's a Cinderella story

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You see the website. You'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Dr. Lovering, thank you so much for joining us in this special edition of the Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for having me. Excited for this conversation. All so as the scientist address the following number one nuclear bombs are bad we are all afraid of their potential right now with what's happening

with russia and ukraine and you want me to have a bunch of nuclear bombs all over my country and that's supposed to be a good thing. I'm afraid of nuclear bombs. Why would I be in favor of nuclear power? So the first part, just to agree with you, I also don't like nuclear bombs. I don't want to see nuclear bombs exploded anywhere. But nuclear weapons are very separate from nuclear energy, although they're often very conflated

and muddled together in the public's mind, and there's good reasons for that. But the industries that produce nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are very separate, or at least they should be, and they are in most countries. So you can definitely have nuclear energy without having nuclear weapons. Plenty of countries do, like Canada, Japan. Japan has great reasons to be very anti-nuclear weapons, but they've been a long supporter and a very large producer of nuclear energy even today.

Is the science the same? If you're making one, can you just make the other? Is one just as dangerous as the other? No and no. So the basic physics is the same. The nuclear reactions that take place in a power plant are controlled and they're controlled through physics and also engineering processes. So you can't have that sort science is used to make fertilizer, which we need for producing food, as to make traditional explosives. But we wouldn't say we can't have fertilizer because it can also be used to make explosives. Now there's controls actually on the chemicals used in fertilizer production for that reason, but we see them as very separate processes. So there's some international regimes, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is controlling sensitive nuclear materials that are used for nuclear weapons. It's a wonderful system. There's an international treaty, a nuclear nonproliferation treaty that almost every country has signed on to and puts really strict controls in place on nuclear materials to prevent countries from making nuclear weapons. But even if you get those materials, it's still a huge endeavor to acquire nuclear weapons. We want to make it really hard and prevent countries from doing it, but it's

very separate from what you would do if you want to make a nuclear power plant. And specifically in the U.S., the people making nuclear power are utilities, public utilities. And we have nuclear weapons, but they're controlled by the state. They're very secure. Give me a second bite at the apple in terms of the science. Why isn't a nuclear reactor just a large nuclear bomb in waiting? So the big distinction, and I don't want to get too much on the technical side, but is what the uranium looks like. So uranium for either power plants or bombs needs to be enriched. And you can think of that as sort of skimming the cream off the top.

Natural uranium in the ground isn't good for most power plants. It's too sort of watered down, you could say. It doesn't sustain that chain reaction the way you want. So it needs to go through this process called enrichment. There's very few places that have enrichment capabilities, but the amount of enrichment you need for a power plant is very different than what goes into a nuclear weapon. So there's controls on who can enrich and how much you can enrich that keeps that material separate. So you can't sort of have that runaway chain reaction in a nuclear power plant

because the fuel is not high enough enrichment of the uranium. It's not sort of creamy enough to cause that sort of explosion. The explosions that we do see in nuclear accidents, like at Fukushima, was not a nuclear explosion. It was a steam explosion. So it was just water got too hot. Like you're boiling a pot of water and it gets too hot and the top pops off. So the impression that Chernobyl, Fukushima, lesser extent Three Mile Island, these were nuclear reactors that turned into nuclear bombs is not accurate.

Well, they didn't turn into nuclear bombs. They did have explosions, but it wasn't the same process going inside as a runaway chain reaction. It wasn't actually the nuclear fuel exploding. It was steam explosions or graphite burning in the case of Chernobyl. One step backwards. You are a PhD astrophysics. You're also a greenie. Also a lefty. You're a lefty, greenie. You started off wanting to fight wildfires. You are in charge and at the top of the food chain of something called the Good Energy Collective. Your people are generally not talking about nuclear power as anything other than a sign of the apocalypse. When did you start

to feel differently about the need for safety of utility of nuclear power? Yeah, it really started when I was doing graduate school in Colorado in energy policy, environmental studies, and, you know, was really excited about clean energy. My driving passion was climate change and figuring out how to mitigate climate change. And there's a lot of action in Colorado on renewables, you know, solar panels and wind turbines. So I got interested in clean energy and was taking courses in it and just sort of stumbled into nuclear as realizing that, you know, it's 20% of U.S. electricity. That's so true today. It's our largest source of clean energy in the U.S. and second largest globally. And no one was really talking about it. And when I started doing some, you know, simple back of the envelope

modeling of, you know, what would it take for certain countries to decarbonize fully, sort of deep decarbonization, it's just really hard to do without nuclear. And as a Green Party member at the time, that was really hard to grapple with and also just really confusing that no one was talking about it. So I started looking into nuclear around that time. That was over 10 years ago. And just discovering that these plants are operating all over the US. They have a really great safety record, really low mortality, really low life cycle emissions, really low cost actually, second only to hydro in terms of affordable electricity. So it just seemed like such a good option. But then of course, learning more about the challenges that nuclear has faced in the past

