Air Date 10/11/2024
[00:00:00]
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. Humans' insatiable need for increasing amounts of energy and our tendency to want to at least have the option to wipe entire populations off the map has led to a renewed age of risks related to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and nuclear fallout. Sources providing our top takes in about 45 minutes today includes Vox, CNBC, Our Changing Climate, One Thing from CNN, Democracy Now!, and This Is Not a Drill. Then, in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in three sections: Section A: Energy; Section B: Climate; and Section C: Risk.
Can clean energy handle the AI boom? - Vox - Air Date 10-1-24
LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Data centers are massive, often windowless warehouses [00:01:00] that house thousands of servers that run virtually non stop. Some of the bigger data centers are as big as four football fields and use as much electricity at any given time as 80,000 households. There are more than 8,000 data centers around the world, and the U. S. has more than any other country. In 2022, data centers, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies made up about 2 percent of total global electricity demand.
But by 2026, that number is expected to double, which is like adding the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Sweden.
That big jump from 2022 to 2026 is thanks to rising cloud storage and cryptocurrency electricity demands. But it's also because of the AI boom. We know AI requires a ton of computational power, but it turns out that the amount of electricity it uses is a really difficult question to answer. AI is a huge umbrella term that includes everything from basic statistical models that detect [00:02:00] patterns in data, to generative AI that creates text and images and videos.
That's the most computationally intensive kind. The thing is, The handful of private tech companies that dominate the AI field don't really disclose how much of their energy use is dedicated to AI specifically. If you look at Google's latest environmental report, it clearly states they absolutely don't want to make a distinction between regular workloads and AI specific workloads.
And these companies AI models are mostly closed source, meaning no one knows exactly how they are built. This has left some researchers to try to piece it together on their own. Researchers looked at an open source large language model called Bloom that has roughly the same amount of parameters as GPT 3, and found that training something like GPT 3 required almost 1, 300 megawatt hours of electricity, about as much power as consumed by 130 homes in the U. S. for one year. Today, large language models like GPT 4 have hundreds of [00:03:00] billions of parameters, if not a trillion. And researchers say that the computational power required to train these models is expected to double every nine months. So far, it has mostly been large language models driving the AI energy boom.
ALEX DE VRIES: Of course, that could change going forward. Now we see AI on the rise for image generation and also specifically video generation. So far we talked about training a large language model. Researchers also looked at energy use from people actually using it. It's been estimated by myself and others that a single ChatGPT interaction would take three watt hours, which is comparable to running a low lumen LED bulb for one hour.
So on itself, it doesn't sound like a whole lot, but of course, hey, it's the volume that matters. This is 10 times more than a standard Google search. And of course, if you're talking about millions or billions of interactions, the numbers start to stack up quickly.
LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Alex took another research approach by looking at [00:04:00] the hardware used for AI training and use.
Over 95 percent of the AI industry uses servers made by the company NVIDIA. They could sell 1.5 million of their servers by 2027. He multiplied that by the information NVIDIA publicizes about each of their servers' energy demands. He found that data centers devoted to AI alone could consume around 100 terawatt hours of electricity per year, or about the same as his home country of the Netherlands.
There's a big part of Cathy's question I haven't gotten to yet. Can renewable energy meet the surging demand from the world's data centers?
The good news is that using green energy is the stated goal of a lot of these companies. Both Google and Microsoft have made pledges to be net zero by 2030. But there are signs that AI is disrupting those plans. That's because solar and wind energy can't produce electricity all of the time. And these data centers need to be running all of the time.
ALEX DE VRIES: In most cases, they will just have a [00:05:00] backup connection to the power grid, which will have fossil fuels on it.
LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: It's not just that. Data centers are being built at a rate that renewable energy infrastructure can't keep up with. It can take a year to build a data center, but many more years to get a solar or wind farm on an electrical grid.
Google's 2024 sustainability report showed that the company's emissions rose by 48% from 2019 to 2023, in large part due to its data center energy consumption, suggesting that integrating AI into their products could make reducing their emissions challenging.
There's already evidence in the US that coal plants that were meant to close are staying open because of data centers' electricity demands, and that state utilities are building new natural gas plants for the same reason. But even if these tech companies can look good on their sustainability reports and get to net zero, there's still a problem.
ALEX DE VRIES: The thing is that our renewable energy supply globally is limited. So if we are attributing an increasing part of that to the data center [00:06:00] industry, the consequences that there's less renewables available for everything else, that probably will mean that on the whole, we will end up using more fossil fuels anyway.
LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: With all this context, the answer to Kathy's question is that for right now, we aren't prepared for renewable energy to meet the increasing demand of the world's data centers.
So, what do we do about this? As users, it would be extremely difficult to opt out of backing up our data on the cloud, or even refrain from using AI.
KATHY: I think AI is embedded in so many things that I'm not sure I will have the option to say I'm not using it, you know, I'm out.
LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Researchers like Alex say the best place to start is to force more transparency from these tech companies.
ALEX DE VRIES: In the EU, the AI Act doesn't really force tech companies to disclose anything with regard to the environment. And that's the EU, not even talking about the US yet, which is lagging behind a bit on this matter. [00:07:00]
LAURA BULT - HOST, VOX: Some environmental organizations and local communities are calling for moratoriums on data centers. And some researchers have proposed the idea of an energy efficiency rating so companies and consumers can choose data centers that are the most sustainable.
We could also hope that the servers and data centers will keep getting more energy efficient. But more than anything, this issue emphasizes how desperately we need to be scaling up renewable energy, and fast. Not only to meet the ever increasing data center demands, but so there's plenty of renewable energy to go around.
Why Nuclear Energy Is On The Verge Of A Renaissance - CNBC - Air Date 6-7-22
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: In the wake of the war in Ukraine, the United States is urging domestic producers to step up.
JESS GEHIN: A light water reactor works primarily by using fission reactions to produce heat. Nuclear fission occurs when a heavy atom like a uranium atom is bombarded with neutrons or interacts with neutrons. These particles interact with the nucleus of a uranium atom [00:08:00] and makes it unstable. It splits apart. When it splits apart, it produces large quantities of energy. That energy release heats up in the coolant, which in light water reactors is water. That heated water then produces steam. The steam turns a turbine, which turns a generator, which produces electricity.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Worldwide, there are about 440 operational nuclear reactors that are responsible for supplying around 10 percent of the world's electricity. The United States, once a leader in building out nuclear power plants, has today fallen behind countries like Russia and China.
CAT CLIFFORD: There were several accidents which really affected the public perception of nuclear power. The Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the Chernobyl accident in 1986, and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. There hasn't been much construction of nuclear power recently because of the change in perception after these accidents. And also, in the 90s, the deregulation of the [00:09:00] energy markets in the United States left nuclear power competing with all other kinds of energy on an open market. And in those markets, natural gas is cheaper.
KEN LOUNGO: The sheer volume of money which is required to build large reactors in the United States today, and the amount of time that it takes, is a significant disincentive. Any utility company is going to say, You know what?, it's a lot easier for me to build a gas plant. It's cheaper and people don't care as much.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Aside from challenges around public perception, costs, and construction time, another often cited criticism is the fact that nuclear power plants produce radioactive nuclear waste. Allison McFarland specializes in nuclear energy and nuclear waste disposal and served as chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for two and a half years.
ALLISON MACFARLANE: Once the spent fuel comes out of a reactor, it's very hot, both radioactively and thermally. That material needs to be placed in a pool where there's active [00:10:00] cooling, water's actively circulated, and that keeps that material cool while some of the initial radioisotopes decay away, and then it does get cool enough after about five years that you can remove it from the pool and put it in dry storage, which are basically these concrete and steel casks that sit on a concrete pad and passively cool the material. But yes, that's a safe practice and it's a standard practice all around the world to do that.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: In the US, nuclear waste is stored at the nuclear reactor facilities because there's no national waste repository. Plans to establish such a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been thwarted by local and federal politics. There are some countries like France that also reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
JESS GEHIN: It is possible to take used fuel and process it, recover the useful materials, the remaining enriched uranium, the other fissile materials such as some of the plutonium, and that could be used as fuel in future reactors.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: But that, too, is not a perfect solution
ALLISON MACFARLANE: That costs a [00:11:00] lot of money. We won't do that in the US because uranium is plentiful and cheap.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Another common argument against nuclear power is that we already have other renewables to help us decarbonize.
CAT CLIFFORD: Nuclear is a baseload power source. That means it runs all the time. For renewables to be used all the time, you need to have a huge build out of battery technology. Right now, that doesn't exist.
KEN LOUNGO: Nuclear power in the United States has changed its future and its prospects have changed quite substantially over the last two to three years. There were a number of plants that were in line to be shut down and some were shut down, but a number of states and now the Biden administration has made a determination that you need those plants and there's zero carbon electricity output in order to meet the climate objectives of the country and also at the state level.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: The war in Ukraine has disrupted energy markets in Europe and [00:12:00] reignited conversations around the need for countries to be energy independent.
KEN LOUNGO: In the wake of Fukushima, the German government made a determination to shut down all of their nuclear energy and make themselves even more dependent on Russian natural gas.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Back in the US, one of the plants scheduled to be decommissioned is Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo, California. The state's last remaining nuclear power plant has a long history of anti nuclear protests. Lately, there's been heated debate on whether to extend the plant's lifespan beyond its planned 2025 retirement. The reasons why nuclear power plants are shut down are often complicated and typically come down to political and economic factors.
KEN LOUNGO: The two drivers for nuclear are price and politics.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: But one Diablo Canyon employee says that the clean energy produced by the plant is still needed.
HEATHER HOFF: Part of the reason that the closure of Diablo Canyon was announced so early in 2016, with a nine year lead time, was so that we could prepare and [00:13:00] get more clean energy online so that when we shut Diablo Canyon, we could replace it with clean energy. And we just haven't made much progress.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Heather Hoff has worked at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant for over 18 years. In 2016, she co-founded Mothers for Nuclear, an activist group that supports the protection of existing nuclear power plants as well as the construction of new ones. Still, Hoff says she understands the reluctance to embrace nuclear power, and it's something that she herself struggled with when she started working at Diablo Canyon.
HEATHER HOFF: My family was pretty nervous about me working there, and I was a little nervous as well. I heard a lot of stories of scary things and just didn't really know how I felt about nuclear. I spent the first probably six years of my career there asking tons and tons of questions and eventually changed my mind about nuclear and realized that it was an really good alignment with my environmental and humanitarian values.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Californians seem to be changing their views too. A [00:14:00] recent poll found that 44 percent of voters are in support of building new nuclear plants compared to 37 percent who oppose such a measure. But that's not to say Hoff never questioned her newfound respect for nuclear power. In March, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami. Suddenly, the world had a nuclear disaster on its hands.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Brian, for the first time, Japan declared an atomic emergency at two nuclear power plants, and Japanese officials say they have lost control of two reactors.
KEN LOUNGO: For any existing reactor, what you need is to be able to continue to pump the coolant around the fuel so that it doesn't get too hot and then melt down. And what happens is in Fukushima, the electricity went out, and then in every reactor, there's backup. generation, which is mostly diesel fuel, but the diesel generators in Fukushima were on the ground and were swamped by the tsunami, and [00:15:00] so they weren't able to keep the coolant pumping, and so the fuel melted down. It's sitting at the bottom of the reactor, and then the explosions that you saw was the buildup of hydrogen inside of the reactor containment that then blew.
HEATHER HOFF: I was actually in the control room at Diablo Canyon during the few days when the Fukushima events were unfolding, and it was super scary. And, it's like my worst nightmare as an operator to be there and think about these other operators just across the ocean from us. And they don't know what's going on with their plant. They have no power. They don't know if people are hurt. Some of what I was hearing on TV and the media was pretty scary. But then, like, when we actually learned what was going on, it wasn't as bad as I thought. No one was actually hurt by events that happened at the plant. And that was really surprising to me. So, it kind of went from, like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to quit, to, like, Oh, now I feel even more strongly that [00:16:00] nuclear is the right thing to do.
MAGDALENA PETROVA - HOST, CNBC: Although there have been no direct deaths attributed to the Fukushima disaster itself, over 160,000 people were evacuated from their homes as a result of the tsunami and nuclear incident. About 41,000 have not yet been able to return home. Some experts predict that it will take another 30 years to clean up the Fukushima plant. But there is some good news. A 2021 report concluded that the doses of radiation that Fukushima residents were exposed to are such that future radiation associated health effects are unlikely to be discernible.
Is Nuclear Energy the solution? - Our Changing Climate - Air Date 5-10-19
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: Many proponents of nuclear point to the lack of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants as a major reason to increase nuclear energy production. While this is true for the actual nuclear fission process that creates energy, the processes surrounding nuclear, like uranium mining and refining, demand emissions. A life cycle assessment of various fuels conducted [00:17:00] by the IPCC reveals that the average greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear power production is relatively the same as its renewable counterparts.
But when compared to natural gas and coal, nuclear emissions are drastically lower. So as an alternative to gas and coal, nuclear power is certainly less emissions heavy and could be a viable low carbon energy option. But, waste also comes hand in hand with emissions. This is a big sticking point for the anti nuclear movement, and rightfully so.
No one has really implemented a viable long term solution for nuclear waste storage. There are currently three main options right now: on site storage, long term deep storage, or reprocessing fuel for use in other nuclear energy plants.
Reprocessing spent fuel sounds like a perfect solution. But it's really not. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, one consequence of [00:18:00] reprocessing spent fuel could be the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The byproduct of the recycling process is more plutonium, which can easily be used to build weapons. In addition, only a little bit of the reprocessed waste can be used again, and you're still left with a host of other radioactive materials.
And on top of all that, recycling this waste has a substantial cost tied to it. So ultimately, the only answer right now to our current nuclear waste is long term storage. Unfortunately, the only country that is currently setting up a facility is Finland. The rest just stockpile their waste on site, with no options or outlooks for long term storage.
