Today, Explained - Is nuclear energy good or bad?

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Listen to the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer explain the arguments and then decide for yourself. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. In a world with many problems, one problem reigns supreme. The climate emergency.

The stakes have never been higher. The odds of bipartisan agreement on this issue have possibly never been lower. But there's a new president in town, and he's hot for science. We've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can't wait any longer. It's Earth Week at Today Explained. We're going to talk about what's in store for this planet, the future of our future. Welcome to Earth. Week on Today Explained. Happy Earth Day. We're celebrating with Earth Week here at Today

Explained. On yesterday's show, we explored the expanding universe of electric vehicles. Today, we're going to focus on what fuels them, our energy. Bill Gates says that if you want to be serious about our climate emergency, you got to get serious about nuclear energy. People at least should be open-minded that a next generation reactor can have far better economics, far better safety, you know, no proliferation, no waste problem. And Bill's putting his money where his mouth is. The thing I'm investing in, and not because I expect to make a ton of money on it, it's because it, I think, because it's zero CO2, because the economics are so good, is a fourth generation design.

And there are many fourth generation designs. This one is very, very attractive from an economic point of view. I mean, way cheaper. We reached out to Bill to ask why he's such a fan of nuclear, but he was busy upgrading to 5G or something. So instead, we asked Robinson Meyer. But you can call me Rob. Rob writes about energy at the Atlantic. So we asked Rob why Bill makes this argument that if you're serious about climate, you got to be serious about nuclear. Because right now, you know, nuclear generates an absolute enormous amount of zero carbon electricity worldwide. And we know, you know, to decarbonize the energy system, to fight climate change,

right, we need to reduce carbon emissions to zero. To reduce carbon emissions to zero, we need to electrify way more stuff. And to electrify way more stuff, we need to have reliable, cheap sources of zero carbon electricity. And right now in the U.S., I believe nuclear actually generates about half of our zero carbon electricity nationwide. And a big risk for us in the U.S. is that there are a lot of old nuclear plants and they are about to go offline soon. And just the way costs kind of come out, they're likely to be replaced by natural gas. And so, you know, this is happening in California. It's happening in New York as these old nuclear plants shut off. They don't

get replaced by renewables, which are also zero carbon. They get replaced by natural gas, which is fossil fuel and emits methane and CO2. And why does Bill Gates feel like he needs to make this argument? Why is there even an argument that needs to be made if this is such a clean, functional alternative? Well, I think people would argue with clean and functional ah yeah okay well before we get into all of the history yeah and even all of the issues in the way of a nuclear future let's just talk about how this works can you give us you know the uh the elevator ride version of how nuclear power functions. So, nuclear energy at its heart, and boy, oof. I'm so sorry to physicists listening to this.

Please keep this in, because I'm really, like, I gotta apologize to them off the bat. Generally, the way nuclear works is you use radiation to generate heat. You use that heat to heat up water. You have these fuel rods. They're submerged in water. They heat up the water by virtue of radiation. The water turns into steam. You use the steam to turn a turbine.

And that turbine generates electricity the same way any other turbine generates electricity, right? I mean, it's just a, it's a magnet. It's an electromagnetic effect. And is this why nuclear power plants are always next to bodies of water? Yes, because they have to cool the water somehow. That's also why they have the giant cooling towers with the steam coming out of it. I guess what I would say as a curiosity here is that basically every way we generate electricity just comes down to turning a turbine somehow. Usually with steam, right?

With coal and gas, eventually all you're doing is just turning a turbine. With wind, you're using the power of the wind to turn a turbine. With nuclear, you're turning a turbine. All of them actually except solar, which makes solar really interesting. I realize that's not in the purview of this podcast,

but what's so interesting about solar to me is it's the only form of electricity generation where you're not turning a turbine. You're like exciting the electrons actually in the solar panel and they're moving into the wire. Next year on Today Explains Earth Week, solar. But this is about nuclear. We spoke to David Wallace-Wells early in the week about clean energy a whole lot. We didn't dig into the question of whether nuclear counts as clean. It sounds like probably not. I mean, it really, really depends on nuclear counts as clean. It sounds like probably not.

