The Jordan Harbinger Show - 937: Oliver Stone | Nuclear Now

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Nuclear Now director Oliver Stone joins us to advocate for nuclear power as a better alternative to wind, solar, and other green energy solutions. What We Discuss with Oliver Stone: The history of nuclear energy and the political factors that influence its usage. Lessons learned from Fukushima, Chornobyl, and Three Mile Island. How nuclear power compares to wind, solar, hydro, and other green energy alternatives. The influence the fossil fuel industry wields over energy alternatives of any kind. What a future fueled by safe, sustainable nuclear power might look like. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/937 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Your math skills have global potential. As an actuary, you'll solve some of the world's most pressing problems while helping people to live better lives. Become an actuary through the society of actuaries and work anywhere in the world. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Chemical damage to our landscape all over the world from oil is huge. People don't admit it, they don't see it. And they go on about radioactive waste, which is the most supervised of all. You can fit all the radioactive waste we've used up to date inside of Walmart, and it decays. Within 40 years, 99% of it is toxicity is gone.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional former jihadi, economic hitman, gold smuggler, extreme athlete or music mogul. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs.

These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, and cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more. They'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. today we're talking nuclear power. We'll explore why it's a better alternative than wind, solar, and other green solutions. Now that we're turning away from coal and oil a little bit here, especially in North America.

This is a positive conversation, just like my previous conversation with Oliver Stone. Yes, some of his takes on Ukraine are questionable, in my opinion. We don't talk about any of that here. So if you're looking for ideological conflict, this is not going to be the right episode for you, especially since I happen to agree with him about nuclear. I like his takes on nuclear. And that's what we're going to stick to talking about here, today. And you know what, it's almost like people can disagree on something and then not somehow

hate every other opinion or quality of that person. Amazing here in 2023, the last week of 23, right? All right. Here we go with Oliver Stone. All right. So I appreciate you coming back to the show. I was surprised actually to see this documentary pop up. And I've been a fan of nuclear power for some time. And I'm always surprised by the ridiculous, in my opinion, ridiculous amount of pushback that I get on this. And your documentary made it really clear that it's just about fear being drilled into us at an early age. Fear, yeah, subconscious. Horror films from the 50s, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

People conflate the bomb with nuclear power. It's a big difference. They don't understand that a bomb is enriched uranium, really enriched, up to 90%. And nuclear power is like 2-3%. So it's not even close. It takes a lot of work to make a bomb. huge amount of work. And a dirty bomb is not radioactive the same way. So it's all this, so much sensationalism around it. I came to it as an observer from the outside. I didn't know much

about it. I was vaguely against nuclear power in the 70s, 80s, because it made sense. Jane Fonda was for it, against it, and Springsteen and Jackson Brown and Ralph Nader, people I admired. And I think they really believed what they were doing, because I don't want to get into the because, but they really were scared of it. And then all the environmental groups kicked in, starting in 1970, with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which was one of the first groups, Friends of the Earth. They spread the stories about how dangerous radioactivity was. Based on the old Rockefeller report from the 1956, Rockefeller Foundation put out, they were highly for fossil fuels, I mean, standard oil. They put out this report, and 56 it said any amount,

any amount of radioactivity is harmful to the body. Yeah. Which is not true. It's just not true. And scientifically, it's been debunked, as have many other myths, but it's continued into the subconscious process. We'll unpack a lot of that. I do want to sort of back up and find out how this all began. The beginning of the anti-nuclear movement, you say in the documentary, Earth Day, 1970, pollution fears, it just seems, it looks a little bit like the Hollywood cause de jour, like you mentioned, Jane Fonda was against it. It just took on a life. of its own, and it reminded me of, what was that, I'm sorry, I'm probably showing my age here, that concert, was it live aid, where they were like, we got to give all this stuff to Africa,

and it turned out like, oh, that didn't do anything. But that was later, that was 1980s, I think. That was the 80s, yeah. But this reminded me of that kind of same thing. Yeah, but it's, you know, it was Ethiopia famine, the famine there. Right. That was significant famine, and I think they did a lot of good. They raised a lot of money that sometimes charity gets confusing, you know, because you try to

do some good and you end up doing more harm than you do good. No, this is a 1970s movement, and it came out of, you know, you could argue that it came from the World War II, the use of the nuclear discovery, which is amazing discovery, by the way. It's the foundation of the universe. It's one of the most powerful energies we ever had. Marie Curie in 1895 found it. It was a movie made with Gerhardt. You should see it. It's a very interesting movie about what radioactivity he really was in the beginning. And she saw the power of it. Enrico Fermi did. Einstein did. Einstein said matter is energy. He understood this. And he understood what nuclear could do. Fermi was able to control it in his experiments in Chicago. Enrico Fermi, the Italian nuclear scientist. He really

did a great job of showing what uranium could be controlled. And that is the key, because people are scared of, as I said earlier, enriched uranium is dangerous. No question about it. But, But the radiation in a nuclear energy facility is background radiation. It's lower level, and it's not to be scared of it, just to be handled correctly. As you want any toxic material and chemistry or all our industries are based in some degree on materials that are toxic. We have to arsenic and lead and all kinds of cadmium, all kinds of poisonings there are going on.