The other two main elements that really hold back nuclear are cost and safety. Combined, the drawbacks of these make nuclear an infeasible solution to a swift decarbonization of our global electrical grid.
ARJENDU PATANAYAK: The problem with nuclear energy is [00:19:00] that, technologically speaking, it is mature, etc., but it's incredibly expensive and very slow to build.
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: That's Arjendu Patanayak, a professor in the Carleton College physics department who teaches a class on sustainable energy policy. And this cost is in the range of an average of 9 billion per plant in the US, with the possibility of a plant taking up to...
ARJENDU PATANAYAK: They'll take 30 billion in 30 years, which. Is an unusual number to hear for a single plant.
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: With that kind of price tag, nuclear energy production becomes almost twice that of other fuels, all while needing someone with deep pockets to finance the whole operation. Once a nuclear power plant is built, the energy may seem low cost. in part due to a small amount of physical fuel needed to be shipped to the plant.
But the actual construction and decommission costs of these plants are huge financial burdens, especially when you consider that they often run over budget and way past schedule. At this point you may be thinking, but what about a [00:20:00] country like France? Doesn't it support 75 percent of its energy consumption with nuclear power? And hasn't it done so for many years? Unfortunately, France is an outlier, not the norm. Partly, this is due to France's strong nuclear initiatives and top down political approach.
ARJENDU PATANAYAK: France is a top-down kind of governmental system. And so the bureaucrats basically call their friends in the technological world and say, what should we do? And they said nuclear and so, okay, let's keep going
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: In the US and other countries lacking clear plans for nuclear power however, the opportunity to use nuclear as a transition fuel to solar and wind has passed.
ARJENDU PATANAYAK: It would take so much momentum that doesn't seem to exist for nuclear energy to have real legs.
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: Indeed, if we are trying to rapidly decarbonize an energy grid like the US's within the next 10 to 30 years, nuclear power just isn't the answer in terms of cost and time. Part of the prohibitively slow and expensive nature of [00:21:00] nuclear comes from safety concerns, which when you look at death tolls seem to be more of a product of public perception than an actual occurrence.
ARJENDU PATANAYAK: Nuclear power per capita is actually the least harmful.
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: According to a tally accumulated by Forbes, deaths caused by nuclear are much less when compared to coal. natural gas, or even wind and solar. But this low death rate could be due in part to the heavy safety regulations put on nuclear power plants already.
Ultimately, nuclear power is a contentious source of energy. As a result of both the public imagination and the complexity of its system, nuclear requires a large chunk of initial capital and time to become a feasible source of quote unquote clean fuel, a fact which Professor Patanaik agrees with.
ARJENDU PATANAYAK: I personally don't see nuclear roaring back.
OUR CHANGING CLIMATE HOST: A transition away from fossil fuels will definitely involve current nuclear power plants, but [00:22:00] renewables like solar and wind have nowhere near reached their potential, especially once we've sorted out battery storage. Not only are renewables cheap compared to nuclear, they can be produced quickly and spread widely across the globe in a decentralized fashion.
While nuclear does have the benefit of a massive power output, it is a slow and cumbersome beast. If we are to swiftly and effectively transition away from a fossil fuel-reliant grid, we have to explore other energy options.
Three Mile Island Is Reopening. Some Climate Scientists are Thrilled. - CNN One Thing - Air Date 9-25-24
ELLA NILSEN: Nuclear power was starting to fade from our collective consciousness, I feel like after various plant meltdowns.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: This is the first time an incident or accident like this has happened in Pennsylvania, which has five nuclear reactor units involving three power companies, which, of course, includes Three Mile Island.
ELLA NILSEN: In the US, the most recent meltdown was a long time ago. It was the 1979 [00:23:00] Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Within days, schools reopened and families came home. On Three Mile Island, workers eventually found out half the reactor core had melted. It took years to clean it up. And it will be years more, if ever, before nuclear power's reputation fully recovers from what happened at Three Mile Island.
ELLA NILSEN: Three Mile Island closed in 2019, and it's among a pretty large number of aging nuclear plants that shut down. But just last week we learned that Three Mile Island is actually going to reopen in the next few years, and will be selling its power to Microsoft to help power AI and data centers.
The project still has regulatory hurdles to clear, and it's going to be an unprecedented thing in the US, but it's a snapshot about how a lot of players, tech companies especially, are embracing it as a way to generate lots of power with no climate pollution.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Well, so, [00:24:00] before we go any further, Ella, I need you to explain this to me and it's like as simple as you possibly can. How does nuclear energy work?
ELLA NILSEN: So, I feel like we think of nuclear energy as really complex, but it's actually pretty simple. Nuclear energy works by splitting atoms to create heat, which then is basically used to generate electricity by steam turbines. That's essentially what it is.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: And, of course, the upside here is that there are no greenhouse gases emitted, right?
ELLA NILSEN: Correct. Nuclear does not emit any CO2 or methane, the kinds of greenhouse gases that are dramatically warming the planet. It does, however, create nuclear waste, which is something that the US still needs to figure out how it's going to deal with.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Wait, yeah, so tell me about that. Are you saying that there's still a bunch of nuclear waste just sitting around at Three Mile Island and other [00:25:00] sites around the US?
ELLA NILSEN: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. That is currently how we deal with nuclear waste. It is just sitting at about 75 sites all over the US and these sites are power plants that have either shut down or are still going.
I will say, I feel like the general American population thinks of nuclear waste as green goo in barrels, kind of Homer Simpson-esque. However, the way that it is currently stored around the country, nuclear waste is essentially metal rods that, have radiation in them, and they are essentially put into these huge concrete casks that stop the radiation from getting out into the air and the environment. And so these things are being stored safely and can be transported safely. But it still, I would say, looms very large in the American imagination as something that is bad and dangerous.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Right. I mean, [00:26:00] we saw in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island incident, there was a lot of concern from the community that even though the government was telling them, Yes, this is all safe, there's no actual problems to your health, I think there are still people to this day who feel like there's been adverse effects.
ELLA NILSEN: Yeah. And there are lots of different places all over the country. Nevada was supposed to be the host site of Yucca Mountain, which was supposed to be the deep geologic formation that was going to store all of America's nuclear waste.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Energy department officials hope 70,000 tons of the most lethal atomic leftovers can be safely stored deep within the mountain for 10,000 years. Putting that in perspective, 10,000 years ago, man was just learning to use stone tools.
ELLA NILSEN: That has never actually been done because public opposition was so fierce to it that it stopped the projects in its tracks.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: But the powers in the capital, Carson City, have been fighting back in court to block Washington at [00:27:00] every turn, calling the Yucca Mountain site perilous, refusing to issue environmental permits. Seems like the government just slapped it up here and said this is where it's gonna go.
ELLA NILSEN: There are a lot of different communities around the country that are still really fearful about nuclear waste and what a nuclear meltdown might mean for our community.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: So, with all that said then, why is nuclear being talked about more as a possible solution to the climate crisis?
ELLA NILSEN: Nuclear is a really good way to generate the electricity that we are going to need, not just for AI and data centers, although that's certainly a big piece of it, but in order to really decarbonize the US. We are going to be driving electric cars. There's a big push for people to electrify our homes. Like, we're going to need a lot of electricity and clean electricity in order to really bring US emissions down. Currently, the US gets about 20 [00:28:00] percent of its power from nuclear. And nuclear has some major pros. It can stay on at all times. It's really reliable. It's easily dispatchable. But there's a push for more nuclear and different kinds of nuclear.
BILL GATES: Yeah, we've been willing to go back to the basics and do what people have always said should be done, which is to cool the plant with metal instead of water.
ELLA NILSEN: Bill Gates, I don't know if you've heard of...
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Heard of him, yes.
ELLA NILSEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, heard of Bill Gates. He's investing, in this big project in next generation small modular nuclear reactors in Wyoming.
BILL GATES: And that means that this problem of high pressure and extra heat when you shut down is completely solved. And so the complexity—that's meant that nuclear has gotten more complex and more expensive as it's gone from first to third generation—we changed that utterly.
ELLA NILSEN: It won't be operational until at least 2030, but it's a really interesting look at the future. And the [00:29:00] US is racing currently to make fuel for this next generation of nuclear reactors, in part by melting down old nuclear warheads from our stockpile.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: It's like weapons into energy.
ELLA NILSEN: Yes, literally old weapons into the energy of the future. The problem is in the US we and other countries have been reliant for decades on Russia for our enriched uranium. That's ending soon because Congress recently passed a ban on importing Russian uranium into the US but we need to now enrich it at other facilities, really start this supply chain from scratch.
Then—we've just been talking about nuclear fission, which is just the standard nuclear energy that has been powering reactors for years—there's also nuclear fusion, which is this holy grail energy of the future, which could really give us a limitless [00:30:00] supply of energy. There are fears that China could be eclipsing the US in nuclear fusion development, and that'll be a hugely important technology to be the first country to get right.
The private sector won't be enough to back the kind of widespread investment that's needed on nuclear, so people are looking to the government to really get this going.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Well, that's kind of what I wanted to ask. Do we know, in terms of the government, what a future President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump feel about expanding nuclear energy in the ways that you're talking about?
ELLA NILSEN: Yeah, so Democrats and Republicans are both pretty into nuclear energy. It's like one of the sort of rare bipartisan, clean energy forms in the US...
DONALD TRUMP: but on the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that.
ELLA NILSEN: Trump isn't as opposed to nuclear as he is to other forms of energy. Like wind, he bashes a lot.
DONALD TRUMP: Starting on day one we will end Kamala's war [00:31:00] on American energy and we will drill, baby, drill. We're gonna drill, baby, drill. That's gonna break down...
ELLA NILSEN: You know, he doesn't really love solar, but the important 'but' here is that Trump wants to slash government funding in general and gut a lot of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, which could be a big problem for nuclear.
KAMALA HARRIS: ...the young people of America care deeply about this issue, and I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels, we have...
ELLA NILSEN: The bottom line is the US needs a president and an administration to keep federal investment at current levels, at least, or even invest more when it comes to nuclear energy.
DAVID RIND - HOST, ONE THING: Is that just because it's so darn expensive?
ELLA NILSEN: It's really expensive, but also with things like fusion, I mean, these are technologies that are still pretty nascent, and they just need a lot more development [00:32:00] and a lot more work to get right and get to a commercial level.
Warnings of Nuclear Catastrophe as Power Plants in Russia and Ukraine at Risk Amid Escalating War - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-29-24
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This extreme situation at the Kursk nuclear plant, the head of the IAEA has said that it is an old plant that doesn’t have much of the safety mechanisms. Can you explain what’s happening there? That’s in Russia. It’s been invaded by Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And also, what’s happening with Zaporizhzhia, which is in Ukraine, but it’s occupied by Russia right now, and it’s the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, Vladimir?
VLADIMIR SLIVYAK: So, the situation on the Kursk nuclear plant is getting worse and worse by, basically, every day. There is fighting between Russia and the Ukrainian army — well, it was officially said it was in the [00:33:00] few kilometers from a nuclear power plant. And today, Russian army already said that Ukrainians been trying to get into the city that is next to a nuclear power plant, where the workers from the plant are leaving.
And it’s true that it’s very old reactors. It’s very similar to the one that exploded back in 1986 in Chernobyl, causing the largest nuclear accident in humankind history. And right now situation, well, you can call it worst of the worst, for the reason that those are very old reactors. It’s not protected, but can’t contain them. And, well, for example, Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, it’s more protected. I mean the reactors itself. In Kursk, reactors are not protected, and basically any big rocket, missile or the bomb dropped on the reactor itself [00:34:00] may lead to a very big nuclear accident. I wouldn’t say it’s going to be second Chernobyl, but it could be very, very big, with a radioactive release approaching a few countries that are close to Russia.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Matt, if you can talk more about what has taken place, this huge change in the last weeks, with Ukraine invading Russia, not clear how Putin will respond, and how he’s responded so far, and Zelensky saying at this point he’s not interested in any discussion of a ceasefire or any kind of peace deal?
MATT DUSS: Right. Well, I think what we’ve seen over the past months, before this incursion, was Ukraine being a bit more aggressive in the way it was striking sites inside Russia, specifically sites that were used to launch rocket and drone attacks inside Ukraine. They were restrained from doing that for a long [00:35:00] time by their U.S. and European partners out of escalation concerns — once again, I think reasonable escalation concerns, given the nuclear aspect here. But I think they showed that those escalation concerns may have been slightly overblown, given Russia’s relatively muted response to those attacks. And once again, I think we should note that attacking sites being used to launch missiles, rockets and drones into Ukraine is a pretty legitimate tactic.
But what we’ve seen just over the past week is, you know, actual U.S. — excuse me, Ukrainian military forces invading into Russia, the first time, I believe, since World War II that Russia’s territory has been invaded by a foreign army. And I think part of the approach here is, again, to kind of turn the tables and show that Russia is not immune to these incursions. It’s certainly a propaganda loss for President Vladimir Putin, though it’s hard to say what Russians are actually [00:36:00] seeing, given the almost complete control that the Russian government has over what Russians are allowed to see in their media. But I do think just taking the initiative, as we saw about a year and a half ago in the first counteroffensive, I think that’s one benefit of this, is for just Ukraine to show that it is not simply on its back foot and defending, it is now taking the initiative and taking the fight into Russia.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Vladimir, if you could speak about the Rosatom State Corporation, which is the Russian state corporation focused on nuclear energy, and its role in the occupation of Zaporizhzhia, Russia having replaced France now as the world’s leading player in international nuclear power plant production?
VLADIMIR SLIVYAK: Well, first of all, it’s not just a nuclear corporation. It’s a military organization. In fact, it’s part of the Russian government. And it’s in charge of a nuclear weapon and civil — so-called civil nuclear power in [00:37:00] Russia.
