The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Go Green! Go Nuclear!

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Zero emissions by 2050 and at the latest 2060. That has been the rallying cry for many of the world's largest economies, including the US, UK, Japan, Canada, and most notably, China. But with almost 80% of carbon emissions coming from energy, demand for electricity continuing to grow by leaps and bounds, and storage batteries still in their infancy, it's not clear how these countries will live up to their promises. The answer, say an increasing number of environmentalists and energy experts, lies with nuclear energy. They say this much vilified generator of power requires fewer materials and produces the least amount of carbon of any energy source - all with a physical footprint 50 times smaller than solar. Nuclear energy has also proven itself for almost 70 years, and currently supplies 10% of the world's energy mix. Critics say that this seemingly simple solution to the climate change challenge comes with potentially catastrophic costs that far outweigh the benefits. As the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan demonstrated ten years ago, the radioactive energy released by fission can wreak havoc on the surrounding environment, threatening the long term health and lives of surrounding populations, and contaminating vast areas of land so that they are no longer habitable. The cost to build but also decommission nuclear plants makes them a far more expensive source of energy than green alternatives. Far better to address the climate change crisis and the world's energy needs with solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal energy.  Arguing for the motion is Todd Allen, the Department Chair of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan. Arguing against the motion is Gregory Jaczko, Former Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Lecturer at Princeton University, and author of Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator. Sources: Joe Biden, Global News, Billionaires Note, Linda Gunter, Nuscale Power, Tomo News US, Fox 5, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto,The Nuclear Institute UK, Washington Post The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail]. To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Producer: Nicole Edwards Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the monk debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day

to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Go green, go nuclear. By 2050, the United States will be 100% clean energy economy with net zero emissions. Making Canada net zero by 2050 an ambitious goal, now legally binding. How they plan to do it, remain. a mystery. Decarbonizing electricity systems is the building block of decarbonizing all other sectors. And we are going to need two to three times more electricity, clean electricity than we have today.

Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Well, zero emissions by 2050. That's been the rallying cry for many of the world's largest economies, including the U.S., UK, Japan, Canada, and most notably China. But with fully 80% of carbon emissions coming, from fossil fuels, demand for electricity continuing to grow by leaps and bounds, and storage batteries still in their infancy, it's not clear how any of these countries will live up to their greenhouse reduction promises. The answer, say an increasing number of environmentalists and energy experts, lies with nuclear energy. This much-villified generator of power actually requires fewer materials and produces the least amount of carbon of any energy source. All,

with a geographic footprint 50 times smaller than solar. Nuclear energy is also a proven technology, having been around for more than 70 years, and it currently supplies fully 10% of the world's energy needs. Here's Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. I see nuclear has an incredible potential because the amount of energy you can get in a small area, and what I think can happen to the economics with the right innovation, mean that I think that's one of the important paths to pursue. Critics say that this seemingly simple solution to climate change

comes with potentially catastrophic costs, as the accident at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan demonstrated just 10 years ago. The built-in risks that accompany splitting atoms makes building safe reactors a lengthy and costly exercise that runs contrary to the urgent timeline to achieve a zero emissions future. The arguments for using nuclear power to address climate change are specious, as we know. It's too slow, too expensive, unsuited to distributed generation and becoming smart grids, as well as completely impractical for rural third world environments.

Meanwhile, renewable energy production and innovation is scaling up by leaps and bounds, sending the price of green power, tumbling, solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal energy, not nuclear, is the more practical solution, according to some experts, to the climate change challenge. On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, go green, go nuclear. Speaking for the motion is Todd Allen, the Department Chair of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan. speaking against the motion is gregory yatko former chairman of the u.s nuclear regulatory commission lecturer at princeton university and author of confessions of a rogue nuclear regulator