But if you handle this correctly, as has been proven for 60 years now in the nuclear industry, you have no problem. You just handle it correctly. And that includes the waste, too. It's no big deal. Sure. I think the problem is when you get all these demonstrations and you have these drills where you stick your head between your legs

and go under your desk, you get scared. And people don't think well when they are scared. One of the missions of this podcast is to unscare people, but the problem is that it's so much easier to scare people than it is to unscare people. And nuclear falls into that category. I know. Well, this is the nature of human life.

The negative is always more damaging than the positive. Something comes out and you say something positive. Oh, great, great. But then when you say something negative, it has more impact. This is true about movies, too, you know. One bad review can spoil 10 good reviews. The negativity in mankind is the subject that we could talk about forever. I think it runs through the human race.

It's been my enemy from my life. It's cynicism. I didn't know anything about this subject. I came to it as a father. And as a citizen, 1970s, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. But by the 2000s, when we started to hear about climate change, this became more mature as an idea. It became the idea that climate change is really happening because of fossil fuel poisoning. Fossil fuel, and that's coal and oil and gas, all the stuff that we put into the atmosphere.

It's out there. That's the danger. That's the poison in the world. You invent an airplane, it crashes. You know, we can give up on airplanes and say, whenever you're never. going to fly again. Same thing is true about anything that comes into being. There are downsides, but we always make the best of it, and that's what happened with nuclear. We made the best of it. Eisenhower understood it. So did Tom Kennedy. They really pushed it. It would have been a

nuclearized society by 2000, 2020, in the United States anyway. And I think we would have led the rest of the world in adapting it. That was what was happening. Russia was also doing it, and doing it very well, by the way, and they stayed with it. They didn't give it up, even after Turnible. So Russia is a good example, as is China now. China has come into its own and is building a huge amount of nuclear reactors. But they, too, are using a lot of coal. Yeah, they're building coal, too, unfortunately. But at least they're on the right track.

And President Z has promised to go to net zero by 2060, and that's significant. Yeah, he'll still be president then. Yeah. Listen, sometimes if you change administrations all the time, And you have different policies like the United States has, well, not with nuclear, it's true, but you can't just change policies all the time. That's part of the problem of so-called democracies. But with nuclear energy, it's been the same.

We have Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have all been pro-nuclear. But they haven't put the energy into it, the word of mouth, the symbolism of it. They've been scared off by all the alarmists and the money. The cost factors in the United States are significant. Well, I'm not talking in the movie about just the United States. I'm talking about the world here. We're looking at an issue that is coming into being by 2050. There's going to be a demand for more and more electricity, which is about two, three, four times more. We're not ready for it. I know. Because most of the societies are poor, they're going to end up using more coal and even wood, if necessary. Yeah, that stuff terrifies me. By the way, the explanation in the movie or the documentary of the fuel used is really something. And I want to highlight this. An amount of uranium, the size of the tip of your pinky finger, that amount of uranium is like $2 to mine and I don't know what else they do. Do they enrich it? They pack it together into the imaginary pinky finger that I'm envisioning in my brain. And this uranium has the same energy as about $100 worth of coal, which is

about a metric ton of coal, and I probably don't have to really describe how much more burning that coal pollutes than using that uranium. There's nothing like nuclear energy. Nothing like it in the world. It's got the most powerful thing of all. It's a gift from the gods. It's Prometheus. I mean, it's truly a gift of fire.

The beauty of Fermi's experiment, you remember with the rods, he shows you how uranium can be controlled. And now got lost. It got lost in transition somewhere along the light. And ignorant people, a lot of them were good people. But they didn't know what they were talking about environmental groups. You know, one of the best moments in the film, I think, is when the co-founder of Greenpeace, Dr. Moore, comes on and he says, you know, we got a lot of things right. Save the whales, stopping the bombs, cleaning up the concept of.

