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March 6, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:26
Episode 440 Scott Adams: Weirdo, UBI, Omar, GND, Climate Change Confusion
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Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Yep, it's that time again.
You know what time I'm talking about.
This time, it's time to gather around, grab your container, your thermos, your cup, your mug, your stein, your chalice, your tankard, fill it with your favorite liquid.
You know what I like.
I like the coffee.
And join me, please, for the best time of the day.
I call it the simultaneous sip.
Mmm. Oh, that's good.
Somebody out here is calling me Papa, which reminds me that I was talking about how Bernie Sanders reminds me of an old dandelion, you know, and they turn all white and they blow away.
Apparently there's a name for that.
A pupa.
P-U-P-P-A? Or a pupa?
It doesn't sound as catchy as it could be for a nickname.
Speaking of nicknames, so President Trump, the nicknamer-in-chief, has given a new nickname.
And the new nickname is Weird Tom Steyer.
Weird Tom Steyer.
And I give that one an A+. So the president has an uncanny ability to pick perfect words.
You know, people made fun of him when he said, I have the best words.
Oh, it's PAPUS, P-A-P-P-U-S. Somebody's correcting me.
That sounds right.
An old dandelion is PAPUS. All right.
So Tom Steyer. Here's why weird Tom Steyer works.
And it's why other people who try to come up with nicknames don't do so well.
Here's what works about it.
Weird, or weirdo, is one of those words you never see in politics.
So that's the first rule.
So Trump likes to pick words that are not already overused.
So you don't want to call somebody liberal Tom Steyer or lefty Tom Steyer.
These are all just old, used-up, boring words.
So the first thing he does is he finds a word that you all know, but it's not often or never used in the political context.
So that's what makes it anaplace.
That's what makes it sticky and interesting and provocative.
It's a word you're not supposed to use in this context.
Secondly, the President likes to use words that will be reinforcing.
And I don't know if it's just me, but when I watch Tom Steyer on television, the whole time I'm looking at him, I'm sort of half listening to what he's saying, but here's my internal thought.
What's wrong with that guy?
Now, I don't think I'm the only one.
Let's look at the comments here.
When I listen to him talk, independent of the fact that he's a critic of the president, I don't think every critic of the president has something wrong with him.
There's just something that's like the uncanny valley, or he's like a person but not quite...
He has opinions, but they don't quite make sense.
Everything's just a bit off.
Now, let me make a comparison.
If you were to say, you know, Adam Schiff, obviously a big critic of the president.
When I look at him, I have lots of thoughts, but he's a real person in a political realm saying political things.
And, you know, maybe he's a weasel because he's saying things that maybe he doesn't even believe.
But I don't look at Adam Schiff and say, what's wrong with him?
Because I know what's going on.
He's a political animal in a political context saying political stuff.
There's no mystery there.
Joe Biden, there's no mystery when he criticizes the president.
He looks like an ordinary guy.
He's a little touchy.
That's a separate topic.
But I don't automatically listen to Joe Biden and then have a running recording in my head saying, I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with this guy.
The same with Bernie.
Bernie looks a little crazy, but he doesn't look like a weirdo, does he?
A weirdo wouldn't really fit Bernie.
Crazy fits him. So the president's ability to pick literally the perfect word, as far as I can tell, of a weirdo, it just so captures your sort of irrational...
You know, feeling about him that it's brilliant.
All right. Here's a little update on predictions.
Remember, I've told you many times that everybody can have an opinion, that's easy.
But predicting is hard.
And if somebody predicts well, you should give them more credibility than someone who can't.
One of my predictions, if some of you can confirm this, I know you've been, most of you have been watching me for a while, I predicted that Hillary Clinton would not run for president, and now she's said that she's not running.
So I'm going to count that as yet another accurate prediction on my part.
So if you predicted, if you predicted that she would run, just keep a tally of your own predictions, and then compare it to mine whenever you can, and see what you think.
So many of you watched, I think yesterday, Joe Rogan having a second chance to talk to Jack Dorsey about Twitter's policies about their algorithm and who gets de-emphasized and who doesn't and under what situations do you get de-platformed and all that.
And apparently Tim Pool, who was there as a bit of a moderator, People tell me you did a good job.
