How to liberate nuclear energy, with Robert Zubrin
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Because what you don't know about energy can kill you. Here's Alex Epstein.

Welcome to Power Hour. I'm Alex Epstein. Well, as I promised at the end of last episode, if you listened to it, I have a very exciting discussion planned this week. And let me just give you a tiny bit of background on it. So for the past two or so years, I've been very adamant about this idea of what I call decriminalizing nuclear energy. And the basic premise is that nuclear has this unbelievable potential. We've seen a lot of historical success before what I call its criminalization, but it's

And it's this crazy thing because it's unlimited potential to improve human life, to expand the supply of low cost, reliable energy, and to do it far more cleanly and safely, including with virtually no CO2 emissions, which is what everyone in the world claims to care about. And yet we have just made this like almost a total non-starter in terms of a significant growing part.

of the world's energy. And my main frustration has been, you know, talking to the nuclear industry, talking to people in the field, it's very hard to get specifics on what should actually be done to liberate or decriminalize it. So I was very, very happy recently when someone I'm a longtime fan of, Robert Zubrin, he wrote Merchants of Despair, which I love. You know, he's been on the show a couple of times. He sent me this manuscript, which is as yet unpublished. It actually doesn't yet even have a publisher called The Case for Nukes.

And I got around to reading it and I thought, wow, this is by far the best thing I've ever read in terms of specifically analyzing what are the things holding nuclear back and

and then putting forward a blueprint for liberating nuclear that could really actually be done. I've been talking about it ever since with different elected officials I work with, and I really wanted to share it with the public, with my audience, so that we can really move this forward. Robert has done some amazing work here, and I'm really eager to showcase it and share it. So, Robert Zubrin, welcome back to Power Hour. Thanks for inviting me.

My pleasure. So let's start off with the history of nuclear. And, you know, this I want to put this in the context of this came up. I think this came up this weekend. I was debating this guy, Andrew Dessler, who's a climate scientist who's become really focused on energy policy. And, you know, he has this refrain of, you know, nuclear is so expensive. And this has just become a kind of refrain, particularly on the left.

And my understanding and certainly amplified by your book is that if we look at the history of nuclear, there's abundant evidence that it could be as cheap or even cheaper than any other source of energy. So could you talk about that history and why you also have this confidence? Yes. Well, yeah.

You know, nuclear power was born first out of the Manhattan Project, and then following that, the creation of the nuclear navy, and then Eisenhower's Atom for Peace program, in which we would take the technology that had been

Now, made practical in the form of engines that could drive submarines and ships and use it to power cities. And put the tremendous power of the atom at the service of humanity instead of just as a weapon of war. And it took off. It was immediately successful.

The design that had been developed by Rickover and his team for powering nuclear submarines was and is extremely robust because, you see, to have a nuclear reaction sustained by low enriched fuel

The neutrons have to be slowed down. That is, moderated is the term that is used because the neutron is actually more likely to interact with a nucleus if it is going slow than if it's going fast. And so what Rickover did was he said, well, we're going to make the moderator be water, which will also be the coolant.

And if the reactor gets too hot, the water will start to boil and there'll be holes in the moderator and the reaction will shut down. And this is a drop dead infallible method of negative feedback to control a nuclear reactor. It is physically impossible for a pressurized water reactor to ever have an uncontrolled chain reaction. It can't be done. You couldn't make it happen no matter how hard you tried.

And as a result of this, while there have been over a thousand pressurized water reactors or related types, can-dos, boiling water reactors, they're all fundamentally pressurized water reactors, on land and sea for the past decade,

65 years, not a single one has ever had a runaway chain reaction or frankly, any other accident that harmed anyone outside the plant game. It's an unparalleled record of success and it's built into the physics of the thing.

Now, so these things started to be built in the 60s in large numbers. And by the early 70s, we were starting a new nuclear reactor in this country twice a month. That's how fast we were going. And if it hadn't been for the policies introduced by the Carter administration, which

which was anti-nuclear and had many individuals in it that were affiliated with a Malthusian organization at the time known as the Club of Rome. The

The United States would have completely decarbonized its electric power grid right now, by now. It would, in fact, was decarbonized by the 1990s. We would have, the decarbonization of electric power would be something that happened 30 years ago. Okay, just as it is the case that France did that.