todd gregory welcome to the monk debates morning thank you good morning really looking forward to this debate today you know this is an opportunity i think for us to take a break from everything COVID and think a little bit about some of the big issues that are going to confront all advanced economies around the world coming out of this crisis, out of this pandemic. How do we grapple with probably the number one long-term issue facing society today, which is climate change and it's effects on every aspect of our lives? So the opportunity to spend some time with both of you who have deep area expertise and a kind of passionate engagement with the issue that we'll debate today is a pleasure indeed. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you for giving us your time,

your insights, and your experience. A simple resolution today, kind of taking us to the essence of this debate, it's be it resolved, go green, go nuclear. Todd, you're arguing in favor of today's resolution. So I'm going to put two minutes on the clock and turn the program over to you. So energy makes our lives better. We want our energy to be clean, affordable, resilience, and equitably distributed. And climate change is really driving the conversation about what we mean by clean. Nuclear energy is already a big deal. It's 20% of the U.S. electricity supply, which is more than half of the carbon-free electricity. And when we look historically at countries that have decarbonized, for instance, France, Sweden, Norway, or even Ontario's getting off

of coal, they had a strong basis in hydro and nuclear. Why do people consider nuclear energy for the future? One, climate change. Nuclear energy produces zero carbon during operation, produces about a million times more energy per action as fossil fuels, so you get a lot of energy out of a very small amount of infrastructure. Second, resilience. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation is concerned about the risk that reliance on single fuels present to dependable electric service. Third, supply chain. There are countries around the world that are building nuclear energy or have announced aspirations.

The question is, does the U.S. compete for those jobs? And fourth, international leadership. Those who build the systems get to guide the international norms. Does the U.S. want a voice in how nuclear energy is deployed worldwide? And currently, nearly two-thirds of the plants being constructed. use Russian or Chinese designs. When I look at a lot of colleagues who do studies on the overall system costs, system reliability, and cost variability of a zero-carbon system, they consistently show if you use a mix of zero-carbon production sources, you're better off. And so using a variety

of sources takes advantage of the strengths of each one of those sources. So finally, who's supporting nuclear energy right now? Large number of private companies are pursuing new nuclear energy products. Many utilities have zero carbon clean energy commitments, typically aiming for 2050, and they consider nuclear a strong part of their potential mix. We have strong congressional bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress, and it's been growing over the past decade. More civic groups are indicating nuclear energy is a needed component in the future. The Biden administration has indicated support for nuclear energy, the Canadian government as well. And even last week, the Japanese energy minister stated that nuclear power is essential if the country is going to

meet its green targets. So all of this evidence leads me to support the resolution, go green, go nuclear, understanding that nuclear is just one component of a zero-carbon clean energy system. Thanks. Thank you, Todd, for those opening remarks and for setting out our debate. I really appreciate that. Greg, we're going to turn it over to you. Similarly, we're going to give you two minutes on the clock to set out the key points you want to make to open today's debate. You're arguing against our motion, be it resolved, go green, go nuclear. When I look at the question of how do we deal with climate change, I really have two big milestones in mind. The first is really 2050 for getting to a net zero energy world, really. And that means energy in all the ways we use, transportation, flying,

construction, buildings, all kinds of different things. A big component of that, of course, is how we generate electricity. And in order to get to that 2050 milestone for net carbon, usually what a lot of climate scientists and other climate advocates talk about is trying to get to net zero electricity production by 2035. So that's a pretty short timeline. We're talking about basically 15 years from now. And right now, non-carbon emitting resources make up. less than half of the total electricity production in the country. So of that, about 19% comes from nuclear, and the rest comes right now from a combination of wind, solar, and hydro. So right now, the majority of non-carbon-emitting electricity sector contributions come from non-nuclear sources.