today. And so I really wanted to work on those challenges rather than dismiss the technology because it had some problems. Because the more I sort of dug into the details, you know, every energy source has problems. Even renewables have problems. I don't think we should dismiss renewables and I don't think we should dismiss nuclear. I think we should see how we can get every tool in our toolbox working the best it can because it's just, it's going to be hard to fully decarbonize, but you know, we have to do it. So improving every, every tool that we have. You must be disowned by Berkeley and Boulder, have your crunchy card pulled, and you can no longer be a Green Party member because you are advocating for a type of power that will make our kids glow and our fish have three heads. And sure, all these other things have problems.

Coal's dirty, oil's dirty, gas isn't as dirty, but it's kind of weird on water. But not like nuclear, which gives everybody cancer, and we've all seen The Simpsons. Scientifically, what do we now know about the relative risks and rewards of nuclear among the other traditional power sources? Yeah, so I think what we have that we didn't have maybe 30 or 40 years ago is just decades of experience working with the technology. Nuclear, over its lifetime, even including the major accidents, really low public health impact, on par with renewables, which I think is surprising to a lot of people.

really low public health impact on par with renewables, which I think is surprising to a lot of people. But just sort of comparing, you know, it's easy to be ideological and just to say like, okay, I just don't want nuclear, even if it's okay, even if it's, you know, not that bad. But we don't have the luxury of making those sorts of choices. And so we really need everything that we can get right now. And so the actual comparison is between nuclear and what it is replacing, which for the most part is coal. And just day to day, you know, coal pollution, air pollution, water pollution is so large. And obviously you can say, okay, but you know, I still worry about what's coming out of nuclear plants. But nuclear plants day to day over their life cycle, such, such low pollution, better than renewables in some cases.

And I think for what we've seen is that countries that have done big nuclear buildouts, you know, have much cleaner air, have much, you know, lower greenhouse gas emissions. And that's from projects that were done in the 60s and 70s. And just if we're going to be realistic about decarbonizing, we just have to have nuclear. And we know that it is really safe. It doesn't release anything just in day-to-day operations. The pollution that you do see in sort of life cycle emissions is really from the backup diesel generators at nuclear power plants that have to turn on every once in a while to check that they're still working. Those are the only emissions from nuclear power plants. Even the emissions from mining uranium are really low because the uranium is super energy dense. So you don't have to take my word for it.

You know, the EPA tracks these things, but also just talking to people who live near nuclear power plants, they're super supportive of the power plant. You know, they've lived next to it for decades. Their kids go to school right next to the power plant. There's nothing coming out of it except steam vapor. So compare that with people who live near coal power plants. They're going to tell you a much different story. Even if they're employed at the plant,

they know what's coming out of that coal power plant, out of those stacks. They'd much rather live next to something that's zero emission. So I think that's what we've seen over the last several decades. The science of it, from a scientific perspective, is it on par? When you look at just the science, not the politics, not even the cost effectiveness, I guess that could be a metric that you could measure and then it could be a function of what you know so therefore part of the science of it but when you do the analysis how does nuclear stack up to the energy sources that are traditional and what are preferenced as better alternatives to nuclear what metric are you interested in emissions emissions reliability safety uh potential X factors, the traumatic event, cost effectiveness,

build cost, the bang for your buck as an efficiency, all those different metrics we hear all the time to compete with wind versus solar versus coal versus natural gas versus oil. Okay. So on the emission side, I think the best source on this is the IPCC, who collects data on life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and also just standard air, you know, traditional air pollution, like particulates and things like that. They've collected a ton of studies that have measured emissions from all different energy sources, and nuclear comes out about at the same life cycle emissions as wind and solar. And that includes mining, that includes disposal. And

people are surprised by that. But the reason is that, you know, wind and solar, they take mining. They have a lot of resources that go into them. They have steel production, concrete. There's a lot of emissions that come from that, but they also don't produce as much energy over their lifetime. So a nuclear power plant is a huge construction project, but once it's built, it generates so much electricity that the life cycle emissions are actually about the same as renewables.

They're of course so much better than fossil fuels, even much better than natural gas, which has lower emissions than coal power plants. But comparing nuclear to coal, it's just not even, you know, on the same level. Coal has not just greenhouse gas emissions, but heavy metals, air pollutants. And so switching from coal to nuclear has huge climate benefits, but also public health benefits and just effects on the local environment, air and water pollution. So that's not controversial. Everyone who's looked at the numbers agrees that nuclear is clean energy in that regard.

