SIO134: Nuclear Power is Critical to Saving the Environment, with Evan McDonell

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:00 Thomas: Today's episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. For $30 off your first week of HelloFresh, visit HelloFresh.com and enter SeriousPod30.

0:00:38 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 134. I'm your host Thomas Smith. Well, a lot going on lately, I went to two events, I went to AACON, I had a great time, I also went to the Bruce City Benefit in Milwaukee, I just want to say thanks to everybody who came out to both of those events and said hi, I had a great time, I'm not doing another event for a while, but when I am I'll let you know, but it's been really fun to meet you guys, seriously, so thank you for coming out and supporting that.

Speaking of AACON, there was a press release that David Silverman, who was on the show recently to promote AACON, was just suspended from American Atheist, there's no details yet as to why, but apparently there's an investigation, so we'll obviously have to withhold judgment until we get a hold of the facts, but yeah, that's definitely worrying and alarming, and I'm glad that American Atheist is taking it seriously, and I just wanted to let everybody know since I've had him on the show recently, I'm going to be absolutely responsive to whatever the facts end up being. But for now, we don't have any of those. It's a very brief statement without any details, so that's all I can really say for now. Right, but in better news, today's episode is something that I think the skeptic movement can take a leadership role in, and that is educating people and moving society forward with issues of science and clear thinking, and this is one of those issues.

0:02:13 Thomas: I'm deeply concerned about the environment and climate change, very, very concerned about it. I just am so scared that we're not doing enough fast enough, and one thing, one component of it that I just think is getting such the short end of the stick and and could really cost us as a society, and and actually the whole, in the entire planet, really, is nuclear energy. So here to talk about that is Evan McDonell. Evan's been someone who's listened to the show for a while, and we've been back and forth on this issue, and he's actually in the middle of, uh, pursuing a degree in chemical engineering with a focus on nuclear engineering, and this is an issue he's passionate about, and so I had him on to teach us some of the basics and answer some of the common questions on nuclear safety, and what about solar and wind and all those kinds of things, very reasonable questions to ask of course, and here's Evan to teach us about nuclear and answer some of those questions.

0:03:22 Thomas: I'm joined by Evan McDonell. How you doing, Evan?

0:03:25 Evan: I'm doing great today Thomas, how are you?

0:03:26 Thomas: Doing great. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

0:03:29 Evan: It's my pleasure.

0:03:30 Thomas: This is a topic I've actually been interested in, I've done a little bit on it, but I'm by no means an expert, but you are something of an expert becoming an expert on nuclear power, is that right?

0:03:40 Evan: Yep. That's right, working towards my expertise there.

0:03:45 Thomas: And this is one of those issues that gets cited sometimes as an instance of liberals not being really along with the science, you know, as much as they could be. Is that your impression? What do you think?

0:03:58 Evan: It does seem to me that liberals get a little bit, you know, as much as we like to try to be the pro-science side of things, that this is a sort of misunderstood topic. I that nuclear power is a really important and fundamental part of sort of any energy policy that the world needs going forward, honestly. And so it seemed to fit really well in with my love of chemistry and to change for environmental problems that we were looking at going forward.

0:04:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. What made you pursue a degree in this?

0:04:26 Thomas: Hmm.

0:04:43 Thomas: Right. So it's kind of job security thing. You wanted to pick something where it seems like it should be be part of the solution for the future to you. Oh, cool. So what do you think people are misunderstanding about nuclear energy? I mean, is it something we are not putting enough of an emphasis on? I hear that we don't build it hardly at all anymore, right?

0:04:52 Evan: Exactly.

0:05:07 Evan: That's true. In fact, we're currently decreasing the total number of reactors that are active in the United States right now. So we're going to lose sometime in the next about five years, another three nuclear reactors are going to go offline.

0:05:24 Thomas: Oh, wow. Do you know the story of that specifically? Are they just too outdated? Or what is the reason we're losing three.

0:05:33 Evan: So it's a combination of a lot of different things that come together. Originally, a lot of these power plants were given uh 40-year leases and a lot of those leases are coming up uh to be renewed right now, and in a lot of places there's not a lot, um, public support uh for politicians to want to renew uh the leases in those areas, and so instead they're being decommissioned and

0:05:42 Thomas: Hmm.

0:05:57 Thomas: Well, that's surprising because I would think that, you know, the price of energy would be something that might be impacted by that. Right. So wouldn't there be enough? Wouldn't it make sense to say, hey, we don't want to if we're not getting it from nuclear power, we're going to have to make it up somewhere. And it's probably going to be something not as environmentally friendly.

0:06:17 Evan: That's actually absolutely true. Is because that, well, it goes back to a big misunderstanding about what things are the most environmentally friendly, at the same time, clashing with public perception. It seems to me that the way the public perceives energy sources is a lot, is a big part of how we move forward in energy policy.

0:06:26 Thomas: Hmm?