And in fact, over the last several years, nuclear is actually in a contraction, been in a contraction period and likely will continue to contract over the next several years. So, At a time in which we need to ramp up our non-carbon-emitting electricity sources, nuclear is actually in the decline. And if you look at the timeframe of about 14 years to try and make real meaningful progress on the non-carbon emitting sources, nuclear, as it currently stands, will struggle. We know from much experience that today it's very, very difficult to build nuclear reactors. And we can certainly talk about why that is. But the reality is that in the next 14 years to have nuclear, say, double its production or triple its production to say maybe get to 60% of carbon-free electricity in this country, we would need to build 150 to 200 new nuclear reactors. Today, we have a handful of plants that are licensed, that could in principle begin construction

tomorrow. We have two plants under construction. Those plants have been under construction now for over 10 years. We had another two that were started and were canceled because they were so far behind schedule and so far over budget. So from a practical standpoint, I simply don't see how nuclear is going to make a major contribution to that need to really get rid of all of the carbon emitting resources that we have within the next 14 years. And that's just a practical limitation on what's happening in the market,

what's happening with the technology, and what's happening with the deployment capability. And that's really the milestone that we have to focus on. So we need practical solutions today because time is running out. Thank you, Gregory. Now, a chance for rebuttals, the opportunity for both of you to react to each other's opening statements. So, Todd, I'm going to put another couple minutes on our show clock and turn the microphone back to you to react to what you've just heard from Gregor. What key points are you going to take exception with? Yeah. So first, I want to agree with Greg that I do think that renewables, wind, and solar are going to be a big part of the transition to zero carbon electricity, zero carbon energy.

without a doubt, the price drops that have happened over the past decade or so makes that possible in a way that, you know, I wouldn't have imagined 20 years ago in my career, so I agree with them there. I do think, though, that one of the issues that will make that challenging is when we transition to zero carbon, it's a huge infrastructure build. And it's more than just building new energy production technology. It's all the transmission and other infrastructure associated with that. And so I do think one of the things we have to think about in pushing to zero carbon and why I don't like taking things off the table, whether it's nuclear or carbon capture or others, is that I don't want us to underestimate the challenge that's involved in going to zero carbon and moving down to single technology solutions.

I just think it's going to be hard. And I think to some of the things I talked about, system costs and resilience will be challenge there. To Greg's point, about 2050, zero across everything, I think that's another area nuclear will contribute. You can build nuclear technology that gives you direct heat and things that industry uses in probably a more efficient way than going from creating electricity, then back into heat. The last thing I think I'll note is that there are a lot of new companies I mentioned with products in the pipeline, some of them talking to the regulator, targeting being ready for in the next decade.

New scale power has developed a new modular light water reactor nuclear power plant using a safer, smaller, and scalable version of pressurized water reactor technology. Rolls-Royce has announced that it plans to build small modular reactors or SMRs and install them in old nuclear sites across the United Kingdom by 2029. So I don't think we eliminate that possibility. And the last thing I'll point out is that the price drops in renewables happened over about a decade. And it was some very smart public policy around combining research and incentives to commercialization that helped that. I don't think it's technology specific.

I think that those same approaches could work for nuclear as well as carbon capture and other things. So I think if we're smart about it, we can bring the costs down on all the technologies we need for zero carbon. Thank you, Todd. So similar opportunity for you here, Greg, to make some early opening critiques of the arguments that Todd's presenting to advance your own case here as to why our audience listening today should oppose our motion. Go green, go nuclear. Over to you, Greg. You know, I think it really just comes back to the practical ability to accomplish this. And I just haven't seen it.

Todd brings up a number of points in the potential perhaps in that beyond. on 2035 timeframe to have nuclear as more of a heat source than an electricity source. Again, I'm not sure that we won't come up with better solutions to do that, that evolve a separate energy stream than nuclear. I would also just say to some of the specific points, this idea of a single source solution. I think while we talk about renewables as a class of solutions, they're not really a single source. The different contributions in the renewable space all have very, very different operating characteristics that can often complement each other. For instance, hydro is a resource that tends to be