But we got one thing wrong. There's nuclear energy. He says it very clearly. But many of his people have come along with. And there are people who've converted from environmentalists into pro-nuclear green environmentalists, but many of them have not. And they continue to be the Green Party in Europe, in Germany, for example, they closed out several nuclear reactors and they went back to fossil fuels.

It was insane. And also, the United States, they closed it down, essentially, not really completely, but they closed it down essentially with the Three Mile Island incident and then Chernobyl incident in 1986, which was a genuine accident. It's understandable and we know what happened, but there was no reason to run away. And we did. We basically froze in place, as did Japan after Fukushima and Korea. But now we're back on track. I think people are beginning to understand the polling in the United States, so 60% of the population is pro-nuclear. I'm glad to hear that.

The problem is that money doesn't get there. I mean, there is money being put in, but they're still banking on renewables more, which is unfortunately very expensive. but nothing wrong with wind and nothing wrong with sun, but they don't work all the time. They don't work all the time. And what do they use as a backup? They use coal, yeah, or oil, yeah. Gas, yeah, mostly gas in the United States, which is methane.

And that leaks all along the line. It goes up in the atmosphere, very dangerous, very dangerous and poisonous, toxic. And then they talk about radioactive waste compared to the shit that's in the atmosphere. You have to always say compared to what? Right. In anything. It's really amazing to look at those clips of those old, videos where by the 21st century, everything will be nuclear powered, no emissions anywhere,

and we still depend on fossil fuels for electricity, well sort of in the window where we were supposed to have electric cars, which we do. Look, the batteries may be mined by child slaves in Africa. We're working on that, but we still need the electricity in the first place, and that still comes from these dirty sources. In part, and this is, I think, important to point out, because oil companies decided this was going to be a huge threat, so they commissioned studies saying that any radiation was harmful, like you mentioned, which, by the way, background radiation is in nature everywhere. You can go in the middle of dead space and you're getting radiated by a star or a supernova or whatever.

And it just reminds me of those studies, Oliver, showing that cigarettes are healthy or this brand of cigarette is healthier than the other one. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's just sort of the inverse of that. Fossil fuel companies have a lot to be guilty of. I mean, they, who knows how much money they gave the environmental groups, because we can't prove that because it's anonymous giving. But you know that they really, maybe it's competition and they just are ruthless. But they knew in their own studies that fossil fuels were going to screw up the planet.

But they knew that from the 1960s studies, 70s studies. We know it from the Chevron, the Exxon. It's come out, you know, the papers are there. They knew what they were giving the world, and they kept going. And they're still going. They owe a lot. There's a very big problem ahead, but there'll always be a place for oil. You can always make plastics and all kinds of stuff. They're not going to be run out of business if they would lose

a lot of their business, but they still manage to be important to many other industries. So it's not like they'd get wiped out. Greed is real. I mean, it's just they probably thought, oh, we'll pivot into this and then they went, why do that? We're making all this money. It's sort of, rather than just think of them as pure evil, I really do think that they get ahead of themselves and they think, oh, you know, we're going to do this our way, and it just never happens because they're... I think your analogy about the tobacco companies is correct. And also the car companies, I mean, with the seatbelts and all the Ralph Nader stuff about safety, they want to profit. And the safety factor always comes in second.

Yeah, there's this old clip of this guy being interviewed on the news and he says something like, they're making us wear seatbelts in cars and pretty soon, they're going to be making us do all this other stuff. And it sort of like argues the slippery slope. Then fast forward, I think it was 20 years, there's a guy cracking a beer and he goes, I can't believe they're not going to let us drink while we're driving. This is ridiculous. This is anti-American. And it's just like, if you think drinking and driving with no seatbelt is your car is the way to go, you might want to re-examine your beliefs on nuclear power as well, right? I remember in Texas. I was married to a Texas woman. And they used to drive around in the 70s with big jugs in the car. They had the car seat and the beer was

in the container, just driving. It's funny. Colts 45. It's so crazy to think about somebody driving with a 40 ounce of malt liquor just in the middle of the console. I can imagine the ads. Now with larger cup holders to hold larger bottles of booze. The right to be American. Yeah, the right to be American, exactly. Well, actually, I was like that a bit when I remember when Thomas Zaz, the philosopher, argued on TV in the 70s, he said, you know, we have the right to kill ourselves. And he's right. Fundamentally, it's a libertarian right. If you want to commit suicide, you should. You could do it, You know, you shouldn't be disallowed to take your own life.

