All Episodes
Previous Next
April 30, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:14
Episode 512 Scott Adams: Pro-Nuclear Environmentalist and Expert Michael Shellenberger
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams.
This is my coffee.
And I know why you're here.
Partly it's for the amazing content and provocative thoughts, but mostly it's for the simultaneous sip, which you are going to enjoy right now, but only if you have A cup, a mug, a glass, possibly some kind of a stein or a tankard, maybe a thermos or a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
liquid I like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Well in a few moments I'm going to invite a very special guest that you can enjoy a lot.
And his name is Michael Schellenberger, and I'm going to invite him now, and while he's coming on, I'll give you the intro.
So Michael Schellenberger is a Time Magazine hero of the environment, Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress.
And Michael, can you hear me?
I can hear you. Can you hear me, Scott?
I can hear you, yes.
Let me finish your intro, and then we'll ask a few questions.
Great. He's one of the world's leading pro-nuclear environmentalists, so it's exactly who you want to hear from.
And he's a leading energy, security and environmental expert.
He has advised policy makers in countries around the world.
And he's helped save nuclear reactors around the world from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan.
Thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding 24 million cars to the road.
And he's written a number of books, including Eco-Modernist Manifesto.
And he was called Prescient by Time Magazine.
And the best thing to happen to environmentalism since...
Since some other book.
All right. Michael, did I leave anything out that the audience should know?
No, it's too much already. All right.
So I've seen a number of your articles recently and people forward them to me because they know I'm on the page of saying that whether or not climate change is the big problem we think it is, it still makes sense to pursue nuclear in the smartest, fastest way we can.
I'd like to start with getting a grounding on your view of, I know this isn't the main topic, but for the context for the audience, Where do you stand on climate change?
I basically agree with the mainstream climate science.
I think it's a long-term environmental challenge.
I don't think it's the only environmental challenge that we have.
I don't think that we need to sacrifice a high standard of living.
In fact, I think that to deal with climate change, we need to Accelerate human progress and economic development because that's what's gone hand in hand with decarbonization, which is the reduction of carbon intensity of energy.
Alright, so climate change is a risk, in your opinion, and do you have an opinion on whether the dire predictions of the majority of climate scientists are credible or not credible?
Would you say we should worry about it or...?
I think we should definitely worry about it.
I mean, I think you have to put climate change in the context of other risks.
You know, if we were to try to, you know, radically increase the cost of energy or reduce the amount of energy we use, that would create other risks.
I mean, I think most climate scientists are quite consistent with the mainstream science.
There's just a small handful of pretty misanthropic scientists out there who have been pretty vocal.
But the truth is we work with more climate scientists, including James Hansen, who are very pro-nuclear, who understand the need for a high-energy civilization.
So I don't think we should let the activities of a small group shape our perception of everybody.
All right.
So for the benefit of the audience, in terms of credibility, Michael believes that climate is a risk that needs to be addressed.
But there are other risks and there are risks of addressing it as well.
So all the risks have to be included.
But I think that gives you credibility because anybody who believes that the climate science story is something we need to worry about and is also on the page of nuclear is sort of unique that...
Do you find that there aren't many people in your camp or is it a growing number?
It's definitely growing, and I think we're actually starting to see it in some of the polling data.
I mean, Gallup just came out with a new survey that shows increasing support, and they mentioned in there that may be increasing because of concerns about climate change.
So, I mean, I think the thing you have to remember is that a lot of the people that got concerned about climate change were anti-nuclear to begin with.
I mean, when the Cold War ended, a lot of the anti-nuclear weapons and nuclear energy activists kind of glommed onto climate as another apocalyptic threat.
So the policy framework really came from the anti-nuclear movement, and it's really taken a while for people to understand that nuclear energy is the best and, I think, really only solution to significantly reduce our emissions.
Well, let me ask you this. I believe you've said some things about the potential economics of wind and solar or green energy in general and you've pointed out their limitations.
But would you say that we should still do everything as fast as we should?
In other words, push every energy source we can as much as we can and still be safe?
Would you say that or would you say we should maybe move our focus away from the green stuff?
Well, I think we should focus on what works.
I mean, I always point out there's really a real-world case study that we've had the last 20 years, France and Germany.
France spends a little bit more than half as much for electricity as Germany, and yet its electricity supply produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions.
So what's the difference?
Well, France is 75% nuclear and Germany is getting out of nuclear.
So sometimes people say, well, we should do it all.
But, you know, when France tried to integrate a lot of unreliable solar and wind into its grid, it actually had to use more natural gas, more fossil fuels, and do less nuclear.
Well, but let me push back a little bit.
Let me be devil's advocate here.
If you were to look at any one of these technologies, you know, nuclear, solar, or wind...
You could quite reasonably say there are all kinds of problems with each one and we haven't fully solved them, but we think we're getting closer to, you know, improving in all of those things.
Wouldn't you say that all of the major solutions to energy have pretty big engineering and practical and maybe legal and public problems involved with them, but that they're all improving?