But it’s also being used by Vladimir Putin as an instrument of geopolitical fight around the world. Like, Russia is going around to different developing countries, proposing them to build new nuclear power plants of Russian design, even giving them loans because most of the developing countries cannot pay such big sums of money, because, well, like, one Russian nuclear power plant with, let’s say, two reactors in it would cost over 10 billion of American dollars, and not many developing countries can afford it. So, Russians would just loan this money to other countries. And in exchange, they get, well, basically, economic control and some sort of political control over those countries, because once you sign up with Russian Rosatom to build reactor in your country, you get into dependence. It’s dependence on [00:38:00] Russian engineers, Russian technology, supplying of Russian fuel — nuclear fuel, I mean. And also, when the nuclear plant will go offline because it’s old, you will be dependent on the decommissioning technology, which is also coming from Russia. And we’re talking about roughly 100 years or even 120 years, you know. So, new nuclear power extension that Rosatom is doing around the world are under order of Vladimir Putin, its extension because Vladimir Putin wants more control over developing world. He wants to use developing world in his, well, opposition to the West, I would say.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And we also have to say that the Kursk nuclear power plant is similar to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which melted down in 1986.
Are we facing a new nuclear arms race? - This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler - Air Date 9-17-24
ANKIT PANDA: During the Cold War, nuclear [00:39:00] weapons were threats to other nuclear weapons, right? The United States and the Soviet Union by the 60s and into the 70s and 80s had adopted practices in nuclear targeting that privileged destroying the other side's nuclear forces. So, that was designed to limit damage. This was the jargon in nuclear strategy calls this counterforce. One of the examples in which technologies have changed today is that we actually live in an era where non nuclear weapons can pose threats to nuclear weapons as well. So you have, for instance, in the East Asian context and in the European context, for that matter, a whole bunch of American allies building conventional weapons capabilities that could be used to destroy nuclear capable launchers in North Korea, in China, in Russia, command and control facilities, leadership facilities. The precision revolution has now been playing out for a few decades, but the implications for nuclear stability, I think, are often overlooked.
But that's just one example. We're also in this era of [00:40:00] disinformation, the proliferation of artificial intelligence capabilities, non-kinetic means of interfering with the adversaries' computer systems, so cyber attacks, all of this can, I think, cut against nuclear operations in ways that could have significant escalatory effects.
But you also have old technologies that have gotten better, missile defense capabilities, I think, are the classic example there. Missile defense was once seen as highly destabilizing in the context of the Cold War. But as I think we now see with Ukraine, some of the cases where missile defenses have been used successfully by the Israelis, tactical missile defense is starting to take on significant salience for many countries, which also has implications for how strategic missile defense, for instance, for the US homeland is going to, I think, factor into debates here in the United States. So just a little taste of some of the technological change that bears on nuclear escalation.
GAVIN ESLER - HOST, THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Could I pursue a little bit of the politics now with Jake Sullivan, President Biden's National Security Affairs Advisor. He said, "the United [00:41:00] States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them".
So, nuclear deterrence has never really demanded nuclear superiority. I get that point. But what is he on about there? Is he suggesting that they have enough conventional weapons which are possibly able to deter because they could also attack nuclear facilities in countries that seem to be proposing a threat?
I'm not quite clear what that's about, that statement.
ANKIT PANDA: Yeah. So, Sullivan made those remarks last year. And since then, there've actually been other speeches by senior members of the Biden administration, not quite as senior as Jake Sullivan, indicating that actually the U S might need to prepare for a future where we do need additional nuclear weapons.
But you referenced this idea of nuclear superiority. It's one of the open debates in our field. I personally would agree with you that nuclear superiority does not deter, but the question of how difficult nuclear deterrence is, is really one of the fundamental dividing questions in the field of nuclear strategy.
You can go all the [00:42:00] way back to debates in the 1960s between figures like Thomas Schelling on the one hand and Albert Wohlstetter on the other that very nicely state the two sides of this debate. I would argue that Wohlstetter—who famously described the balance of terror that underpins nuclear deterrence as being delicate—really, in many ways, carried the US establishment, I think in the United States. If you talk to members of the military involved in nuclear operations and targeting, they would evince a belief that numbers do matter. The precise contours of force structure matter.
What Sullivan says, though, is really important, right? He is pointing out that the US is now facing an unprecedented problem. This problem is now known as the two-peer problem. For decades, the United States has only had to contend with one adversarial nuclear arsenal that is in the vicinity of being quantitatively in the realm of what the United States feels. And that's of course, the Soviet Union and later Russia's arsenal.
But now China is building up. And so the unprecedented [00:43:00] problem is that by the mid 2030s, the United States will have significantly more nuclear warheads pointed its way than it will be able to field in return unless a change is made today.
Now, for deterrence, the only thing that needs to obtain is that the adversary understands that pursuing a course of action that is inimical to US interests will not yield him or her advantage, or it may be unlikely to succeed. But you have two approaches basically to deterrence, you can threaten punishment or you can communicate that you have the capabilities to deny benefit. Neither of those necessarily depends on precisely ensuring that numbers match what an adversary can bring to bear.
But, going back again to counterforce, which has been this really, really strong undercurrent in US nuclear strategy since the 1960s. If the goal is to have the ability to hold at risk adversary nuclear capabilities. So, let's just use some numbers here. China's [00:44:00] building about 1500 (is what the Pentagon says) by 2035. Let's say they put that on their 300 plus nuclear silos, submarines, ground launch missiles for theater purposes. The US would need to add warheads to have the ability to hold all of those capabilities at risk in addition to simultaneously holding everything at risk that we hold today at risk in Russia, and that, of course, demands a buildup.
Now, the question for anybody concerned about an arms race is why would Russia and China tolerate that? Why would they tolerate an American nuclear force that is cumulatively as large as their combined nuclear forces? The answer is they probably wouldn't. And the other question that I think we need to ask ourselves is, in the field of nuclear strategy, we think about worst case scenarios.
During the Cold War, the worst case scenario really was a Soviet first strike against the United States. Today, it is not uncommon in Washington in certain circles to hear genuine concern about Russia and China collusively contemplating a first strike against the United States. Now, for anybody that watches the Russia-China relationship, sure, they're [00:45:00] partners. They work closely together. Xi and Putin have a lot of shared grievances. Are they ever going to collusively carry out a first strike on the United States? Probably not. But if you're a military planner in Omaha, Nebraska, at US Strategic Command, you cannot rule that scenario out, right? You mentioned this idea of thinking about the unthinkable and these are the kinds of scenarios now that American planners have to take into account seriously.
GAVIN ESLER - HOST, THIS IS NOT A DRILL: I do get that, but I expect also listeners of a certain age will remember MAD—mutually assured destruction—and will say, This is mad, I mean, both in the common sense and also in the sense of looking at those initials and what they mean. In other words, we don't really need to spend a lot of time thinking much more on this, even because Russia and China have got grievances with each other that perhaps receive less treatment in the media than they should.
ANKIT PANDA: Yeah. There's other wrinkles to this, too, for the United States, right?
So we in the United [00:46:00] States extend our nuclear deterrent to 34 other countries: the members of NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. And each of those capitals has a stake in the decisions the United States will make about the future of its nuclear forces. And of course, no two allies are alike. You'll get very different answers in Berlin, in Warsaw, in London, in Paris, in Seoul, in Tokyo, in Canberra, about what the United States ought to do about this. But in the coming years, as these debates are hashed out in Washington, American allies will have a stake in the outcomes here. And of course this is a conversation we're also having against the backdrop of a presidential election where you have two candidates with very, very different ideas about the obligations the United States has to its allies around the world. So that, too, I think, factors into a lot of what we're talking about.
Note from the Editor about the nature of humans and energy use
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with Vox explaining the energy uses of the AI boom. CNBC looked at the renewed interest in nuclear energy. Our Changing Climate highlighted the disconnect in [00:47:00] timeframes between the climate and nuclear energy. One Thing discussed the evolving design strategies for nuclear plants. Democracy Now! highlighted the extreme danger when war and nuclear power mix. And This is Not a Drill look at the nature of nuclear deterrence.
And those were just the top takes, there's a lot more in the deeper dive sections. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed the you'll receive sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, there's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but anyone, depending on the app you use, may be able to use the time codes in our show notes to jump around similar to chapter markers, so check [00:48:00] that out. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue onto the deeper dives half the show, I have a few thoughts on the nature of energy usage that I think anyone wanting to address climate change needs to come to terms with. The crux of it is something called Jevons paradox, and the basic idea is that as a commodity becomes more efficient and therefore cheaper, demand for that commodity goes up. It happened with coal production, that's what the guy Jevons was originally talking about, but it was that same idea that also describes why adding an extra lane to alleviate traffic congestion just ends up inviting more traffic. The extra lane makes driving more efficient, therefore more people do it up to the point when it becomes too congested again.
Starting around the turn of this century, [00:49:00] there was a lot of talk about switching to more energy efficient light bulbs. Like compact fluorescents and LEDs, which are 90% more efficient than the old style. Doing this in the home. Definitely reduces energy consumption, but with the availability of such cheap and efficient lights, it also opened the door to a lot more use cases for lights that we just wouldn't have considered before. One article points to the Las Vegas sphere and it's 1.2 million LEDs as an example. So globally, even though lighting efficiency has gone way up, we collectively use about the same amount of energy on lighting now, as we did about 15 years ago.
For another example, many years ago, we all started learning about the energy usage required to run the internet in general, as well as specific use cases like spam. We don't think generally of sending an email as an energy intensive thing, but once you add them all up, they actually do take their [00:50:00] toll. Now in more recent years, crypto and crypto mining came on the scene with its absurd energy usage, all for the purely philosophical supposition that it's the mining of crypto that gives it its value, which I think is a pretty perverse idea of value. Now even more recently, AI has come along with their chat bot queries that require something like 50 times more energy as a regular Google search.
And the problem with our relationship with energy is that as people who live in societies with 24 hour electricity, barring acute emergencies, we think of it as basically limitless. And when something is seemingly limitless, we feel no compunction about using more of it. We may individually want to use less of it for the sake of climate change or a company may strive for efficiency for the cost benefits or the social credit they'll get, but collectively, if there's a halfway decent reason [00:51:00] to use more energy, like building a light up sphere in the desert, making fake money, that's just real enough to sell to other people, or making the faustian bargain inherent in new technology that may deliver us from our woes or destroy us entirely, we are going to use that energy in those cases.
There's been a concern for a long time. Now that focusing on efficiency may actually backfire, and targeting renewables to be able to replace carbon emitting sources of energy has always been guaranteed to be too little too late if we don't also consider the inevitable growth in our consumption. I fear that the alternate option to this Jevons paradox we keep falling into is a world in which we are actually bumping into our power limits, experiencing rolling blackouts and brownouts as our demand exceeds our supply.
Now in theory. [00:52:00] That's one way to fight climate change—don't focus on efficiency so much, just put a hard cap on usage—but it's the sort of thing that would backfire into fascism immediately. Blackouts due to a lack of power is one thing, imposed blackouts, or even the threat of blackouts due to a government policy to artificially limit energy usage when we could theoretically generate more, that'll get people angry.
So where does that leave us? Ultimately, we are probably in another progress trap. Using more and more energy as a society has always been beneficial to humans, right up until it becomes catastrophically unhelpful. Just like Jevons paradox, progress traps have happened again and again, and climate change is the biggest one of all time. So when it comes to an all-of-the-above energy strategy, I'm in favor of that concept consisting of [00:53:00] philosophical and sociological strategies to keep energy usage as low as possible, like building walkable communities so that the easy thing to do is also the cleanest and most efficient. But also recognize that humans are going to keep demanding more and more energy, and when they demand it, what we have to offer had to better be as clean as we can get it.
Solar and wind or good starts, we should keep going on that path. Geothermal may be on the brink of a revolution as incorporating fracking technology of all things can make geothermal feasible in many more places than ever before, and it is incredibly efficient once it's set up. Thinking farther out, space-based solar power and the theoretical Dyson Sphere may even be in our future. But in the meantime, I do find it difficult to imagine a world in which nuclear doesn't need to be part of the mix. That's where I sit right now. [00:54:00]
I guess what I'm saying is that if we continue to follow our nature, then we can either pave the way for a fascist backlash against environmentalism, or we can be destined to become the aliens from independence day, roaming from planet to planet to scavenge for resources. If we want to find another path, I really think it's up to the philosophers rather than the engineers to steer us in a new direction.
SECTION A - ENERGY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up, Section A: Energy. Followed by Section B: Climate and Section C: Risk.
The Renaissance of Nuclear Power Part 2 - The Energy Gang - Air Date 1-27-23
MELISSA LOTT: One of the things I would really love to dive into before we run out of time are the concerns that people have about nuclear power. And it goes back to something I said earlier, actually, about the future not looking like the past nuclear power. And I'm not going to recap the great safety records or any of that stuff. I'm just saying when people look at the future of nuclear, often I run into these conversations where they think it's a replication of the past. And with these new technologies, how do they or do they address some of the [00:55:00] biggest concerns that people do have around what having nuclear power means? So if we could touch on that, I think it's an important part of this conversation.
KATIE HUFF: I would love to come back to a comment that Carl made about his dad being anti institutional rather than anti nuclear. And I think this comes and points directly at a concern about nuclear that is rooted in distrust of large institutions, particularly large, you know, utilities or large companies that make big engineering projects, or the Department of Energy itself.
Trust is absolutely critical in our ability to build this out. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides trust. Their incredibly high standards worldwide provides trust internationally. But we also have to make good on our promises. And in the Department of Energy, for example, spent nuclear fuel is one of those promises. We are legally required to begin taking spent fuel from the sites where it currently sits and waits for a final destination. And [00:56:00] during the time in my office, we've been able to restart a process for consent based siting of an interim storage facility that would reduce the number of those interim storage facilities across the country.