I mean, it really, really depends on how you define clean. And I'd say, if you hear a politician talking about clean energy, they are probably including nuclear in that, because they mean zero carbon energy. I think critics of nuclear would tell you that because nuclear generates this waste material, it is not clean. You know, because you have nuclear waste at the end of the process, it is not clean in the same way that, say, solar or wind are clean. Well, let's talk about the waste. Yeah.

What is the byproduct of this zero carbon form of energy? Spent fuel rods that emit radiation for hundreds of thousands of years. Wow. And what do we do with these spent fuel rods? That's been a live question in American politics for a couple decades. You know, we were supposed to store them in Nevada. Beginning with the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982, Congress has attempted several times to address the back end of the fuel cycle. In an effort to resolve an earlier stalemate,

the federal government was supposed to begin taking title to used fuel and moving it to a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada beginning in 1998. Why Nevada? What did they do? Because it's really remote. You know, basically the idea, you store them at Mount Yucca and it's super remote and no one gets near it. There's actually a lot of really interesting

almost like anthropological work done in the 80s and 90s to figure out how you can possibly communicate to people living 25,000 years from now not to get near the fuel rods. And so there were ideas about how do you put up signs, how do you make huge signs in the land that indicate to people this is a bad place that you don't want to go.

What's the thinking? That people will forget that all of our nuclear fuel rods are stored there? Yeah, we know very little about people who lived 10,000 years ago. And I think the thinking is we know very little about people who will live 10,000 years from now. And in case there's some loss of, you know, civilizational knowledge between now and then, which we also know happens from time knowledge between now and then which we also know happens from time to time and they forget there should be some markers that indicate you know the classic line is like this is not a place of honor you don't want to come here there's also a lot of thinking about could you breed cats there was there's this idea you could breed cats to turn a different color when they're near radiation.

And then you write songs and develop this lore around you don't want the cats to change color. I'm sorry. Excuse me? This is a real solution that was proposed by real humans? Put together in these kind of like, you know, blue sky brainstorming sessions about what you could do to try to just communicate the hazards of nuclear waste over the tens of thousands of years that it will remain active. Has anyone written the song yet? I have heard versions of this song actually on another podcast. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I think it was just written for that podcast.

So, you know, in the US, we put all this thought into it. In Europe, they just bury it really, really deep underground in Finland. And they pay the communities that live on top of it. It's supposedly so deep that it doesn't intersect with the water supplies. I think in the U.S., it remains a live issue. And I think what most nuclear plants do is they just have spent fuel rods on site, like under protection in containers where the radiation isn't escaping. I've also always heard this idea about nuclear waste that we should just launch it at the sun. Is that a serious idea? I wasn't going to ask you about it, but now that you mentioned singing

cats, I feel like it's fair game. Okay, I have to be honest with you. I have also always wondered this about nuclear waste. I believe the reasons why not to do it are that, first of all, launches do fail. So it's bad if suddenly you've sprinkled a thin dusting of fuel rods across the Atlantic coast of Florida. The other half of this is like costs matter there too. And nuclear is kind of expensive. It requires some level of subsidy, at least in the US. And it's expensive to launch things. Okay, let's talk more about cost. How expensive is nuclear energy compared to other sources? It depends a little bit plant by plant, but it is not cheap. And it tends to require some level of state subsidy when we build it. It's not cheap in part because the safety regulations are very high in the U.S. People understandably want to make sure it's safe,

and it's a very high cost burden to comply with that. Nuclear is more expensive than renewables, basically, period. It's much more expensive. And that's pre-subsidies. And we tend to see nuclear get subsidized. And of course, where nuclear is different, and I think why climate people get very excited about nuclear, is because nuclear is a source of what's called firm power

or firm electricity. And this is arguably why, even though it's expensive, it's worth paying for. Because nuclear generates electricity all the time. Once you get a nuclear plant going, you're basically running it all the time, especially a conventional big multi-reactor giant cooling tower nuclear plant. And power all the time is the hardest and most important part of the electricity system, right? The Texas blackouts happened because actually natural gas was unable to supply power all the time.