I didn't see the whole thing.
I'm waiting to see the highlights because the parts I watched, I watched it for a while and it didn't seem like it was creating a lot of news.
All the parts I saw were Twitter explaining what they always explain, which is that they're not They're not beating people up for content so much as behavior.
So that's all I saw.
And that's the same thing we already knew.
So if there was any news that came out of that, I saw one little interaction about a particular person whose name they didn't recognize.
That felt like a little bit of a gotcha moment, but probably wasn't.
I mean, it was kind of a pretty minor thing.
But there must have been more...
that came out of that.
I'm just looking at...
Okay, Mark is on here.
I'm going to talk to Mark Snyder in a little bit.
And I'll give you an introduction before I do that.
Let's talk about the fine people hoax.
So, I've changed it from the Charlottesville hoax because that's misleading because Charlottesville happened.
You know, there was an event there.
Somebody really died, etc.
There really were racists there.
But the hoax part is the fine people.
The hoax is that Trump said that the racists were fine people when obviously he was referring to other people at the event.
Now, we're still waiting.
For that to be addressed by CNN. And I wanted to revisit my four news outlet rule.
Now, I present this rule as something to watch, not as some kind of scientifically validated, you know, physical law.
And it goes like this.
That something is probably true news if it's reported the same On all four of these major news outlets, CNN, MSNBC, covering sort of the left, and then Fox News and Breitbart as my proxies for news that is more right-oriented.
If it's not on all four, it's probably not true.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that that works every time, but it's a provocative little Rule, and it's a good first filter.
It's probably not the only filter you should put on things, but let's run a few things through the filter and see.
Number one, which of those four outlets reports that Q is true?
None. Zero.
There is not one of those four news outlets, nobody on the left, nobody on the right, of those four who report that Q is real.
So therefore, Q is fake news.
It's news that there's something called Q, but it's fake that Q has some insider access.
Let's run another one through the filter.
How about the thought that President Trump called racists fine people?
Well, I don't think that's on all four networks because it's fake news.
How about...
Here's one.
The idea that the whole secret plot behind the Green New Deal and the plot behind climate change is really a giant socialist globalist plot and they don't really believe it.
They're just pushing it to cause political change.
Have you seen that reported on CNN or MSNBC? You haven't.
Now, if I'm wrong about that, just fact-check me and I'll circle back to it.
But that's fake news.
It's fake news.
There is no globalist plot to change politics through climate change, according to this filter.
Again, I'm not saying the filter works every time, but we're running some stuff through to see how confident we are of it.
Here's another one. You're not going to like this one.
I've been seeing in the headlines, but not everywhere, the idea that there was some kind of a law proposed about not allowing abortion for babies that are already born and they're healthy, I guess, or at least they're survivable.
So on the right, You'll see the news that says, my God, the lefties want to have the right to abort a live baby.
Nobody's reporting that on CNN. I don't think anybody's reporting that on MSNBC. Nor have I ever seen the language which describes the way it's being reported.
So I declare it's fake news.
It's real news that there was a law presented.
It's fake news how it's being interpreted.
Now, I'm willing to change my mind and all it would take is somebody to send me the text of that actual law and maybe a link to somebody who's familiar with it to explain what it was.
Now, some of you are saying, wrong!
Wrong! It was definitely there.
I know it was there. For the moment, we don't have to argue whether it's true or false.
I'm running it through the filter and I'm telling you that it's BS Governor Nadler admitted it.
Send me a link. So I've been waiting for weeks to see if I would see watching social media, watching the news.
I've been waiting to see if I would see anything that clearly describes what the law meant to do with somebody who supports the law confirming that that's what the law says.
That's all. I haven't seen it.
So I would suggest that my four-outlet news suggests that that law has been maybe exaggerated in what it's meant to do.
And that would be a good test.
All right. If you haven't seen, there's a documentary.
It's on Netflix.
That I highly, highly, highly recommend.
It's called Abducted in Plain Sight.
And you might want to watch that in conjunction with watching the Leaving Neverland, which is another documentary about Michael Jackson and allegations of child sex abuse, I guess.
The Abducted in Plain Sight is a story that It's so mind-blowing that I don't want to ruin it for you.
So I'll just tell you this.