Is that not true?
Well, that used to be my view.
And so in the early 2000s, I was one of the architects of the original Green New Deal, which was focused on solar and wind.
And I thought that technological innovation could improve solar and wind.
And what I learned was that the problems with solar and wind aren't essentially technical, they're natural.
So it's the low, it's the energy dilute nature of sunlight and wind that make them require 450 to 750 times more land than nuclear.
It's their essentially unreliable nature.
Wait, but let me pause just so we don't lose this point.
The fact that wind and solar require lots of land Does that really matter?
Because we're not really running out of land.
Yeah, we actually...
First of all, it matters in a lot of different ways.
I mean, the first way it matters is that, indeed, land is scarce.
In particular, land near places where we use a lot of energy, like cities and industry.
We don't have a lot of land.
Even in California, where people said we have all these huge deserts, well, it turns out that there's a lot of wildlife in those deserts, including some pretty rare and threatened wildlife.
And so what really changed my mind was the fact that much of the opposition to building big solar and wind farms It's coming from conservationists.
It's coming from people who are concerned about the natural environment.
Plus, you know, the other problem is that you just get much larger transmission costs, much higher costs with the unreliability.
So the physical nature of renewables, which is that they're unreliable and energy dilute, It stands as really a physical, a hard physical barrier to being able to scale them up.
And don't take my word for it, the University of Chicago just came out with a study showing that solar and wind are increasing electricity prices across the United States specifically for both the unreliability and because of the large land use demands.
Now, in the interest of me being the independent question asker here, I have not reviewed the economics of any of these technologies, but every time this topic comes up, there will be somebody who will point me to an article or a study that says, here's the study that shows absolutely green energy is less expensive or at its current rate will be less expensive than nuclear energy.
And then I see people in your camp who have sources and estimates and links to exactly the opposite.
So would you agree that there are opposite messages out in the world and people like me can't tell the difference?
Is that fair to say there are directly opposite messages on which ones of these are the economical ones?
Well, I think what you're seeing is that people will use, they'll basically say, when solar panels are producing electricity, the electricity is really cheap.
And that's true. The problem is that we need electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
And so that's why I always point to national level comparisons.
So when you look at, again, you know, if nuclear were so much more expensive and if renewables were so cheap, you would expect Germany to have cheap electricity.
Instead, its electricity prices increased 50% over the last decade.
It will have spent $580 billion on renewables and the related infrastructure by 2025, and its emissions will either be flat or have gone up.
Meanwhile, France generates one-tenth the carbon emissions Yeah, the other thing that I heard the other day, which I forgot to include in my Understanding of this is that when you're looking at solar, it's not just a case of whether it's daytime or nighttime or cloudy or not.
It's also the season, right?
There are seasons when there just isn't going to be as much sun, and so what do you do then?
For sure. Yeah, so for sure.
We measured how much.
If you used every battery in California, and we've spent more on batteries than any other state, including every battery in every car and truck, You would have less than a half an hour of electricity from the grid backed up.
Well, you need thousands of hours to make it through the windless and sunless days of winter.
So you need thousands of hours.
We have less than a half an hour. You're talking trillions of dollars.
Really, even renewables advocates don't think that we're going to just be able to get our way there with that.
So would it be fair to say that all of these comparisons, they do apples and oranges, because the apple in this case is nuclear, which once it's built, it's just continuous and doesn't have a slight low patch, versus the green energies, they just sort of leave out the batteries or assume that someday we'll invent them?
How do they even compare these things when it's like comparing a bicycle to an airplane?
The airplane isn't going to improve to the point until it flies.
Are they literally being that disingenuous that they just leave out batteries and leave out the fact that they're not continuous power?
Is it that simple? There's actually two.
They do two things. The first is that they will just point out how much electricity costs when the sun is shining on a solar panel.
The other thing they do is they will construct very elaborate models that allows them to hide the assumptions.
And those models just assume a lot of things that don't exist right now.
Assume, for example, all of our hydroelectric dams.
Are used for storage.
This was what the Stanford professor Mark Jacobson did, is that he estimated that we would have really a hundred times more storage, or I'm sorry, I think it was more like a thousand times more storage from hydroelectric dams than was physically available.
And he got called out in a Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences report.
And you can sort of tell by people's behavior.
He then filed a lawsuit against the people that wrote the paper debunking him I think that sort of speaks loudly about the confidence that they have in those models.
Wow. All right. So it's scary when you hear that such a major decision is probably being dominated by economic analyses that are, would you say, fraudulent intentionally?
Can we even tell?
Or are they just incompetent?
Well, what it is is that there's a deep ideology behind moving towards renewables that is really quite...
It imagines that we're all going to go live a very low-energy lifestyle, that we're all going to voluntarily decide to live with very small amounts of energy.
It's a very sort of...
It's both dystopian and utopian at the same time.
So it's not like...
I mean, yes, I think there's some dishonesty in it, but I think you have to remember that it's incredibly motivated by a very dark ideological underlying kind of structure.