There's many of them at the sites where that fuel is generated, and we like there to be a single consolidated one or maybe a couple. We need to find a site that recognizes and centers the energy justice inherent in that. So I would touch on the trust that we need to meet for nuclear spent fuel management in the United States. And that's on me. And we're taking it very seriously in my office. And I hope we're starting to rebuild some of that trust. But I would say it is infiltrated throughout. Many questions people have about nuclear reactors, even just the cost overruns, are a matter of trust. Do you trust a company to meet the cost and schedules that they've promised the public utility commissions, for example? It's about trust.
MELISSA LOTT: Yeah, I'm actually having a flashback really quick on just that comment. And I remember it was, I believe, Steph Spears who said this at the Aspen Ideas [00:57:00] festival last summer that was talking about. She said that, I'm going to paraphrase, you can find the direct quote online at the video of the event. But it was that these things move at the speed of trust.
Like that's the core of this so I just, I'm hearing it in what you say, Katie, and actually something you said earlier, Carl, about regulation. And just to give a little more background, Ed, I didn't say this earlier, but I grew up in a Navy family. Admiral Rickover is like childhood stories to me. And the nuclear navy, I mean, I grew up on that stuff, but I thought of nuclear as being this thing in a submarine, you know, and then I became a power plant, you know, more aware person around power plants later. But I just think that phrase I keep coming back to, and it's not just with nuclear, but I think it certainly applies here. But Carl, I'm sure you want to jump in on this topic too.
CARL PEREZ: I think trust is super important, but also the messengers. And what you're seeing much more of is these public advocacy groups that are grassroots movement. None of them are paid for by the utilities or anything. These are just concerned citizens. I mean, I see it here in New York. Thanks to nuclear New York, NySErda finally decided to include [00:58:00] advanced nuclear. Right. So what's also interesting is I think we spent a lot of time as an industry and myself admittedly trying to say, well, what you think of the passive nuclear is not actually what you think it is. And I think we should try to, and obviously opinion, but stop trying to focus on saying, let's agree on the past and let's agree on the future.
Let's agree on what we want nuclear to look like together.
That was really the focus of what we tried to do when I as an undergrad at 21 years old, tell myself, hey, let me start a nuclear energy company. What emboldens me in that moment is when I start learning about a scientist like doctor Alvin Weinberg, who was at the head of Oak Ridge and was one of the first environmentalists talking about carbon in the air and how problematic it is before so many other people were discussing it and him saying, we should better utilize our resources. And so he was one of the co inventors of the light water reactor and the Moen saw reactor. So obviously where I had my passion for the Moen saw reactor. But when you start looking at the technology and you start looking at the people beyond just Alvin Weinberg, Eugene Wigner and so many other engineers years, when you [00:59:00] add that personality and that humanity to it, you realize, okay, these are people who really wanted to do the right thing and were willing to take the risk because at the time, those rates and working in those labs was not the same thing as working in the labs today. And they were willing to take those life risks to make sure that we have a good future.
ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Yeah, no, that is a great point. I always think about one of the best lines on this I've ever heard was from the chief executive of electricity de France, who was talking about France's nuclear program. And he said, all countries have different endowments of natural resources. Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil, Scotland has a lot of wind. California has a lot of sun. In France, we have a public that's happy with the idea of nuclear power. That's our natural resource, and that's what we have to build on. Which was very funny and said it at a conference. Got a big laugh in the room. There is something to it. But also, as you've been saying, it's not a fixed endowment. People can change their minds, people can be persuaded. I think the polls always are highly unclear on [01:00:00] nuclear power, and it depends a lot how you ask the question and so on. But it does seem to be the case that there has been a shift in general, in public opinion in the United States and some other countries to being more pro nuclear over the past decade or so. Certainly there was a huge setback after.
CARL PEREZ: Fukushima just for the messengers. France. What they also did, which really changed the opinion in the recent two, three years, is they're injecting €1 billion into their nuclear industry for innovation. And more than half of that is destined to create a private sector, because they see that in the United States, there's a private sector and that we're all competing on price. And so utilities are looking at different costs, they're doing due diligence, and that's really what's helping the innovation move forward, because we're all pushing each other to progress. And I think France, because of its very nationalized nuclear industry, coming back to anti institutionalism, that was the reigning factor. In fact, three years ago, when they did a poll on nuclear, 60% of french people thought that nuclear energy generated carbon emissions.
ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: That's amazing. [01:01:00] One thing I worry about particular moment is, of course, the situation at Zaporozhazia in Ukraine. When you've been talking about, as you say, Poland, Ukraine, other countries in central and eastern Europe being very interested in new nuclear development because of the energy security benefits that they see. The situation in Zaporozhugier is really quite alarming. It seems to me. If you look at the recent statements from the International Atomic Energy Agency, they've been saying it's very important that the site be kept secure to avoid what could be a very serious problem. There and issues both with getting power supplies on the site, maintain cooling systems and so on, and potentially with damage. There's been missiles and shelling kind of around the plant quite a lot. There's been some quite intense fighting in that region over the past couple of weeks. Katie, maybe get specifically your thoughts on this and how the administration is thinking about this. Is this something which is a particular concern? How [01:02:00] worrying do you think that situation in Zaporozhyzia is right now?
KATIE HUFF: Yeah, it's an unacceptable situation. No country should turn a nuclear power plant into an active war zone. Combat operations in the vicinity of any nuclear plant are dangerous. They're irresponsible, they're unnecessary. Nuclear reactors are incredibly safe, but, you know, are not designed to withstand targeted military assault. And, you know, the heightened risks of a nuclear incident at Zap are the result of, of Russia's unprovoked invasion. And, you know, they've controlled a dangerous military presence at that site and they've been unwilling to turn control back to Ukraine for safe and secure operations. They've damaged power lines in the vicinity, which increased the likelihood of a loss of offside power event, which we have seen many times over the course of this invasion. And that kind of loss of offside power event, if extended, can increase the likelihood of the reactor failing to cool itself and therefore causing a meltdown, which is then a problematic situation for the reactor. Now, we haven't seen that [01:03:00] transpire because of the heroic efforts of folks repairing those transmission lines. But what it really draws out is a couple of things. One, it's just not acceptable. But two, when we look at a future of nuclear power in Ukraine, as you noted earlier, there's interest from Ukraine in building more nuclear. And the designs that they would likely select are going to leverage some of the passive safety features that would allow longer periods of walk away safety in the event of a loss of off site power event.
So, for example, the Westinghouse SCP 1000 has 72 hours after the beginning of such an event where you don't have to do anything. There's no human intervention required at all. And even after that 72 hours period, the human intervention is extremely minimal. And so you really are in this place where we've learned over many decades what to do to design reactors that are robust even to that totally unacceptable situation.
The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste - Huge If True - Air Date 5-10-23
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: This is Argonne National Laboratory. We're gonna get to go see the research that they're doing. And they have been doing research on nuclear power since, like, before I was born. Hold on. Do you recognize that name?
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: [01:04:00] Argonne National Laboratory. Yeah,
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: this was the same national lab that developed that incredible old nuclear waste recycling reactor.
But I didn't know that yet. So we go on this incredible tour. It's awesome. I'm learning a ton. I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm gonna be so overprepared to talk to Johnny about nuclear power. And on this tour with me are these two people from Oklo, which is a company that's working on new kinds of nuclear reactors.
And at the end of the tour, I'm sitting with them under this beautiful, Big tree and one of them says something that just short circuits my brain.
SPEAKER 1: So we're actually working with Argonne closely on how to recycle existing nuclear waste in the us. There is enough use fuel to power the country for the next 150 years.
Wait, I'm sorry. What? There is enough use fuel in the country in the US alone. to generate power for the country for the next 150 years.
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: There's enough used fuel, meaning nuclear waste, in the U. S. to power the country for 150 years. Like, you can see me not believing her. I think it's some fake math. Like, [01:05:00] maybe technically there's enough energy there, but like, we could never really use it.
We don't know how to do that. Or it's like when they say, you know, geothermal, you can power the earth for like, Thousands of years if we could get all of the energy out of the earth. It's like yeah We can't we don't know how to do that. Do we know how
SPEAKER 1: to yeah, we just don't have the facility Commercial facility to do so but the technology is there
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: experts differ on the exact number of years here But they agree that the nuclear waste we have now It could be used as a large energy source, based on technology that we've already built.
But it gets even better. If you reuse that nuclear waste, especially if you reuse it more than once, you can dramatically cut down on the amount of time that the waste after all of that's done is radioactive for. So the amount of time that we have to store our nuclear waste. The problems are cost and global politics, not fundamental technology.
Here we go. By the time I got to DC to talk to Johnny about this, I was Obsessed. Hello!
JOHNNY HARRIS: How's it going? Good morning! Welcome to our studio.
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: We have all of this nuclear [01:06:00] waste, right? And it is scary. But imagine that there was a way that you could actually not just store it, but actually use it.
JOHNNY HARRIS: So you can use nuclear waste as fuel for more energy.
You can recycle
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: nuclear waste. You can
JOHNNY HARRIS: recycle nuclear waste. Yes.
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: And I dug all the way into this in a video that I'm now going to promise is going to be on my channel by the time we air this one. This is that video. To understand what's going on here, you have to understand that nuclear waste isn't what you've been told.
Basically all of the electricity that you use, except solar, comes from spinning a turbine. It's magic. Most of the time inside a power plant what you're really doing is you're heating up a liquid into steam and using that to spin the turbine. The most common way to do that is still burning stuff near it.
That's fossil fuels. But you could also use liquid that the earth already heated up for you. That's geothermal. Or You can split atoms apart inside special rocks and make them really hot. That's nuclear. And the special hot rocks are uranium. Uranium. Uranium 235. Uranium. Uranium fever. But only a [01:07:00] really small part of natural uranium, less than 1%.
is a kind of breakable uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction. This is uranium 235. The number refers to the number of neutrons in the atom. So typically, uranium goes through a process called enrichment, which is making more of the uranium 235 out of the less useful uranium 238. By the time that's all done, your fuel looks like this.
If you take your finger up to your first joint, that's about the size of a uranium fuel pellet. Those pellets then go into these long metal rods that I got to see while I was at Argon. And then comes the nuclear reaction. So you fire a bunch of free atoms at your uranium 235, which cracks it into smaller, very unstable atoms, and throws off a couple other neutrons in the process, which zoom off and hit more uranium nearby, and then more, and more, a chain reaction of splitting atoms.
And each time they get split, a little mass turns into energy, which makes the rods really hot, which heats the water, which spins the turbine, which generates electricity. Ta da! But eventually, after four to six years, you've broken enough of [01:08:00] that special uranium that the reaction stops working efficiently.
And that spent fuel is now considered high level nuclear waste. At this point, that waste is a mix of 238 and a little bit of leftover 235 and a bunch of very unstable atoms that give off ionizing radiation. That ionizing radiation, in large doses, is the bad stuff. It's the scary, invisible killer that affects our tissues and our DNA in often deadly ways.
And the thing is, this nuclear waste stays radioactive for an insanely long time. We're talking hundreds of thousands of years sometimes. Which is To put it mildly, a problem. We've got to find better and safer ways to store nuclear waste. Waste that can remain radioactive for centuries, that remains a big problem.
Right now, most nuclear waste in the United States is stored in dry casks that look like this, to protect people from the radioactive material inside. Those dry casks are meant to last decades, but not hundreds of thousands of years, which is what we're talking about here. So we've been having this ongoing fight for decades.
decades about what to do with nuclear [01:09:00] waste. There are options for long term storage, and some countries are already doing that. Johnny and I got into the details in his video. But right now, in the U. S. and in lots of other countries, there are a lot of dry casks full of nuclear waste just sitting there at nuclear power plants.
So, to summarize, we take uranium out of the ground, we use it once, and then we store it basically forever. This is the once through fuel cycle that the U. S. has today. Now listen to the analogy that they used in the 1960s to describe how This fuel cycle would be. Would you say that using the 235 and not the rest is sort of like using the cream and throwing away the milk?
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Exactly. The key is to figure out how to filter out the stuff that's still useful from the real waste that's not. Turns out, Argonne is one of the few places that is still testing nuclear waste recycling in the U. S. And I got to go see it. I'm just gonna go right on up, and they're gonna tell me to stop filming right now.
CLEO ABRAM - HOST, BIG IF TRUE: It was a whole thing. I had to send them my passport to prove that I was a U. S. citizen before they'd let me on the tour, and I wasn't allowed to film inside. [01:10:00] In order to go into this place that I can't show you, I have to wear these cool safety glasses. How do I look? Amazing. Let's do it. Luckily, Argon itself has actually published footage from the lab that I toured, so here's what they're doing inside that large protective box.
First, they cut up the nuclear waste into little pieces. Then they dissolve those pieces into a vat of molten salts. When they run electricity through that vat, it separates the uranium and other useful materials from the rest of the junk, and pushes it across the vat, where it creates deposits of the useful stuff on the other side.
Then they make new fuel rods out of those deposits and stick them back in a reactor. And it's not just possible to do that once, you can do it multiple times, not just making electricity, but also reducing how long that waste is radioactive for, because you're using up the materials that last the longest.
From hundreds of thousands of years, down sometimes to hundreds of years, which is a much easier time frame to store something. If you can pull this off, you can have a nuclear fuel cycle that looks like this. You mine the uranium, you use it in a reactor, filter out the useful stuff, then you use it [01:11:00] again, and maybe again, and again.
And when you can't anymore, then you put it in much shorter term storage that's much more manageable. This is called a closed fuel cycle, and there are lots of variations, but it's not hypothetical. Some countries, like Japan for example, are already doing this. And they say they do it because it reduces their dependence on imported fuel, it conserves uranium, and it reduces the radioactivity of their nuclear waste.
Which makes sense! So, what happened in the United States? Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced new policies meant to stop the growing risk of nuclear war. And that meant stopping all nuclear recycling. Why? Well, you remember the materials that we separated out during the recycling process.