The content is very disturbing because it's about a pedophile.
And there's some images that you don't want any kids in the room.
Don't watch this.
If it's a topic that bothers you, don't watch it.
But if you do watch it, Watch it for the psychology about it.
Watch it for the persuasion, the understanding about confirmation bias, and watch how the people involved believed things that were amazing, as in they weren't real things, but the things they believed were just shocking.
Now, when I watched it, my...
My background as a hypnotist and studying persuasion for decades.
I watched it and I said, there's nothing in this that is surprising.
Every part of that show, while it was mind-boggling and jaw-dropping, it was not surprising if you have my background, which is persuasion and hypnosis.
And the things that it shows as happening in real life are very predictable.
So watch those two shows and you'll learn something about the weakness of human perceptions.
Now, I should say on Leaving Neverland, what you should do is you should watch not only the special, but you should go to YouTube and somebody sent me some links and probably somebody who's watching right now.
Send me a couple of links to a skeptic of the Leaving Neverland story and And the skeptic was giving the opposing argument, which would say that Michael Jackson was unfairly accused of being a pedophile.
And when you listen to the documentary, I'm pretty sure you can walk away saying, oh, he's definitely guilty.
That Michael Jackson, there's no way that these two people made all that up.
The details are too convincing, etc.
And then as soon as you're done with that, Go watch the YouTube bits.
You could probably just find them in a simple search.
Find those YouTube bits and then look at the counter argument and you'll be surprised at how good it is to the point where I'm not sure what to believe right now.
It could go either way. Let's talk about UBI. Everybody's asking me to talk about universal basic income.
The idea is giving people some amount of money every month that they can spend any way they want as a universal basic income, whether they work or not.
Now, most of you fine capitalists say, quite reasonably, my God, that's the worst idea in the world because it will be an incentive to not work.
What could be worse in a capitalist world than creating an incentive for people to not work?
Well, I have not reached a final opinion on UBI, but I'll tell you there are some things I think you're overlooking.
And I'll just mention the other variables and let us sink in for a while.
The first variable I'd like to suggest is that the economy and technology and civilization are are trending toward a place where a big portion of the population simply won't be smart enough to do the work.
In other words, we are guaranteed to have people who would like to work but are not capable.
They're simply not smart enough To do the kind of work that jobs still exist.
Because robots will be chewing up all the jobs that don't require a lot of thinking.
And when those are gone, what are all those people going to do?
Now, you're probably saying to yourself, all right, this is capitalism.
If you tell those people...
Aside from that point, let's assume that there are jobs and you've got universal basic income.
And some people will say, I would prefer to get this universal basic income than I prefer to work.
Is that bad?
Your first instinct is, hell yeah, that's bad.
Why are you taking my money that I worked for and giving it to somebody who chose not to work?
It's literally the worst thing you could possibly do in a capitalist system.
Well, that point is well taken.
But it's not the only point.
So let's throw in some more variables.
One of my observations is that for every person who can't work or doesn't work, there's at least one other person who's crippled by it.
In other words, there's somebody else who's taking care of that person's non-working ass.
For example, how many adult children are living with their parents and their parents would like to get rid of them, but they can't get rid of them because their kid would starve?
Probably quite a few.
So if you were to help the kid by giving them a universal basic income, you might really be helping the parents.
Because now the parents can boot them out and say, Look, maybe you can't live in this neighborhood on that universal basic income, and maybe you've got to get a job at McDonald's to supplement, but you can go live someplace cheaper with your UBI, and now I don't feel guilty.
I'm kicking your ass out.
So I've come to think that UBI is...
Wait for my provocative framing.
Provocative framing alert.
Here it comes. UBI could be thought of as abortion for lazy adults.
In other words, it's a way for the parents to abort a grown child who won't leave the house.
In this case, aborting them out of the house, not out of the fetus.
UBI is like abortion for adult lazy people who don't want to work or are incapable of working, I suppose.
So my big point here is that the UBI doesn't just help the person who gets it.
It's helping the people who would have had to pay for that lazy person's ass, but now they have a legitimate way to say, look, you're not going to starve to death when I kick you out of the house, and you could work if you want to.
Now it's just your choice.
So you have to figure out the secondary and tertiary effects.