Okay. Now, my audience here on Periscope and on Twitter, we've had the benefit of one of my nuclear, well, my only other nuclear advisor, Mark Schneider, and he's been educating us all on the potential for generation four.
Now, we understand Generation 4 to be sort of an umbrella that would include a number of new technologies for nuclear.
Can you give us your opinion of whether the Generation 4 is where all the action should be, or is there something that's more already ready to go that you recommend, or both?
Yeah, I mean, so I think it's important to stay really close to the data on this issue.
So what the data show is that the cheapest nuclear power is the nuclear that we have a lot of experience building, operating and regulating.
It's water cooled.
It's not cooled by any exotic materials or metals or gases.
Basically, it's experience, experience, experience.
You know, if we had decided in the 1950s that we were going to use, that everybody in the world would use a different kind of nuclear, then that nuclear would probably be cheap.
Although there's even some doubts about that.
I mean, I forwarded to you a graph that basically shows that You know, we did that.
Britain, for example, used non-water-cooled reactors.
They used gas-cooled reactors.
They just turned out to be more complicated, more expensive.
They don't last as long.
So it just turns out that the water-cooled reactors that we have, which can run for 60, 80, maybe 100 years, are the best of the nuclear technologies.
We tried so many...
But the water-cooled are the ones that the public is going to be scared to death of.
The public is scared of nuclear for reasons that have to do with the associations with the bomb, has to do with manipulations of public fears.
But yeah, if you tell people that we've got some new nuclear that doesn't create any waste, that doesn't have any risk of accidents, and that can't be used to make a bomb, if you lie to people, then yeah, you might be able to win them over.
The problem is I don't think lying is a particularly good marketing strategy.
Well, let's say, instead of lying, let's say optimism.
And my understanding is that there are Gen 4...
Technologies that are going into production.
I'm not the expert, but I think Canada has one that they just put into production.
Is that true? So Canada uses heavy water-cooled reactors.
I think they're great.
They have a lot of experience making them.
The reason the non-proliferation community doesn't like them is that it does seem to be a little bit easier to But wait a minute, wasn't there a Gen 4 that just came online?
What is the site that just came online?
They're great. I think they're really low-cost.
I think Generation 4, you should realize, is just a marketing term.
It actually refers to...
I mean, really, the reactors that people refer to as Gen 4 existed before we moved to light water reactors.
I mean, we had the predecessor to chemical-cooled reactors.
We had gas-cooled reactors.
We had sodium-metal-cooled reactors, all before we used light water reactors.
to gas-cooled reactors.
The United States went to water-cooled reactors.
France followed.
Britain didn't.
And France has just a much more successful program than Britain.
The Russians have the most advanced sodium metal-cooled reactor, and it's just much more complicated and expensive than water-cooled reactors.
Now, my understanding is that the Gen 4 stuff was the big win, should it ever come to pass, would be that they could make them smaller and simpler and then reproduce them en masse so that they're sort of pre-approved, we know what we're getting, and and the economies of scale come down.
Now, why is that not true?
Why isn't Generation 4 not yet ready?
But we should be able to iterate our way to the smaller, reproducible, economical model.
What part of that story is not credible?
Half of what you said is correct.
That's pretty good for me.
So we know what makes nuclear cheap is making the same kind of nuclear reactors and nuclear plants over and over again.
That standardization allows the experience that brings the cost down.
That's occurred in Korea, in France, and some periods in Japan.
And in those situations, they do end up manufacturing a fair amount of the components in factories.
On the issue of size, The data is overwhelming that moving to larger reactors makes for cheaper electricity.
Why is that? Well, it's because you can increase the size of the reactor.
The Koreans went from 1,000 megawatts to 1,400 megawatts, a 40% increase, without significantly increasing either the number of workers you need to build it or the number of workers you need to operate it.
So small I think we kind of end up thinking that energy is like information and computing technologies like microchips.
It's completely different.
It's about a transformation of natural energy stocks and flows into usable electricity, totally different physical processes.
I think we have to remember that when it comes to energy, bigger Makes things cheaper.
If you can make more of the components in factories, great.
But even that is no guarantee.
What you really need is you need a lot of repetition.
You need a lot of quantity.
So a one-off project building in a factory could end up being more expensive than just something built in the field.
Well, the comparison is that the ones built in the factories, they make more and more of them until the price comes down.
So it's a question of quantity, isn't it?
Right. And so right there we have a problem, right?
Because we are now making more and more.
The Russians, for example, are making a big investment to make a lot of light water reactors.
That's what's cheap. And so if you were to say, well, let's make a switch to some completely different reactor.
First of all, those different reactors have been more expensive to build in the past, in part because they're more complex, both in terms of the science and the engineering.
And then also it assumes that somehow we're going to have a huge demand.
You have a chicken and egg problem.
So why do we think we're going to have more demand for some alternative design than we have for nuclear today?
Wouldn't the demand be the same, which is that we need energy anywhere we can get it.