Okay. France had a nuclear power program, which had support from pretty much all wings of the French political spectrum, ranging from the Gauls to the communists, and they just did it. And

And it is only France and I think actually Sweden as well that has largely decarbonized its power grid. And they both did it with nuclear power because nuclear power is a fully reliable way to produce electricity. And, yeah,

And not only that, it is immune to geopolitical cutoffs. The only other reliable way to produce electricity is fossil fuels, but they do require world trade to adequately supply many of the countries that use them. And we're seeing this, of course, in Europe, the weakness of its strategic position in that, especially Germany, which

chose to shut down its nuclear power plants and make itself dependent on Russian gas and oil, basically making themselves dependent on people who are dedicated to their conquests, which is not a good idea.

So let's talk about the, just to go back to the price issue. So definitely, you know, we've established it can be done reliably, you know, it has a bunch of advantages. It can be done very safely and cleanly. Now, France, my understanding is certainly lower cost electricity than Germany. It's not lower cost historically than the U.S. But so if we go back to when these plants are being built, are you saying that we would have gone all nuclear for purely economic reasons? Yeah.

Well, yeah. Sure, hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest, you can't beat it. But we would have been dominantly nuclear. And so what's the evidence for that?

Well, the evidence for it is, in fact, nuclear power did completely replace oil as a method of producing electricity in the United States. In the 1960s, oil was responsible for producing over 20% of American electricity. Today, it's 3%. And nuclear power went from negligible to 20%. That was the major shift. Look, the thing is that in the 60s,

It took four years to build a nuclear power plant. Okay? Four years. Okay? And in fact, the shipping port power plant, the first one, took three years. And four years was the typical construction time. The Carter administration implemented regulatory changes, which we'll discuss, which has expanded the average time to build a nuclear power plant from four years to eight years and then 16 years. And

A study was done in the 80s when this process was quite evident by a professor, Bernard Cohn, and I quote aspects of his study in my book, which showed that the cost of building a nuclear power plant goes up as the time squared to construct it.

Okay. Because you see, it's not only that you have to keep paying the workers, no matter how slow the job is going, but the more time there is, the more lawyers get into the game. And they're a lot more expensive than electricians. And the, and then also you have the NRC actually making changes in the design after it's built. And if you've ever done

a home improvement, for example, you would know that there's nothing more expensive than changing your mind about what should be built after it's been built. And this is what's been imposed on the nuclear industry. So

You know, really, with experience with building nuclear power plants, the time should have gone from four years to two years to build a nuclear power plant. Instead, it went from four years to 16. And I should add, however, that it still only takes four years in China or South Korea to build a nuclear power plant. And once again, it should have gone down, not up.

And then there's been other things. On the basis of really political vandalism is the only way to describe it, capricious decisions by political leaders, it's become extremely difficult to finance a nuclear power plant. For example, in the 1980s, there was built the Long Island Lighting Company, built the Shore Emitting Nuclear Power Plant, which cost then $5 billion, which is like 10 billion today.

And it got all done and it was ready to go. And Governor Mario Cuomo, the father of Governor Cuomo, who was until recently governor of New York, said, I'm not going to let you open it.

Project, just forget it. We're not gonna let you open the plant. And therefore it became a dead loss. The plant had to be sold to the state for $1 and then destroyed. The entire investment was lost. And when something like that happens, that sends a signal to anyone who's gonna invest in any other nuclear power plant anywhere else

you know, hey, you're taking a big risk here because you could get everything done and then still not be allowed to operate your plant. So there could be nothing more destructive than that.

Yeah. So that, I mean, that's like, it takes 16 years or it takes infinity years in a certain sense. So to go back to the economics, you know, one, one thing you mentioned in your book is you estimate, so maybe today it takes 5 billion or more, I'd emphasize more to build a gigawatt nuclear reactor. You estimate that it could be built for 500 million. What, what gives you that confidence? Because that's the kind of money it takes to build one in a nuclear submarine. Yeah.

The reactors of nuclear submarines and nuclear aircraft carriers do not cost $5 billion. They're smaller, right? Well, they're smaller, but that's not really the reason. The reason is they build them and they go in, and they don't take 16 years to build one. And they're not subject to a process which...

I outline it in my book. The NRC itself has a 32 step process for getting approval of a nuclear power plant. And each of those steps or most of those steps bring in other agencies with multiple step processes to accomplish it, including most notably the Environmental Protection Agency, which is completely infested with anti-nuclear activists.

and which frequently, for instance, imposes on the plant for approval of its environmental impact statement a requirement to prove that the utility could not have done anything else. Imagine, if you will, that you're trying to, you have a piece of property and you want to put a log cabin on it, and you go to the local authority for the building permit, right?