I believe strongly the right to die laws. And I think we'd have to have more in this country. But that is an American right. But killing yourself by killing others first is what's dangerous. If you fast forward on yourself and you have a reason, I understand, I don't want it fast forwarded on me because you were thirsty on the way home from work. The same goes for smoking because the smoke hurts other people. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Oliver St.

own. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every week, it is because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at six-minute networking.com. This course is all about improving your relationship building skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you, and it does that in a non-cringy, down-to-earth way. No awkward strategies or cheesy tactics. Just practical stuff that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, and won't make you look like an a-hole. It just takes a few minutes a day

and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, you can find the course for free at six-minute networking.com. All right. Now, back to Oliver Stone.

That's how I look at the fossil fuel industry in many ways. And I'm not saying there's no place for fossil fuels anywhere in the whole world or any petroleum products. I'm not trying to paint this as black and white. But when you look at the numbers, it just doesn't make sense.

4,000 deaths from Chernobyl, probably the largest nuclear disaster in history, 4,000 deaths from Chernobyl, that includes cancers down the line from exposure. 500,000 global deaths annually just from coal. It's not even close. And people are going to ask, that doesn't even count outdoor air pollution from cars that kills something like 4 million people per year. So. Yeah, what about the waste from whales?

oil wells and all the shit that they put in the air. Right. Chemical damage to our landscape all over the world from oil is huge. People don't admit it. They don't see it. And they go on about radioactive waste, which is the most supervised of all. You can fit all the radioactive waste we've used up to date. And inside of Walmart, you know, it's highly supervised, and it decays.

Within 40 years, 99% of it is toxicity is gone. And then it's buried in, as you know, concrete casts, watered. And then it's also underground. Finland and Sweden are doing remarkable achievements in underground storage, putting it in. And we can do the same. The military has been doing that for years, too, our military. Yes. But in other words, we're making a big deal about it compared to what?

Let's climate change. That is horrible waste. Right. And it's ruining us. Indeed. People will say, and I kind of knee-jerk reaction would also say, wow, well, every bit of nuclear waste is tracked by the industry and protected. I don't know, that still seems scary, until you realize that the waste from coal and oil is in the air that you're breathing right now and is pumped out essentially haphazardly

from every factory power plant and vehicle on the road. Even if factories and power plants have filters, your car really kind of doesn't scale down well. And methane gas pipelines. Yeah. Pipelines leak all along the line. Right. The leakage. From your stove all the way back to the well, that thing is leaking.

And like you said, all the nuclear waste, all spent nuclear. fuel from the United States, which is 20% of our energy generation, from what I understand, over the last 60 years, all of that is what fits inside the Walmart that you mentioned before. So it's really just minuscule amount. I mean, the average human is thrown away probably more crap over the course of their life just in terms of plastic bags and stuff that's going in their kitchen garbage than all of the nuclear fuel ever spent by the United States. Younger people like you are the ones we're talking about. This one's conversation was not possible a few years ago. Now, I'm not an expert. I believe that nuclear was bad when I was younger. People

like Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda, I looked up to them, and I still do. But the problem was that there was no consensus for nuclear. The lobbies were terrible. They didn't really advertise themselves. The only people that could have really said something were scientists, and many of them didn't quite understand what it was. You know, Wyoming has its coal industry, Texas has its oil. They all have consensus. They have a following. It's very difficult for nuclear. That's why I wanted to make this film. This is one of the few films that talks about nuclear energy. If you look at all the movies that are ever made from the beginning of time, they were horrible. All the horror movies of the 50s I grew up with, even up to X-Man. I mean, you get bit by a radioactive spider,

you become Spider-Man. It's bullshit, the whole thing. They make radioactivity into the most dangerous thing in the world. And it scares people. That's what the movies have done. And they continued with Three Mile Island. What was it called? China Syndrome, Sinai Syndrome, and Silkwood. And don't forget Chernobyl, the HBO series in 2015, scared the shit out around the world. They weren't seen by everybody. Again, vast exaggeration. We went to Russia to visit Rosetom. We got a lot of information from them. They're very good, Rosetum. There's a 250,000 man agency, men and women agency, they do a lot of good work. Around the world, they export quite a bit. And they're probably the best in the world. Yeah. France has an agency, China. You find that

most of the best way to really approach nuclear is with some government, public control, public responsibility, because we put it in the private hands in the United States. Westinghouse in General Electric. Westinghouse went bankrupt. General Electric is still doing it, but they make much more money from oil coal and the other things. So they built turbines and they build all the good stuff. And they have a small nuclear contingent. They're doing good stuff. They have what they call a small modular reactor coming up with Hitachi, the Japanese firm. And it'll be out on the market within three, four years. Looks good. It can be used very well. But it's still small. It's not producing the same kind of gigawatts that the big ones do. But it's still there. But it's all private is what I'm trying to say.