So if we can get it from this design versus that design, it should be the same demand.
It's just a different solution.
Right. So, I mean, I think just look at what we have.
I mean, so if you kind of go, there's two leaders in building nuclear plants, the Chinese and the Russians.
The Russians will build you a sodium-cooled reactor, a metal-cooled reactor, or they can build you a water-cooled reactor.
The reason that countries buy the water-cooled one is because it's a lot cheaper.
The risks are a lot lower.
They actually are making a lot of those components in factories, whereas the sodium reactor, it's just much more complicated, much more difficult, much more expensive.
And really, there's no need for it.
I mean, you get all the same benefits from the water-cooled one.
Well, is it true that the benefits of Generation 4 are that it's safe from meltdown versus the water-cooled, which can have a higher risk, which I'm sure you would say is...
overblown in terms of the risk and I wouldn't disagree with you there, but isn't there a big difference in the risk?
I mean, I mean the truth is that you can have accidents including fires with all kinds of nuclear plants and under that situation the radiation can escape the plant just like it can with a water-cooled reactor. I mean the truth is that you can have accidents It But is the difference, so let me just check some of my facts here.
My assumption, my belief is that if a Generation 4 had a problem, the problem would cause it to stop being a reactor, whereas the water-cooled, if it has a problem, The reaction is uncontrolled, so that one of them is inherently safe, the one that if something goes wrong, it just stops working.
Now, if it leaked, let's say terrorists got to it or something, wouldn't the Generation 4 have a pretty small footprint for that radiation leak compared to a larger pressurized, water-cooled situation?
Well, we don't really know.
First of all, we've had pretty bad accidents with both gas-cooled and sodium metal-cooled reactors in the past, including people being killed and there being fires.
So, I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be suspicious of the claims that we're going to get some sort of perfectly safe reactor.
When radiation escapes from existing nuclear plants, the truth is that it's just very small amounts that cause very little harm.
I mean, I don't even think scientifically you could say that the reactor is safer without running it for a hundred years because so few people have been killed by our existing nuclear plants.
I mean... Well, let me make...
I shouldn't use analogies, but if you're comparing a hand grenade that's loaded...
To, you know, a bowl of Cheerios, you wouldn't have to run tests forever.
And it seems to me that the Generation 4 would be built by design so they couldn't at least explode and send radiation a far distance.
Is the problem with the water-cooled that people imagine that if the worst case happened, which I believe has never happened, right?
There's never been a worst case scenario.
Scenario that the kind we imagine involved with the older reactors has there?
Well, I mean, I think you could argue that Chernobyl was the worst that you could imagine.
It's hard to see anything getting worse than that.
And I mean, in terms of the inherent safety, so look at Three Mile Island.
You had the worst possible disaster with that reactor, with one of the two reactors.
The reactor melted, and the containment structure worked.
If you're standing right next to the plant, you got less radiation than you would get from an x-ray.
So I think you have to kind of ask yourself, What kind of safety benefits are you hoping to get?
I think what we see from the accidents is that the vast majority of harm is caused by people panicking.
You know, so you see people in Fukushima, they're pulling people out of nursing homes, out of hospitals, a completely unnecessary overreaction because of exaggerated fears of radiation.
That's what caused all—that's what caused—I mean, there's likely to be no deaths from the radiation from Fukushima, but 2,000 people will have died in the evacuation.
So do you think the new nuclear—a new nuclear plant, a Generation 4, what you call a Generation 4 plant, if there were an accident, Can you be sure that you won't have a panic?
Because that's where the harm comes from.
I think the assumption that you wouldn't have that panic is wishful thinking.
I think the fears of nuclear have basically come from people thinking that nuclear plants are sort of like a bomb and that a nuclear accident is sort of like a bomb going off.
Yeah, the psychology is always going to be the tough part.
Let me see if I understand this fine point.
If we were going to start building nuclear right now to really get aggressive and address climate change and even just address pollution and the need for more energy in general, I think your point is that the only technology that could do that right now is the technology we've used and has worked for a long time and has been way safer than people imagine.
But here's the question. First of all, did I get the first part right?
Yes. Okay. The second part of my question is, there is always a better technology.
And I'm sure you would agree with the general statement.
That whatever technology you're talking about, if you wait long enough and people work hard enough, they're going to come up with one that's safer, cheaper, better.
You don't believe that we have the ultimate solution right now.
Is that correct? Right, and I think that we are getting great progress, but it's within the water-cooled designs.
So we've had a huge number of changes to make them much safer over the last several decades, and many of the important changes have been human factors.
It's been improved human performance, checklists, worker training, Things that aren't as sexy, maybe, but have actually been the difference in terms of increasing the safety and performance.
Yeah. You know, the trouble is that as soon as you say we got our checklists and our human processes are much better, I just see Homer Simpson.
You can't tell the guy who writes Dilber for a living.
Well, we'll train the people better.
That should keep us safe from nuclear disaster.