seasonal in certain parts of the country. You have wind and solar, which on a time of day perspective often complement each other. And then we have a lot of untapped, more traditional dispatchable types of renewables like biomass and geothermal. So I don't think if we're, you know, looking to do a net carbon electricity sector without nuclear that we are going with a single source solution. In fact, it's a multi-source solution taking a variety of different resources that have very different operating characteristics. I think you do get that with, say, you know, 100% kind of traditional renewable solution. So, you know, again, I just come back to the fact that the practical implications of what we need to do in the next 15 years precludes a nuclear solution. We are

simply not building plants. There are not 100 plants that are ready to begin construction tomorrow, which is effectively what you need. And so, you know, without that, I think we're just talking here about words and not actual practical solutions. Hi there. Rudyard Griffiths, the moderator of the monk debates. Look, this we know. Our society is becoming dangerously polarized. We don't Listen to each other. We don't search out opposing views. Instead, too many of us live in tribes, convinced that we are right and they are wrong. It's time to put a stop to polarization before it wrecks our democracy. This is what the monk debates charity is all about. Ending polarization, searching for common ground. We do this by producing the world's only weekly debate radio program through our monk dialogue series

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Well, now we get to kind of talk with our audience, or at least think what our audience has in terms of questions around this debate of go-green, go nuclear. And Todd, let me come to you first with, I think, a question, no doubt, that is on listeners' minds right now, which is the, at least for, environmentalists, a seemingly deep contradiction that nuclear energy is in any way green. For many environmentalists, this power source is seen as dangerous. We talk about Chernobyl. You can talk about

Fukushima, that these are examples of a failure of a technology that caused huge environmental consequences, and that the waste that this technology produces isn't simply something that humans and the planet has to worry about for years or decades. It's a waste product that has risks to the environment for millennia. So I'd like to hear a little bit from Utah as to, you know, if you're speaking to a hypothetical environmentalist, what is the case that you would make to say, no, you're wrong. There is actually a green aura, a green impetus to nuclear power. Well, I think that green impetus behind nuclear power comes from a couple of places. One, it's zero carbon, right?

You do not produce carbon dioxide during the production of power from a nuclear energy source. That's one. Second, it's the highest energy density source we have, right? So in making power, it involves the smallest amount of mining and sort of having to dig things up. And so from that perspective, we touch the Earth very little. I think on your comments about the safety of the technology, the day-to-day operation of nuclear technology has proven to be very safe. Look at statistics around operational safety around nuclear plants. It's very good.

Where you have had issues, and you pointed it out, were the three cases where we had sort of major industrial accidents. So Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island, on. So in Three Mile Islands case, effects outside the plant were not significant. I would argue on the safety standpoint, we've proven that you can operate it safely, and that improvements in the technology beyond the first generation that we built also will allow us to eliminate the large consequence, low probability accidents like we've had with Fukushima. That's one of the promises of second generation of the technology. And I've actually think we've gotten much better at operating the technology over time.

time. I think on the waste, the argument is there's very little of it. We've shown that we can handle it safely. We store it on site in engineered casks that's not a risk to people, but it's unacceptable because we don't want to keep rebuilding and reshuffling casks. So we look at geological disposal, and some countries are successfully opening up their repositories. So, you know, in the U.S., we have not been able to open up a repository for a fuel, although we dispose of other nuclear wastes all the time, low-level waste from the power plants, from hospitals, defense waste from defense programs. And so places like Finland have a repository, Sweden on track for a repository.

You know, in the U.S., I think the issue was we dictated to the state of Nevada that they got the repository, and they were very unhappy with them. it, and I understand their point. The Yucca Mountain Project was all but dead until 2017 when the Trump administration revived a plan to store nuclear waste there. For purposes of the state of Nevada, we have been fighting against. We are united from Republican and Democratic governors. It is not safe for the storage in Nevada.

So I think technologically, we can dispose of the waste, but we need to stop thinking of it solely as a technology problem and engage sort of the social scientists to help us work through how to make it acceptable. And we see this in other countries. Sort of finished with a recent report from Sweden about how they got on track. And they started out and they turned over the waste problem to technologists who only studied geology. And it wasn't until they partnered the technologists with social sciences to look at how do you actually make a convincing case that a community may get value from being the hosts, and they have successfully done it.