And the government is, they have the Department of Energy in this country, and they have helped a lot. And all the presidents have been, the last four presidents have been for it from Bush on. But it's not really putting the amount of weight that we could do to make this happen on a big way. Right. Yeah. We have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, but we don't have the same thing like Rosatom or France's agency where it's just like, this is a priority for national security. It's just kind of, it more regulates and maybe inhibits. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not actually, is not given any go-aheads to anything in 60-some years. I mean, they're really bad. If a government agency is going to be like, let's say the FDA, you could criticize the FDA

because there are many issues, but they promote new drugs, which has led to many improvements. We need more of an FDA kind of approach to let this thing happen. And they make it very tough for the smaller companies. That's why they get smaller because people don't want to invest big money. if they're going to run into the end of the regulatory commission. Nuclear plants, you brought this up sort of at the top of the show. Nuclear plants, they produce something like 100 times the power of a solar plant per whatever acre per square foot, however you want to measure it.

But there's nighttime, there's winter, clouds, they make solar impractical. Nuclear reactors take up something like one-fifth of the space. Wind produces more than solar does, but it's only still about a quarter of the capacity of nuclear. And I did a little bit of math, and I think this is also in your film, you need 4,000 turbines spread across the land and plenty of wind in that place to equal one nuclear plant. And I don't really know anywhere where the wind blows across that big of a piece of land 24-7 without interruption. I don't think it exists. And don't forget the other problem is what's the backup for renewables? The perfect partner that's been advertised is gas. So they put gas in.

It's an easy backup, and that's methane and gets out in the air. So it's not a solution. It's putting more shit in the universe. The nuclear could be a backup. It certainly could be, and it can be worked out. There are all kinds of issues with the grid. Every grid is different. Obviously, India has a different grid than Denmark. You know, one's wind, one's solar. You know, there's a lot of variations on this, and you cannot make a uniform rule. But we have to think about the world. I would say, generally speaking, if you could, maximize solar and wind, if you could, and really get it going as much as possible, and get a good backup for it. You could get maybe 25% total of the energy we need in the coming future by 2050,

25%. And nuclear could cover easily 50%, easily, along with hydropower. Of course, a lot of countries still have hydropower. These are the most practical solutions, combinations of this. And of course, there's new energies are coming. We are doing new things. And I try to show that at the end of the film with all the stuff that nuclear is capable of breaking up hydrogen, using hydrogen to bring liquid fuels into the business. So nuclear could be combined with hydrogen to make liquid fuels for airplanes. As the scientist at Idaho National Lab was saying, it's very interesting developments as possible.

We have to go all out on nuclear. We have to use it. It's a magic energy. as Einstein and Mary Curry and Fermi said, it's a magic energy. We've got to be smart about it. It's got uses everywhere. It's the primary solution. Sun, wind, sea. We could take all the salt out of the seawater. We didn't use massive amounts of water are available. And above all, Earth, Earth being nuclear to me. Those four elements will solve climate change. It would not be an issue even if we had gone ahead with the Eisenhower program. and the Kennedy program, but we didn't. As Asia modernizes, so India and China as well,

they're going to need something like, well, we, I should say, as a planet, are going to need two to four times the current amount of power that we use now. And the question is, will it be clean? Because if it's not, we're in deep trouble. Yeah, two to five times the electricity. I wouldn't say the power, but just we have to electrify everything we can.

That's why we're doing the cars now. I see. That's very important. But some of this stuff like liquid transportation fuels possible in the future will come through other means, will come through development of the hydrogen and nuclear, I believe. Yeah, the film shows a lot of really interesting nuclear innovation, smaller reactors that are modular, and they kind of could potentially scale down to fit in an office building and have a reactor underneath. Everywhere.

It's really interesting. And so you can scale the stuff way down or way up as needed. Well, we will be able to in the future, which I think is fascinating. because you can do something remote, just like we do with submarines, right? There's a nuclear reactor in there. Power's the whole thing, the aircraft carrier, same deal. But don't forget, one caveat, it's just nuclear reactors on submarines are enriched uranium. Oh, they are? They're military enriched. Yeah, I didn't know that. They're not civilian usage. That was part of Rickover's deal. A Rickover did cross over and give us the first Admiral Rickover,

gave us the first civilian nuclear reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, which was not enriched. So nuclear power developed in the first place, how this developed in the first place was submarine reactors. You mentioned Admiral Rickover. Rick over. Hymann Rick over. He came up with the design, I think, or I mean, I shouldn't say that. He came up with a plan to implement the design. He was the engineer, yeah.