So there's a natural problem with that.
I'm assuming everything you're saying is 100% true.
I don't have any reason to doubt it, and it seems obvious that that's true.
But your brain can't wrap around, oh, people will be smarter, therefore we're safe from a nuclear disaster.
That's exactly the method.
So when I say… We can certainly point to certain… I can certainly point you to many technical changes that have been made in the plants, but I do think it's interesting to point out that when Three Mile Island happened in 1979, American plants were running about 50% of the year.
After that accident, and in many ways the Three Mile Island accident was the best thing to happen to nuclear.
The performance improved so much at the plants that they now run over 90% of the year.
So those were changes made mostly by improving the operations of these plants.
It's a similar story with jet planes.
We've had a huge decline in jet plane crashes over the last 70 years or so.
Some of that is because of improvements to the technology but another big part of it is just the improvement of the operations and maintenance of those jet planes.
I would caution you against using that analogy because when people think about it, they think about the crash, not the success.
Maybe you're right, but I have to say, I think the reason I like it is because I think we all fly a lot these days and I think we get on airplanes and we look over at the pilot and the pilot comes out to meet us.
And we feel like we're in safe hands.
We know that there's a risk.
But I think most of us that fly a lot, we go, hey, this is run by people that know what they're doing.
And yeah, there was a crash with a newer technology.
I mean, and I think that's a notable thing, right?
Newer technologies often bring with them problems, like we've seen with the new Boeing jet.
So, you know, I mean, I think like...
Like, you would expect that a radically new technology, which is what nuclear power was in 1957, would take some time for humans to get used to using in the same way that it's taken us some time to get used to, you know, to making, operating, and flying jet planes.
Now, but check my thinking here.
There are something like a dozen Generation 4 startups, is that right?
Yes. And is that just in the United States, or is that worldwide?
Well, that's just in the United States.
I mean, I think internationally, though, you have smaller players, but they tend to be part of much bigger companies.
So like I said, I mean, the Russians are the ones that are out there with a sodium-cooled reactor right now.
Yeah, and then... So we...
We've got 10 dozen or so startups working on it.
Bill Gates is pro-Generation 4, is he not?
Or at least pro-development of it.
He's not saying it's ready to go.
Is that true or not true?
Yeah, so he had a joint venture in China that was using a sodium-cooled reactor, and they've not built a demonstration reactor yet.
And like I said, the Russians actually have one they're building, and we've been doing sodium-cooled reactors for a long time, and they've just proven to be much more expensive.
So the thing that we can't know...
Is how effective those startups are at accomplishing the hard part, which is making it simpler and safer at the same time.
That's the magic bullet, right?
Simpler and safer simultaneously?
I think we should measure progress by results and by performance.
And so you have a lot of people with designs, but you have to remember we've also done a huge number of experiments.
I mean, we've had now Almost 70 years of nuclear research development, demonstration, experimental reactors all over the world, not just in the United States.
So now you have people that kind of come back and they say, well, I'm going to try this older design, but I'm going to call it Gen 4.
And somehow it's all going to be different this time.
I think it's fair to say there's a lot of wishful thinking.
Well, but how do we, as citizens, you know, we're standing on the outside and we're looking at this, and it seems to me that you could have said at any time in the past, you know, before the Wright brothers, well, we've tried these flying machines for a hundred years and people just fall off a cliff and they kill themselves.
Why would it work now?
So, you know, most of us have in our heads There's multiple histories in which things didn't work until they did, and when we see that there are a bunch of startups working on it, and the startups are not the dumb people.
There's not a lot of dumb people who went to work for a nuclear startup.
Bill Gates is not a dumb guy, and he's putting his money into it.
So we look at this and we think, yes, I definitely believe that what we have now If we were to start today, we'd be unambiguously using the stuff we know that works.
But it feels to me like if we're looking at climate change and we're doing 80-year predictions, that new technologies of nuclear is just guaranteed to be a big part of that.
Am I wrong about that?
Well, I think you might want to ask yourself, so we have a particular kind of jet plane right now, right?
Are there alternative ways to have jet travel?
Well, there are, actually, other than using the jet turbines that we have.
There's other ways to create nuclear power, but I think you have to ask yourself, in the case of jet engines, after we invented jet engines and started using jet engines after World War II, Did we need to switch to different engines to get these incredible improvements in performance?
The answer is no.
So the question is, why do we think we would need to with nuclear when we've had really major performance improvements with existing water-cooled designs?
Well, I think people think in terms of stories and narratives and histories that they've seen before, And everything we've seen before is that there's no such thing as a technology that doesn't improve.
And, for example, the electric car was not a great thing until Tesla, you could argue.
Yeah. So, why wouldn't there be a Tesla of Generation 4 nuclear in our 40-year future?
Does it seem...
I mean, maybe there will be.
The question is... Let me ask you this specific question, then.
Over a 40-year period, would you say it's closer to 100% chance that we'll have safer, different designs than the current ones, or would you say it's closer to zero?