And the authority doesn't just look at your plans. They ask you, please present a proof why you couldn't build something else there. Why didn't you build a chalet or a Cape Cod or a pet store or, you know, or anti-ballistic missile base? I mean, there's an infinite number of things you could have built on that land. Prove to us that this was the best way to use the land.

That's almost an impossibility. And let's say, however, you do do that to the satisfaction of the authority, the decision is then subject under the current regulations to intervention by outsiders who don't want you there. And they bring it to court and challenge the authority's approval that your decision to build a law cabinet on that was irrational.

I mean, this goes on forever. It's an impossible situation. If you want to kill an industry, this is what you do. And this is what the Carter administration did.

So let's jump into what I want to jump into. And we'll talk about some more of these obstacles, but let's talk about them in the context of solutions. Because as I said, that's what I really love about your book. And so I think most of these things are specifically in your book, maybe one or two are ideas I got from your book. But so if you disagree with anything I say, let me know. But one thing I definitely got from your book is the idea of

combining the licensing process for construction and operation and limiting it to two years total. Could you talk about what the problem is and then how this solves it? Well, there's a real problem if they give you permission to construct your plant, but then leave open the possibility they'll never give you an operating permit, which is how Governor Cuomo destroyed the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. In other words, how can you

mobilize finances to build something if there is no assurance that you're going to be allowed to operate it. Okay, this should be one process. And then furthermore, the Environmental Protection Agency should not be involved in the permitting process at all. Their role in this and many other things, I should add, should be prosecuting people who cause environmental harm, not

Making people convince them in advance that they cannot possibly do environmental harm. Okay, because that process is like, you know, you want to take a road trip and you have to go to the police in advance and convince them that you're not going to speak. Okay, so

The correct way to enforce any set of regulations is you promulgate the regulations and they should be clear. OK, and then only people who violate them should be prosecuted as opposed to having to prove in advance that nothing you do would cause environmental harm to the public.

So with the licensing and construction, give us a sense of how long that takes and how that's expanded over the years. Well, it's become impossible because, first of all, first, the utility has to create what they call an environmental impact statement.

And that could take about a year. OK, but there they make their case. But then instead of the NRC then approving it or not or stating what needs to be changed in order for it to be approved. OK, they then develop an environmental impact statement that goes to the EPA and the NRC is required by law to get this done within two years. But they don't.

They just don't. And what are you going to do when they don't? There's no law controlling them. I mean, there is a law, but they ignore it. And they can take five years. And then it goes to the EPA, which can take much longer. And then furthermore, this whole process has involved in both at the NRC and the EPA, numerous places where

quote unquote, the public can intervene with its point of view. So this is like you want to open up a business and it doesn't go to just the town council to approve or not approve your plan to have a pet store on the corner of main and first. It goes there and then all your competitors can come in and say,

play a role in the process. They are precisely the people who should not have a role in the process. Okay. The government authority should be there to simply protect the interests of the public, not of individuals who are hostile to your business for private reasons. In fact, the government should be there to protect you against

uh interference by people who are hostile to your business they should be there to ensure that you can go into business and compete on legitimate terms with other businesses okay that's where the public interest lies public interest lies in competition who can provide the best services okay you know so this is uh i mean the analogy i use in my book is a process that occurs in in russia where um

Somebody wants to build a hotel and they get started, but eventually their competitors go to the city council and they haven't pulled the building permit. And whoever has the most influence within the corridors of power can destroy the other person's business that way, as opposed to the public deciding who has the better hotel by patronizing the one that offers the better value. And so this is, this is,

completely improper system and abuse of government. And I have to say that the, you know, and this is documented very well in a book that I'm sure you're familiar with. Michael Schellenberger's book. Apocalypse Never. Yes. We go into how in the,

The 70s, the first set of interests that were endangered by nuclear power actually were fossil fuel power plant interests. Because oil was, as it were, the low fruit on the tree for nuclear to take away their business because they were more expensive than coal or gas.

And they funded the Sierra Club and a number of other groups to go after the nukes. Now, in the more recent period, we've seen actually the, well, we've seen some of the natural gas people go after oil and coal.

and using environmentalists front men. And of course, we've seen the so-called renewable energy bandits going after all the fossil fuel people. So this is just, in other words, these environmental groups, you have to understand, okay, there's two things about them. One is they are a political force which has been gathered around an environment of de-industrialization.