It's clean in terms of water pollution, in terms of mining impacts. It's, you know, if you think renewables are clean energy, then nuclear is clean energy based on any metric. If you think renewables are clean energy, then nuclear is clean energy based on any metric. So other metrics to look at, the big one and the reason that utilities are really interested in nuclear and why sort of perceptions of nuclear have changed just in the last year or so in Europe and the U.S. is really about reliability. So unlike wind and solar, nuclear runs 24-7, even when it's really cold, when it's really hot. And that's really useful from a grid perspective, keeping the lights on. Wind and solar, this is a cliche, but the sun doesn't always shine.

The wind doesn't always blow. And that can be difficult to manage, especially when you have a lot of renewables on your grid. It definitely can be managed. But you have to have sort of backup systems or ways to balance the load. If the voltage drops, it can cause power outages and things like that. So why utilities are really interested in nuclear, especially now, is that it can be really good to balance renewables. And I think we're seeing more and more dialogue about that from the renewables community as well. So it's not nuclear versus renewables.

about that from the renewables community as well. So it's not nuclear versus renewables. It's how can we work together to have a low carbon balanced grid that delivers the power that people and businesses need? Why does it have to be balanced, Doc? If nuclear is scientifically superior by looking at the cost efficiency and environmental impacts, why would we have anything else? Or is that just kind of giving some ground to the fact that people hate it? Yeah, I think there's a lot of different values that go in, and I'm sure you can find someone who will argue that we can just do 100% nuclear. I definitely know people like that, but I think there's political realities. You know, nuclear isn't popular everywhere. It is popular in some places.

And renewables are really cheap, at least on the per unit of electricity basis. So if you can build them and still keep your grid balanced, that can help keep costs down. Now, if you go 100% renewables, that actually can become quite expensive because you need to overbuild your system to be able to keep it balanced. So that's why you need something low carbon that can serve as that firm baseload power because it helps bring down costs. So there's been a lot of modeling at different levels at the US. There's been a lot more in California looking at how do you get to zero carbon power sector with different combinations. And really, and this is not surprising, but diversity helps keep costs down and having different sources that go at different times. So if you exclude nuclear power,

your total costs are much higher. Even though the cost of electricity from a nuclear power plant might be a little higher than renewables, but looking at system-wide, having that diversity of generating sources actually keeps costs down and makes for more affordable electricity. Why is it higher? The capital costs are quite large,

the upfront costs. You did a study on this that was a peer-reviewed study about the cost efficiencies of nuclear, and it does cost billions of dollars to build a nuclear power plant, but you say that you can't have that one-dimensional thinking because it's not just the initial build cost. So I'll give you two points. The first one is that, yes, traditional nuclear has been quite expensive, particularly in terms of that upfront capital cost. But even those plants that were expensive, even the plant that's under construction and is going to come online in Georgia this year, the Vogel plant, which is way over budget. Once it's built and is generating electricity, that electricity is affordable because these plants produce so much electricity over time. Now, we'd still love to see the costs come down.

If the costs come down, it just makes decarbonizing and building clean energy easier. That's true for renewables. That's true for batteries. It's definitely true for nuclear. And costs don't have to be that high. And it's not hypothetical. Nuclear in other countries is much cheaper. And I'm not talking about, oh, it's cheap in China, it's cheap in Russia because, you know, everything's cheaper there. But it's cheaper in countries like Japan, South Korea. And the reason is that they built a lot of it and they built standard designs. And that's something that really sets the U.S. apart and why costs went out of control for our nuclear power plants is that we were building every nuclear power plant

as this sort of cathedral or sort of large concrete snowflake. Everyone was different and they had to learn new lessons and figure things out. And there were different mistakes made at every plant. And, you know, everyone was sort of custom made. So they were built like large infrastructure projects rather than being built like a commercial product, which is what you see for most other energy sources. Even combined cycle gas plants are built in a modular fashion in a factory setting. And that's what's different about new nuclear that I can talk more about and sort of this modular fabrication and why people think nuclear has more of a future in terms of cost and bringing those costs down. So two other studies that you've done, among many,

will also be pointed to as a negative, even though that's not what the studies are, but the perception, the optics is what's killing nuclear. How to make nuclear clean, how to make nuclear innovative. Now, people will take just the titles of those studies and they will say, yeah, see, you got to figure out how to make it clean. You still have to figure, you got to be, you get nuclear is an unfinished understanding of technology. And they're always trying to update it because we're still not really sure about what's going to happen when we do this and how to store it and all that. We don't know yet. There's too much unknown with nuclear. That's what makes it too dangerous. Response. So the first report is actually called How to Make Nuclear Cheap, which I do agree nuclear needs to be cheaper. And that can be done through standardization,