And we know like with wind and solar, solar farms attached to giant batteries might eventually play this role. But just like more sources of really super reliable zero carbon electricity would be something that would be good to put in the electricity system. And nuclear is a potential source of that. A third impediment here that you haven't mentioned is death. Why haven't you talked about the death, Rob? Because the death, how would I put this? People get very worried about the safety of nuclear plants. And like, understandably, right? If you have a nuclear incident, there is potentially waste around for a long, long time. Which we did have just about 10 years ago, almost to the month. This is a potentially catastrophic disaster. And the images of destruction and flooding coming out of Japan are simply heartbreaking. You know, Fukushima

killed, I believe the estimates are, the stress of evacuation killed way more people than the radiation itself. You know, the estimates are hundreds of people may have died as a result of the overall Fukushima tragedy. But most would say, you know, several dozen people died of, you know, immediate exposure to the Chernobyl waste and then somewhere on the order of thousands to tens of thousands died as a result of, like, increasing their exposure of cancer

or another radiation-induced illness later on. And these are public health estimates. These aren't counts, right? In Chernobyl, officially, the count is 31 people, but we know it is probably higher. Here's the thing. Compared to coal or really any part of the fossil fuel system, which we know causes hundreds of thousands of cardiopulmonary injuries a year, heart attacks, strokes, cardiac disease, early death, asthma attacks. Nuclear is almost certainly below the public health burden of the fossil fuel system.

Like just cumulatively, nuclear has almost certainly injured and harmed and killed fewer people than the fossil fuel system overall. We just are used to living with the result of the fossil fuel system. We're used to people having heart attacks, right? We're used to people growing up with asthma. We're used to, you know, people in the most polluted parts of the world just underdeveloping getting in a car and driving, even though they're far plane crash, you know, several different things have gone wrong. It's outside the control of anyone experiencing it. And it's quite dramatic, like a plane crash. You know, while fossil fuel deaths are just something that happened in the background, they're hard to associate with the actual fossil fuel system. You know, someone dies in their late 50s or early 60s of a heart attack,

and they've lived downstream of a coal plant for 20 or 30 years. You know, we don't count that. That's not front-page news, but that is a death in the same way a plane crash death is a death. It's just a whole lot less dramatic. And so it's less salient. If you want a generally lower risk system, I understand why people get scared of nuclear. However, that being said,

you know, would I live next door to a nuclear plant or a coal plant? Absolutely no question, nuclear every day of the week because nuclear is basically fine. Like, you know, if I live next door to a coal plant, I'm taking years off my life. Well, if I live next door to a nuclear plant, the most likely thing is that nothing ever happens, and I have very cheap electricity. More with Rob in a minute. I'm Sean Ramos for him.

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Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Rob, okay, so I think we've established that it's a little bit unreasonable to fear living next to a nuclear power plant. You know, personally, fun fact, I grew up next to a nuclear power plant, and here I am. Oh, really? Ten fingers. Ten toes. You can't see them, but trust me, I only got ten. But tell me— The third eye might be below the beanie. That's right. They don't know I'm wearing a beanie, right?

They don't know they're wearing a beanie, yeah. Wildly unprofessional. He's wearing a beanie. Tell me, how's the world doing on nuclear? Oh, it's all over the place. China's building a lot of new nuclear and seems to be having lower costs. But generally, in the West, we haven't done a giant nuclear build-out in a little while. You know, the whole history of energy,

like in Europe and North America, is basically energy was really, really cheap until the 1970s. We did this crazy thing, which was burning oil for electricity. It wasn't a huge share of generation, but like we burned oil and then the oil embargo happened, the back to back oil crisis in the 1970s. And one out of every seven gallons of oil we've been using to power our homes, our cars, our businesses, and our schools just wasn't there anymore. Cost of oil really went up. We started to care about energy. And all these countries across Europe and North America kind of were like, oh, we can't just plan on importing cheap oil

forever. What are we going to do for electricity generation? We were caught by surprise with a crisis that could recur and recur unless the entire country recognized the dangers of a quite real energy shortage. In the U.S., what we did, actually, fun fact, we said we have coal and nuclear in the country. And so we'd be able to generate, this is what we should use for electricity and coal, which was actually on the way out in the 1970s. It was like really fading as a source of power, came back as a source of electricity and made up market share. We also tried to build a lot of nuclear plants, but there was a lot of opposition to them from environmentalists, from local communities. No more news! No more youth! No more youth!