OK, so their legions will support anything that looks like the industrialization. But the leadership now having put together a force of this nature, have it available for sale. In other words, so now you get mercenary environmentalism where the targets get chosen on the basis of who is providing the money for the campaign.

And these are, I mean, it's important. These are massive businesses themselves. I mean, many of these, even just look at what Bezos just gave tragically, in my view, some of these organizations, he gave National Resources Defense Council like a hundred million dollars just at once. And then World Wildlife Fund, I believe also a hundred million dollars. Yeah. Many of these, many of these organizations have multi-billion dollar budgets. And yes. And, but,

you know, they are interested in revenues and they can get them by using their legions to destroy targets that are of interest to their sponsors. And so, for instance, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund

who allegedly are concerned about the existential threat of global warming, were both very active in shutting down the Indian Point nuclear power plant. And they brag about it. And they're trumpeting their recent success in getting the nuclear

Nuclear Regulatory Commission not to issue license renewals or shortening the term of renewals of a number of nuclear power plants. So here are these people. Now, why are they doing this? Well, because if they say if there's going to be a clean energy mandate, it's got to go to our sponsors from the solar and wind crowd. OK, and not nuclear. But.

Shutting down Indian Point, did that significantly increase the amount of wind power in New York State? No. What it did, well, frankly, the difference had to be made up with coal, which was exactly the opposite of what an actual environmentalist who might be concerned with global warming would want. But from their point of view, if they get rid of the nuke, okay,

the coal is sitting with duck, okay, for decarbonization, clearly, right? So that's it. So

And more broadly, I would say the greatest vehemence of the environmentalists, it has been against nuclear power. And, you know, I'm by education, a nuclear engineer, I have a PhD in nuclear engineering. I've only done an actual limited part of my career in the nuclear field, but that's where I started. And I debated Sierra Club back in the 70s and 80s. You know, they're there saying,

you know, industry is horrible. It uses fossil fuels that are going to run out and they smoke up the world. And I say, well, here's nuclear power. It's never going to run out. It doesn't produce any smoke. They say, we hate that. And, and I came to realize that the reason why they hated nuclear power the most was because it threatened to solve a problem they needed to have. Hmm.

Yeah, I know that Schellenberger has a very similar idea. He talks about how if you have nuclear, it doesn't require you to remake society in this very totalitarian way and these euphemisms like circular economy. You can actually have prosperity and have it be really clean and not have...

at least from electricity, these rising CO2 levels. So let me ask about another, well, let's talk, so I would just summarize, it is really catastrophic that you can have these anti-development activists involved in the approval process. I mean, it really is just, it's really amounts to, or half of it amounts to

the actual competitors of nuclear can just sabotage nuclear at will by having these quote unquote environmental organizations involved. So like what specifically needs to happen to eliminate their ability to be involved in this process? Is it just a matter of saying you can't be involved in this process? I think they should be excluded from the process.

I think, you know, it's like having the public have a voice in whether or not you can build a greenhouse in your backyard. In other words,

You may be in a locality where you have to go to the town council for approval, or it's superintendent of this or that. And fine, okay, there can be a process there. But it should not be open to interference by everyone else. I mean, it's essentially anarchy. I mean, look, it goes to a fundamental principle, really, which is...

The role of government is to create and protect individual rights by protecting each of us from anarchic bullying by everyone else. Okay.

And so, you know, in other words, you own your house because you have a title to it that the police are willing to enforce. So if a gang of bullies come in, you call the police. The police.

But to have a situation where anyone could go to the police and say, we'd like you to throw him out, you out of your house. That's the current situation that that shouldn't not be had. The police services should not be available for the highest bidder to come in and use them to abuse people.

And that's fundamentally the nature of the situation here. So I'm not an anarchist. I think there should be some government regulation of these sorts of things, but they should be not be, but people who are hostile competitors should not have a voice in these organs to use against other people. The public interest is served by full competition by the government, protecting the ability of people to do

legitimate business, provide that they don't become a public nuisance themselves through pollution or something. Got it. You mentioned environmental impact statements and them taking a year.