So I don't think it's unsolvable. We've made it very difficult for ourselves. But I think in the end, zero carbon benefits and the fact that we need very little fuel and very little mining to make it possible, keep it in the conversation as a green technology. Thanks, Dodd. So to come to you, Greg, I'm really interested in your views here because you are a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So you've kind of lived this file for a period of your career. Todd making three points here, one that nuclear power touches the planet very lightly.

I think that's an interesting idea. That on safety, we're making big improvements with this new generation of designs for reactors. And third, as Todd was just saying, there's a potential here to solve the waste disposal issue. Canada's going through this right now with its own nuclear waste management organization. We're making some progress. So why on the basis of these three factors can't we maybe reorient our thinking

and kind of imagine nuclear as a genuine green technology? To shortly answer that question is, I think that is where people's thinking is. As Todd mentioned at the outset, that there's bipartisan support in Congress. There's strong support within the academic community for nuclear as a green solution. This is how most people view nuclear. It's not a reorientation that's needed. It's an implementation that's needed. You cannot be a green solution if you can't actually implement the solutions. And that's the problem with nuclear.

I don't think it's the lack of people thinking of it as that kind of a solution. Now, some of that is because the industry spends a lot of money to encourage people to think of nuclear that way, because the industry in this country in particular is struggling. And that is one of the ways that you deal with a struggling technology is you look to rebrand. And that's certainly a big piece of it. But as Todd mentioned, I mean, nuclear does provide carbon-free electricity. That's a fact. But right now, it's only 19% of our electricity source. And it's been around for decades and hasn't really done better than that.

On the issue of safety, you know, I think we will continue to see safety forever linked with economics. And this is the fundamental tradeoff and balance when you're dealing with something like nuclear safety, which is always about low probability high consequence events. And, you know, I would disagree with one point that Todd made where he said that we have eliminated the low, probably high consequence events for light water reactor technology, which is the predominant technology in use today in the U.S. and throughout the world, I would not agree with that statement. There are many factors that affect the nuclear safety risk for small nuclear reactors. There would be a probable increase in frequency due to a greater number of reactors and their interaction between them. So there is a huge uncertainty and we recommend a better understanding of the risk associated with the SMR. We have now eliminated.

We've certainly done things to reduce the likelihood of accidents, but we have not eliminated because they are a function of the very design of the reactors themselves. And so you need a number of systems in order to ensure that in various states of operation, the plant does not essentially overheat. But the basic physics are there always to overheat. And so you rely on auxiliary systems to prevent that from happening. And we know that there is no foolproof system that can be invented by people. So we have certainly done things to reduce it, but we've not eliminated that.

But again, that comes with a cost in financial terms. And that is part of what is making nuclear very non-competitive today, is the cost that you need to deal with that particular safety feature of nuclear. And Greg, just to push you on one more point of Todd's, though, about the light touch of nuclear on the planet. I mean, solar, for example, I mean, land use compared to nuclear, astronomical in terms of the difference. As Todd's pointing out, the mining that you need to do to create the inputs for a lot of these renewable technologies, especially, again, solar, much greater than nuclear. So why on just a purely environmental basis shouldn't we be over-indexing for nuclear based on its greener input?

costs and the dependable power that you get out the other end? I would concede that point, perhaps, that nuclear overall life cycle mining impacts are lower than renewables. The land use is, in my view, is not a meaningful argument. The facts are that solar, if we were hypothetically, just to say that we were to cover the entire United States with sufficient solar panels to provide the total electricity generation that we use in a year, that would be one percent. of the land mass of the United States. So solar is talked about as having this big landmass,

but it's actually still relatively small impact. And again, looking at solar in particular, if you were to just take existing surface area, so roofs, parking lots, and covered those with solar panels. So not increasing land use one bit from what we currently have for other structures, you would actually accomplish 50% of the energy that we use in a single year. So, you know, again, this comes back to the fundamental environmental issue that we are trying to tackle right now is carbon reduction. And nuclear is simply not solving that problem. It may have wonderful characteristics, but if you can't build a nuclear power plant in less than