The next thing is, if you've ever worked in a large organization or even if you've worked in any small group of people, was the worst person you worked with worth keeping?
Was the laziest person in your department worthy of having a job?
Not really.
The people who are not good at working or they're unwilling or unable to do it well can cause more trouble than they fix.
So I would argue that for that lowest, let's say, 10% of workers, you're not really losing much in the economy.
And if we were not willing to let them literally die on the streets, somebody who has a productive job is going to have to work harder, sacrifice more, and do somewhat unproductive things to take care of that person because we don't let them die.
Somebody's always taking care of them.
And so those are the factors I think you should put in there.
I don't know if the numbers will ever work, but once we have a robot economy, UBI is guaranteed.
So I'll say that again.
UBI will happen.
I would say that's a 100% chance.
What it looks like and when it kicks in are big questions.
But there isn't the slightest chance it won't happen as long as the robotic industry continues to grow, and I don't see anything that's going to change that.
So if you're arguing about whether UBI is good or bad, you're on the wrong topic.
UBI is coming. There's nothing that would stop it.
But it's when and what's it look like that's the question.
All right. I was thinking about persuasion in the context of climate change, and I'm going to talk about climate change in a little more detail in a minute.
But one of the things I realized is that when we're talking about aggressively going after climate change, it really means aggressively getting off of fossil fuels.
Now, if you do not in the same sentence say, and we're going to replace it with clean nuclear, if we're not going to replace that with Generation 4 nuclear, we have a very risky situation.
And here's how I would frame the Green New Deal.
I would frame it as risky.
Because what is the reason that people want to address climate change?
The risk, right?
It's a risk. And I think you could convince most people who, especially anybody over 50, if you're over 50, you're planning to be dead before the climate's a problem anyway, even if it is.
And so you could convince those people to not take a risk.
So if you're over a certain age, and I am, it's risky To change the whole system.
So I think one of the best arguments against climate change is that one word, risk.
It's risky to get off of fossil fuels unless you have a backup plan such as Generation 4 nuclear.
Here's my current thinking on climate change and I'm going to bring in Mark Snyder to talk about Generation 4 Nuclear in a moment if he's still on there.
I think he is. My conclusion at this point, and this is important for you to keep in mind, the studies have shown that something like half of all published scientific papers on science in general turn out to be bad papers.
So about half of science in general Turns out not to be right.
Well, let me say that.
About half of the published papers turn out to be not reproducible and they don't last.
Let's put this another way.
The minimum truth about climate change looks like this.
If climate change is real and it's the dire emergency that many of the scientists are saying, if that's real, It would also be true that half of the things said about it are probably not true.
So you could have a situation where half of all the science and all the claims and all the studies about climate change are just wrong, and it would still be true.
You could still have climate change being 100% a risk, 100% driven by CO2, and 100% really a big emergency.
That could all be true at the same time that 50% of all the studies are just clearly garbage and 50% of all the arguments are irrational.
Those could all be true at the same time.
And I think that's the minimum case or the best case.
The best case for climate science is that half of the studies are garbage.
So if you're a critic and you're a skeptic, And you're looking for things to attack.
You could attack hundreds and hundreds of things about climate science.
You could attack hundreds and hundreds of studies, and you could be right.
You could accurately debunk hundreds of climate change studies, and climate change could still be true.
Those things would be completely compatible.
In fact, they would be expected.
The most expected situation is that the skeptics could have a field day just destroying climate change arguments without having any impact on the fact that the 50% that's true still makes the case.
Now, I don't know if I'm describing reality.
I just want you to know that there is no reality, no reality, there's no chance that all of the climate change studies are true.
There's no chance of that, because it would be the only science ever in which that was the case.
So how settled is climate change?
Well, I had Dr.
Shiv on here yesterday talking about the iris effect.
It's the idea that when the Earth warms, there are certain types of clouds that essentially open up like the iris of a camera in a very generic sense to release some energy into the universe and cool the planet.
So the idea is that extra warming opens up a little lens that allows the heat to go out and therefore the world stays in homeostasis.
The number one thing I don't like about that idea is that it feels like almost religious.
Now, there's no religious claim involved, and Dr.
Shiva never made any claim like that.