Well, I think that we will continue to have a lot of technological innovation and that the nuclear plants that will continue to be the safest, the cheapest, and the highest performing ones are going to continue to be light water-cooled reactors.
I mean, I think you've got to remember, you're imagining that folks are trying to invent something new when the reactors that they want to invent were all already experimented and developed.
Okay, so here's the problem.
It's always hard for we as observers to look at this complicated area because we're always missing something.
And here's what I'm missing.
In no reality I can imagine could there be 12 startups and Bill Gates investing in these newer kinds of technologies that And I think even the energy department just approved a facility for testing Gen 4 fuels and iterating.
There's no way I can conceive that all of them have missed the obvious, which is that it can't be done.
That's not conceivable to me.
So then what's your explanation for why over the last 60 years we've demonstrated every single kind of reactor that you're talking about?
Gas cooled, sodium metal cooled, chemical cooled.
So why have they not been able to succeed up until now?
And what makes you think That another demonstration reactor, which by the way, we're nowhere close to building, not even an experimental test reactor, what makes you think another experimental reactor is going to make a difference?
Well, remember, we're not talking with technical expertise, so we're just saying sort of generic things which are always true in every situation, which is when you've got this many smart people who Who are sure enough to change their jobs and invest hyper-millions of dollars in it.
When that many people think something is probably going to happen sooner or later with some amount of iteration, they're almost always right.
I've lived through, for example, smartphones being invented.
Basically, I worked at the phone company when we were trying to invent a handheld device so that everybody could have a wireless phone.
And all of the talk at the time was, yeah, we've had wireless cell phones for 30 years.
They're never going to catch on.
And then we just made them smaller and cheaper and put a screen on it, connected it to the Internet, invented apps, and suddenly you can't live without it.
So if you have, like I have, I've lived through a number of times where even the smartest people in the field said, you can't really have cell phones in everybody's pocket because the radiation will kill you.
They had lots of reasons. They were all bad reasons.
But this doesn't look different than all of the times people said, well, you'll never make a plane that flies.
Okay, there's a plane that flies.
Well, you'll never have an electric car.
Okay, you have an electric car.
You'll never be able to have cell phones in everybody's hands with no wires.
Well, okay, now we all have one.
Why would this be different?
And by the way, I'm not doubting that it's different.
It's not different, actually.
I mean, I'm pointing out that actually it's the same.
In fact, you know, we've had a huge amount of innovation with water-cooled reactors over the last 60 years.
We've done all sorts of experiments with other kinds of reactors.
And so, and Lightwater have, I mean, it's like, our Lightwater reactors that we have are like the smartphones.
I mean, so I guess the question goes back to you.
Why are you so pessimistic about the progress of light water reactors?
So here's why.
If you said to me, yeah, you got your smartphones, and everybody's using them, and they all sort of look the same, whether it's an Apple or an Android, they're sort of the same.
But there are 12 startups...
We're working on a direct brain interface, and if you're 20 years in advance, you're not going to have a thing in your hand.
It's going to be a direct brain interface, and we know that because there are so many smart people working on it.
We don't know which one's going to win, but the one thing you could say for sure is that in 20 years, you're not going to be holding something in your hand that you call a phone.
Now, I don't think there are 12 startups doing that.
But if there were, I would say, yeah, if you're looking 20 years out, you're not going to be holding a piece of equipment in your hand.
That is very unlikely.
And so I just extend the same thing.
Likewise with electric cars, you know, I don't think anybody will be driving a car in 20 years.
I think they'll all be self-driving and electric, probably.
So I guess...
The central question is whether there's something special about the water-cooled versus the other coolings that means that forever the other kind will be complicated.
Is it such that the current technology by its nature doesn't get complicated and we can figure out how to do it better for a long time, whereas the new technology Just by its nature can't be solved.
Is there something that the nature of the new stuff is?
It's a little bit of both, and it's not entirely clear.
I mean, like I said, the British, we have two other experiments, right?
So we have the British and the Canadians who have done different kinds of designs.
The Canadians have done a heavy water-cooled reactor.
That's been amazing.
Great program.
It appears to work as good, if not better, than light water reactors.
It's fabulous.
The British did gas-cooled reactors.
When you get them up and running and you kind of get better at using them, they operate pretty well, but they've had a shorter lifespan because of some inherent physical problems.
The graphite bricks have been cracking is sort of the biggest one.
Whereas with the light water reactors in the United States, we can refurbish them, we can upgrade the parts, and they can run for 60, 80, 100 years.
So to some extent, there's a physical difference.
You know, if we had all been using sodium-cooled designs for 60 years, they might be as good.
The problem with fast reactors, where you're not slowing down the moderators, is that they are just much more difficult to manage.
So there are reasons to think it would have been harder with sodium-cooled fast reactors.
Those are, incidentally, the kinds of reactors you need if you want to reuse the so-called waste.
So to some extent it's a problem of just experience and lock-in and to some extent it's an inherent physical problem.