One of those materials was plutonium, which is a highly radioactive element that was seen as the highest concern for nuclear proliferation. So President Jimmy Carter stopped all nuclear recycling, saying, quote, A viable and economic nuclear power program can be sustained without such reprocessing and recycling.
The U. S. moved away from the kinds of reactors that could [01:12:00] handle nuclear waste, called fast reactors, and toward the kinds of reactors that exist today, called light water reactors. But while the U. S. stopped nuclear recycling, other countries didn't. The ban on nuclear recycling stopped being seen as helpful to slow the threat of nuclear proliferation.
So, President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981. But by then, companies had invested in the kinds of reactors that couldn't recycle, the kind that we have now. Today, the main claim is that nuclear fuel recycling is too high cost. It's just not economical. And that's true, compared to using new uranium, which has been cheap and plentiful.
What incentive did anyone have to recycle their fuel? But those incentives The combination of wondering whether global conflict will cut off fuel supply and the recognition that we need more clean energy in as many ways as possible, as fast as possible has started to wake people up to a technology and a dream that we left behind.
We are not far off from it. We're not talking about a technology that we're dreaming of, that we hope can work. We're talking about a technology that has already been [01:13:00] demonstrated before and proven. We just need to commercialize it. There is a lot to figure out and a long way to go, but if we can recycle nuclear waste, I think it says something profound about what we as humans are capable of.
Splitting atoms, sure, but I mean something much more simple. Changing our minds and overcoming our fears to use our resources and our technology and our ingenuity to make other people's lives a little bit better tomorrow than they are today.
The Renaissance of Nuclear Power Part 1 - The Energy Gang - Air Date 1-27-23
ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Do you think we are seeing a global nuclear renaissance, if you like?
KATIE HUFF: Yeah, absolutely. You know, that word has a specific sort of connotation for folks my particular age. You know, we got into the nuclear energy world in the first renaissance that never really panned out. But I absolutely think there's a resurgence. You've noted all of the ways that I would say are really critical. The increased attention on the quantifiable impacts of various energy technologies, on our fight against the climate crisis, and on our other things that are valued by people and communities. [01:14:00] I think those quantifiable impacts are being better understood by the public now than they once were.
It's a very quantitatively sophisticated public out there on the Internet now, and people want to see the statistics, they want to see the receipts. And nuclear energy looks really great. When you think about the things you mentioned, like reliability, energy density, energy security, land use, materials use, lifetime emissions, and even cost, because of their incredibly long lifetimes and stable high capacity factor power production, nuclear reactors really stack up nicely against other energy sources. And because we care about clean energy now more as a society, as a critical sort of existential threat, we worry about emissions.
Nuclear energy has an incredible role to play, and I think people are recognizing that in a more mature and sophisticated way.
ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Cole, what do you think?
CARL PEREZ: Just adding onto that the advent of Internet and social media and just much more transparency and [01:15:00] information and facts has been super helpful in creating new public advocates. You have never seen as many reactor types and companies in development ever. So you definitely see that there's a renaissance, but as the renaissance in the 14 hundreds, 15 hundreds, there's also an association, enlightenment, right. And people are truly understanding what are the risks beyond simply the environment, but also energy security and what that means for geopolitical tensions. And there's a clear understanding that if we really want to ease geopolitical strife globally, solving energy dependence, or at least security for nations out there, is crucial for that first step. And the second thing I'll just add is we now know way more than we knew before, right. We've had accidents. After Fukushima, there were about $47 billion spent globally in enhancements of nuclear installations to make sure that they abide by these new regulations. So we're also learning, and that's why I think that today we're in a prime position to really capitalize on nuclear technology that was first conceived in the fifties and sixties.
ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Melissa, what do you think?
MELISSA LOTT: So I think it's [01:16:00] interesting thinking about the fifties and sixties and the conversations that I'm in around nuclear power, which I agree, I'm seeing a huge uptick in the interests and questions around it. And. Okay, I want to understand more. How could this work when it comes to this whole question of how we get our power systems to net zero? And actually that might be the clarifying question in my part of this field. We're not talking about a 50% reduction or an 80% reduction anymore. It's net zero. And when you want to do that, and you want to do that quickly in your power sector, because that's the backbone and the leading piece of the drive to net zero, you have to start thinking about firm power, and you've got to think about how that complements energy storage and complements variable renewables. And you don't have a ton of options. Nuclear is one of them. So I see a change in the conversation as a result of that. One of the questions and why. I'm Carl, I love that fifties and sixties popped into my brain when you were saying it is. I often get asked, okay, so we're going to do what we did already again, that's what we're talking about, right? I like this conversation about how the future of nuclear. Yeah, some of it looks like the past. We're talking about vision, you know, we're talking about processes that we have used in the [01:17:00] past, but actually the technology that have been developed in the decades since then. I mean, the future of nuclear doesn't look exactly like the past.
There's actually some key differences in how we'll build things out in the future. And the second piece that I'll say, ed, that I see a lot in the work that I do is how different the conversation is actually in some parts of the US versus the international conversation. And Katie, I'm thinking about the US Poland announcement.
KATIE HUFF: Yeah, absolutely.
CARL PEREZ: And I don't know if you want to talk about that one at all, but that's a big one that signals, hey, you know, okay, maybe not every community is saying, yeah, nuclear power plant, that's something we can have, but a lot of places are seriously considering it and considering different sized reactors, different proportions of their overall energy mix and electricity mix. And I think it's important we differentiate there. It's maybe your community or my community, it's not on the table for a number of reasons, but in a lot of places it is a big part of the conversation. Poland's just one example.
KATIE HUFF: It's existential for places in central and eastern Europe right now where energy in particular, natural gas have clearly been weaponized. And countries as a [01:18:00] matter of national security, national existence, sovereignty in general, are looking towards energy sources that are going to be both clean and secure. Energy sources that don't require refueling every day. Nuclear reactors require refueling once every 18 months, every two years. If we're looking at a gigawatt scale plan. It also can supply an incredibly large fraction of a grid, the scale of Poland or other eastern and central european nations.
ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Sorry, I missed this announcement about the US Poland agreement. What's happened?
KATIE HUFF: Yeah, so there's been an announcement that Westinghouse will be building three, possibly more AP 1000 reactors in Poland. These will be the first reactors that Poland has built commercially and they're ready to go with a large set of three full gigawatts, possibly to expand to six.
CARL PEREZ: I was actually going to continue on that point because there's also an interesting announcement which was Ukraine's Ernago Atom saying that they also want to add two reactors. So we're just mentioning Japoricia, but Ukraine has just announced that they want to buy two AP [01:19:00] 1000s. So it's really interesting to see that even the nations that are, again, Ukraine had Chernobyl, they're one of the largest consumers of nuclear energy in Europe and they're planning on having even more. I think these signals go in the right direction.
ED CROOKS - HOST, ENERGY GANG: Yeah, agreed. No, that is really fascinating. I just wanted to jump back to something you said, though, Katy, about those words, nuclear renaissance, which have that somewhat unfortunate connotation. And it feels like probably in the late two thousands, we were talking a lot about that around 2010. The phrase nuclear renaissance got banded around for rather similar reasons to the reasons we're talking about nuclear power today. This appeal of reliable, consistent 24/70 carbon power seemed very significant then. And then the Fukushima accident happened in 2011, and that completely knocked that whole thing off course. And you had a lot of pullback from nuclear power, a lot of delays, nuclear plants being shut down, projects being cancelled, and so on. Do you think we've learned lessons from [01:20:00] that? Is there a danger that this is going to be sort of yet another false dawn for the nuclear business?
KATIE HUFF: Yeah, you know, possibly my favorite author, Sir Terry Pratchett, once wrote that coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. And we may be sort of back in this place where there's an incredible amount of optimism about nuclear. There's a recognition that we need more of it, and there's a lot of interest from vendor companies, but we have learned a lot about deploying and meeting those needs. I think the United States will be turning on two big gigawatt scale units in Georgia, the Vogel units, that are the sort of small realization of that renaissance is a very small fraction of what was expected. But we've learned so much in building those plants, learned about making sure that the design is fully complete before starting work, making sure that you have enough craftspeople in your region, you know, skilled trade workers and craftspeople, union workers, to do the work of electricians and boilermakers and welders and everything that's required. Construction union laboratory to [01:21:00] actually build a plant. Taking a design to an on the grid power plant is an incredible endeavor that we haven't done at scale since the sort of decades between the seventies and nineties. And implementing that has taught a lot of lessons that I think we will take forward as we sort of venture out this same path again. I don't think we'll hit the same roadblocks around implementation, meeting deadlines, and hitting projects on cost and on timeline.
Nuclear waste is reusable. Why aren’t we doing it? - DW Planet A - Air Date 8-2-24
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: To understand why most other countries consider them waste, we need to take a quick look into how nuclear reactors work. Basically, nuclear power is created by splitting atoms, also called fission. One specific type of uranium loves splitting up. When a neutron hits it, it breaks apart and releases more neutrons.
These neutrons then hit other uranium atoms, which also split, causing a chain reaction. When the atoms split inside the reactor core, they create heat. That heat then boils water, [01:22:00] which produces steam, which then drives a turbine. This splitting creates byproducts called fission products. After about three to five years, they build up so much that they absorb neutrons, weakening and slowing down the chain reaction.
And that's when the fuel rod is declared spent. The problem is that according to pure physics, it's very hard to get more electricity out of this type of nuclear fuel safely. There are a handful of other types of reactors where more of the energy can be used continually, but those are mostly experimental, very expensive and complicated to build and maintain.
The majority of nuclear waste around the world is sitting around unused. So what's left is mostly uranium that doesn't like to split up that much, fission products and plutonium. This plutonium is one of the big reasons why there aren't that many countries doing this. But we'll come back to that later.
So that's when [01:23:00] the fuel lands here. The next step is disassembly and separation.
SYLVAIN RENOUF: Behind this door, we have the chemical process. Everything is inside nuclear cells. Without windows, we only use sensors, but we also can send robots or drones inside to make measurements, to check that the equipment is OK. The chemical process consists in separating, uh, uranium, plutonium, and fission products.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: First, you separate the metal cladding from the fuel pellets. Then you put them into nitric acid to dissolve them. After that, you put the solution together with a solvent that extracts the uranium and plutonium, leaving the fission products behind. Then a chemical is added that changes the state of the plutonium, letting it separate from the uranium.
The fission products, which make up about 4 percent of the waste, are not recyclable. We'll get back to these later. This uranium can be used in regular [01:24:00] nuclear power plants instead of mined uranium. But this process also produces purified plutonium. And that's where it gets interesting. One gram of plutonium represents the energy equivalent of one metric ton of oil.
And this is the not so peaceful part of nuclear technology. And the first reason why recycling isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Because that plutonium is also what makes nuclear bombs so destructive. Nuclear weapons are usually produced with dedicated military technology. But you can also use recycled plutonium from civilian reactors, like India in the 1970s.
ALLISON MACFARLANE: They extracted plutonium from a can do reactor, Canadian designed reactor, using U. S. supplied nuclear fuel.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: This is Alison McFarlane. She used to work for the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
ALLISON MACFARLANE: And this really terrified the U. S. government. And so that's when the U. [01:25:00] S. indefinitely deferred reprocessing.
They wanted to set an example for the rest of the world, because they now saw that reprocessing was a crime. a grave threat in terms of nuclear weapons proliferation.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: So what does Orano do with the plutonium today?
SYLVAIN RENOUF: It's a product that we have to take care of it because it can be dangerous, of course, but we have many, many protections for that.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: Orano ships the purified plutonium all the way across the country in secret, using specific trucks and escorted by the French army. There, the company mixes it with uranium to make something called MOX fuel. This fuel can then be used in regular nuclear reactors. This whole process means that the operators can use up to 30 percent less fresh uranium.
SYLVAIN RENOUF: In the end, the energy is so important that in France, 10 percent of the electricity is generated thanks to the MOX fuel.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: But there is still one pesky little thing left even after recycling all of this. The fission [01:26:00] product, which brings us to the fourth and final step of the recycling process, vitrification.
That's when the fission products are trapped in glass. And they are stored where we're headed now. It's
massive.
You can just walk right on top of them.
SYLVAIN RENOUF: Exactly. So down just below my feet, uh, the floor is two meters thick. Below my feet, I have a pit with nine canisters on top of the others. So when I stand like this, I got 18 canisters. That's the space you need for one nuclear power plant operating during one year.
I got five rows by 20. That's one year of waste for France.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: If you did not recycle, how much more room would you need? [01:27:00]
SYLVAIN RENOUF: Five times more than this.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: So the vitrified waste needs less space. The whole trapping in glass thing also makes it safer.
SYLVAIN RENOUF: But it's the same if you don't recycle. The lifetime is the same.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: The canisters are stored here year after year, for now, until France completes its final storage site, which is supposed to start construction in the coming years. So, sounds neat, yes. But the biggest hurdle here, as is often the case, is cost. The 24, 000 rooms, the security needed, the transportation casks, bespoke technology.
All of this costs a lot of money. Just buying mined uranium, using it once and throwing it away is cheaper. The price of uranium is rising, but it's still quite abundant.
ALLISON MACFARLANE: There's plenty of uranium. There's just, there's just no need to spend the money to recycle. And it's not [01:28:00] really, it's more difficult than it sounds.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: The way I explained Orano's recycling process was extremely simplified. This is what it would look like if I'd shown you the entire video. And not many countries know how to do this at scale. Russia is the second biggest recycler, reprocessing about a tenth of what France does. India also reprocesses its own waste and is planning on expanding its capacities.
China has one demonstration plant and is currently building more. The UK used to recycle, but gave up a couple of years ago, also because it was too expensive. Japan has been building a reprocessing plant for over 30 years, with massive delays and cost increases. But out of 32 countries that use nuclear power, that's it.