But the way it strikes me is, why would the Earth be self-regulating?
Unless we're a simulation.
The simulation theory would imagine that you would program your environment so it's self-regulating because there's no point in putting your little humans in your simulation if the environment's going to blow up in a day.
So the IRIS idea is compatible with simulation theory, which doesn't mean either one of them are true.
It's just compatible.
Now, how settled is climate change?
Well, you saw that climate change had an idea that the climate's getting warm and it's a problem.
And then we saw that Dr.
Linzen, I believe, is the one who came up with the IRIS idea, and he published a paper that seemed to suggest that the Earth is somewhat self-regulating.
Now, that's what Dr.
Shiva talked about. Predictably, and this is what I tell you happens every time.
So what I'm going to describe happens in every conversation with climate change.
I've never seen the exception.
It goes like this. Here's a paper that claims something.
Immediately, people send me links to three papers that debunked the IRIS hypothesis.
So right away, it's like, is it settled?
Here's this IRIS idea.
You know, a real scientist, smart person, showed his work, his paper was published.
But soon after that, within a year, there are four more papers poking holes in it.
So I, of course, tweeted that within an hour, I think.
Dr. Shiva had tweeted another link that was an even newer paper.
That criticized the criticisms.
In other words, it was back to the original where this iris thing looks pretty good after all.
Now, are we done?
No, we're not done.
Check with me in a week and there will almost certainly be another paper that debunks that latest paper and then come back in two weeks.
And sure enough, there'll be another paper that debunks that paper.
Until you can't understand what's going on, and then you say, well, I'll just default to whatever I believed before.
All right. Here are some of the tells for a bad argument.
A good argument tends to have one or two good reasons, and they're easy to explain.
For example, if I cut taxes, I might have a larger deficit.
One good, clean reason not to do it.
If I institute UBI, I will hurt incentives.
One good, clean reason.
It's probably real. If I get off of fossil fuels, it will be disruptive to the economy in a bunch of different ways.
That's really one reason.
That's a reason. Here's what is not persuasive.
200 reasons for the same point.
Now, if you look at the skeptical science site, which is a good one in terms of it's organized well for the arguments and the count arguments, and it shows something like, I don't know, somewhere close to 200 skeptical arguments, and then it shows the, you know, the science argument that debunks the skeptical arguments.
Now, if you have 200 reasons That a theory is not good?
That's telling you something.
Is it telling you that the theory is no good because there are 200 reasons against it?
Now it's the opposite.
It's the opposite.
If there are 200 reasons against a theory, it's telling you that the people who came up with those 200 reasons started with the conclusion and worked backwards, meaning they didn't believe the theory, and they looked and looked until confirmation bias kicked in, and they found something that would be their argument.
And they were all finding different things because there wasn't any real thing to find.
Now, this is not like a rule of physics where if you've got 200 reasons against something, that's just proof that it's not real.
It's not that clean.
But as a tell, as a big red flag, if there were one good reason against the climate change argument, I could be persuaded depending on what that reason was.
If there are 200 reasons and they're all different, And by the way, they're all debunked.
That is a very, very strong indicator that the arguments are invalid.
Doesn't mean they're all invalid.
You can't guarantee it.
But you can't ignore that, right?
I've asked, here's another tell.
If you ask a direct question of either a skeptic or somebody who's an alarmist, a warmist, if you will, Can you get a direct answer to a direct question?
And it's hard.
Here's my direct question.
There seems to be a difference between the skeptics and the alarmists on this very, very simple point.
And I want to suggest this.
I asked Dr.
Shiva yesterday, I said, what would be the one indicator The one thing you could measure in the present that if it's going up every year, that is going to definitely tell you there's climate change.
You know, that's a problem.
What is the one thing that is most dependable?
Is it the melting of the ice sheets?
Is it sea level, let's say, at one place where you know the land isn't changing?
Is it temperature of the oceans?
Is it temperature over land?
Is it temperature in the troposphere?
These are all the things that they measure.
What is the very best gold standard?
And here's the problem.
If you talk to a skeptic, they will say, the theory said that the temperature would be X and that we would get these various things, and they didn't happen.
Therefore, the theory is disproven.
Do you know what the scientists say?
We made some specific predictions and they all came true.