agree nuclear needs to be cheaper and that can be done through, you know, standardization, modularization, as I said. But in terms of clean, it's hard to make nuclear cleaner. It already is quite clean. I think the one aspect that we just want to be careful about is the uranium mining. Uranium is mined in a lot of places around the world, places with really good standards, you know, protections for workers, places like Australia, Canada. But the largest producer of uranium is Kazakhstan. They do have really good standards. But, you know, uranium mining has a troubled history, particularly in the U.S. It was done on a lot of indigenous lands with not good safety protections. This was in the sort of 50s and 60s. And so we do just want to make sure standards are really good. But they are right now. But communicating that is tough. And then the other thing that you're probably thinking about is nuclear waste or spent fuel. And that's something

where there's definitely progress to be made as well. The U.S. doesn't have a place where we put nuclear waste. We're supposed to. It was supposed to be Yucca Mountain, but that's effectively been canceled. Department of Energy is looking at restarting efforts to site an interim facility for nuclear waste, but they want it to be done in a more fair, equitable way that really has community support for siting, which Yucca Mountain didn't have. So there's progress being made there, and the tricky part about nuclear waste, the reason we don't have a repository is that it is safe where it is, and it's not that big of a problem in terms of volume.

is that it is safe where it is, and it's not that big of a problem in terms of volume. All of the nuclear waste from the entire, you know, 60 years of generating nuclear power in the U.S., 20% of our electricity for 60 years, it could fit on a soccer field. And so, you know, we need to do something with it. But other countries recycle their waste, so they get more energy out of it. They use it again for fuel. Why don't we do that? Why don't we do that? Yeah, cost, actually. It was banned by Carter for sort of weapons proliferation reasons, but that's not really relevant anymore today. The main reason is cost.

It's much cheaper to mine fresh uranium out of the ground, unfortunately. But if we had some incentives on it, you know, encouraging recycling like we do for aluminum cans, which is also not cost effective, while recycling other things, for aluminum cans, which is also not cost-effective. While recycling other things, aluminum might be. Other countries like France and Japan do fuel recycling, and it's much better from a sustainability perspective and from a mining perspective. So where we are right now is on, we're just talking about waste and a repository for it. The waste is the scariest part. You've got the, it's going to blow up

and make everybody glow for generations. And the stuff that you're putting, wherever you put it, is like deadly to anybody who's anywhere near it. The key words of the concern, two words, radioactive. I know it's one word, but that's the concern two words radioactive i know it's one word but that's the concern radioactive that word does not get attached to any other energy and the risks of it yeah kills the fish makes the water dirty puts the smoke up in the sky yeah we get it we get it. We get it. That's called civilization. But radioactive is an

existential threat and only nuclear presents that threat. Not worth it. Response. So I will interject with one quick tangent, which is nuclear is not the only source that releases radioactive material. So coal power plants actually release much more radioactive material to the environment than a nuclear power plant in their emissions because every element under the sun is in coal. It's a very dirty fuel in general, and that stuff just goes straight through into the atmosphere. So things like uranium, thorium, radioactive elements, but it's very diffuse because there's a lot of stuff coming out of a coal power plant. After that aside, the waste, which is, you know, sometimes referred to as spent fuel because it's the fuel rods, they can't make electricity anymore, but there still is radioactive material in there.

It's not as scary as people think. And so, you know, we definitely need to handle it carefully, but it's sitting at sites around the U.S. and it's quite secure. And where it's sitting is basically in parking lots. It's in these dry casts. They're big concrete tubes. And you can go up and touch them. You can give them a hug.

You're not going to be glowing. The radioactivity, I think what's scary for a lot of people is that it's very long-lived. But the kind of paradox around radioactivity is if something's really hot, meaning really dangerous, it's very short-lived. And if something is very long-lived, it's actually very not hot. You can go up and touch it and handle it. And so the problem with nuclear waste is that it's a mix of long-lived and short-lived things. So it's really hot in the short term, but then you also have materials in there that are really long-lived and short-lived things. So it's really hot in the short term, but then you also have materials in there that are really long-lived.

So that's one of the benefits of recycling is that you can get out that long-lived stuff and use it again, run it through a reactor again, and separate out the really hot stuff and handle it more carefully. But again, that's sort of this really weird paradox about nuclear waste is the reason we don't have a solution to it

is it's actually quite safe where it is and not an urgent problem. The way other sort of, you know, chemical pollution might be like things that oil refineries that are, you know, if they leaked into the environment are really deadly right away. Nuclear waste is stored very safely and securely in the U.S. right now. If you had to live next to a power plant, how would you rank your choices? I would definitely live next to a nuclear power plant. They also tend to be in beautiful locations, but the zero emissions would do it for me.