My, I don't know. Environmental impact statements take a lot more than a year. Well, I thought you had said something about a year in connection with them. I know they can. Oh, I forget the term. It's environmental assessment or something. It's okay. No, this is something that the utility puts together. I see. This is the first stage.

of the process. And that takes about a year. That's in the hands of the utility. And that's a fair amount of work, but okay, fine. Explain how you're going to operate and why it won't harm the public. Okay? Okay. But then the environmental impact statement takes much longer. So let's say

I'm even questioning this first step, but what nuclear is so clean, it's compact, it can exist with virtually any species in part because it's compact and it's clean. I don't see why you should have any environmental impact statement. I mean, I'm against most of them in general, but I mean, in this case, there's nothing that can really happen. I mean, you're just building this extremely compact thing. It's got a wall around it.

It's just that I don't, I mean, you can have, you know, safety stuff if there's any legitimate safety concern, although even there it's the safest form. Like why can't we just, I mean, my view is we should just eliminate environmental impact statements for nuclear power plants because I don't think there's any plausibility. And so it just gets all these activists involved. Well, I agree with you in the environmental impact statement. I'm just saying that the, um,

The environmental assessment is something much less than that. It's basically an organized presentation of what the utility intends to do and making it clear that it can be done soundly. I think that it is a reasonable thing. The environmental impact statement, I'm with you 100%. And

there's all sorts of things wrong with the EPA as well in that the EPA judges its right to enforce not based on whether any real harm has been done to the environment, but whether someone has transgressed an EPA rule, whether it is rational or not. And for example,

There are parts used in automobiles that, say, in 2015 were not approved, but the part was approved in 2016 for use in automobiles. And if you try to use the part, it's the same part that was produced in 2015.

that they now approve, they will go after you for using an unapproved part. Now, it has no relationship whatsoever to the environmental safety of the action. It simply has to do with

maintaining enforcement. And furthermore, not only that, the EPA has its own courts, administrative courts, where the judges are EPA employees reporting to the EPA administrator. Okay. So, you know, this is once again, like Russia, where the judges are employed by the police. It's crazy. And it should not be allowed. The

among many other things. Also, it's very difficult to get from the EPA. It's like talking to the IRS. If you're trying to get clarification on how something should be classed or whether this is allowed or not allowed, the person might say something to you, but then they'll say, but look, you know, don't quote me on this because we'll see. And it's very hard to actually get from them in many cases, clear information.

vocalization of what their rules are. And so that's very difficult as well. So I think there's a lot of problems with the EPA. And this affects things much broader than nuclear power, as you know. Let me jump in with another aspect, which is linear no threshold hypothesis. I mean, my view is that just needs to be eradicated from nuclear policy. Well, the linear no threshold hypothesis

idea is that if one views radiation as a toxin, that if we say that a thousand REMS has a 100% chance of killing a person, then 10 REMS has a 1% chance. Okay. And so forth. And a hundred REMS has a 10% chance. And this is simply false. Toxicology does not work this way. That is, you know, if,

you drink one glass of wine in a night for a hundred nights, it will not kill you. If you drink a hundred glasses of wine in one night, it will. The, you know, the

The human body has mechanisms for dealing with toxins, whether we're talking alcohol or radiation. And therefore, long duration exposure to low levels of radiation, in fact, is not harmful. And in fact, there's a significant body of evidence showing that it helps health because it takes a certain amount of insult to the body's health.

systems to provoke a proper response. That's why people spend a lot of time outdoors in the sunlight and getting ultraviolet and all that tend to be healthier than people who spend all their time inside. Um, and, um,

So it's a nonsensical idea. And actually, it originated with a very questionable person named Herman J. Muller. Herman J. Muller is a very curious duck. He was a geneticist. He was a Nobel Prize winning geneticist. In fact, he won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for some classical genetic works involving fruit flies. He's a real scientist. But he was also a communist.

and a eugenicist. In fact, and he had connections at the highest levels of the communist international. He actually knew Stalin. And the...

And in fact, however, he ran afoul of Stalin, as many high-level communists did, because he proposed to him that Stalin make use of his power to realize the eugenicist dream of improving the Soviet race by restricting reproduction to the top 1%.

specimens of Soviet men. And Stalin, whatever it can be said for him, did have some pretty good political instincts and he saw a definite downside to this idea. And so he ordered to have Mueller killed, but Mueller was warned by his pals in the NKVD and he managed to get out of the country and he came to the United States. He became prominent. And anyway, he...

is the person who proposed this linear no threshold method of regulating nuclear power. And I mean, I think it's applied to a lot of other things as well. But yeah, I mean, it's just this thing, because it leads to like this idea of unlimited regulation is justified because you're always saving a life by doing some of it. And it's just, if you apply that to anything else,