Therefore, it's proven.
Those two things can't be the same.
It can't be true simultaneously that all of your predictions, all of them, I mean 100%, all of your predictions did not come true.
That can't be true at the same time as 100% of our predictions came true.
They can't both be true.
But those are the claims. Now, how in the world can we not at least find that out?
And I would suggest that the first thing we should do is talk about the same topic.
Because I know the skeptics will say, well, we've had fewer super storms and hurricanes.
And I think that's probably true.
And then the scientists will say, look at those ice sheets, just like I said.
But are ice sheets the gold standard?
And can we measure that to a level that both skeptics and believers would agree is a good measurement?
I don't know. So here's my challenge to both the skeptics and the believers.
Give me the one gold standard, the one thing which if it's not changed five years from now, you'll say, I guess we were wrong.
And likewise to the critics, yeah, to the critics of climate, warmest, yeah, what is the one thing That if it did change, you would change your mind and say, oh, wow, I didn't see that coming.
I guess there's something here.
If you can't both give me one of those, let's just agree that nobody knows what they're talking about.
All right, let's talk to you.
Let's see if Mark is still here.
I'm going to add Mark.
Mark, are you there?
Mark? Mark? Mark Schneider?
I can't hear you.
You have been added, but I do not hear you.
You may have wandered away.
But I'll keep you active until you either fix your microphone or come back to us.
I think I hear you.
Mark? Yeah, I have a hearing aid, and when I'm on the hearing aid, for some reason it disables my microphone.
Ah, is that all fixed now?
It is, yeah, I just turned the Bluetooth off.
Alright, Mark, can you give us the brief version of your background so we know where you're coming from?
Alright, yeah, so I've been in the nuclear industry since I was 18, served for 20 years as a nuclear power operator.
I made it up to Chief.
By the way, that qualifies me to drink coffee that's as thick as motor oil.
And then I became an officer and then I retired.
I currently work at a commercial power plant.
I have my bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering technology.
And then my wife has her master's in nuclear engineering.
I like to say that I have the nerdy Alright, so you have a perspective that's from the inside of the industry and I've been watching your periscopes which are fascinating but sometimes more technical than I can follow.
So I want to ask some questions and I want you to answer them as best you can without any jargon.
Just give us the big points.
Number one, The current nuclear power plants in this country are Generation 2, is that correct?
Yeah, all the operating reactors in the country are Gen 2.
And how many of them are there roughly?
About 95. So we've got 95 second generation design of nuclear.
In Europe they have Generation 3?
Yes, they do have Generation 3 there.
And what would be, without a technical explanation, what would be the main advantage of Generation 3 over the ones that we have in this country?
They have a longer fail-safe margin.
So the Generation 2, you can have meltdown within 24 hours.
The Generation 3, it's two to three days before you get into that kind of problem.
Has there ever been a Generation 3 that had a meltdown?
No. Never.
And how many Generation 3s do you think there are worldwide?
20 or 30, probably.
And they've been around for a few decades?
No, they've only been around for about, I think, 10 years or so.
So 10 years, the Generation 3 has had zero meltdowns.
That's true? That's true.
Now, there's something called Generation 4, and none of those are in operation, are they, or are they?
None that I know of.
So Generation 4 is a catchphrase, correct, that incorporates a number of different designs.
Does it include thorium and salt and whatever the other things are?
Yeah, so it generates a wide array of types of power plants, of cooling mechanisms, which is the molten salt, and then types of fuel, which could be thorium, plutonium, or uranium.
Okay, and then within those designs, is there a favorite that you have that is unambiguously the one we should be going for, or is there any question about which is the good one?
So I have three that I like.
It's the Molten Salt is one, another one is Molten Lead, and then the last one is Gas Cooled.
All right, so without...
Without any engineering description, tell us from the user standpoint what is the functional difference to us as just consumers in terms of safety, cost, difficulty in engineering, anything like that, just the highest level. Well, it removes water as your cooling source.
Stop. Stop.
Okay. You're already too technical.
Yeah, so I don't need to know the advantage of materials.
Okay. Just tell me at the highest level, are they safer?
Yeah, they're safer. And safer in the sense that you could have a complete loss of electricity, for example, that in the traditional sites, if the electricity is lost, you can go into meltdown.