Of course, I would happily put solar on my roof if I was a homeowner as well. I'm not sure I'd want to live near wind turbines just because of the noise, but if you're happy with them on your land, you have a lot of land. I know people are happy to tolerate them. I think nuclear would probably be my first choice. I guess hydroelectric, be nice to live on a lake. So that wouldn't be bad either. I would

definitely not want to live near a coal plant or even a natural gas plant for obvious health effects. Health of X. Now, I am older than both of you. However, we are close enough to have both been raised with similar understandings, that you don't touch the stove when you see the flame, and that nuclear power will make you glow, okay? And it's radioactive, and that is one of the scariest words. So that's why we actively are against it. Heather, before you got into STEM

and you developed all of the more sophisticated understanding, what made you start to think differently, or where were you when you used to think nuclear power? And where are you now? I really had no idea much about energy or nuclear. I did know that, you know, I was born in 1979, which also happens to be the year of Three Mile Island. My mom, you know, when I talked to her about nuclear,

she's like, oh yeah, there was this stuff going on in Pennsylvania. And I was definitely silently protesting along with them. She was scared. You know, she instilled some fear in me. I never really had plans to work in the nuclear field. It kind of happened by accident. And I'm so glad that it did because it's my passion now and how I think we're going to save the planet. And I'm super lucky that it just it kind of happened because of where I live in San Luis Obispo, California, and having Diablo Canyon right nearby. But, yeah, it took me a lot of questioning and a lot of thinking to try and get over a lot of those fears that were instilled in me from an early age before I kind of felt comfortable working there. And then even more before I felt comfortable being a mom for nuclear. So we were talking before, Kristen,

I've met moms who are organized around nuclear energy before. My father was governor of New York for 12 years. And I remember him having problems with a facility in a place called Shoreham. And the moms were there. And they were in front of the plant. And they were in front of the house where I was living.

And they were saying, you're killing our kids. And they closed it down. What's changed, Kristen? So much. We still have those same mom groups now, which is one reason why Heather and I started Mothers for Nuclear. For a long time, after I changed my mind from thinking nuclear was one of those terrible things out there to strongly supporting it for climate and land conservation reasons, I think that it was hard for me to understand that my voice was needed. Right. But then I saw all these images of moms protesting nuclear and saw

how powerful that was. And so Heather and I got together and we thought, well, you know, we need to be the other side of this. You know, people need to see what's really going on. And what's really going on is not what I was taught. I was raised watching The Simpsons. And I'd say the only accurate thing in The Simpsons about nuclear is the donuts. But everything else really is just not what I expected at all. I went to work at Diablo Canyon thinking I was going to find like piles of glowing green material, some definitely some barrels leaking. And what I ended up finding was one of the best kept secrets in land conservation and climate action, because that power plant and other existing

nuclear power plants produce electricity without carbon, which is, you know, if you care about climate, obviously a huge deal. Around 20% of our electricity in the United States that's carbon free is coming from nuclear. So it's huge. You know, we just can't afford to shut that down in the middle of a climate crisis. And then also for me, I really cared about using natural spaces and land really judiciously, right? I want to see land conserved for my kids to be able to enjoy wild natural spaces like I had when I was growing up and like, you know, my heroes of the conservation movement worked so hard for. And when I see a single power plant producing nearly 15% of California's clean electricity on a land footprint, basically the size of a football stadium, I mean, that's something you can't ignore. It's really compelling from an environmental perspective. Anyway, a roundabout

way of saying, I think it's a secret, you know, and the big secret that they're keeping about nuclear is how valuable it is to us and what a great tool it is in the fight for climate. And we need more non-corporate voices, more relatable voices out there, you know, spreading this message. The reason that it's a secret, Heather, is because it makes you glow. That's why. you glow. That's why. And the stuff that you bury in the ground lives forever and will give us fish with two heads and make our kids incapable of doing math. Those are the kinds of fears that we attach to the word radioactive. Oh, I get coal puts smoke in the air, but I can see it. And I get that some of these other types of power plants, they're messing with the water, but we can filter it. Radioactive just kills you dead for generations. And that's a

big part of the stigma. How do you correct that? Is that correct? Well, it's super scary. And I think our industry hasn't done a very good job of addressing those emotions. They tend to say, very good job of addressing those emotions. They tend to say, oh yeah, you know, like here's radiation and here's, you know, some value with these obscure units that no one really knows what the units mean. And they're different in different parts of the world. And, you know, I don't even understand the units that they use in other countries. I'm like, I don't know how much radiation that is and if it's scary or not and if it matters. And so I think we need to acknowledge that fear, that it's real and that it's okay to have feelings. We're humans and we have feelings and it's all right to be scared. And then we have to also be able to pivot to the science and the

facts and say, you know, like I've talked to the experts and I understand, you know, this isn't damaging. It's not dangerous. There are very, you know, specific ways that we control it. And there's something that we do. I want to show you. Since you mentioned glowing green, we have uranium pendants. They're necklaces. So you're as good as dead then, basically.