The 60s and 70s is the birth of the modern environmental movement. And they won a number of victories really quickly. In 1962, scientist Rachel Carson published a groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, arguing that pesticides like DDT were also deadly to birds, fish, and even humans. Silent Spring became a national bestseller. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth

without making it unfit for all life? The hippie, you know, boomer energy winds up getting devoted to opposition to nuclear. And not for awful reasons. I mean, there were some really scary scenarios floating around to people. We've seen recently India evolve an explosive device derived from a peaceful nuclear power plant. And we now feel that several other nations are on the verge of becoming nuclear explosive powers. If you're not worried about climate change, maybe, you know, there's lots of reasons to oppose nuclear and climate change hadn't emerged as a major environmental concern in the 70s yet. They succeed in making it so expensive and so onerous to build a nuclear

plant that nobody tries for decades. So from 1977 to 2013, no one tries to build a new nuclear plant in the United States. Not one. Not one. So this isn't even like a partisan thing? Like this movement's so effective that it shuts down any ideation about nuclear energy across the country? The partisan dynamics are like really, they're not quite as cut and dry as they are now. You know, like what does start to develop, especially in the 90s, is

like, Republicans do start to kind of embrace nuclear, especially as a quasi-solution to climate change. And Democrats continue to some degree to oppose it. Though, Democratic opposition is, like, quite

fractured between the kind of historic base of like older environmentalists and then like a newer base of like professional Democratic elites. And what I think is really important to know about like the history of energy politics in the U.S. is like, you know, in the 1970s, we respond to the oil crisis by like investing in R&D, a ton of different energy solutions R&D. Then in the early 80s, oil prices go back down again and it becomes less of a pressing pocketbook issue. And energy politics start to get really cultural. So we have this kind of bizarre situation in the U.S. where Republicans support nuclear, even though what we know is that the nuclear industry

is highly unionized and requires heavy state subsidy, while Democrats often oppose it, even though it's zero carbon and heavily unionized and requires state subsidy. The politics of it are not what you would expect in the U.S., given international context. Tell me more about the international context. I imagine our situation in this country

is a little more complicated and fraught than others. That's right. Although, you know, after Fukushima, we saw a number of countries who were heavily reliant on nuclear also move away from it because of that incident. But the most important international story about nuclear, I'd say, is in France. Energy nucléaire.

France responded to the same oil and energy crisis in the 1970s as we did. But instead of building out coal, they built out nuclear. And from 1976 to 1990, actually France's CO2 emissions fall really, really dramatically because it switches to nuclear power. And I believe the fastest drop in CO2 emissions while the economy is growing in like the history of developed countries because they switched to nuclear.

Now, France does it through a heavily centralized, basically like state-supported industry. You know, the opposite of everything you'd think Republicans would want in the US. But they do it. And even today, you know, France still gets, you know, 70, 80% of its electricity from nuclear. It remains a major industry in France.

And France is in some ways like able to decarbonize and able to respond to climate change in a much easier and simpler way than the U.S. has because so much of their electricity system is already zero carbon. Has anyone looked at this example in France and tried to replicate it? The politics of it are really fraught here, you know, because you have people who are pro-nuclear and want to replicate it in the U.S., but that's a very small contingent.

In the U.S., what has started to happen, and I'd say I'm basing this on very strong anecdotal evidence and just what I've picked up in reporting, is that there is a real generational divide among environmentally concerned people around nuclear power. So if you are older and were involved or exposed to that 1960s, 1970s moment, like you really oppose nuclear a lot. Still, you don't want to see it happen. And so what's your biggest fear? A meltdown, a spent fuel fire, sabotage, tsunami, earthquake, man-made error, human mistakes, engineering mistakes.

I'm not sure which one is biggest. And if you're younger and, you know, the primary environmental cause that you grew up with was not nuclear waste or nuclear war, but climate change. In my experience, people tend to be a little more open-minded about nuclear and even excited about it. I actually have a really funny story about this. So I was in Greenland with a bunch of climate scientists. And on the trip was this one of the most respected climate scientists in the country who did a ton of work to really help us understand. I'm not going to name him, but he did a ton of work to really help us understand, I'm not going to name him,

but he did a ton of work to really help us understand how dramatic modern climate change is in the context of historical climate change. It's like modern climate change is really bad. He helped us understand that. It was with a couple younger grad students about my age, 90s kids.