0:06:44 Thomas: Yeah, it does seem I mean, because there's the idiotic thing, you you know, lately and within the past, I don't know, five, six, whenever it was where all of a sudden clean coal was something like, if you just put the word clean in front of it, then that meant, and of course, Trump thinks that means you take it out and then wash it, like give it a, give it good scrub.

0:07:02 Evan: Just give it a good scrub and get everything nice and clean.

0:07:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, is that, that, is it that kind of thing where it's possibly more about some sort of marketing or if not marketing than just, you You know, there are obviously some big, big reasons why people are wary of nuclear power. You think it's more of an image problem than the actual underlying substance.

0:07:24 Evan: I do think that the vast majority of public opposition is in a misunderstanding of exactly what the risks of using nuclear power are, that it seems that there's been a really consolidated anti-nuclear campaign in a lot of different countries. Areas like concerns about proliferation of nuclear material and, you know, who has a bomb and those kinds of those kinds of problems compared to what is actually going on. So it seems to me that risks have been played up to a really great extent and that these disasters that have happened in the past have really played into people's fears and that they don't really understand exactly what's going on.

0:08:20 Evan: And it seems to be something that people can take and really manipulate to their own ends in order to push various agendas. So

0:08:29 Thomas: Right. Is it a, is it, I don't know of many right-wing arguments. The only argument I can think of, I could just be wrong, but the only arguments I think of are, you know, the kind of not in my backyard or, you know, environmental arguments. Are there any other arguments that are coming from a different angle, or is that pretty much that assumption that it's going to hurt the environment or there's going to be an accident and kill a bunch of people?

0:08:55 Evan: I think that's a really big part of it. But another argument that people bring up a lot is cost and the fact that there needs to be level of government subsidy in order to and operate nuclear power facilities. Is that the licensing and are very expensive. And there are not a lot of companies who are finding it as profitable to keep constructing. While when we, Republicans especially, uh, conservatives keep pushing things like, you saving coal jobs and trying to, um, make coal as competitive as possible and then on the left people are trying to make, uh, solar and wind, um, as competitive as possible. And, you know, those those two extremes, um, really have so many of their own issues that need to be addressed, um, So

0:09:55 Thomas: Yeah, actually, I was going to ask that. Do you think it's a reasonable argument to say, okay, well, nuclear might be fine, but there seems to be some problems with how expensive it is or whatever, And so, therefore, we should put all our resources into wind or solar or something like that.

0:10:14 Evan: The problem, uh, with wind and solar currently is they're not what are called base load, uh, energy sources. Currently is that they can't maintain, um, the base load of energy requirements as we currently need them in the United States, or anywhere, for that matter, they have problems with intermittency, and they have problem with transmission. It's really great to say, oh, just build a big solar array out in the desert somewhere, except that then you have to transmit that power, back to the East Coast in the United States. And that's not a problem that we have solved yet. Is That storage capacity is really not where we need it to be yet for industrial scale uses for things that are inherently intermittent sources. So it's basically that we need something that can be built where people need the energy so that we can mitigate our transmission costs as best as possible while maintaining the base power that we meet.

0:10:54 Thomas: Okay.

0:11:31 Thomas: But is it the kind of thing, like, it seems like it's advancing, you know, all the time. Am I wrong on that? Is it, would you, is it reasonable to say, well, okay, we're not there yet, but we're going to be there soon enough to where it's the way of the future?

0:11:46 Evan: It strikes me that we are not, guess it strikes me that the problem of global warming is something that needs to be addressed right now. It's not something that we can say like, well, in five years, you know, we're going to have some breakthrough in batteries. It's something that We can say in 10 years, You know, we're going to be able to build panels that have a high efficiency to overcome intermittency problems or, you know, something that we can say we'll be able to, you store all of our wind energy enough in order to overcome that. It's something that needs to be addressed right now. And the only thing that currently has the ability to address those problems right now is nuclear energy.

0:11:59 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Hmm.

0:12:35 Thomas: Right. I just actually Googled it up because I was curious of where we're getting our power currently. And it is striking that only 0.6% of our power in the US is solar. So it really is not quite there yet. It looks like a third is coal, a third as natural gas, and right around 20% is nuclear. And then we've got wind is actually 4.7%. Looks like there's a little more infrastructure infrastructure there. But yeah, I guess we're a far cry from anything like a majority of our power being able to be, you know, created by wind and solar.

0:12:50 Evan: Yes, That's exactly right. Really something that is just a little bit over the horizon before we can really make it majority of our energy consumption. That

0:13:24 Thomas: You I Don't know that much about natural gas, like, which which is is that a in terms of what's polluting the environment and, and driving climate change? Do you know? Like, I mean, coal sounds bad. Natural gas, I actually have no idea like what what how how much carbon or whatever that involves. I mean, what is natural gas like?