It was an engineer. Oh, so he may have actually come up with this. Started off with submarines using nuclear reactors, which I did not know were different levels of enriched uranium and then civilians. So nuclear actually started at what you would consider small scale in air quotes because it was for use on one particular ship. Military usage, yes. Yeah. It was the military usage.

Right away, they used it for military purposes to build the bomb. I mean, Oppenheimer and all that, being up in the asylumist project. But the Navy used it the same kind of fuel to make, not bombs, but to make submarines run for 50 years. And then he crossed over that knowledge, I'm saying, in the shipping port, Pennsylvania, by 1958, when he opened shipping port, he did a great job. And he brought everything in on time, but on budget, he was a tough. taskmaster, one of the best we've ever had, we need good people. It has to be handled well, and he did a great job of safety. Anybody who worked with Rick Over will tell you that he beat

his officers up and made them really fucking good people. And we have a great nuclear force. We had one. And people who worked, I know people who worked with them, and they were tip-top people. But now, you know, we lost that generation. And we're getting a back. We have to train a new generation. That's what's going on now with all these startup companies. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Oliver Stone. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.

All of the deals discount codes and ways to support the show are at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also email me if you can't remember what something's called or you can't find the code. I will happily surface that for you. I am Jordan atjurbinger.com. Happy to help anytime. it's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Oliver Stone. It's really kind of exciting to see because I hate to say it,

I almost counted nuclear out completely, especially in my lifetime. I just thought there's no way. I know China's building a ton of reactors. I was kind of hoping that might scare the rest of the world into catching up, provided we don't see a nuclear disaster in China to re-scare everyone again. Well, even if we did have a disaster, you know, what's wrong with that? That's how progress is made, you know. Just from a psychological perspective, though, of people going,

ah, see, it's always, I mean, that's what I mean by that. That's the problem. I mean, if you have one airplane crash, you're going to give up on the airplanes. You can't do that. You have to have a stick to an approach. Obviously, you want to avoid accidents, but accidents are part of the game too, you know. So, I mean, when you say one nuclear disaster in China, it's not likely to be a bomb type thing because it's not enriched.

It's more likely to be like a Fukushima, which was hydrogen explosion. not a nuclear explosion. The only nuclear explosion was at Chernobyl, and that was because they didn't have a containment structure. And as a result, the low-level radiation spread all through Northern Europe. That's what led to the 4,000 assumed deaths from cancer. But we learned from Chernobyl. We shouldn't have shut down. That was the problem. And the Soviets didn't. They moved on, and they kept going in there. They've developed a breeder reactor, which I saw it in the Ural Mountains at Beliarsk. It's amazing reactor. It eats its own way. It uses its own. waste to make more, more energy. So a state of the art is too expensive for the market, but it's

certainly a breakthrough reactor. And they've had that since the 1980s to 90s. They've done amazing work. Russia and China have to be commended for that, and instead of attacked as enemies, I think if the world is really the biggest problem in the world, I believe, is climate change, and it's not ideology or territorial fighting or Ukraine, this, that, it's really about climate change. They are our natural partners, natural partners. Well, they have to be. If we had stayed friendly with them instead of this Biden approach, I think we would have had a possibility of breakthroughs on a faster level. Now we're going to go slower because it's the nature of this world is very hard. But I consider it, just to sum it up, I consider it like a bit like a

Cinderella story. You know, remember the story in the fairy tale? Sure. Cinderella is the ugly sisters. They put her in the back, mopped in the floor in the kitchen. And the ugly sisters go out there and freeing and fro and they want to meet Prince Charming. And finally, at the end of the tale, Cinderella emerges as a beauty. She's been buried all along. This is what I consider nuclear energy is the beauty of this. She's the Cinderella of this thing. Nuclear energy just needs a pair of glass slippers. That's right. I forgot the word of glass slippers. It's been a minute since you've read Cinderella, I guess. Yeah, I mean, me too. I do have little kids, so I should, I probably got a copy in the living room. People are going to say, yeah, you mentioned Fukushima, but what about that?

I watched the film, of course, and I did some research on this. To clarify for most people who aren't that familiar, most damage in Fukushima was caused by a 100-foot tsunami from Japan's strongest ever earthquake, at least in recorded history. And the plant had pretty terrible design. The seawall was less than 20 feet high. Generators were all on low ground, which is a great idea in a tsunami area because they flooded with water and stopped working immediately. So the plant lost power, which helped the reactor melt. melt down. Essentially a meltdown means overheating, no cooling from water that was pumped in from the generators. And like you said, it wasn't the nuclear fuel that exploded. Hydrogen gas built up

and I assume that stuff was pumped out and ventilated or something normally with the generators. That wasn't happening. That then heated and exploded, which blasted nuclear fuel and other radioactive material into the air. But of note, other nuclear plants in the area were just fine because they were designed differently, and the generators kept working. So the death toll from Fukushima was actually zero from nuclear, and the tsunami itself had 18,000 victims. And that still resulted in Japan shutting down almost all of their nuclear plants, which is not...