10 years, and if you can't do it at a cost that's competitive with other non-carbon sources, it doesn't matter. And that's where we find ourselves today. So these other technologies do have environmental benefits. They may have some impacts, but there is no energy resource that doesn't have impacts. So, you know, from an overall environmental perspective, these other sources are good and they're actually working. And that's really what it comes down to at the end of the day.

So, Todd, let me build on one of Greg's points there because I think, again, our listeners are kind of trying to wrap their minds around the cost efficiency of. of nuclear. You know, the industry itself is reporting that the, you know, the lifetime total costs of building and running a nuclear power plant versus a renewable or, you know, utility scale solar power plant. Those costs are going up, well, the costs of renewables are going down. So it seems like the trend line for nuclear is headed in the wrong direction versus renewables heading in the right direction. So leaving aside these issues of whether it's greener for the planet or its positive or negative environmental effects, why just on a pure

specific cost-benefit analysis? Why isn't it right to just say that nuclear has priced itself out of the race for the technologies that will power a green future? So I think there's maybe two answers. So when we're talking about these costs, we're talking about current generation plants, the sort of large plants that we've traditionally built. And they're not impossible to build in a shorter period of time. And we see that in China. We see the South Koreans building plants in the United Arab Emirates close to the five years originally proposed. And so I do think that the idea that it's impossible to build a traditional large nuclear plant in a timely manner is not true. And I like to differentiate that between the U.S. and Europe where we stop building them. We never

really in the U.S. built replicas, right? Even when we were building at the 30 plants per decade in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, utilities were sort of customizing the plant in different ways. And so you think about how we brought the cost of solar down, right? It's because we're repeating. So I think that it is possible to bring costs down in nuclear or other large technologies, but it requires that you do it. We've seen in the case of China and Korea when they have have done it over and over. There is a learning curve the way you'd normally expect that we haven't seen in the U.S. Thanks, Tom.

So Gregory, we're going to move to closing statements in a moment. But before we do, I think it's important to just touch on, I think, one more issue here that's kind of top of mind for listeners. And it really comes out of the extraordinary experiences in much of the continental United States, the planes down into Texas. this incredible polar vortex that completely slammed the energy industry, the ability to provide power to people based on the incredible loads that were being generated as people tried to heat their homes.

Why isn't it just essential to have a dependable, reliable source of power like nuclear as a major part of America's future power grid in order to deal with these, well, they used to be one in a hundred year events, but maybe with climate change, they're going to be one in every decade events that would severely challenge both the technology and the power generation capacity of any renewable system.

I would say, I think your question has got a lot of loaded assumptions in there. Number one, the biggest problem with the polar vortex was primarily with fossil fuel. resources. Right now, the power system in Texas is seizing up. What we're seeing is that some of these traditional thermal power stations, which include coal, gas, and nuclear have equipment literally freezing over, seizing up, and that is contributing to some of the power failures.

The projections actually for wind resources during the polar vortex were relatively low because the projections during the polar vortex were for a minimal amount. of wind to be in operation. However, some of the wind did suffer from icing and other effects of the extremely cold weather. That's not to say that you can't design wind systems that deal better with those temperatures. They're just not like that in Texas because Texas does not plan for events like this. So there's a saying in the law that, you know, the edge cases make difficult law. And we shouldn't necessarily design our, like, electricity system around a very, very low probability event like this weather phenomenon. But by the same token, there certainly are renewable combinations of renewable systems that would do perfectly fine in an event like this. As I said, the fundamental issue has been the lack of fossil fuel resources and the fossil fuel resources going offline. Certainly, the nuclear power plans did reduce power or shut down, but were operating for a large portion of the time. But there are