0:13:47 Evan: Natural gas, is it's not really, it's not terrible, but any time that you're taking, um, some sort of carbon-based, um, fuel source and combusting it, you're You're going to end up with, um, some emission of carbon dioxide. And carbon, carbon dioxide is one of our, you know, one of the greatest gases, and it's of the biggest risks for global warming. So there's, there have been a lot of advances in things like carbon capture and that kind of thing. And that's, that's really what goes back to like clean coal is really like implementing carbon capture practices. But it's still a perfect system. There's still inherently some carbon dioxide release. And anytime you're combusting fuels, you're always going to end up with carbon dioxide. Side, okay.

0:13:57 Thomas: Well, then I guess that brings me to the straightforward, possibly stupid question of, can you explain how nuclear energy actually works just to get our basics down?

0:14:55 Evan: So nuclear, when we talk about power generation, um, aside from, um, solar power, we're almost always talking about the ability to turn a turbine to make energy is that we spin the turbine, you get an electromagnetic field, and you can harness the electricity from that, transmit it wherever you need to. So It's always been a question of how do we turn a turbine. And so, you know, that's why wind energy works is that wind goes over, over the blades and spin them, and you're turning a turbine. Or hydroelectric, you're running water over the turbine and you're turning it. But for things like coal and nuclear, the issue is heat generation. So you're creating a lot of heat in order to convert water into steam, and using that steam, uh, at high pressure to turn your turbine. And, um, you're talking about heat generation, uh, combustion creates a lot of heat. That's why your engine gets really hot when you drive your gasoline car, um, it's, you how steam engines have worked for, you know, know, 150 years.

0:15:21 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds so old fashioned. You're just getting water hot and then steam turns something. I didn't know it was that old fashioned for nuclear.

0:16:18 Evan: Or So It's It's absolutely, it really is the, the next step of the, uh, same fundamental principle. So what it comes down to then in the race between using something like coal or natural gas versus using, uh, something like uranium, it's how energy dense your material is. And, uh, the difference between coal and nuclear is that nuclear fuel is about 10,000 times as energy dense as coal is. So You really only need a very small amount of material, uh, to, um, create enough heat, and then you just put water through that core and, um, it to steam, and you can turn your turbine.

The basic way then that that we create that heat in a nuclear reactor is by the process of, uh, nuclear fission, which is, we have, um, some isotope, uh, in the, um, currently everywhere, everything, everything that everyone uses is that we use an isotope called Uranium-235, um, That's what we call a fissile material, which means that, um, when it's bombarded with neutrons, which are part of the building blocks, one of the fundamental building, building blocks of the nucleus of an atom, neutrons impact the nucleus of the Uranium-235 atom, and it splits apart and creates fission products and a whole lot of heat. So it actually all goes back really interestingly to the famous Einstein equation, E equals MC squared,

0:17:00 Thomas: Hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.

0:18:15 Evan: Where you're converting the mass of the uranium-235 atom, and when it splits apart, you're losing some amount of mass, and that's converted into the energy that we use to heat everything up.

0:18:34 Thomas: Right. And then for some reason you get to multiply like the speed of light involved and then it creates a tremendous amount of energy. How did that, I don't know how that works, but you get just decide, oh wait, it's mc2 too. C2, that's crazy.

0:18:41 Evan: That's Yes. That's Yeah. You get to square the speed of light, which is even better, really. Really, is fantastic

0:18:50 Thomas: Wow. Well, no wonder there's so much energy. It really is a crazy thing to think about. I don't know what, that's an insane amount of enery.

0:18:53 Evan: Um, it. That's, that's the thing, is that it really is an absurd amount of energy that you get for every, um, atom that fissions. We take, take that U-235, and some portion of its mass into energy, boil water that goes through it, and that's what turns our turbines.

0:19:16 Thomas: Simple as that, huh? So what are the challenges? I mean, you always hear about meltdown and that sort of thing. Is it just containing all of it in a safe way? That's the biggest challenge.

0:19:25 Evan: Really is a big part of the challenge. At this point, the biggest challenge to building our most efficient nuclear reactors is a materials problem, is that the materials that we build the core out of, that we hold the fuel in, bombarded with the same neutrons as they spray out during all the fission events. Um, and that the activation of those, what we call activation, which is that that neutron bombardment, um, is actually, uh, can be really detrimental to those, um, those materials, and that we can only keep, um, any given fuel assembly in a core for a fairly short amount of time at this point, um, something on the order of six months, uh, We can keep it in there so

0:19:46 Thomas: Hmm.

0:20:13 Thomas: What kind of time are we talking? Oh, wow. So is that the kind of thing where you're, you're well, okay. First, a basic question. What does it mean for something to be radioactive? What does that mean exactly?

0:20:29 Evan: Uh, radioactivity is, um, uh, emission of energy in the form of, um, very different types of particles from the nucleus, or, um, or the orbiting electrons of an atom. So radioactivity specifically refers to releasing of some sort of particle from the atom, which causes atom to turn into a different atom of another. So, for example, uranium decays by alpha emission, which is basically releasing an entire helium atom from the nucleus of that atom. And so that uranium-238 becomes thorium-234 after that emission. Emission.

0:21:10 Thomas: Hmm.

0:21:22 Evan: Emissions.