So if you had a choice between these two strategies, one is that you try to convince the public that what we already have is good enough or You convince them that there's a new technology that solves all the psychological problems they had before,
meaning that the new reactors could eat nuclear waste instead of creating it in some cases, and that it would be far safer, if built correctly, than from a meltdown, because if you lost your power, you wouldn't have a meltdown necessarily,
as I understand it. Which of those two do you think could get you to the end zone?
Versus maybe taking even a greater risk and a greater cost to move to generation four a little early so that the public can say, oh, that's a different thing.
Now, I'm not worried about the waste transport and I'm not worried about the meltdown as much.
It's gone from something I worried about a lot, even irrationally.
I'm not saying that they're rational, but now they have a new story That that problem has been fixed.
Which of those do you think could get you to the end zone better?
Well, I mean, it seems like it's less interesting, kind of what I think, and more what the market is choosing.
And the market is choosing the plain-jane, old-fashioned, water-cooled designs.
But wait, hold on. Yeah.
But the market wants those, but the public has such a resistance, and presumably the government has to follow the public to some degree, that isn't it sort of impossible to go big with the current technology because of the public resistance?
Even if the market, meaning the energy companies, etc., have all agreed that this is the way to go.
Isn't the public going to stop this?
Not really. I mean, I think when the public...
I mean, around the world, when publics and governments and people are deciding what kind of reactors to get, they want to get nuclear plants that we have experienced building and operating safely for many decades.
They don't want to make big risks.
If they did, then they would be buying the Russian sodium-cooled reactor rather than the water-cooled reactor.
I mean, if I were a policymaker having to make a decision of how to spend $10 or $20 billion, I'm going to go with the kind of plant that we know how to run Not with some radically experimental design.
So the way people process risk, if you gave me these two options, look, I'll give you traditional nuclear, which is really, really well defined, and there's never been, even in the worst case scenario, there's never been, you know, a horrific accident.
And in fact, the evacuations have killed more than the actual accident itself.
So you've told me this is the risk.
But, but, I have in my mind...
That in the worst case scenario, which has never happened, that there could be something catastrophic that could take out a county or half a city.
So that's what my mind says is the risk, and there's literally nothing you could do to talk me out of that.
First of all, would you agree that's how the average person is thinking right now?
No, I don't, actually.
Basically, what you have is you have a minority of people that are adamantly anti-nuclear and that think it poses a catastrophic risk.
You have a majority of people that kind of go, yeah, there's good and bad parts of it, and given that we need to deal with other problems like air pollution and climate change, It's worth it.
So I don't think you can generalize to the majority of people in the world the fears of a minority of anti-nuclear people.
I did a bad job of explaining it, and so your correction was accurate.
Let me say it differently. Nobody wants it in their neighborhood, so won't that stop it almost entirely?
I mean, but it's not true that nobody wants it in their neighborhood.
In fact, what we find is that support for nuclear power is higher in the communities that have nuclear plants near them.
So there's a lot of benefits to having nuclear plants nearby.
Well, but in order to stop something, what does it take?
10% of the public to be deeply invested?
I mean, it doesn't take much in terms of a percentage to stop a project because they're more active.
What do you think is sort of the tipping point?
If you said, let's put a nuclear reactor in your backyard, and your public was 90% in favor of it, would that be enough?
Well, obviously, for a lot of countries that are building nuclear plants, it is.
And for a lot of the places that are not building nuclear plants, it's not.
So, I mean, you have situations where people are comfortable with the risk.
They tend to be places that are developing economies.
They tend to be places with very significant levels of air pollution.
And the places that don't want it are places that tend to be rich, that have abundant energy, and don't think they need it.
So, obviously, people have to think they need nuclear.
In order for us to be building a lot of nuclear.
And I think when people, you realize it's a technology that people, they think it's something that it's not.
I mean, even your language where you say there's a catastrophic risk, it's kind of like, well, what is the most catastrophic outcome?
If the most catastrophic outcome is Chernobyl, then you're talking about incredibly small numbers of deaths.
No, but nobody is saying that.
People are saying that there's a potential that's worse than Chernobyl.
That's either true or not true, but we don't really know, do we?
I think we do, actually.
I mean, you have Chernobyl as a reactor that had no containment and was on fire.
That's just not an accident that we can have anymore given the state of the technology.
And you got to remember, I mean, like, seven million people die every year from air pollution.
So you're talking about, you know, 250 people, I think something like 250 people died last year, you know, getting hit by cars while looking at their smartphones.
Well, that's about the total number of people who will die from Chernobyl over 80 years.
Clearly people have a fear of the technology because they think it's like a weapon or like a bomb, and so I think we have to do more to help people to see what the technology is and what it isn't.
That would be an interesting framing because I've never seen anybody try to sell a nuclear plant by saying, we're going to build a plant The most people who have ever died from nuclear is X. This will save a million people per year or something.
The first nuclear plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania was precisely sold as a clean energy alternative to the heavy coal plant pollution that was contaminating Pennsylvania at the time.