Like if you just say, well, uh, you know, you need five bodyguards to go everywhere you can or something like that. Like if, if you prescribe too many quote safety measures, everything becomes prohibitively, uh, expensive. And, and these, these standards are not applied to any other form of energy, which I think is part of the, I mean, can you imagine, you know, uh,

here's you know advil um uh if you said well uh you know if you take a hundred of them you're going to die one of them's a one percent chance of death therefore it must be banned um the and and it's simply counterfactual okay it simply has no scientific basis and um you know um

it's just nonsense. Yeah. So I think, you know, banishing this from the government, it's people have tried, but it's, it's so important because I think as long as it's there, it's the underlying driver of so many of these other things. And there's this unique fear associated with nuclear one, one proposal you had that I was curious about was making government labs available at no cost for all kinds of nuclear testing. Could you elaborate on this? All right. So here's the thing. Okay. Um,

I am not in agreement with a certain group of people whose ideas have become somewhat fashionable to say nuclear power would be okay if we had newer and more advanced types of nuclear energy than this, you know, light water reactor, which is a fossil of Rickover's nuclear navy. Okay. I think the light water reactors have been entirely satisfactory, but

They have an unblemished safety record, frankly unmatched by any other form of energy production. Any. However, that said, certainly I am open to the idea that there should be a research and development to see if we can't do something better.

There's a bunch of people with a variety of ideas based on a variety of assumptions that have ideas for different kinds of nuclear power plants in the light water reactor. One thing that's been said is the light water reactor has been such a success that a variety of alternatives that people were looking at in the 50s and 60s were just

eliminated from consideration and that this may have been premature and that perhaps some of these might offer cheaper nuclear power. Fine, okay. And there have been significant entrepreneurial ventures that have been launched including some fund by Bill Gates and other heavy hitters to attempt to give these ideas a spin.

The problem, however, is, and I will say the Biden administration has done well in this particular area, that they have created some DOE funds, 10 million here, 10 million there, to fund some of the more credible of these outfits. But the problem is having a place to test them.

Now, the Department of Energy has large reservations, as they call them. These include national labs like Los Alamos, Livermore and Idaho National Lab and other places like.

where one can set up a nuclear facility and do testing. And I think these should be made available at no cost to people who are in this field of research so that they can attend. Are they not available? What's the availability now? It's pretty difficult. I don't know exactly what the availability is now, but I...

I don't know. I know people are having some difficulty getting permission to do this kind of thing. Got it. What do you, this is an idea that wasn't in your book, but I'm curious, what do you think of the approval process being local or state, given that there's no actual, like, there's no national danger if you're making a nuclear power plant?

Well, that's an interesting idea. Now there are state authorities who are involved in this. So in addition to the feds, there are the state people. Yeah. In addition. Okay. I have to say, I mean, I was once employed by the Washington state office of radiation protection and we had regulatory regulations.

of the nuclear power plants in Washington state, which are quite significant. And also the Trojan plant, which is actually in Oregon, but right across the border and therefore of interest to the state of Washington. And I have to tell you that the state regulators were much more reasonable than the federal regulators. This tends to be true in a lot of areas, by the way.

And I think that's of potential interest. They're closer to the facts. We had a situation at the Trojan plant. This is a...

good interesting i was going to ask you about this story this one of my favorite stories from the book if you're telling the one i think you're going to tell about your experience right yes trojan plant was an excellent plant and it was built in the early 70s it was built in three years it was producing electricity at two cents a kilowatt hour it was actually competitive not just with fossil fuels it was competitive with hydroelectric dams okay that and it was a great plant and but they had a problem

They started to experience corrosion in the secondary loop in a pressurized water reactor. There's the water that actually goes through the reactor and then it comes out and then it heats other water that has never gone into the reactor, turns it into steam to go to the turbine so that the turbine never sees water that was in the reactor. And that secondary loop was having corrosion.

And the utility identified the problem and they said, well, we could fix this. We should just replace these carbon steel tank pipes with the stainless steel pipes. Cost a little money, but they were willing to do it because it was causing them to have to shut down every six months to solve the corrosion problem. The NRC would not let them do it.

Okay, we were entirely in favor. So were the Oregon people. But the NRC, no. Your license states that it would be done with these pipes. And this is a change from what is in the license. And if you want to do this, you have to apply for a new license. And we're talking now the late 80s, by which time the licensing process had already gone berserk. And, um,

just no way that the Trojan people were going to expose their plant to that kind of regulatory free fire zone. So they just went on with the carbon steel plant. And this is a problem that NRC prevents improvements. Okay. In other words, in any business, there's always people who are doing the work who,

come up with ideas for improvement. And if you are prevented from implementing these as they appear advisable, you're causing a stagnation and you're harming the existing installation and well, preventing experience from being gained that could lead to a superior design in the next iteration.