Is that correct? That's correct, yeah.
These ones would prevent that in a loss of electricity situation.
Okay. So is there any other situation other than a loss of electricity that could cause a disaster?
Let's say a terrorist drops a bomb on one.
How big of a problem is that if it's a Generation 4 reactor?
That's actually the same as a Gen 2.
They're designed against that.
They're designed against that?
Yes. Meaning that there's no sort of bomb that could make one leak radiation?
Yes. That is correct.
They designed the containments for that.
Hold on.
Are you saying that the bombs would not be strong enough or that even if it blew up, there would be no radiation?
The bombs would not be strong enough to penetrate the containment.
I suppose we would all have a question in our heads.
Couldn't they make a stronger bomb?
But how about something like an earthquake or a Category 5 storm?
Would a Gen 4 site be hardened against those?
They'd be designed against that, yes.
Okay. Now, designed against them to bring the risk down to effectively zero or just lower than it would have been?
Well, it goes back to that meltdown.
They designed meltdown out of it so that the loss of power would be taken away, right?
So you wouldn't melt down without a loss of power.
And that's the biggest concern is loss of power.
Okay. But the old Gen 2s can actually blow up, can't they?
Or is that not a thing?
They can. But the Generation 4 can't really blow up, right?
So let me put it this way.
If something we didn't see coming caused one of them to have a leak, whether it was aliens come to Earth and hit it with a laser, just something we hadn't thought about, does the radiation from a Gen 4 just wipe out the county, or does it stay localized because nothing exploded?
It would stay localized.
How local is localized?
It stays within a square mile or a square 20 miles?
It would stay most likely within the site, maybe a small area outside the site, depending on wind direction.
Okay. But even the wind wouldn't necessarily take it more than a few miles?
That's correct. And that's true for Gen 2 right now.
Okay. So Gen 4, you said there are three types that you like.
Is there one of those three that stands out?
For me, it's the molten lead.
Now, the molten lead, how close are we to being able to build one for commercial use?
Maybe five to ten years.
And what would need to be developed in order...
So apparently there's some more invention that needs to be done, or is it engineering that needs to be done?
We're at the engineering stage.
I know Russia has used molten lead before.
Okay, so would this be a case where if we could iterate more quickly, we could shorten that five to ten years to, you know, closer to five?
Yes. And what stops us from iterating?
It's the lack of having a test site and approval to iterate, right?
Yeah, that's the basic barrier right now.
Now, is that being solved by what Rick Perry is doing at the Department of Energy?
He created a site for testing nuclear fuels, but I don't know if that's the same as testing nuclear designs.
Does it get us everything we need to iterate, or do we need more?
We need more.
You've got the fuel, and then you've got the design.
So we've got the fuel part now, but we need the design portion.
Is there any reason that we couldn't do...
The design portion in some remote place and feel completely safe about it?
Absolutely. So it would just take some government leadership to say, all right, we're going to designate this remote place and you guys all can put your reactors here and if one blows up, it's only going to take out one mile, so we're all safe?
Yeah, well, really, they just need to redesignate places that were used in the past.
Yeah, so we have existing sites that were once designated and we could just co-locate them, you're saying?
Or actually where there's a closed down reactor, we could locate them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you also mentioned, do all of the Generation 4, do they eat nuclear waste or is that just some of the designs within Generation 4?
That's just some of the designs.
Does that include the molten lead, I think you said?
Yeah, molten lead would consume spent fuel.
So the molten lead option, I think I heard you talk on your Periscope that the cost of building a site might be maybe 10% of what it would cost to build a Gen 2 that would create the same amount of power.
Do I have that right? Yeah, it would be 1 cent, yeah.
Now, but is that really one-tenth, or are we comparing, you know, if we looked at the original estimate for a Gen 2, they would have said, well, this will cost us only a billion dollars, but then you come back later and it's 10 billion.
Is it possible that the Gen 4 costs are greatly underestimated just the way we always underestimate nuclear?
That is a possibility, yes.
But, yeah, I would say it's a possibility.
But in all likelihood, it would be substantially cheaper than what is already a pretty cheap form of energy, which is nuclear.