Yeah, they panicked. Yeah, they panicked. They checked out all the Japanese afterward for years, and nobody died from radiation poisoning. So here we go again, you know, the sensationalism. And now still, you know, with the tritium, the water that they're one of discharging to the position, Generally speaking, they're ready to do it, and the scientific organizations have okayed it,

but there's still this sensationalism from the environmentalists who say, oh, Tridium's going to screw up the ocean. This is nonsense. What is that? I don't know what that is. Tritia is a wastewater. It was part of the wastewater that was, not a scientist, but they want to put it in the ocean, which is where it belongs. And you could drink a gallon of tritium. Several people have told me this. You can drink a gallon of tritium. It has the same effect as eating the banana, which is the same amount radiation, but they've made it such an issue by sensationalizing it. They've baldened up. Now the Japanese are still not released this tritium into the ocean. I see. This is wastewater from Fukushima. Yeah. Tritium. Yeah, I'm Googling this and it's a very sort of low level stuff.

I understand that the need for an abundance of caution essentially because it can't put that toothpaste back in the tube, but also it's just from a science literacy perspective, you really do need to decide what you're going to panic about. Otherwise, we're not going to see. nuclear supersede fossil fuels in our lifetime. I mean, maybe as fusion gets closer, people will realize we've got really no other choice. I would just love to see, we forget bring Einstein back or Enrico Fermi and see what they'd say. What idiots, you know, they'd be saying, what a historical tragedy this is, that you let your ignorant people lead our society into this restriction, where you cut off what Prometheus gave us, you know, this is a gift to mankind, a gift. Use nuclear well.

part of the earth. It's part of what we have. It's frankly, the greatest uranium is a gift. I wish we had intelligent people to lead our society, but we don't. We have people who, the scientists have not made a case for it that it's, they're certainly for it. They're certainly pro-nuclear, but I've talked to a lot of them in MIT and at Harvard. Somehow they're not getting through because I think there's a general cynicism about science too. I think that people say, oh, you know, I had my own conspiracy theory about this, I think sinus or this and that. It's true. I think there's a lot of too much of the superstition is in the air.

Of course, they'll blame me, but on the Kennedy case, I just wanted to refer to the, you know, damn well, that Mr. Biden on the night of Friday, the July 4th weekend, closed down and stuffed those files, stuffed that fucking action. He illegally killed off the JFK Records Act. The power was given to Congress to open those files. And Biden took it back and basically said, CIA and me, president, are going to decide what to release. Yeah, I don't know much about this. You mentioned it at the top of the show. I am curious what this is because I wasn't paying a ton of attention to this. Nobody was. All I know is they were set to release some of these documents about the Kennedy assassination, and they didn't. I don't know exactly how many. I was told 4,000. Other people have told me more, far more. And a lot of it's about the CIA and a lot of these people. We know what they want. that we want questions answered about which site.

These CIA agents were working with the Cubans, this, that. There's names, Joannidis. There's a bunch of them. People want to know more about them because they play into the connection with a Cuban operation to liberate Cuba. And you know that all that was concealed from the Warren Commission by Dulles, who was on the Warren Commission. Dulles was the ex-head of the CIA.

He'd been fired by Kennedy. And he said, basically, he never told anybody on the Warren Commission that there had been all these plots against Castro prior to Kennedy's death. So, I mean, you have to understand there's a lot of linkage there. There's a lot of motifs. There's motives to kill Kennedy because there was a lot of dislike of what he was doing in Cuba. He wasn't prosecuting the war against Castro the way the radicals wanted him to. It opens up a whole lot of issues. But the point was that Biden said, no more. Nothing's coming out. Why? This is 70 years later, right? Seventy years. Geez, I don't even know.

Mostly 60 years, I'm sorry. Oh, 60th anniversary, you know? 60 years later, oh, everybody's dead. You have to ask yourself, what is the danger? What are they scared of? Yeah. Okay. Embarrassment?

Okay, let them be embarrassed because the CIA did screw up numerous times on this case. We know that they had a relationship with Oswald for three, four years. This was a significant, and that he was on their radar. They knew all about him in Angleton. The counterintelligence chief knew about him and kept file secret from everybody else. too. There was a lot of cloak and dagger stuff going on. And I think some of that could be embarrassing, but it's never going to be a document that says, you know, this happened and it doesn't work like that. But we know that embarrassments, what the hell, man? This is what it's about.