0:21:22 Thomas: Well, Just, just to, just ask the dumb question like that. I know, I think, radioactive bad, you know, that, hurt, harms us, can kill you, but that the way you just described it, sound like, oh, it's just giving off helium, what why is that a stupid thing to say? What is it actually doing, huh?

0:21:37 Evan: So it's really a function of what type of the radiation that's being given off. So for the example we were talking about with throwing off a helium atom, that's really not dangerous for an external exposure because, because alpha particles are attenuated almost entirely by something like an inch or two of air.

0:22:01 Thomas: Interesting.

0:22:01 Evan: So if you're more than an inch away from something giving off alpha radiation, you're basically completely protected from it.

0:22:02 Thomas: Oh. Okay, so that's not the kind of thing that's the, that's the hazard suit and all that, what's, how does it become dangerous then, what's

0:22:17 Evan: So there are other types of emissions. So we have beta emission, which is basically an electron, or its antiparticle, or positron, being emitted. And those have a little bit more of a penetrating power, and they have, uh, they travel a little faster, and they have a little bit more energy, uh, and so it's something that you, you know, need to consider, but again, they can be blocked by, you a little bit of glass, or, you know, anything like that, if you have, you know, a thin sheet of, uh, metal in between you and it, you'll never even, uh, feel any of those particles, and then we have, um, gamma radiation, which are, uh, high energy photons. So the same fundamental particles as light, but much higher energy.

0:23:03 Evan: And those have a lot more of the penetrating power, and can interact a lot more from an external dose inside a person's body, so

0:23:08 Thomas: Uh-huh, okay.

0:23:17 Thomas: Sothat I mean, I know you're, I don't, you're probably not a doctor or anything, but, like, Like that, that just messes with our atoms in a way that sounds bad.

0:23:27 Evan: It's something that can come in and, have can interact with atoms, like in people's DNA, and that's where you can see some small amounts of cellular damage and things like that, so we have a whole area of the field called health physics, which basically deals with how radiation impacts the, people's metabolism, and things like that.

0:23:54 Thomas: Interesting.

0:23:54 Evan: And then the final kind of radiation that we usually worry about is the neutron radiation, which is a lot of what you get when you're doing this nuclear fission, because neutrons are what we need in order to propagate, you now, a fission event. You need a lot of neutrons to be flung out from each fission so they impact more of the atoms and can create more fission events.

0:24:20 Thomas: Okay.

0:24:20 Evan: And neutrons tend to be really high energy and can travel through materials pretty well. And that's what we really need to shield against when we're talking about building nuclear reactors.

0:24:37 Thomas: Okay. So you were talking about the containment materials kind of, and you have to change them out in a period of months. Is that when we talk about like where we're dumping nuclear waste, like where are we putting this stuff? Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

0:24:50 Evan: That's a really big part of what we talk about with nuclear waste. Basically, we end up with lots of different types of nuclear waste talking about waste. So we have activation product we were talking about with the fuel assemblies, and with some of the atoms that were in the fuel but were not being directly, and, uh, things like the water that we send through to boil, that can be an activation product, and so we usually keep that in a separate, um, closed loop, so that we can, uh, not worry about it too much, um, and at the same time we have the, um, um, fission products from, from the fuel itself, which, which are the, that are flung off from the fission.

0:25:41 Evan: So every time it fissions, it splits near about in half, and you end up with two new atoms, which are often radioactive themselves. So, a big part, I think, of the misunderstanding of the dangers of nuclear power is in how dangerous the fuel is and how we should be handling spent fuel that we create.

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0:27:49 Thomas: That's $30 off your first week, Try it out, HelloFresh.com, SeriousPod30. Alright and now back to the interview. That I remember there's a John Oliver segment on something about to do with this. There wasn't, there was some nuclear waste that wasn't being managed properly, but why Why is that something that ultimately, I mean, while obviously it's a worry and it's something you have to deal with, for you, it's ultimately not a reason to move away from nuclear power.

0:28:15 Evan: The main thing is that I think that while it's true that this spent nuclear fuel and the, the waste that we get from, um, nuclear energy in total is a dangerous material, and it is, is something that we need to worry about, it is ultimately a solvable problem, is that we have techniques that we can employ that we just currently aren't using in the United States that could significantly mitigate the risks, risks, so

0:28:53 Thomas: Really? So like what? We're not using them?

0:28:56 Evan: There, there are, there are two basic, um, ways that you can deal, um, with the spent fuel that's

0:29:03 Thomas: Yeah. First is you bury it near a town water supply and just hope for the best, right? Is that?

0:29:09 Evan: That's, uh, exactly right, no, uh, in fact, uh, what we want to do ultimately with all these problems is what's called a deep geological repository, which is where we want to find somewhere that is deep underground and is in a geologic formation that is itself a part of the containment for it, so we have started construction in a couple of places, um, one of them, uh, most famously is the Yucca Mountain facility, um, where the, the idea is that it's a giant natural salt formation, and that salt formations like that are, uh, a self-healing, um, formation, so that even if cracks do form in the salt, that, uh, the nature of salt is that it will close off those cracks, and it, um, even in the event of some sort of leak or something like that, that the movement of the material through the, the nuclear material, through the ground, is so slow that by the time it would reach any sort of groundwater supply, we would be looking at of the radioactive material having decayed to like a natural background radiation level.