They actually do glow green. So it's true. We sometimes wear these as a demonstration of, like, look, radiation is all around us, really. Like I'm wearing it on my neck. And I know that this small amount of radiation isn't going to hurt me rationally. I know this, you know, like emotionally, it's still a little bit scary. But so we just try and, you know, talk about it in a more honest way. So you were working at Diablo Canyon, Heather, in the control room, like Homer Simpson.

That exact job, yes. But lucky for you, you don't look or sound anything like him. Give me the donut. And what changed your perspective on The Boogeyman? A couple things. Like I said, it took a lot of years and a lot of questions before I started feeling a little more comfortable. And a couple things kind of stand out in my mind. One of them was when An Inconvenient Truth came out.

And I kind of said to my coworkers, look at this. This is a, this is a great movie. We can go and we can talk to the people that are giving a showing of this movie and we can share with them about nuclear energy, like how great it is that we can make all this energy, you know, without emissions. And it's like the solution to everything they care about. And all my coworkers were like, we don't believe in climate change. Like, why would you want to do that? Why would you want to go talk to these people? And then, of course, I go to the movie showing and all the people are like, why are you here?

Why do you want to talk about nuclear? And it's just like this complete loss of people who care about what we care about, understanding how important this is and being willing to examine it. And so it's a really big challenge that I think we have going forward in terms of how do we reach the people that we think should care about the same things that we do. Why didn't Fukushima, so to remind people, so Fukushima was in Japan. I covered it as a journalist at ABC News. There was an earthquake. Fukushima was in Japan. I covered it as a journalist at ABC News. There was an earthquake. The reactor was too close to the fault line of the earthquake, and it caused all of these catastrophic things at the facility that wound up making people run for like 50 miles all around

the facility. You were working in the business at the time. why didn't that make you just give up the ghost and be like, I can't be around this? Oh my gosh. Yeah, it almost did. I was in the control room at Diablo Canyon. I got called in early that day because Fukushima is right across the ocean from us. We had a tsunami watch at our plant. So I had to go in early. They were going to evacuate the town that's on the way into the plant. So we had to get through before they closed everything down. And yeah, it was super scary. Stand at attention, watching all the boards, monitoring our indications. And it was a couple of days before things started really going badly over there because they have backup power supplies and they have passive safety mechanisms that last for a while.

But the real trouble was they didn't have power for multiple days. So after a couple days, we have a TV back in our briefing room, and I went back there, and there's the media with explosions of this other nuclear plant. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is my worst nightmare as an operator. Those poor people just across the ocean from us don't know what's going on in their plant and I'm like oh my gosh this is my worst nightmare as an operator like those poor people just across the ocean from us don't know what's going on in their plant they can't see any indications they don't know if their co-workers are hurt so they don't know if their families are okay they can't call anyone I was just I was in tears I was scared um well I had a two-year-old

daughter at the time and a couple of the moms from my birthing class. One of them was from Belarus, actually, which is kind of close to Chernobyl. And the other one was from Japan. And so, like, we were talking with that a lot, you know, with other moms. They were scared. And I was like, I think I have to quit my job. And they're like, well, that makes sense. You know, like, this is super scary in bed. And at the same time, we won't hold it against you because we know you quit my job. And they're like, well, that makes sense. You know, like, this is super scary and bad.

And at the same time, we won't hold it against you because we know you like your job. But yeah, I almost kind of gave up at that point. It took a while for some more good information to come in about what was actually happening over there. And, you know, a lot of people ask us details about what happened at Fukushima and it is kind of complicated. So we try and just boil it down to like, what were the real causes of the bad things that happened? We don't usually get that far in our analysis, right? Yeah, right. It's like people don't really get too far into the why beyond the cause when they're trying to ascribe something as a threat, right? So that second, third sentence, Kristen, we usually don't want to get there. I mean,