This is what Congress intended, transparency on these issues that are 60 years old. This is what's disgusting. And nobody's been able to pick up on it because he did it very surreptitiously on that Friday night. I don't love stuff like that, of course. I think. Anything that sort of circumvents our system is usually a terrible idea? He broke the law because he said, no more. This was an act of Congress, by the way. You cannot do that. You cannot undermine an active Congress and say, it doesn't apply anymore because CIA and I are going to decide what we want to release.

By the way, I meant to ask you this because it's such a bizarre little thing in the film. In nuclear now, you mentioned you're in this French nuclear plant and they said, oh, the water's hot. Don't lean over the pool. keep your cameras away from over the pool. But what happens? Are they worried about something falling into the pool? I believe. I didn't really get into it deeply. No. They don't want foreign materials falling into that pool. Is it just cooling water? I don't get what that even is. It cools the water, yeah, but they don't want anything coming into it. That's why I asked if I could swim in it. Yeah, I saw that. And then they laughed, but of course you don't want to swim in it, but what really

is it? And is it like, oh, your camera strap falls in there. They got to send a guy in a suit down to go get it? Is that? What happens? Yeah. Something like that, I imagine. Yeah, I'm so curious about that. They want to keep it as pure as possible. Yeah, I suppose that makes sense.

You don't want a corroded part in a nuclear reactor that you didn't find out about until later on. That seems like a bad idea. Although we have a lot of corroded parts in the sun panels everywhere. Well, yeah, I just mean from a safety perspective, it's probably a really bad idea to have a camera, a lens cap floating around in a cooling pool. Oliver Stone, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

I really appreciate it. Nuclear Now. We'll link it in the show notes. Well, thank you, Jordan. Always a pleasure to talk to you. You're very smart. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Thank you. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about a guy who went from Nigerian royalty to the rugged streets of the Bronx. Remy Adelike's life was thrown into chaos after a corrupt government stripped his family of their legacy, dive deep into his captivating journey from being surrounded by drugs and drive-bys to his inspiring pursuit to become a U.S. Navy SEAL

even though he didn't know how to swim. There's a saying in Nigeria every day is for the thief. Corruption was my dad's demise. They knew that my father would not stop fighting them. They killed my dad. I went from riches and wealth to the Bronx, man, and it was really, really rough. Once you make the decision to join the Navy, in my opinion, you're giving up any fear of death. One day, I got approached by another human trafficking nonprofit that actually employed former SEALs and former agency guys.

to go to other countries to rescue kids trapped in sex trafficking, but specifically kids who are being purchased by Americans. When I got down there, my eyes would just like open fully, and I just remember being appalled. The parents would sell their daughters to traffickers in the North. I just remember being disgusted. It's such a global issue. The human trafficking is a blanket term under human trafficking.

You have sex trafficking, you have organ harvesting, you have forced mass trafficking. forced marriage, you have forced labor. You know, I made the film in order to be able to expose more people to this atrocity of organ harvesting. But the perception of these traffickers is that they're these scraggly, evil-looking, uneducated, you know, on a corner type people. And the reality is the majority of people involved on the organ harvesting side of thing

are highly educated, learned people. The truth needs to get out there. But that's not all. Remy's fight is far from over as he confronts the dark underworld of human trafficking and illegal organ harvesting. To uncover what drives the man who refuses to be defeated, check out episode 868 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. If you want to watch the film yourself, it's called Nuclear Now, you can search for it, and I'm sure there are easy ways to watch it. I want to say I saw it on YouTube, and it was like a couple of bucks. Real easy watch.

The one update is that since we recorded this, and of course since the documentary was made, I think they ran into a pretty significant hiccup when it comes to the modular nuclear stuff, so the small scale stuff. Now, I haven't really done a lot of research on this, but it looks like, oh, we're going to have a little nuclear reactor in every building. It looks like that's just kind of maybe not possible or it needs a lot more work than they thought. So maybe it won't be modular, but I still think nuclear is the way to go, at least so far.

All things Oliver Stone will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com or just ask the AI chatbot on the website. transcripts always in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter.

Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect lessons from it. Takeaways. If you're a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways or you just want to know what to listen to next. The newsletter is a great place to do just that. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six minute networking.com. I'm Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio, Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's into nuclear power interested in maybe the environmental aspects of this, the technological aspects of this, definitely share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show

so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you

or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something You Should Know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.