And also, I mean, look, one of the reasons why there hasn't been much in the way of nuclear innovation since the pressurized water reactor is not just that the pressurized water reactor works, but to try to come into the NRC with something that's really new. I mean, forget it. So that's going to be another problem that these people who with the NRC,

new types of nuclear reactors are going to have to deal with. Well, so to deal with, so I'm totally on your team in terms of the, I just reject the demonization of current nuclear reactors. And I think if you're going to criminalize those, the underlying things that cause you to criminalize them are going to cause you to criminalize everything else. So I don't believe in welfare solutions and I don't believe in quote unquote research to

As if it's going to solve the underlying problem, which is the whole regulatory apparatus, which leads me to my final question is what should be done up to and including abolition with the NRC? You know, because since the NRC, we have not had one plant that has gone from beginning to end in terms of conception to completion. I think the ones that are closest in Georgia are like total price prices.

And we had nuclear power plants before we had an NRC. So what should we do up to and including eliminating the NRC? Because it's like, I mean, it is a poisonous organization right now. Yeah, it is. Well, yeah.

Eliminating it would be a pretty good idea. If you can't, it needs to be dethroned. It needs to be restricted to enforcement to when harm is done, okay? Which is sort of how we run the police, right? They are restricted to intervening when somebody is actually doing harm, right?

And they're useful for that purpose. And, you know, I think state authorities might be a good substitute. I believe every state where there are nuclear power plants has some appropriate organization for oversight. And, you know, once again, we don't have the FBI intervening into our lives to, you know,

except if we do something that is a federal crime. And I think also that should be the discipline that's imposed on the EPA as well. They should be environmental enforcers, not permitters.

One, sorry, I said that was the last one, but you had one more point that I want everyone to know about, which is about the policy toward waste. And in particular, this idea of, you know, glassifying the nuclear material and putting it way deep in the seabeds. All right. The anti-nukes beat the drum about what are you going to do about the nuclear waste?

And actually, this is only a question for nuclear power because it's the one source of power where you can actually deal with the waste. To deal with the waste from coal-fired power plants is simply impossible. They produce literally millions of times more waste than nuclear power plants do, including not only vast quantities of toxic waste, chemical toxic waste, but even radioactive waste.

But nuclear power, because it is so compact, it is literally a million times more energy per kilogram in a nuclear power source as in quality fossil fuel per unit kilogram. And therefore, the amount of waste is also lower by about six orders of magnitude. Now,

The environmentalists, when they decided to turn against nuclear power in the early 70s, identified the disposal of waste as a potential vulnerability for the industry. I remember reading a bulletin by the Sierra Club from 1974 saying,

in which they said a couple of things, very interesting things. Number one was that they opposed nuclear power. Sierra Club had supported nuclear power in the late '60s, for example, because they viewed it as a way of reducing fossil fuel pollution. But now they were making a decisive turn and they said, "We're against it because it could lead to unnecessary economic growth."

That's what they said. It could lead to, in other words, the target, the grievance they had against nuclear power was not the waste. It was the promotion of industrial progress. That very thing, its virtue was its crime. Then they said,

A key vulnerability is the waste. If we can make it impossible for them to dispose of their waste, we can destroy the industry. And they said this very clearly. OK, this is a tactic. OK, now the the best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to, first of all, reprocess it to get the plutonium that's in it out of it and decompose.

so forth. And then glassify the remainder. You can turn it into a kind of bar silica glass, which is not water soluble. And then you encase it in

stainless steel canisters and you then go out to the middle of the ocean and drop it and that stuff then goes down and it goes it'll tunnel like 100 meters into the mud at the bottom of the ocean if we're talking the center of the ocean you're talking about areas that have been geologically stable for literally hundreds of millions of years okay it's not going anywhere okay it's

buried under 100 meters of mud and 10,000 feet of water. The water itself takes 10,000 years to go from there to the shore of the ocean. It's done. Okay. The Carter administration, which was the first anti-nuclear administration that we had, first of all, shut down nuclear waste reprocessing. Okay.