weather phenomenon under which nuclear units do not perform well. So there are certainly any technology is going to have the situations in which it does well and does not do well. And so when you design the system, you need to ensure that you design it so that it can be robust and can be, can withstand the kinds of conditions that you expect. Clearly in Texas, they did not do that. That's the fundamental problem. It's not really the resource mix. It's that the system was just never designed for this kind of extreme temperature that they're seeing right now. Thanks, Greg. Todd, before closing statements, what's your lesson that you take away from the weather, Armageddon that, you know, struck the Central Plains down into Texas and the South?

What lessons should we draw from that in terms of the future of renewable energy? Yeah, so I think I'd answer the question for energy in general. And it gets back to my previous points about designing systems, right? We put together an energy or electricity system, and we want it to be zero carbon. So we're going to drive in that direction. But we want it to be resilient. We want it to be affordable. And each one of these technologies is good at some things and not as good at others, right?

Whether it's when it's available, under what circumstances it will be at risk. And I think in Texas, it showed that very well. And so this is a very different, low probability, high. consequence event, but I think that designing a system that takes advantage of the best of solar, the best of wind, the best of batteries, the best of nuclear is likely to be the system that keeps the energy on reliably at the lowest cost and lowest cost variability, right? Because the costs were very variable during the polar vortex. So, you know, I'm an engineer, right? We're designed to think about how you optimize a system. When I think about zero carbon,

And my brain goes to use the best of a lot of different technologies. And to do otherwise is just not good engineering. Thanks, Todd. Let's go to closing statements. This has been a terrific debate. I've learned so much from both of you. I'm going to think about this issue in new ways. And that's the power of, I think, this format and the ability for us and our audience

to access people of your kind of experience and insights. So, Greg, I'm going to put two minutes on the clock for your closing statement. you've been arguing against our motion, go green, go nuclear. Let's have your concluding remarks for the debate. Well, thank you, Redyard, and thanks, Tom, for your thoughtful comments, and I very much did enjoy doing this. You know, I would come back to the points that I made at the beginning, which is that we are looking to try in, in the electricity sector, decarbonize in the next, really 14 years. And that's a very, very aggressive timetable. And we'll require some very significant investments in infrastructure and significant costs.

So the solutions we're going to have to look to are going to be the solutions that can be built and constructed in that time frame and that can do it at the lowest cost. And right now, those solutions don't include nuclear. In the United States today, we have almost no plants that could come online in the next 10 to 15 years. And in the U.S., the time to build a plant is anywhere from five to 10 years. And to make really a meaningful contribution to the overall carbon electricity landscape, we would need to build 100 or more plants basically starting tomorrow. And that's simply not happening.

So when we look at the solutions that are most viable, it's just not nuclear. And I think that's the fundamental issue that this comes down to is we're no longer at a point at which we have the luxury of planning or looking for optimal improvements to the technologies that are out there. We have to look to the toolkit that we have kind of strapped around our belt today. And in that toolkit is wind, solar, geothermal, battery storage, hydropower, these are the solutions that we can deploy and have the best chance of getting to that carbon neutral level by 2035. And unless nuclear can do some significant improvements in construction time, in cost, in operational flexibility, which is an issue we didn't really get to,

but as we introduce more intermittent sources like renewable into the grid, what we really need are sources that can adapt to power changes. And that's not the current design of nuclear reactors in this country. And moreover, if you're operating nuclear reactors at lower, capacity factors, you then increase problems again with the cost. So the system that we're looking at, and the one that seems the most viable, is a system that simply does not favor nuclear. And that's why, irrespective of what we may think of the virtues of nuclear, it's simply not a practical solution in the marketplace today for a net carbon electricity sector in the short term. Thank you, Greg. So, Todd, we're going to give you the last word in this debate. Go green, go nuclear.