Kristen, you also worked at Diablo Canyon. And the idea that, yeah, Fukushima happened and kind of took out a whole region of a country. And we were worried about that here with the tsunami watch. And that's all I need to know, because that would never happen at a natural gas place or at a coal place or at a wind place or at a solar place. And that's why nuclear has to go. And how do you defeat that argument, Kristen? You know, it's really, I think what Heather just described with being okay with feeling the emotion

of it is really important because I certainly felt a lot of emotion about it as well. But intellectually, when you look at all the different power sources, you know, where we're getting our energy from, there's far more harmful sources of electricity that we're using every day. Like we're emitting particulates and carbon into the air by burning fossil fuels that's killing millions of people every year, millions of people. And when you look at what happened in Fukushima, while it was definitely a tragedy, you know, and it deserves and it's okay to feel all those emotions about it, we can't let those emotions then guide our decision-making because when we shut down existing nuclear plants because of fear, what we

do is just lock in our reliance on fossil fuels. That's what's been happening around the world when we closed nuclear plants. It doesn't make what happened at Fukushima less scary, but as Heather and I both learned more about it, and we actually visited the plant in Fukushima, I was six months pregnant with my third child. And we went there and toured and got to see firsthand what happened. What we saw, the real tragedy was the massive earthquake and tsunami that killed 18,000 people there. But yet when we say Fukushima, most people think about the nuclear plant that actually didn't kill anybody, the radiation from the nuclear plant. And that's shocking. Most people think the nuclear accident killed a whole bunch of people. It did not. And so I think it's a little

bit, you know, sad that we just kind of overlook the real tragedy that happens there. And then because of our fear of nuclear and, you know, our fear of radiation, they're doing a cleanup effort over there that's so far above and beyond what they really need to do. It's, you know, it's prevented people from coming back to where they live. And it's put a stigma on people in that region, like produce from Fukushima, don't eat it, it's contaminated. Or people from Fukushima, you know, don't socialize with them. They're like a lower class or maybe a little dangerous. They might be radioactive. And so that whole social side of it is really a tragedy. And it comes from our fear,

often misguided, you know, about nuclear and what radiation really is. Unless the Japanese are crazy as an entirety, if Fukushima was a one-sentence proposition, they wouldn't be investing so heavily in nuclear as they are right now. They are rapidly expanding their capacity with nuclear, which would be insane by definition if they thought that Fukushima wasn't a one-off. So, Heather, what do you think the message is there? Yeah, it's really hard for the public to understand. And that mom that I mentioned from my birthing class, you know, she asked me kind of recently, well, why is Japan so pro-nuclear now,

you know, like with this and their history? And I was like, well, they saw the actual, you know, outcome of the events and they know what the actual damage was and what the causes were, and they still know that they need nuclear. When they shut down most of their plants after Fukushima, they had to start importing liquid natural gas for electricity, and their emissions went way up as a country, and that was far more damaging than the events of Fukushima itself.

That was far more damaging than the events of Fukushima itself. Here's the thing. None of us has ever seen a movie where James Bond had to stop something from happening at a coal plant with seconds to spare or on a windmill, you know, or dancing across solar panels before a doomsday scenario. How do we get past that, Kristen? Even saying as much as, well, you got to feel the feels. Yeah, I got it. You got to feel the feels. But most people stop at feeling the feels. It's like, yeah, I've never seen a movie about natural gas, you know, is going to destroy the world.

But nuclear is the go-to. Well, I mean, it does make really great viewing, right? It's really interesting and we can really blow it out of proportion. And because a lot of people don't understand the intricacies of how it works, it's really easy to conflate nuclear weapons with peaceful uses of nuclear. But what most people don't realize is, you know, nuclear energy is one of the safest ways to make electricity. Nuclear medicine is saving lives every day. So while we're so afraid of radiation, and it's just like a really easy visual, right? You can totally blow it out of proportion and it makes for entertainment. This is just not the reality of it. And it takes a little digging

in to find out what the reality is. You know, Heather and I have been at this for over six years, but we're still trying to find new ways to make it more interesting to people. And it's just like the shock factor of mothers for nuclear is probably working the best because then our other shock is that, hey, nuclear is actually our best way of making reliable electricity for people. You know, that's like, I haven't seen that as a headline anywhere or the subject of any movies, right? It's just not that interesting. We do like to every once in a while point out the few examples of like a post-apocalyptic solar plants.

Like in Blade Runner 2045, there's a solar thermal plant that it's like, it's very scary. It is scary. Yeah, that's what we should be paying more attention to. In reality, like, you know, the other sources of electricity, like dams, right? Dams break. Here in the United States, you know, a long time ago, we had the Johnstown flood, right? And just killed over 10,000 people, right? And totally apocalyptic.