SYLVAIN RENOUF: France made the choice to recycle a long time ago, more than 60 years ago now. But for France, it's a very strategic way to keep sovereignty, because we have, um, a strong [01:29:00] parts of our electricity which is produced with nuclear electricity. So it's logical to have our own plants.
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: This is also why the entire recycling operation is state owned.
So is the operator of all the nuclear power plants in the country. France just locked in that strategy through 2040. But right now, they're recycling much more than they can reuse. Most of the recycled uranium is sitting around in another location and could be used if uranium becomes more expensive.
Plus, recycling does reduce the amount of extremely radioactive waste, but it also creates another problem.
ALLISON MACFARLANE: Those chemicals and all the other equipment and other materials that you use generate a lot of waste. It's not, you can't just go in and pull out, you know, with tweezers. And the once
KIYO DÖRRER - HOST, DW PLANET A: recycled MOX fuel isn't currently recycled again, so it also becomes waste after another couple of years.
SECTION B - CLIMATE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Climate.
The big environmental costs of rising demand for big data to power the internet - PBS NewsHour 6-22-24
ALI ROGIN: Tell us a little [01:30:00] bit more about what a data center is. And why do we need so many of them?
SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: Whenever we use the internet, upload photos to the cloud, send emails, watch a video, all of that data and digital information needs a home and it lives in these huge facilities called data centers, which hold tens of thousands of servers each and they process all that digital information for us. Something like 70 percent of the world's digital information is processed by a cluster of data centers in Virginia alone. And there are over 5,000 facilities in the US.
ALI ROGIN: What are the environmental impacts of having some of these data centers in your backyard?
SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: So to process all that information, they need two things. The first is electricity, of course, to physically crunch and process all that gigabyte going on. The other is water, which are used in cooling systems to protect these servers from physically overheating. And researchers think they're in the top 10 water consuming industries in the U.S. they use 2 percent of the electricity in the U.S., which is a lot.
And a source told me that data center campuses can use the resources equivalent to a small city and as AI booms they'll use even more. The average AI [01:31:00] application uses six times the amount of electricity so they run a lot hotter and that is scales exponentially they just need more water to cool down.
ALI ROGIN: And how do these data centers in the United States and around the world affect global efforts to decarbonize?
SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: It's tricky, because right now we are building out green energy solutions at a great scale, it's happening really fast, but it might not be happening fast enough. Currently, a lot of the grid is still running on fossil fuels, and even plans in Virginia to shut down, you know, coal firing plants may not go through, because these data centers need so much energy that grid operators need to fire those coal plants backup or just keep them running in order to meet all that demand.
So in one of the talking points of these data center reform coalition's I've spoken to is that that's a step backwards from clean energy goals, and kind of almost a betrayal of some of the promises certain states have made to, you know, get off of carbon.
ALI ROGIN: And many of these data centers are located in densely populated residential areas. What's it like to live near one?[01:32:00]
SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: Yeah, you know, they're being built near schools and neighborhoods protected nature parks in Virginia, in particular. And one big impact is that they're really loud, they hum and they bring all this noise pollution to the area.
All that concrete also means a huge increase in stormwater runoff, because that rain can no longer soak into the ground at all has to go somewhere. And so the amount of electricity also could be more than the grid may be able to handle. So when there's an outage, there's kind of a question of who gets the power of residents or data centers.
ALI ROGIN: We're talking to you now via Skype, we're using a lot of data to do it. As we increasingly rely on this type of cloud computing, to do so many things we use apps we use, we do virtual meetings, that kind of thing. Is there any way that these data centers can continue to expand, continue to grow and support all this usage, but do so in a more environmentally friendly way?
SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: You know, it is possible to build cooling systems that use less water, but we don't really see those built out at scale yet. And you could power them with green [01:33:00] energy. But again, right now we have a grid that's kind of stuck on fossil fuels, and we're slowly making the transition to green energy, but maybe not fast enough to meet all this demand.
First, before we can really know what we need to do next, we just need more transparency from the industry, which scientists and activists both told me is pretty secretive. Google is saying it's a leader in sustainable data centers. And they only began releasing their water usage data a couple of years ago, after a lawsuit.
ALI ROGIN: And to that transparency point, I want to play for you a soundbite from an environmental activist in Northern Virginia, as we've said, where so many of these data centers are located.
JULIA BOLTHOUSE: One of the big things that concerns me is that some of these data center companies are claiming to be holding federal or Department of Defense servers, and therefore their critical infrastructure and cannot be allowed to go down. And so there's this this question of who gets the water in a trout situation? And are they going to leverage that kind of argument of national security [01:34:00] to potentially say they get the water first?
ALI ROGIN: Are there any safeguards that exist to make sure that these companies are being honest about the types of companies that they're supporting with their servers and what the effect on the environment is?
SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY: We're kind of trusting companies to be transparent and do the right thing. There are a lot of companies like to tout sustainability goals. But truthfully, we're trying to get lost there in Virginia right now, a couple of bills were introduced in Virginia and in other states, but they're not getting a lot of traction until we have that research we need.
And so right now, Virginia is conducting a data center impact study. And the results of that will come out later this year, hopefully. I mean, we're just seeing a lot of action. In Virginia in particular, the Piedmont Environmental Council is a group that has this coalition called the Data Center Reform Coalition. And they just started this year really digging in organizing their community together with hundreds of individuals and nonprofits on board.
And they're working directly with lawmakers too to see what they can do, and how they [01:35:00] can, you know, keep this industry a little bit more accountable. They also are taking action through the Freedom of Information Act requests, to see what other kinds of information they can learn about these data centers even before the transparency is coming from the companies themselves.
The Three Mile Island Melt Up - Decouple - Air Date 9-20-24
DR. CHRIS KEEFER: In short, 20 year power purchase agreement with Microsoft, which we'll see three mile Island, uh, unit one, not, uh, not the melted unit two.
Restarted just five years after it was shut down for economic reasons. Mark, what's going on? Break this down for us.
MARK NELSON: First of all, I don't differentiate between unit one and unit two. It's all three mile Island coming back. I think that, uh, people use the meltdowns in the past to smear all of nuclear. So I just say three mile Island is coming back.
Chernobyl operated for 14 more years. Probably no hope for hope for Fukushima Daiichi, but yeah, Three Mile Island rides again. So Three Mile Island has already had a 40 unit one has already had a 40 year life. It's [01:36:00] been shut down since 2019 for two big reasons. Fracking boom made an enormous amount of cheap gas, including under Pennsylvania itself.
So there's gas coming out of the ground in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Meaning if you set up a new, uh, competing natural gas plant, you could drive down the local cost for of electricity wholesale prices enough. To kill off the local nuclear plant. So that was the idea. Economists said we'd have these markets to destroy long lived cheap assets, because that will somehow be better for consumers.
They're, they have PhDs, so they're very smart, Chris. Um, anyway, so we lost 2000, in 2019, we lost Three Mile Island Unit One. Why that reactor? Because as opposed to most other nuclear plants in the area, it was only a single unit plant. The other one melted down in 1979. So we had a one unit plant. Whose costs were higher than the two unit plants of the area and were higher than the almost dirt free, nearly free natural gas going [01:37:00] into natural gas plants nearby and the natural gas plants can turn off when there's a low prices, but nuclear plants do best when they're base load and run for the whole system all the time because they have fixed costs.
So in 2019, the nuclear plant was about to go offline and they said to the state, we need subsidies are going to lose us. And the state said, not our problem. And then they said to the tech companies, you need to buy our power or you're going to lose this power. And you're not going to have it in the future.
And the tech company says, Oh no, we're already 100 percent renewables. Powered. Now it was a lie. Like they knew they were lying. They knew it was false. They knew they were not getting 100 percent renewables. They knew they were running off of fossil fuels, but legally they were able to claim and their lawyers said it was okay to claim that they're on 100 percent renewables.
They did that by building wind and solar in a different state. Crediting themselves with that generation than building their data centers by the coal, gas, nuclear and hydro plants. Great system, until you run out of other people's baseload power, the [01:38:00] certificates of which you're not buying. This is what happened.
The big tech companies, over the last 24 months, suddenly realized they needed to 10 X the size of their biggest data centers to effectively compete for the cheapest compute, the cheapest operation of the most number of processors. So suddenly they need a gigawatt or more at a time. Of power to build the largest and therefore the cheapest per unit of computation data centers.
But they've absorbed almost all the excess available in the market and they can't just snap their fingers and bring through existing transmission lines, another gigawatt of power. And they certainly can't gather up from renewables here, renewables there, and flow it all to a single point in. In space, like a single data center and know for a fact, they're going to be able to deliver all that power at a price anywhere close to what the power purchase agreements were for the wind and solar that's getting built.
So if [01:39:00] we see as with levelized cost of electricity or power purchase agreements that are for wind and solar. where they can put their stuff on the grid. 30 a megawatt hour, 40 a megawatt hour. That means nothing to the data centers that need physical power delivery at a specific location. And if they say to the wind and solar, hey, we'll pay, we'll pay 100.
Isn't that better than your 30 and 40? And then the data that the renewables would say, so yes, but you're gonna have to have somebody else get it to you and you're gonna have somebody else like have to actually supply the The power because we're just the certificate saying you're totally good man. So there's the background with my anger.
You can hear my anger here because we lost nuclear plants because of this, this awful system. In the case of three mile island, clearly constellation was hedging a little and they took a sort of german pace of years long, slow disassembly. If that now they shut off that plant when they did need to. Some [01:40:00] life extension upgrades and some work they couldn't justify spending what at the time would have been a couple hundred million on that work.
And at the moment, what we're hearing now is that it's about 1. 6 billion dollars of spending needed at that nuclear plant. To upgrade it for long life. Now, whether that's like to build the data centers, build the hookups or to operate, or there may be a bunch of goodies thrown in there, but constellation needed to be sure it could make 1.
6 billion and the cost of the power and a healthy profit, I think they've probably been quite certain for some time they could get it. The question was how much could they get and how much certainty now I would imagine that Microsoft said. To anybody in the country that makes power, we'll take 20 gigawatts yesterday.
If you've got it clean, hopefully, but whatever, we're not picky. That's what all the big, the big tech companies are saying at the moment, in the case of three mile Island, they would have needed that as soon as possible. And I would imagine that there was [01:41:00] a. Very nice premium that was likely paid to get that restart date as soon as possible and to lock in as much of the power as possible.
Now, this is not true behind the meter. This isn't behind the meter. They're going to put this power on the grid. So it's not clear how much of this power is going to a co located data center versus just being sold into the grid and allowing Microsoft to say they have. Additionality. What is additionality?
It means you're adding low carbon generation. So there's only a few nuclear plants in the country where you can get this additionality by either, you know, turning the back on or in, I guess, in aggregate, you can have a few nuclear plants worth of up rates if people really push that. So here in Three Mile Island, there's almost none of these left.
Plants to turn back on. We've got what Dwayne Arnold in Iowa and, uh, Palisades in Michigan, but that power has been spoken for probably at lower than the prices that the tech companies would now, uh, purchase it. So Three Mile Island seems to be getting a deal that may be [01:42:00] the largest electricity deal in us history, or at least one of the largest, certainly from a single power plant, what we're hearing is it's above a hundred dollars a megawatt hour, which means on an annual basis, almost 800 million of revenue, not of profit.
You know, they've got to pay for the fuel and the staffing and the, and safety and stuff like that at the three mile Island, they've got to pay for the upgrades too. But they're going to make a few hundred million dollars of profit for years, as far as I can tell, if deal terms hold, and they're going to make it over 20 years.
Here's the key points. For your listeners, Chris, these are scales of revenue equivalent to the task of financing and building new gigawatt scale nuclear plants in America. Starting today, if we can deliver reliably, that's that's the thing. It doesn't even. Not even delivering it cheap, Chris. It's knowing that in six years or seven years, you can be giving Microsoft power at a given location and, [01:43:00] and at a, at a, at a price that they're willing to pay. Three mile Island is such a high price in part because it can be available in by 2028 and there's almost nothing left. That's additionality. Now, are these companies going to wait for additionality? Oh, hell no. They are going to buy up entire nuclear plants.
And the cities that are currently using that power are going to suddenly learn the downsides of the electricity markets if they didn't know them before. Which is, Even though a nuclear plant can keep running for 20, 30, 40 years after it's paid off its construction costs. And even though those, those operation costs for the nuclear plants, maybe 20, 25 a megawatt hour, if there's a shortage, you can sell that power for a hundred, 120, even the plants that were built out of rate payers pockets.
Back in the seventies.
Nuclear Power and the Climate Emergency - Against the Grain - Air Date 7-1-24
SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: We're told that while nuclear power may have its downsides, we need to turn to it to avert a larger catastrophe from the combustion of fossil fuels, since nuclear power would [01:44:00] allow us to produce energy without greenhouse gases. Why don't you find that argument convincing?
M.V. RAMANA: That argument is a good one and, um, under other circumstances, one would go with that argument because precisely the reason you mentioned, which is that the climate is in a real crisis situation today and it's getting worse.
But, Nuclear energy, we've had experience with this for about 70 years now. And one thing we can conclude about it is that nuclear reactors are very expensive and they take a long time to build. And this means that using nuclear energy to solve the climate crisis will be an expensive way to deal with it and will take a long time to even affect any kind of reductions in emissions.
And so the problem With that is there are other [01:45:00] alternatives. If nuclear were the only way to replace fossil fuels, then perhaps we could consider that. But, uh, because there are other alternatives, which are far cheaper and far quicker to build, I'm talking in particular about solar energy and wind energy, which have grown tremendously in the last couple of decades.
Um, trying to invest in nuclear energy represents a diversion from investing in more effective, uh, and currently deployable climate solutions. One should also think about this question politically, not just in terms of technology and, you know, does this emit, uh, greenhouse gases or not. One has to try to also think about this in terms of who's pushing it, who's going to benefit from it, what else are they interested in.