In fact, most nuclear companies throughout most of the history have sold nuclear as the clean energy source of electricity that it is.
So the pollution benefits of nuclear are really front and center.
I mean, we live in California, right?
So our air is pretty clean. But when you go to really polluted places...
You know, Going back to a point you made originally, it does seem like this amazing irony that the thing that will make nuclear, and by the way, I think there's no question that far more nuclear is in our future.
There's no question about that, is there?
Well, I mean, it's been coming back a bit.
I mean, the share of electricity from nuclear globally has declined from 18% to 10% since the mid-'80s.
So we have had a decline in share of electricity.
Now, it also had a net decline over the last 10 years.
Some of that was due to Fukushima.
It's been coming back a little bit since Fukushima.
The Chinese and Russians are building.
But the demand is much lower than what any of us would like it to be.
But wouldn't you say at this point that Congress is both sides?
My understanding is there is bipartisan support for nuclear energy.
That's true, isn't it?
There's bipartisan support for nuclear research and development, as there has always been.
What we find is that Democrats, progressives, liberals tend to be more anti-nuclear, and right now there's efforts to shut down nuclear plants all across the United States and replace them with fossil fuels and renewables.
Those efforts are mostly led by Democrats, and it tends to be Republicans who are the ones defending nuclear.
So But doesn't it seem that if nothing surprises us, in other words, if the variables that we see in the world today are largely the same variables that are still here in a few years, which seems probable, isn't it likely that the fear of climate change will guarantee a switch in the public mood toward nuclear?
Because there's just no question which of the risks is bigger.
If you're going to be pro-science, The people who are worried about climate change are, they literally mock the people who don't believe.
It's like, you've got to be pro-science or you're a moron.
So therefore believe in climate change risk.
But you have to, to be consistent, you also have to say, and the scientists don't know any way to solve this except nuclear plus whatever else we can make work.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I mean, I think that the big change that makes me optimistic is the fact that millennials grew up more afraid of climate change than they did of nuclear war.
And so what we see is that when I talk to, like, I'm Generation X, but I talk to Generation X or baby boomers, I just think it's going to take a while.
You know, I wonder, I spend a lot of time thinking about the persuasion aspect of this, and my great hope was that Generation 4 was a way to change people's minds, even if the technology ended up not that different, even if that's a marketing term in the end.
But I'm also wondering if the climate risks It just opens up the box to just say, there's only one way to solve it, and if you want to be consistent about being pro-science, there's only one way to do it.
Would you say that if you're anti-nuclear, that you're...
I know this is more of a political statement, but wouldn't you have to be pretty anti-science to be against nuclear energy?
Well, I think, I mean, yes, in a sense.
I think that, you know, people use and abuse science, and they try to justify their views on that.
But I mean, I wrote a column for Forbes called, The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear is Because It Means We Don't Need to Use Renewables.
I think that the desire for renewables...
Preceded, in many ways, the fear of nuclear.
And the problem with nuclear is, of course, if you're like France and you just get all your electricity from nuclear, you don't need solar and wind.
In fact, if you add solar and wind, you just increase the air pollution.
The same doesn't work in reverse.
There are no major economies that can run on solar and wind.
If there were, Germany wouldn't be producing 10 times more carbon emissions than France.
So I think that the desire to harmonize with the natural world is behind a lot of the love of renewables.
There's all sorts of political motivations as well, but I think it's not just the denial of science.
I think it's a desire to kind of shape society in a particular way.
Isn't it almost a lifestyle choice which people are bastardizing to To make it a policy for the world?
There's a famous blogger at Vox named Dave Roberts, he's their environment blogger, and he just tweeted, post-agricultural human civilization was a mistake.
I mean, just contemplate the irony of somebody on Twitter condemning industrial civilization.
I responded, life expectancy in pre-industrial civilization was under 40.
I mean, are we really having an argument about whether or not we should have industrial civilization?
Or is he sort of engaging in, is this just a kind of, like, fantasy?
You can't tell.
Yeah. Yeah.
And it wouldn't matter.
I wouldn't care if it wasn't part of an effort to shut down our best and largest source of clean energy.
Yeah. Alright, I want to wind down here and I want to thank you very much.
This was amazingly useful.
I think I could tell from the comments the viewers were getting as much out of it as I was.
This helps a tremendous deal.
We'll keep working on what is the best way to persuade in that direction because it seems inevitable and the sooner we get there the better.
So, thank you very much.
And, by the way, give a thought to being on my app, Interface by WenHub, where anybody can call and talk to an expert and you set your own price.
Yours could be zero if you just want to make the world a better place.
And then, if you do, Mark Schneider's on there, so we'd have at least two people who are pro-no-clear who experts and journalists could contact, and they can schedule their time so you don't have to be live the whole time.
But anyway, consider that.
You don't have to answer it right now.
And I hope this helped the world a little bit.
And thank you very much, Michael.
Thanks for having me on, Scott. All right.
▲
Export Selection