0:29:36 Thomas: Oh, really? It's that. So I was going to ask that, like how long, because I thought this stuff stays nuclear for, you know, when you think. In terms of, sorry, I have like 10 questions. I'm trying to get into one. First off, and this is in Nevada, so that's fine with me. I mean, we could just put it, we just put on the ground there. I don't even care. You don't have to bury it. It's Nevada.

0:30:46 Evan: Absolutely. Right.

0:30:55 Thomas: I just get rid of most of Nevada. Yeah.

0:30:55 Evan: There's hardly anyone in Nevada anyway. So

0:30:59 Thomas: There's no, nobody's there. It'S okay. No. But when it comes to burying something like that, you know, it does sound like to, to, uh, to my non-expert ears, it sounds like, okay, okay, you're just burying your problem for a minute until, you know, 10, 20, 50 years from now, you've got a ton of this stuff and then you've just buried it. And then ultimately there's going to be a problem, but it does, it does it not have like a thousands of years half-life or what?

0:31:26 Evan: It does have not just thousands, in fact, but tens of thousands of years half-life for some of these products. But things that have very long half-lives don't actually emit that much radiation. So they tend to have a low what we call activity, which is the actual number of radioactive particles that it gives off. Off. So things like uranium have a half-life for different isotopes on the order of 10,000 to 100,000 to a million years.

0:31:33 Thomas: Okay. Wow.

0:32:06 Evan: But that being the case, that means that not very many of their particles are actually spontaneously giving off radiation.

0:32:12 Thomas: So it is as simple as if you're giving off a ton, then your half-live is shorter because you're getting off a time. Like it is that as simple simple as that. Like it's kind of, uh, proportional to, to how much you're giving off or in inversely, I guess.

0:32:25 Evan: That is a big part of of it. And of course, a lot of things decay into other products that also give off radiation. And so it's this, what we call a decay chain until it reaches a stable state.

0:32:41 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:32:41 Evan: And those can be very, very long. But the vast majority of the actual activity in the spent nuclear fuel tends to come from things that have much shorter half-lives, on the order of 30 to 50 years. So things like your cesium-137 or your cobalt-60 or other things like that tend to have much shorter half-lives, certainly on a geological scale. And so they will decay to much lower levels much more quickly. And so you're looking at something like 100 to 200 years before the long-lived actinide take over.

0:33:32 Thomas: So in 200 years, you could dig it up and, uh. Put it in the, put it in your stew and you'll be fine. If you dig it, dig it and eat it like Nevada.

0:33:39 Evan: I mean, I would definitely not recommend that, But um, it is something that needs to be somewhere that we leave it alone for um, as long as possible. So Nevada is perfect, basically, uh, and Texas has been in talks a lot actually for a geologic repository as well, so there's a possibility of building one there, so.

0:33:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, but you said, uh, sorry, just to clear it up. You said we weren't using some of these things in the US, what did you mean by that specifically? Oh,

0:34:09 Evan: That's, that's exactly the problem, is that we started building this um repository in Yucca Mountain and then stopped and have never shipped any of our um spent nuclear fuel there. So, so, so basically the problem is that um, there are a number of sites that handle nuclear waste, but for the most part, um, the The reactors themselves are having to store all of their spent fuel at this point.

0:34:21 Thomas: Yeah, Okay, I because we have, because, so, what, why didn't we put any of our stuff in in Yucca Mountain, was it one of those was, hmm, right, okay,

0:34:45 Evan: It's basically an issue of political will, of the not-in-my-backyard idea of the people of Nevada saying that they don't want to have all this shipped there. And I think a big part of it is succumbing to that kind of political pressure. And not understanding the in which those sort of repositories actually make the problem of spent nuclear fuel of a problem. So our best way of mitigating it is to put it here, but people are more concerned with own fear, basically, about it, uh,

0:35:04 Thomas: Okay, okay, So that is that a reason why some of these plants are shutting down, or or or is that unrelated?

0:35:37 Evan: I, I think that's an unrelated problem, I think those are, those are more about not wanting to have a no,

0:35:38 Thomas: Okay. So it's not as though we're so jammed. So in terms of storing the stuff in the actual plant, because when you said that, it kind of sounded alarming, but is it something that we're not at any sort of capacity yet, or how's that work?

0:35:56 Evan: We're really not at any kind of capacity, so it's another thing that a lot of people don't understand, is how much um of this sort of um high activity, most dangerous waste, waste is produced. So if any given person had all of their energy from nuclear fuel for their entire lives, the amount of this high activity waste that would be produced is about 12 ounces.

0:36:09 Thomas: Yeah. Okay.