And nuclear energy came up in discussions. We were sitting by the fjord one day after a day of field work, and nuclear energy came up. And the younger postdoc was like, oh, we got to do it. It's so important. It's like the future of energy. We got to research it. We got to build out nuclear. It's a good source of zero carbon electricity. It's like there's still so many technological

advantages there that remain untapped with nuclear. Like it's still the future. And this older climate scientist, who again has devoted his life to how bad climate change is, was like, no, no nuclear ever. Nuclear is worse than climate change. Climate change is bad. It will impose all these costs on us. But nuclear produces literally the worst substance in the world.

And we can't have it at all. And it was just really stark to me how even among people who have devoted their lives to trying to get policy action on climate change, they were not willing to entertain the benefits of nuclear or the potential benefits of nuclear. And frankly, this is still a pattern I see in emails. And whenever I write about this generational divide in nuclear, I get a bunch of, to be frank, older readers, I'm thrilled at reading my work,

who are very upset that I've made that argument. Is there an argument to be made here that, you know, if we have renewable energy that doesn't have this harmful byproduct, hydro, solar, wind, I know they're still not used at the levels they need. Well, of course, we stopped building dams, too. We stopped building hydro for other environmental reasons. I mean, part of the— Sorry to just completely interrupt your question, but actually in 1950, a larger share of U.S. electricity was generated by zero carbon sources than it is today. What? And that's because a ton of it came from dams. But there is all these

other conventional problems of building dams, and so that's kind of gone out of favor as well. So in some ways you can see the like story of electricity in the US being, we used to be really excited about hydro and nuclear as like two zero carbon sources back in the fifties and sixties. And then we kind of fell out of love with those. And then we got into coal and then we discovered coal and natural gas had all these issues. And now we're of fell out of love with those. And then we got into coal. And then we discovered coal and natural gas had all these issues.

And now we're into solar and wind. Anyway, I'm sorry. You should, I apologize for interrupting. No, I mean, that's really interesting. I guess I'm asking, is there some sort of established tier that we can all agree on, on the cleanest, most preferable source of energy to the dirtiest and most harmful sources of energy? And if so, ultimately, do we have any consensus on where nuclear falls in that tier? This is a tricky question. You know, in my brain, I guess,

it's like wind and solar at the top then nuclear then the fossil fuels where's hydro off to the side somewhere i don't know not even touching that one hydro is good i mean actually uh if we could figure there's a lot of excess hydro in canada and if we could figure out how to bring it into the u.s like how to use that electricity in the u.s that would be really cool but you got solar and wind at the top nuclear nuclear in the middle, and all the dirty stuff below it. Yes, but look, we really, really need solar and wind. And what I'm about to say is not to take away from their cleanliness at all. However, especially solar has huge mineral costs, like huge mining costs. Where we mine some of the minerals we use in solar is really up for grabs. And a huge share of the world's, and we're talking more than a third

of the world's minerals that we use in solar come from Xinjiang, the same province where the Chinese regime's imprisonment and alleged genocide of Uyghurs is happening. And it's coming from facilities staffed by forced Uyghur labor. So as the demand for solar and wind increases, we are also going to face questions about what kind of communities bear the costs and how do we share the cost of solar as we expand. And, you know, don't get me wrong. I think there are ways to do that. I think solars and wind are exciting. And I think, you know, potential advanced nuclear where

the waste output is different or the risks are different is also really exciting. I just think, let me take the ultimate journalist cop out and say these kinds of conversations are really important to have because as we change how our energy system is powered, we're going to discover that there's trade-offs no matter where we go. And how we navigate those trade-offs is still quite up in the air. What I'm getting is wind is the safest bet. Well, wind has some mineral needs too, just because you got to put like copper and nickel in there.

Can't win. But wind is pretty good. Wind's good. We should build a lot more offshore wind. I'll leave it there. Rob, thanks so much. Absolutely. Thank you. Rob Meyer, he's a staff writer at The Atlantic. We are wrapping up Earth Week tomorrow at Today Explained with a movement. A movement to conserve 30% of planet Earth by the year 2030. And Vox podcasts have been making a whole month out of Earth Day, by the way.

You can find everything the Vox pods have been doing on climate and energy and biodiversity and even movies about planet Earth at vox.com slash earth month. you