And I don't think nuclear, those people who are promoting nuclear energy are really very keen on, uh, solving the climate crisis as soon as possible, [01:46:00] especially in the way that we think it should be done, which is to have significant social and political change, uh, system change, not climate change, as the slogan in many, uh, rallies go.
SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: Well, we'll return to this whole push now for nuclear power as a purportedly cleaner alternative to the climate crisis. But I wanted to ask you if you could just give us a sense of the trajectory of electrical generation from nuclear power. Why has it fallen globally? In the last several decades,
M.V. RAMANA: the fleet of reactors around the around 400 nuclear reactors operating around the world, and this fleet has been built up since the 1950s.
Uh, initially it was a slow growth, and then there was a steep increase in the 1970s and 80s. Most of the reactors that were built, um, came up in the 1970s in the United States, and then in the 1980s, [01:47:00] uh, in Western Europe and Canada and elsewhere. Uh, And the maximum number of reactors that were ever constructed were in 1984 and 1985, roughly a little over 30 reactors every year.
And since then, there was a sharp fall, and one might note that 1986 was the year that the Chernobyl reactor exploded, uh, and caused a huge amount of radioactive contamination in Belarus and, uh, Ukraine and other parts. Uh, that did affect, uh, how, uh, Many countries thought about nuclear energy, but since then, uh, since the mid 1980s, the number of reactors that have been shut down each year, um, has, uh, compensated for or been, uh, roughly comparable to the number of reactors that have been connected to the grid each of those years, so the result of that has been that the number of reactors And the total generation capacity for nuclear energy around the world has been more or less constant, uh, [01:48:00] for since the 1990s.
But at the same time, uh, it's not as though energy demands have not been growing. And, uh. Various other kinds of, uh, electrical generation systems have been, uh, constructed around the world. And the result of it is what you mentioned, the share of nuclear energy. Uh, in the globe's, uh, electricity generation has been declining consistently since the mid 1990s.
In 1996, it was around 17.5%, and that has declined to around little over 9% in the last, uh, few years. Uh, and, uh, that's the trajectory that we've been seeing entirely contrary to what you would want, uh, if nuclear energy were to be a solution to climate change. What you would be expecting is that the share of nuclear energy should be increasing and the share of fossil fuels should be declining.
But, in fact, that's not been happening. The, uh, in contrast, uh, renewables, [01:49:00] uh, modern renewables, which is mostly solar and wind, have been increasing consistently since the mid 1990s and exceeds about 14 percent as of 2022. So considerably more than nuclear energy.
SASHA LILLEY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: You know, you mentioned the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.
What is it about nuclear plants that make them prone to accidents, even including the recent generation of nuclear plants, which claim to be safer?
M.V. RAMANA: So nuclear power, um, is, uh, Ultimately, a very complicated way to boil water. That's what it is, um, because you're producing steam, which is going to drive a turbine, and the process that is used to produce the heat that's, uh, producing the steam in turn, uh, is, uh, nuclear fission, um, nuclear fission by its very nature is hazardous because when, uh, a uranium or a plutonium nucleus, [01:50:00] uh, fissions and breaks up into two or more lighter substances.
Many of the substances that are produced, so called fission products, are highly radioactive. And in a nuclear reactor, we have to try to design it in such a way that none of these hazardous fission products or many other radioactive materials that are produced inside the reactor when the neutrons that are produced in the fission are absorbed by various other materials that are part of the reactor.
All of those radioactive materials have to be kept within the nuclear reactor and not allowed to enter the environment. And this requires a lot of safety mechanisms, extremely robust construction and so on. Um, that, uh, But, but the very fact that you have to have all of these complicated, uh, systems together means that we are dealing with a very complex technology with [01:51:00] multiple parts, which, uh, also interact with each other.
Uh, in the 1980s, uh, the sociologist, uh, Charles Sparrow, uh, examined what happened at the Three Mile Island accident. Uh, in, uh, Pennsylvania in 1979. And he realized that, uh, nuclear power, nuclear reactors, like some other hazardous technologies, which also he examined, have two fundamental characteristics.
One of it was what I talked about, the, uh, interactive complexity, the fact that you have a complex technology with multiple moving parts, which can interact with each other. And the. Implication of that particular feature of the technology is that it's very hard to foresee what all can happen, what possible end states a nuclear reactor might end up in, simply because the number of ways in which a system can evolve is extremely [01:52:00] complicated.
The second feature that, uh, Pero noticed was that they have something called tight coupling, that the events in a nuclear reactor happen very quickly and one can very easily affect, uh, another. Uh, an example I often give is imagine that you are taking, uh, some kind of an intercontinental flight. Uh, let's say you're flying from Washington, D.
C. to Colombo in Sri Lanka, uh, odds are that you would have to change, uh, flight somewhere, maybe in Frankfurt in Germany. If the time between, uh, your, your first flight landing and the second flight taking off is a very short period, let's say just half an hour, then any small error that might happen, let's say you forget to lace your shoes.
Or you forget to zip up your bag as you're leaving the first flight and all the contents fall down. You stop to tie your lace or pack your bag again. That slight delay can mean that you might miss the second flight. [01:53:00] Whereas if the flights were like six hours apart, then these kind of small errors may not cause a major impact.
The system is more forgiving of small errors. Nuclear reactors are like the tightly coupled, uh, flight system, that even small errors cannot be tolerated very easily. The only way to deal with that tight coupling is to add multiple systems, uh, to try and compensate for these errors. Uh, but that would both increase the cost of your reactor and also add to the complexity.
And adding safety systems because of the complexity does not always mean that you're going to end up with a safer system because sometimes a fault in the safety system can ultimately result in an accident. We have examples of all of these from the history of nuclear reactor operation. The bottom line from all of this is that it's very hard to, it's almost impossible to design a nuclear reactor that can, you know, under no circumstance release, [01:54:00] uh, radioactive.
There will always be some scenario where these reactors can have a catastrophic accident that results in radioactive contamination, uh, being spread out. And this is true for all kinds of reactor designs, whether they are the traditional light water reactors or fast neutron, uh, sodium cool reactors, the kind that, uh, Bill Gates has been promoting in Wyoming, uh, or Uh, so called molten salt reactors.
All of these reactors have, uh, different kinds of accident, uh, scenarios. Uh, so you cannot really rule out, uh, any of this. And you have to take into account the possibility of an accident whenever you're planning for nuclear power.
SECTION C - RISK
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: Risk.
Why does America need new nuclear weapons? Part 1 - On Point - Air Date 5-25-24
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: You've written quite extensively on the overall plans and expansions of America's nuclear arsenal. I'd like first to learn more from you about Sentinel. These are missiles that haven't yet fully been constructed, because obviously there's an issue about the [01:55:00] delivery of the program.
But what is the Sentinel missile? How would it ostensibly work? It is a land based, long range nuclear armed missile.
STEPHEN YOUNG: Each missile would carry one to two or three warheads potentially, and each warhead would likely be about 20 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Japanese war.
So these are massively powerful weapons that have about a 30-minute flight time from the U.S. to almost anywhere in the world. We've had these systems like this for decades, but in reality, we don't need them at all. We actually have no need for land-based missiles. We can be perfectly safe without them.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay. So when we say that there are orders many times the strength of, or the devastation power of the bombs that landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you're talking about then therefore bombs that could kill millions and millions of people, should they be used.
STEPHEN YOUNG: [01:56:00] That's correct. Absolutely.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay. Now, their land base, which is the key thing here. You've also written about other weapons systems, for example and, there's a lot of, we're talking about the Defense Department, so there's a lot of acronyms and numbers here, help me keep them straight. Is this, is Sentinel the same thing or something different as the proposed gravity bomb that has been discussed before.
STEPHEN YOUNG: So the U.S. maintains what's called a triad of nuclear systems, the land-based weapons are one leg of that triad. Another leg is the air based weapons delivered by jet fighters and bombers. That's what uses gravity bombs. And the third leg are missiles launched from submarines at sea.
The third leg of the triad. So we have navy, ICBMs, bombers, and nuclear armed submarines, are the three legs of the nuclear triad. I would argue we could get rid of one, if not two of those legs of the triad [01:57:00] and still have a very strong deterrent to keep us safe.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay, so the gravity bomb then is the one that's also, it's flown in by a bomber.
And there's one at least that you've written about called the B61-12, which as you report, would cost more than its weight in gold. Is it in production though?
STEPHEN YOUNG: It is. It's taken a very long time and cost far more than initially estimated. But yes, it's in production now. And they will complete production in the next two to three years, probably. And it will be deployed in the United States and also about a hundred U.S. weapons are actually deployed in Europe, and four or five European countries maintain U.S. nuclear weapons. And should a war happen, those weapons would be handed over to those countries for nuclear war fighting.
It's a scary thought.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: So that's gravity bombs. And then Sentinel falls under the land-based missiles that you talked about a bit [01:58:00] earlier.
STEPHEN YOUNG: Yes.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Are there other land based missiles that are in development, or new types of warheads? We only have the one land based missile currently deployed, the Minuteman III, and the one to replace that is the Sentinel.
Minuteman III, as we mentioned in the previous discussion, was deployed first in the '70s. It's been updated and upgraded many times since then, so it's not still a 70-year-old missile but it definitely needs to be refurbished again, or simply retired. I would argue we should retire it.
But yes the Sentinel Missile is the only missile we will have, if it is indeed built, despite the cost increases it's going through. And then again, the third leg is the nuclear armed submarines. ... 20 or so nuclear armed missiles that have mini warheads on those.
Okay. And so are there new sea based or submarine based ballistic missiles in development? Because I think you've written about a new warhead. Is that different [01:59:00] than the quote, low yield warhead that the Trump administration deployed?
STEPHEN YOUNG: So the submarines can carry, each submarine has currently 20 missiles on it, and they can carry multiple warheads, and some of those warheads, most of those warheads are very high yield weapons.
Again, ones that are 20 to 30 times the size of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima. But under the Trump administration, the U.S. has had to deploy a few weapons that are lower yield, only a third of the size of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima. But still, if you drop it in a big city, that would kill tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people in minutes.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay.
STEPHEN YOUNG: Still, massive destruction.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: But Stephen, I just want to be sure that I hear you clearly. So the low yield ones are a third of the size of Hiroshima, which is still very devastating. And then you say the other regular yield submarine based [02:00:00] nuclear weapons, I want to be sure I'm not mishearing you, were 20 to 30 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima?
STEPHEN YOUNG: That's correct. And in total, if you add up all the explosive yield of all the bombs on U.S. submarines, one submarine has seven times the destructive power of all the bombs used in World War II. And we have 12 of those submarines. So one submarine, again, has seven times destructive power of all the bombs used in World War II.
And we have 12 of those.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: All the bombs, including conventional artillery and yes, fire bombs, et cetera. Not just nuclear bombs.
STEPHEN YOUNG: Yeah, that's correct.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: All the bombs of all types, including nuclear bombs in World War II.
STEPHEN YOUNG: It's just incalculable the level of obstruction we have at our fingertips.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: And yet, this is an effort to modernize and even expand [02:01:00] America's nuclear might, is an effort that has been consistent over several administrations, both Republican and Democratic. We'll talk in a little bit more detail about what happened under Obama, what happened under Trump and what may be going on under Biden.
But what's your conclusion from that, that there's a consistency from the White House and also the Pentagon, in the belief that this massive modernization and expansion of America's nuclear power is essential for U.S. security?
Yes. And there is a bipartisan consensus at one level that the U.S. needs to maintain a nuclear deterrent. If you actually have a vote in the U.S. Congress, most Democrats actually would support getting rid of the Sentinel Missile Program, but not enough of them. So if the President called for cancelling the Sentinel Missile, he probably would lose a vote in Congress [02:02:00] because enough Democrats agree with Republicans that they think this is a valuable contribution.
STEPHEN YOUNG: But the reality is the military simulations they play out are just so terrifying, that people worry, oh, we have to be just sure that we're going to be safe by having more of this destructive capability. But the reality is we have still far more than we need. And I think the argument to me is pretty clear that the risk is simply not worth it.
We don't need this massive nuclear arsenal. We don't need redundancy upon redundancy. We don't need to have every target covered multiple times with multiple yield warheads that are massively destructive. It's simply overkill, again and again.
Nuclear power in an unstable world - Front Burner - Air Date 7-10-23
TAMARA KHANDAKER: I was wondering if you could take us back to 2011, the tsunami that happened in Japan, which was triggered by an earthquake. What happened at the Fukushima power plant?
JIM SMITH: When the earthquake happened, the nuclear site at Fukushima, the reactors shut down automatically. [02:03:00] But 40 minutes later, that giant tsunami arrived and that overwhelmed the sea defences at Fukushima and flooded the reactor buildings. And that caused the diesel generators to be flooded and stopped working and it shut down the cooling system. So basically, the reactors no longer had cooling, they'd shut down, but they were still very hot and they overheated. And that led to a meltdown and release of radioactivity. And so the really dramatic thing that we saw at fukushima was three of the reactor buildings exploding from an explosion of hydrogen gas.
[news clip]
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: It’s becoming difficult for crews to try to prevent a meltdown at the site. Since the weekend, there have been explosions in reactors one, two and three, and temperatures are also rising at two other reactors nearby.
JIM SMITH: And so the meltdown and the explosion released radioactivity into the [02:04:00] atmosphere, which then deposited on the land and the sea, as well as direct discharges of radioactivity into the pacific Ocean.
TAMARA KHANDAKER: So this water that Japan wants to get rid of now, where is that coming from?
JIM SMITH: So initially, water was radioactive water from the plants that were trying to cool the reactors. And so water was going into the ocean, but the Japanese started pumping that out and storing it. And this is still going on because the reactors still need water for the cooling operations. And there is also radioactive water in the water around the plant, underneath the plant. And so that has to be pumped out. So since about 2012, the Japanese have been collecting that water and storing it in over a thousand giant tanks. So they've now got about 1.3 million cubic metres of radioactive, not, I wouldn't say, not highly radioactive, but significantly [02:05:00] radioactive water stored in tanks.