0:36:24 Evan: Would be for your entire lifetime usage of all electricity. It's a high volume, it's a high activity, um, the higher volume are a lot of the other kinds of um your various nuclear wastes, which tend to be things like the gloves people were wearing while they were working on some sort of problem, which also, you know, is something that we want to um deal with, but which, which isn't producing a lot of this sort of dangerous activity. It's just something that we need to hold on to for five or 10 years.

0:36:26 Thomas: Wow.

0:36:58 Thomas: There's just just germs on it. No, I'm just kidding.

0:37:00 Evan: And yeah, it's, it're things that get like a little bit contaminated. They get a little big contamination is just having like a little bit of nuclear material or like radioactive material actually physically on it. So like, if you, you know, rubbed your finger on some, you uranium that you could get a little bit of uranium on your finger and then that would be contamination so things are contaminated and you which are going to be very tend to be uh much lower activity and not present nearly the same kind of um long-term problems that we're looking at for

0:37:06 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. But it's still something

0:37:37 Evan: Things like that I'd

0:37:37 Thomas: You want in Nevada. It's just not as, not as dangerous.

0:37:40 Evan: Say we actually have a lot of storage facilities for that kind of waste we, there's a lot of that kind of waste produced in lots of other capacities, so like medical isotopes after they get used need to be shipped somewhere to be stored, but they're also tend to be very short-lived, so it's all these sort of short-lives, short-term storage problems. There are a number of different sites around the country that that handle that kind of that kind of material, the

0:37:41 Thomas: Oh, okay. Oh okay. What gives here? I mean it sounds like it's, it's expensive. I'm seeing, you know, in things I look at that, you know, it does, it doesn't cost a lot. And, and is that, is that all a result of actual cost, is it regulation, is it, is it, you know, both? What do you think?

0:38:25 Evan: The biggest impediment, uh, in terms of cost is absolutely regulation, but that's not to say that this isn't uh something that needs to be regulated because this is absolutely, absolutely something that we need, you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to to be in charge of, and that it's very, it is very important. So a big part of uh these sort of costs are in developing new types of reactors, the, the, the next generation of reactors. So we have, you know, most of the reactors in the country are are aging, um, a lot, which doesn't make them less safe because they um are actually designed for uh very long lives, um, but they're, we are talking about, you know, reactors that are 50 or 60 years old, um, at this point, and that we, you are looking to build new generations of, um, nuclear power plants, but that, that the design process,

0:38:34 Thomas: It might, might be good regulation, yeah, right so

0:39:24 Evan: Uh, is very long for those sorts of things, um, in a large part because of, all the regulations that that we need to meet in order to um ensure the safety of those uh new types of reactors, um and

0:39:39 Thomas: It sounds like there's a lot that goes into, I mean when it already sounds like people are kind of negative on nuclear power in general, and so it's, is it just a question of a lot of factors, of maybe people don't want to invest that time and money into trying to design or invent something new and build something new. And it's just kind of a culminates in we're not, we're not, which is not building any more of them.

0:40:04 Evan: That's basically exactly right, is that without the political will, um, to um make it so that we can build those reactors, build new reactors, and especially next generation reactors, that it really becomes too difficult for private companies to want to stay in the nuclear industry, basically, that, it becomes easier to say like, oh, well, we'll just build a new coal plant because that doesn't take, you know, nearly as much, regulation to get through. And it's it, it seems to be in their short-term financial best interest essentially it's

0:40:33 Thomas: Hmm. Right. Oh man. So the coal jobs are coming back is what you're saying. Oh,

0:40:49 Evan: You know, I, I don't see uh any way in which coal jobs are sustainable in the long term, and that's a big part of the problem, I think, is this idea that we can save all these coal jobs, um, you know, coal is it's a very finite resource, and we're not sure exactly how much longer we have for things like that and how long we can continue using it at that rate. Whereas we know what kind of stockpile of uranium we're looking at, or there are other possible fuels that we could use for nuclear reactions that we haven't even considered in the U.S. or anywhere in the world at this point.

Um, thorium 233 reactors, uh, molten salt reactors, and um other kinds of like next generation reactors that are are not getting a lot of serious consideration, mainly because nobody is mining any thorium because there's no call for it, so there's, you you know, we get a little bit of thorium mined from other kinds of heavy metal mines. We get a lot of thorum out of it, but that on the whole, you know, there's no financial incentive to mine thorium, despite the fact that it's more abundant in the Earth's crust than lead is.

0:42:18 Thomas: Wow. Are there any countries that you think are doing nuclear right? I mean, are, is it anywhere in the world that, um, that people are building plants or, cause you always see when we're looking at renewable energy, it seems like the U.S. is not necessarily leading the way on that. What about nuclear?