All right. So, in terms of how many of these we could build, do you think we could, if we did sort of a Manhattan project and started iterating these Gen 4 designs, do you think we could get to...
A point where climate change is riskless?
Yes, we could.
All right. People get anxious with me.
I'm watching the comments here because often I don't let my guests talk.
But I do that just to...
Make sure I've got a framework that makes sense.
What would you like to tell us that I haven't asked you?
Something we need to know about Generation 4 that I didn't ask?
Well, maybe when you asked about exploding with the Generation 2, and this is why I went into the water aspect, is that it's the water that causes the explosions.
And so that's why generation 4 won't explode, is when you're eliminating water as your coolant, it makes them not be able to explode in the same manner.
And the issue with the water is that it has to be compressed at many atmospheres, so there's something under pressure which you don't have with the molten.
Is that right? That's true.
So that's one aspect.
The other aspect actually is that at high temperatures, the water will split out and create hydrogen, and that's what caused the explosions at Fukushima.
Okay. All right.
Somebody was asking about cost.
So the Gen 4, we already talked about it, but somebody asked here, would be about 10% of regular cost of a regular site, but it's also possible that that estimate could multiply when you start building it.
All right. What else should we know about Generation 4?
What's the biggest downside?
If a critic were talking to you, they'd say, well, this won't work because why?
I would say the biggest downside comes into some of the difficulties with using these new cooling sources, whether it's the lead or the gas or molten salt, because we don't understand it as well because we haven't...
We don't have the engineering down like we do with water as a cooling medium.
So the risk is primarily that we could not engineer it in 5 to 10 years when it looks like it's doable, but we would need to iterate some designs and do a lot of testing to get there.
Yeah, that's correct. I heard you talking about some of the related benefits of having nuclear, because what happens is you've got suddenly...
Lots of inexpensive power.
And when you have that, it makes other things possible that weren't possible before because they weren't economical.
For example, Mark?
Oh, for example, that was a question.
Yeah, that was a question. So, for example, is that you have a lot of, you only use about one-third of the heat From the plant to make electricity, you could use and design into it.
The other two-thirds could be used to, say, distill water and make water out of that.
You have fresh water from, say, salt water.
So just think about that to the audience.
Think about the fact that a Generation 4 reactor could be built to create electricity at a much lower cost and lower risk.
At the same time, it could be using its extra heat to desalinate ocean water, and you could do everything from populated desert to...
I imagine this would be not possible, but I was imagining...
Using the nuclear reactor to pump your fresh water up to the top of a hill so it can run down somewhere many miles away and create hydro, but that probably doubles the expense.
The other use for power...
That I see is there are a number of startups that are creating technologies for sucking CO2 out of the air.
Let's say that we decide we want to do that someday.
And I know, I know, there'll be 25 comments saying, well, what if you take too much CO2 out of the air and then all our plants will die?
I'm going to trust the science would know when to pull back.
I don't think they'd pull enough CO2 out of the air that the plants would die.
But, you know, I will note That that's a risk.
But it seems to me that these big devices for pulling CO2 out of the air are mostly an energy cost.
I don't know if I'm right about that.
Do you suspect, Mark, that that's true?
That if you brought the cost of the energy for operating these machines way down, then suddenly it would be economical?
Absolutely. The other thing you could do with that is that during your non-peak periods, so your peak power period You know, when everyone's using electricity, you have all your power plants making it for, you know, the population.
But then when you come off those peak periods, you could use that power to, say, suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and convert it into something that's useful.
And it's operating 100% at all times.
Right. I see people are anxious about that idea and should be.
All right. Anything else you'd like to add?
You know, actually, I kind of want to go back to your discussion about the Ralph Northam thing, you know, about the aborting babies after they're born kind of thing.
Okay. So a little background on me is I had a daughter that was born with some complications and was at the hospital that Ralph Northam was educated at.
And I will tell you that the words that Ralph Northam said was the exact process that I went through with my own daughter.
So he was just describing what is normal.
So just to kind of back that up and discussions with that.
So I didn't vote for Northam, don't care for him, but he was 100% right on that.
He was just describing the existing process.
Yes. Yeah, that was my speculation.
And thank you for that.
That's good context.
Alright, so thanks Mark.
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