[news clip]
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Treated radioactive water at the plant is stored in about a thousand tanks that are nearing their 1.37 million ton capacity. It must be removed to prevent accidental leaks and to make room for the plant's decommissioning.
TAMARA KHANDAKER: You said that it's not that radioactive and the Japanese government says that it’s been treated and its plan to dump it into the ocean through this tube is safe. Last week, the u.N. watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Association signed off on this plan.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The plan as it has been proposed and devised is in conformity with the agreed international standards and its application. If the government decides to proceed with it, would have negligible impact on the environment.
TAMARA KHANDAKER: So what is it about the water that [02:06:00] people are worried about?
JIM SMITH: So the water has been treated. So there's a wide range of radioactive elements, things like if we cast our minds back to the Fukushima accident, people were worried about radioactive cesium. And that's been the main contamination of both the marine and terrestrial environment around Fukushima. That's been removed, except for the radionuclide in their water treatment processing system. What's left is a thing called tritium water. So tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. So instead of H2O, it's what we call HTO. Instead of two hydrogens and an oxygen, it's got hydrogen and oxygen and a tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen. So chemically, it behaves in an identical manner to ordinary water. And at that sort of scale, it makes it pretty much impossible to separate it from the, you know, 1.3 million [02:07:00] cubic metres of ordinary water.
TAMARA KHANDAKER: I see. And so these concerns about the tritium, I just want to dive into this a little bit. What kind of danger does tritium pose to humans and marine life?
JIM SMITH: So at high levels, the tritium can pose a danger both to human and marine life by damaging DNA essentially. So DNA damage is going on all the time in our bodies not only from radiation, but from other things, from all sorts of chemical reactions that are going on in our cells. But the cell can usually repair it, but there's occasional moments where the cell can't repair it and that can lead to cancer. So those are the sort of concerns, but we're not talking about those sort of levels of tritium.
TAMARA KHANDAKER: Right. The Japanese government says the final level of tritium that would be deposited into the water is [02:08:00] safer than the level required by regulators for nuclear waste discharge or by the WHO. So can you just sort of put the numbers when it comes to the level of tritium into context for us?
JIM SMITH: So the Japanese plan is that after this dilution 100 times, the sum of all the other radionuclides in that release will be less than 1% of the Japanese guideline limit for discharge. Yeah, the tritium will be about 40 times lower than the Japanese guideline level, and that makes a value. We measure radioactivity in Becquerels, and the tritium will be about 1500 becquerels per litre in the discharge water. Now, to put that in context, the World Health Organization guideline limit for tritium in drinking water is 10,000 becquerels per litre, so seven times higher. So in theory, from [02:09:00] the radioactivity perspective, you could drink the water that's going to be released to the pacific.
[music]
TAMARA KHANDAKER: So there seems to be agreement among a lot of scientists that this plan is safe, but I feel like it's worth noting that there isn't total consensus on this plan in the scientific community. Even inside the IAEA, there are also some who say there needs to be more studies on how this would impact the ocean bed and marine wildlife, and that Japan and TEPCO have cut corners, that this has all been a bit hasty. And what do you think of that?
JIM SMITH: I think that's totally inaccurate. It's not that this is unprecedented. We know that this has been going on for decades. And I just think that there's no scientific basis for claims that this is a big risk or that it hasn't been considered properly. I [02:10:00] think it has. We know from previous experience what tritium does in the environment. The proviso is that the Japanese do what they say they're going to do, which is really important. But if they do what they say they're going to do, then I don't see any grounds for considering this a significant risk.
TAMARA KHANDAKER: But there has also been some opposition to this plan from the Japanese public. So surveys show that people are pretty evenly divided and 45% of respondents support the plan. 40% of people are against it. But fishing communities in Fukushima have been especially hard to convince. And on Friday, a petition with 33,000 signatures was delivered by fishing cooperatives, expressing their opposition to the plan. If the majority of scientists say the water is safe, why are fishers so opposed to this?
JIM SMITH: I mean, they have a very good reason to be opposed to this because they know what perception of damage it will do to [02:11:00] their products. And we know that food is a very sensitive issue for people. And any kind of… even the perception of risk is certainly going to damage their ability to sell their catches on the market. And we know that Rice from the Fukushima prefecture after the accident, even though it had been tested and it was radioactively below the safe limits, it achieved prices less than other rice from other parts of Japan. And the fishermen know very well that this is going to damage their industry, and I have a lot of sympathy with that.
Why does America need new nuclear weapons? Part 2 - On Point - Air Date 5-25-24
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: There's a massive program to rebuild every piece of the U.S. nuclear arsenal at a cost likely to top two trillion dollars over the next three decades. Through this modernization program, the military industrial complex is building new submarines, new land based missiles, new stealthy bombers, new stealthy fighter craft, and new stealthy air launched cruise missiles, plus a suite of all new nuclear warheads and bombs [02:12:00] for the delivery vehicles to carry.
It is an enormous, yet largely unnecessary, excuse me, undertaking, end quote. What is your response to that?
MADELYN CREEDON: This whole debate and discussion really is about the fundamental security of the United States. And I think the fundamental security of the United States, the backbone of deterrence of the United States, is really based on our nuclear weapons.
And as big as these numbers are from a cost perspective, they really do have to be put in perspective. The nuclear budget of the U.S. is about 7% of the overall defense budget. And the triad, as you have been discussing, so the three legs of our nuclear deterrence, the land, the sea and the air legs are all in modernization and they've been in modernization since about 2010.
And it's a more or less for like [02:13:00] replacement of the bombers and the ICBMs and the submarines, but it is an absolutely essential part of our deterrence, as well as the deterrence of our allies.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: So the point I think that Stephen was making is that if, specifically let's talk about sea launched missiles, if we have such a mighty arsenal on at least 12 nuclear, 12 submarines that are patrolling the world's oceans right now, why would we need those land-based ones that would be launched from here in the United States?
First, we also have to look at the strategy and we also have to look at what our adversaries are doing. And in this case, what I mean by adversaries, are really China and Russia, but each of the three legs of the U.S. triad provide a different purpose. And you look at China, they're also developing a full nuclear triad, and Russia has also had a full nuclear triad for many years, [02:14:00] like the U.S.
But each one of these provides a very different response. So our sea-based leg is really for a second strike. It's survivable, and by the way, all 12 of the submarines are not at sea at any one given time, obviously they have to come back, they have to change crews, they go through refurbishment.
So it's important to keep in mind that we want these different capabilities, both in the air, the sea and land.
Okay. But this, I really appreciate your insight here because Ms. Creedon, I have to say I'm struggling to understand, and from a layperson's perspective, what would the different scenarios be that would lead to the preference of using land-based ICBMs, for example, than a sea launched nuclear capability that would ostensibly be [02:15:00] closer to whatever targets were selected by the Commander in Chief and the Pentagon?
MADELYN CREEDON: The idea here is that a president has multiple options to respond to whatever the situation presents. Obviously, no one wants any sort of a large scale nuclear war. So one of the things that the recent strategic posture commission concluded is that it's important for our national strategic posture to also focus on our conventional capabilities, so that we never get into a situation where we actually have to use the nuclear weapons, but they are all there.
As our backbone of deterrence, and there are different scenarios that each of these would be used, but the most likely in a conflict, in a regional military conflict, is probably first used by either someone else, Russia or China, or what we refer to as the [02:16:00] theater nuclear weapons. Not the strategic nuclear weapons, the strategic nuclear weapons are fundamentally there to deter an all-out nuclear war, which we don't want.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI - HOST, ON POINT: Okay, this is a really good point. So Stephen, let me go back to you, because as you well know, both of you will know that we came closer, everyone experienced a greater fear of potential nuclear war in the past couple of years than we have in some time, specifically because of Russia.
There was legitimate talk about would Vladimir Putin use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine? If that were to happen, how would the United States or the rest of the world respond? People were very appropriately anxious about this. So does that not give creed, give heft to what Madelyn Creedon here is saying in that we actually are closer to a [02:17:00] potential nuclear war than we've ever been before?
And so therefore now is not the time, in fact, to let the United States arsenal languish?
STEPHEN YOUNG: A great question, Meghna. Thanks for asking it. Yes, nuclear war is a terrifying thought, and she's correct. The most likely scenario is that probably Russia might use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. If it starts to lose that war, it could use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine to try and say, stop, I want to win this war so badly, I'm willing to start nuclear war.
And that is a terrifying scenario. The reality is though, if they do that, we would not need to respond with nuclear weapons at all. We have vast conventional capabilities, and Russia could be decimated with those capabilities. And that's far preferable to us launching a nuclear strike in response, because that leads to their retaliation and a nuclear escalation that would never be stopped, and we'd all be dead.
The reality is that if Russia did go nuclear, we would absolutely not want to respond with nuclear weapons. We would want to respond conventionally, and to [02:18:00] avoid further escalation, if at all possible. We can't control that. But if we do respond with nuclear weapons, we can guarantee escalation will happen and we'll all be dead.
The world after nuclear war - The Gray Area with Sean Illing - Air Date 6-17-24
ANNIE JACOBSEN: Imagine every single engineered structure. I'm talking buildings, bridges, changing physical shape and collapsing. We haven't even spoken of what happens with that thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire. It melts lead steel. I mean, titanium.
You're talking about streets nine miles out, transforming into molten asphalt lava. People kind of getting sucked into this. The details are so horrific. And I also think it's important to keep in mind, these are not details from Annie Jacobson's imagination. These are sourced from Defense Department documents because the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department have been keeping track of what nuclear bombs do [02:19:00] to people and to the environment.
Things ever since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of 1945.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: You can't find a vision of hell and any religious text that can even approach the horror of this scenario, in my opinion.
ANNIE JACOBSEN: You know, it's interesting that you say that because the religious tax and I often look at the paintings that portray hell and their narrative and their evocative.
They're not specific and scientific. And when you read in the book, things like at precisely what distance pine needles will, you know, ignite from line of sight, nuclear flash, and you realize that that is something that has been measured by the defense department. Because when we were setting off these thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands.
We were measuring [02:20:00] all of this in terms of distance, in terms of atmosphere, we were sending animals up in planes, we were tying animals to ships. This is like horrific details, a lot of which I left out so that readers didn't get essentially beyond grossed out. I worked to include enough detail that The readers could have their own imaginations and their own narrative thoughts about this kind of horror, or as you say, hell, you know, working in tandem with some of these scientific facts.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: In service of more detail in that giant mushroom cloud.
That's the image everyone has of a atomic bomb. If I understand the physics of this at all, and I don't, but if I understand what people who do. Understand it told you [02:21:00] everything around that blast gets sucked up into this giant mushroom cloud. So in the case of an actual bomb in a populated area, what gets sucked up into that cloud are thousands of people.
And I guess all the rest of the non human population. Debris in the area, which would be basically everything.
ANNIE JACOBSEN: It's not thousands of people. It's hundreds of thousands of people. It's upwards of a million people. If you're talking about a one megaton thermonuclear bomb, and when you can, you know, try and wrap your head around that.
I think that it takes your heart and soul to an entirely different area of being, perhaps that you've never even been. This was certainly my experience reporting this book when, when Ted Postal, the MIT professor emeritus was describing to me how humans turn into [02:22:00] combusting carbon and then they become sucked up in that cloud.
And this is a man who's Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I want to talk about a nuclear winter for a minute, or what you call day zero in the book. What does that look like? How cold would it be? How dark?
ANNIE JACOBSEN: One of the big premises of the book was to take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter.
And the nuclear launch up to Day Zero, as you say, takes place over this horrifying 72 minute period. And, you know, that is enough to shock anyone that, as STRATCOM Commander General Keillor said to me in an interview, when we were talking about a nuclear war,[02:23:00]
And so, nuclear winter begins. In essence, after the bombs stop falling, stop exploding, there is a process of mega fires. So, the area around every nuclear detonation is going to ultimately result in what is known now as a mega fire. You're talking about a hundred. 200, 300 square miles of fire per bomb where everything in that area is burning until it doesn't exist anymore.
This is because, of course, there are no first responders anymore. There are no fire trucks. There's no way to put anything out. And so, with all of these explosions, soot gets lofted into the air. Troposphere. 330 billion pounds of soot would be lofted [02:24:00] into the air, and that is enough soot to block out 70 percent of the sun.
What happens when that much sun gets blocked out is a dramatic temperature plunge. It's up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Certainly in the mid latitudes, the areas, for example, from Iowa to Ukraine, that whole band of the mid latitudes, the bodies of water in those areas become frozen over in sheets of ice.
With that temperature drop, you have the death of agriculture. And that is why nuclear winter, after nuclear war, will result in what is now estimated to be 5 billion.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: And that model you just mentioned, if I remember, also estimated that in places like Iowa and Ukraine, temperatures basically wouldn't go above freezing for something like [02:25:00] six years, at least.
ANNIE JACOBSEN: That's right. And I mean, you know, sometimes the, the details become so overwhelming, they're almost hard to keep track of and other details you simply can never forget. At least that's the case with me as a reporter. And when I was reading Carl Sagan's, he was one of the original five authors of the nuclear winter theory.
And Carl Sagan wrote about how after these uh, uh, uh, bodies of water that get frozen over for, as you say, seven years after the thawing out of that, the dead people who had been frozen in the nuclear winter, then you have to start considering the pathogens and the plague. And so just when you thought you couldn't imagine more horror, now you have to learn about the details of nuclear winter.
And I think the best quote for all of [02:26:00] Was spoken by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Kennedy administration. And the two of them talked a lot about nuclear war with deep horror. And it was Khrushchev who said after a nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yeah, that sounds about right.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today as always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show included clips from the energy gang.
Huge. If true. DW planet a, the PBS news hour decouple against the grain. On point front burner and the gray area, further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Aaron Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our [02:27:00] bonus episodes.
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