0:42:32 Evan: It's actually really interesting thing. One, uh, of the biggest markets for um building new nuclear plants right now is actually China, uh, that China is on track to build some of the first um next gen um nuclear power plants to, uh, there should be opening up in the next couple of years, and then they're building something like 30 to 50 new nuclear power plants in the next 20 years or so. China is really becoming a world leader in nuclear energy right now. And also India has been building a lot of new nuclear facilities, not quite on the same magnitude as China, but It's something they're really getting to, yes

0:43:16 Thomas: Right, well, both very populated places that need a lot of energy and growing places as well. So it makes sense. They have a ton of energy needs.

0:43:25 Evan: And they're quickly realizing it seems to me that uh nuclear is a really great way to meet those energy needs and yeah it really gives them a lot of advantage as sort of energy leaders in the world as they can, you know, point to their their clean energy production. You nuclear energy is one of the lowest carbon intensive forms of energy. It's actually significantly less carbon intensive than either wind or solar energy.

0:43:34 Thomas: Yeah, and not pollute necessarily. Oh,

0:43:59 Evan: It actually, so the production of solar panels and the Production of the parts needed for farms actually uses a lot of their manufacturing, is that you end up in using manufacturing facilities that require a lot of, know, carbon intensive work that they get their energy from coal sources or natural gas sources, and that the mining facilities for those tend to be much more carbon intensive.

0:43:58 Thomas: Really? How does that work out? Uh-huh.

0:44:29 Thomas: Right, I mean, but wouldn't some of the same stuff apply if you're building a nuclear nuclear power plant, you're going to use some carbon energy to do that, right?

0:44:36 Evan: It's It's true, I mean, you're necessarily going to use some, but it's still ranked significantly less either of those, uh, by orders of magnitude less, actually, than one of the, the only things that are less carbon intensive are, um, like geothermal energy, which is, uh, very situational. And Makes It a lot Harder to apply it

0:44:56 Thomas: This must be per unit produced over the lifetime? Do you know how they figure that?

0:45:03 Evan: Is it, I mean, it is also a function of how much energy they can supply, to By, by kilowatt hour, it's, you the carbon intensity of nuclear fuel is next to nothing, um.

0:45:09 Thomas: Okay. So in trying to draw to a close here and summing up, I mean, what should we be doing? I mean, is there any organizations you think are good on this? Is there any measures politically that we should be taking, or just, just trying to increase awareness that this is a good way to go for climate change purposes?

0:45:35 Evan: There are some, um, although not, uh, particularly many, um, organizations who, um, do this kind of trying to get the idea about, uh, nuclear power out. I think that it's, it really needs to be sort of a grassroots movement, where we need to be contacting legislature, legislators, and asking them to invest in nuclear energy instead of investing in solutions that don't provide the amount of the, the kind of energy that we need as a society. So, you know, that that investing money in research for renewable energy sources is really, really important, that research isn't offering us a solution right now, and that we need a solution right now.

0:46:29 Evan: And so it really comes down to contacting, you know, your representatives and your senators and trying to vote for people with, you know, positive energy policy, people who are willing to use nuclear power as part of of their energy portfolio the country.

0:46:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, it's a tough one. It just doesn't seem like it's that politically smart of a thing right now to say, yes, nuclear. It seems to have a bit of a stigma attached to it, so I guess doing work to try to reduce that stigma may help, but it's one of those long-term in battles.

0:47:10 Evan: It's really a public perception campaign It's that we need to spread public awareness about what nuclear can do for us and the sort of anti-science narrative that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster irradiated the entire ocean. And when you see those graphics that show the, you know, all the radiation from there spreading out throughout the water and say, well, actually, that was just a graph of, you know, there's a graphic of ocean currents and had nothing to do at all with, you how radiation had spread from there, you hello, Yes, uh, I really think there's an obscene amount of fake news around that disaster, that it, it's really been a focal point of sort of that anti-nuclear movement, and you, it's really been detrimental, despite the fact that there was no loss of life reported from the disaster itself, and that there's been, that show there's no increased cancer rates at all among the affected people, and this is really something that people are not.

0:47:13 Thomas: Right.

0:47:49 Thomas: Yeah, there's a lot of fake news, involved in that disaster, right?

0:48:24 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I guess, uh, there's, there's always plenty more we could talk about, but, uh, I think in the meantime, I, I, I do, it, it has been something that I've, a position I've had, that I think we ought to do more with nuclear. I also think we're, do, we seem to be, uh, still, um, subsidizing really shitty forms of, you know, energy, I don't know why, and it's like nuclear might be expensive, but we're also, also subsidizing coal and subsidizing oil and stuff. And I think if you take that into account, if we could just really focus into subsidizing better forms of energy, that would do a lot.

0:49:04 Evan: That would be a huge, huge difference if we could work on subsidizing, you forms of energy that are, that are not so, you know, environmentally destructive, and then, you retrain people to work in that industry instead, so we're not losing, you know, sort of this, this job creation, or You Know, we're Losing Jobs, we Could Just transition Them

0:49:22 Thomas: Yeah, there's probably 30 or 40 coal jobs in the entire country that we need to make sure we don't, God forbid, we lay off 75 coal workers in the US or something like that. But yeah, no, sorry, go ahead.