I mean, that would make a great, terrible, heart-wrenching movie. And that's reality. So, but I haven't seen any great movies about how fossil fuels are killing people, right? It just doesn't make quite as good of a visual. It's not scary enough. Well, it's also because the unknown is what scares you. And the reactor looks like this big this big ominous thing and you don't know what's going on inside of it and it's silent and and that's one of the reasons i'm covering this is that i felt all of those things and the more research i do i can't believe what a disadvantage we put ourselves at you know you i hear this stat all the time. You used it here that somewhere between 17 and 20%

of our electricity is made by nuclear. That's usually put in the context of politics of, and we're trying to get it down, not up. You know, I mean, Newsom in your state had a real battle on his hands that really he wound up justifying, you know, not for the right reasons but just political capital just what it was going to cost to shut it and the blackouts and what are

we going to do and the resistance kind of faded away because constituents got freaked out about the potential blackouts and the brownouts so it's not like he's you know he understands it but you guys are touching on exactly what matters most kids because they are always the vessel for our concerns right um it's nobody ever wants to save adults right there's like nothing there's nothing romantic about that you want to save kids okay moms for nuclear totally counterintuitive because people are going to expect to meet these two moms who hate their kids you know i'm for nuclear power because i've had enough with my kids and it's time for them to glow and maybe their brain capacity will increase. But what do you want moms to know,

Heather, when they come to you and be like, so wait a minute, you love your kid and that's why you want more nuclear power? I don't get it. Yeah, I think it's really important for us to be role models and examples for other women because not every mom has the chance to go work at a nuclear plant and spend six years asking questions relentlessly in order to get all the information they need to change their mind, you know, on a technical kind of perspective. I feel like by sharing our stories about how we did that and we changed our minds that maybe we can help other moms be able to change their minds more quickly.

But you're also engineers, you see? That's why, I mean, like to me, I mean, I have tremendous respect for STEM. And that's why I call all of you scientists. And I know you're all, you know, I'm not a scientist. I'm an engineer. Yeah, I know. To me, that's the same thing

because you are in the quantitative business of fact analysis and understanding processes. And that's not how the rest of us operate with these things. So even though you are fully minted moms, you are engineer moms. And most people don't function that way because it's about risk. And Kristen, the risk,

I don't want you to explain away the risk. As soon as I hear risk, you know, that's it. It's like, you know, you're asking me to have my kid bungee jump. All I see is down. You're telling me how strong the band is and how safe the harness is and how the deceleration rate happens almost a third. Risk. No thank you.

Risk. How do you get past that? Well, I'll say for scientists and folks in STEM, it's a different process than for other people in society. Like Heather and I asked a lot of questions. Heather's notorious for this. She still is. Like she'll be the one at work the latest because she's just questioning, questioning, questioning until she's finally satisfied. And so that's what we did. And then when the data finally, you know, seemed clear enough and we got all our questions answered, we were able to change our minds. But then for other folks like us, often that's just good enough. We're like, okay, I'm good now, you know, but that doesn't help the rest of society. Those people, scientists and engineers who have all that data need to pivot and learn how to communicate it better.

So that's what we've been working on. We need to not just keep that information to ourselves, lock it in there and say, oh, well, the data is clear. We need nuclear. We need to start talking about it in different ways in the public sphere. We don't always do it well, but we're trying because we just see such a gap in the social narrative about nuclear. You know, moms are scared of a lot of things. When I had my first child, I was in the hospital and they said, oh, well, do you want him to get these vaccines before he leaves?

And I was just like, stay away from my baby with that needle, you know, and I went home and I was like, well, I'm not getting him vaccinated at all. And then I started reading and researching and well, now I have three kids and they're all vaccinated, you know, but anything like that, that seems like it initially presents harm to your children. I think moms are just automatically protective, you know, it's like no until proven yes. And so, and I was the same way with nuclear. It was like, no, and there had to be a lot of proving before I got to yes. And so we want to help other moms change their minds because we just can't, you know, with the energy situation the way it is, we don't have enough energy, period. We certainly don't have

enough clean energy. You know, here in California, where we're so green, right? If you're like, oh, where's the greenest place in the United States? Well, it's got to be California. They talk about it all the time. We're still burning mostly natural gas for our electricity. So in green California, I mean, that's how green it is. It is not green. So we need to do better here and all around the world. And we have to start talking about energy issues differently. It's just it matters too much. Well, you picked the only thing I would want to sell on people less than nuclear power,

which is vaccines, specifically the COVID vaccine. So like, you know, you're lucky nuclear is not in as bad a shape as the COVID vaccine is. So now the exercise is this. Based on what you've heard, let's have counterfactuals. Send me your comments. Tell me why you believe what you heard today. Tell me why you still have reservations about what you heard today. I do.

I don't know how much is too much in what way, but I do know this. It seems very, very counterproductive for us to just completely cross off a form of power that seems, according to research and what we're seeing empirically all over the world, could help get us to a better place. Again, thank you for subscribing, following your comments, wear your independence by being a free agent and a critical thinker. And I'll see you next time. And don't forget to watch YouTube. Subscribe over there. It's free. And News Nation.

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