take us away. So I go back to energy makes our lives better. People around the world will continue to demand clean, affordable, reliable energy distributed equitably, and protecting the climate requires we accelerate our use of zero-carbon energy. Nuclear energy currently produces more than half the U.S. zero-carbon electricity. We need to keep that current fleet running, not make the mistake Germany is making of shutting down nuclear plants and adding fossil fuel as a replacement. One thing that's interesting to Greg's comment about flexibility, some of the nuclear plants are now starting to look at making hydrogen when electricity is not available. So not planning to start up and shut down the plants, but look at different business models, different products. In addition to that, companies are designing new types of nuclear products that aim to do more than the first generation of plants.

This is important to think of any technology. You get better as you go beyond the first generation of commercial products. some of those companies plan to be online in the next decade. They're talking to the regulator. They're working their way through the system. They have more intended functions than just large electricity. As a side note, having been a submarine officer, I can attest that roughly 100 people can live in a home with a nuclear reactor.

So I think thinking about nuclear differently than we traditionally have is important. I think these new products coming along the line have features that improve upon the strong safety record of the first generation of plants, including ways to prevent small probability, large consequence events like Fukushima. There are communities that are proud hosts of nuclear technology. The energy communities' alliance are strong advocates for being the place to build new nuclear technology, and nuclear plants have been good neighbors for these communities. To Greg's point, like all technologies, nuclear companies need to find ways to decrease cost. I think from a public policy perspective, we should follow the model that we did with solar and wind

to combine research and public policy to help drive the costs down. And I do think that making a transition to zero carbon requires a lot of infrastructure, and infrastructure can be hard and time-consuming. I think about transmission lines, they're not easier to build than a nuclear plant. I use a quote from Sheila Janosoff, who's a professor at Harvard Kennedy School that I like, that says scientific and technological advances bring unquestioned benefits, but they also generate new uncertainties and failures, with the result that doubt continually undermines knowledge

and unforeseen consequences confound faith in progress. And I think we need to keep all zero-carbon technologies in our discussion because we're going to have unforeseen consequences. So I think for the health of the planet, we have to go green. I think we do that through a combination of all our technologies that decrease carbon in the atmosphere. To do that, we need to keep including nuclear, building on our first generation of this very important zero-carbon technology.

Thanks. Hey, thank you, Todd. And thank you, Greg. This has been a civil, substantive debate. You've engaged with each other. You've engaged with the issue. And we're all the better for it. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you both for being part of today's conversation. Thanks for the invitation. It's great. Yeah, thank you. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Todd Allen and Gregory Yatsko. Certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have any feedback or reflect, on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Again, that email podcast, MUNK, Debateswithan S.com. Here are some emails that we've received recently from listeners. Eric Kluck writes, the shift to a podcast format during the pandemic has been excellent, in my opinion.

I especially like that you've been able to cover a much greater number of topics. An interesting debate idea would be focusing on the housing market and how government is managing the affordability situation. It's a constant discussion point amongst millennial aged listeners. We will check out that topic and hopefully we can come up for a debate for you and all of our millennial listeners in the coming weeks and months. And another email from Andrew Hurd. He writes, hello, Rudyard in the wider monk community. I've enjoyed the discussions you've had with various experts on the COVID-19 crisis and related. government responses.

Perhaps a topic for a future debate might be the various errors with the modeling being used by governments, despite its seeming failure to make accurate predictions of the future course of the pandemic. Andrew, a great idea. We've had a lot of positive response to our COVID-19 debates on this podcast. That's a fascinating topic and we'll certainly turn our minds to it. Again, we'd love to hear your debate ideas and suggestions. suggestions. It really helps our production team. It helps me think through the issues and ideas that you want us to bring to you in a debate format.

So keep them coming to podcast at monkdebates.com. And again, thank you so much for being part of our community and our efforts to bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffith, Christina Campbell, and Nicole Edwards are the producers. Api Rahaja is the associate producer. The Monk Debate podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening. evening.