0:49:25 Evan: No You know, just what, once, once we transition into, anyone who works in a coal plant can move and work in a nuclear plant with just a little bit of training. It's not magic that's happening. It's just other jobs that people can be taking over instead.

0:49:46 Thomas: Right Right Well, Evan, thanks so much for, uh, joining me, and, uh, is there anywhere you want to point people online or anything, or are you just content to, to try to educate people on nuclear policy a little bit? Well,

0:50:06 Evan: It's really just my pleasure to be able to talk about something that is really a passion of mine.

0:50:12 Thomas: Excellent, I appreciate a lot, I enjoyed it, and thank you so much for coming on.

0:50:16 Evan: Thank you so much, Thomas.

0:50:42 Thomas: So I was inspired by this recording to do a little more research. There's some great TED talks on this, and I think one thing that people really don't have a handle on, and I would include myself prior to, you know, educating myself on it, is how the nuclear disasters really happened and what the casualties really were and why. Everyone thinks about Fukushima, and we touched on it, there's a lot of fake news, uh, yeah, people, people died, it was, it was horrific, but, uh, most of the deaths, actually, if not the vast, vast majority of them, were because of the decisions made by the government in how evacuation would take place, and rather than... sit tight and try to shelter in place, which is what, in retrospect, should have been done.

0:51:32 Thomas: They attempted to evacuate lots of elderly and people who needed hospice care, that kind of thing, and that was what most of the deaths were. Also in these TED talks that I've watched, and of course there's also sources in those talks, because, you know, to be skeptical of everything, those talks can sometimes be BS, but if you follow up, it turns out that radiation, we get a lot more of it from other things than we would ever get from some of these disasters, and so much more radiation as a result of nuclear testing back in the 60s, that sort of thing. So lots of ways to put these things into perspective, doesn't mean nuclear is completely, completely safe, of course, but nothing is. And I think the key perspective, the thing that I've really learned, and that's made me wish we could do better on nuclear and that we're actually actively building nuclear power plants rather than shutting them down, is how many lives are saved.

0:52:28 Thomas: You don't really factor that in. I mean, air pollution costs millions of lives. Climate change could be catastrophic, it's definitely going to cost lives, that's the sort of thing we don't, we sort of don't factor in when we talk about nuclear, just how much better it is for our air quality, and that's a very real factor. Much as I think we all wish that wind and solar were, were ready for us to just use, it's just, it's just not there, and it's going to take a long time for it to be a significant source of our energy, and nuclear is here now, and it can be safe, and it, it costs zero pollution once it's running, of course, I mean, there is some cost, you got to be accurate in factoring in all the costs of building the plants, and there is some, but over the life of the power, it's so much cleaner than what we're doing now.

0:53:20 Thomas: And we need that, you know, the environment needs it. And it's something that I just don't think enough people are talking about. And in fact, the latest data that I'm finding, and I wish there were more, but I'm not finding good polls on this, but as of 2016, Gallup posted an article indicating that there, for the first time in history, a majority of people, a majority of Americans, opposed nuclear energy.

Now, there's some other sources that say it might not be that way, it might have been how the questions were asked, but you can see the trend line regardless. It's, it's not good either way. I mean, maybe you could argue methodology on some of it, but you can see a clear trend downward. Before Fukushima, it was trending steadily upward and then after that it really, that really did take a toll on people's perceptions and it's unfortunate. A lot about this issue. I'm curious if you're someone who disagrees, if you think we shouldn't be pursuing nuclear. I'd love to hear counter arguments because I think this is a pretty solid case. I think there's more information out there. So, you know, email me, voicemail, whatever. If you disagree, I'd love to hear your arguments and kind of look further into it because I think it's a really important issue.

It's one we should be talking about more either way because the environment is, you know, especially with what Pruitt and what Trump has done to the EPA, I mean, I'm very concerned. So I think this is a key step to reducing global warming, to fighting climate change. Alright, thank you so much for listening, quick note to my patrons, I had promised a bonus episode, well, the travel took a serious toll on me, the last two weeks of travel have just been kind of a nightmare, I often don't factor in just how exhausting it is, and how much I have to catch up on, so I wasn't able to do that, and then also Phoebe got sick, and that ruins everything because then I have to watch her, and it's very difficult to do anything while you're watching an infant. Daycare is awesome until Phoebe is sick, which happens seemingly at least once a month. And that's very frustrating. But I have a guarantee.

I will absolutely have two bonus patron-only episodes per month at a minimum. That will happen. I will get those in. And I am going to talk about, I'm really excited to talk about the article about atheists moving toward the alt-right. I actually, I think you'd be surprised on what I have to say to that.

0:55:51 Thomas: Well, I'll leave it there. That's the bonus episode I intend to do. I'll have it out very soon. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for people supporting at patreon.com/seriouspod or seriouspod.com/support, either way. Thank you a ton. I hope you'll enjoy the bonus episode when I do get it out, and I'll be more prompt when I'm not traveling all the time. Alright, thank you for listening, and I will see you next week!