And then they shut down the idea of sub-CBD disposal. And now then they said, but we will dispose of it on land because at that time you still couldn't be so crazy as to just be against any way of disposing. Okay. And the,

So they started this project for underground disposal of nuclear waste, but they put criteria on safe disposal that were absurd. I mean, literally, I mean, for example, they said, you know,

we don't know that the United States is going to always exist. Okay. Civilizations rise and fall. There could be another ice age and our civilization to be swept away. And the people, the nomads roaming North America after the ice age, they have to be protected from this nuclear waste too. Okay. And they might not speak English. They might not be able to read. How can you guarantee that this waste will never harm them?

And so

billions of dollars were spent on risk analysis and risk mitigation for the post ice age nomads um which is incredible because you know if you think how many lives you could have saved if you use those billions of dollars for child vaccination programs um or not delaying nuclear plants or not delaying nuclear power plants or any other purpose you might think of fire escape inspections body armors for the troops swimming lessons i mean name it okay there's

Any purpose you could think of is better than that. But you have these people banging the drums to prevent the establishment of this nuclear waste disposal facility, insisting, therefore, that the waste had to be held by the utilities on site where the reactors are, which tend to be reasonably close to metropolitan areas.

So you're saying that it's safer to keep the nuclear waste in swimming pools in the suburbs of Chicago than under a mountain in Nevada because there it might endanger the nomads of the post-Ice Age world. Okay, this is just bananas and it completely exposes the conceit of these people that they are trying to protect the public. In fact,

Their goal was to create as much apparent hazard with nuclear power as possible in order to make the public be against nuclear power. They didn't want to make it as safe as possible. They wanted to make it as dangerous as possible. They don't want to make it as cheap as possible. They want to make it as expensive as possible. That is their program. There's no two ways about it. And it's transparent. And here you have these people who say,

Carbon emissions, global warming is an existential threat to human civilization. Okay. Existential threat means a threat to human existence. And they would rather incur that threat than put the nuclear waste under a mountain in Nevada. Now, the Navy...

We need a nuclear navy. You can make electricity with natural gas if you like. You can make it with windmills if you really have to. You can make it with coal or nuclear power. And a kilowatt's a kilowatt when it reaches the consumer, although unreliable electricity is inferior as far as the consumers are concerned. That's another issue. But a submarine...

nuclear submarine is a different animal than a diesel electric submarine. It is qualitatively superior because nuclear energy is not just an additional way to produce electricity. It is a new type of energy and it has new types of abilities. And,

A submarine on nuclear power can cruise around the world and stay submerged, or a diesel-electric submarine has to come to the surface every 48 hours to recharge its batteries and therefore is vulnerable. So the Navy...

It's not going to take, well, you use solar powered submarines or, you know, wind powered. You have them surface and the windmills could charge them up. You know, no. OK, no. OK, we're going to have nuclear submarines because anything less than a nuclear submarine is a second or third or fifth rate submarine. And so what do they do with their nuclear waste?

since there is allegedly no solution for storing nuclear waste. Well, they store their nuclear waste in solid tones in Mexico. This is a soft problem. The French store their nuclear waste. This idea that there is no solution to storing nuclear waste is just total bunk. There are ways to store nuclear waste, either sub-seabed or underground in soil formations are particularly attractive because they keep any water out.

that people are doing. There's only no solution to nuclear waste when you have a political faction that is stopping you from implementing readily available solutions for nuclear waste.

Well, even with the current state of things, it's not like the nuclear waste is killing people at all. I mean, even where it is. So I think it's, as you said before, it's the least, even in its current state, it's the least problematic waste that exists from energy production.

Coal fired power plants produce a lot of toxic waste in very large quantities. Solar power, people think that's waste free, they're way off. Produce the photovoltaic quality silicon involves chemical processes using fluorine and fluorine compounds are admitted to the environment and this is why most of this is now going on in China.

And they've had massive fish kills and so forth from the release of hydrofluoric acid, silicon fluoride compounds and things of this sort. There's nuclear power. The waste is compact. It's solid. And there's...

Never been anyone harmed by nuclear waste stored near a nuclear power plant. Now, I will comment on, I mean, there's only one nuclear accident that has actually ever harmed anyone, and that's Chernobyl. Okay, Three Mile Island,

No. Three Mile Island, you know, the anti-nukes were saying if you had an accident in a pressurized water reactor, if you cool it, okay, you can't have a runaway chain reaction, but what if the cooling system fails? Then the residual heat of the radioactive waste that's in the reactor in the fuel elements will cause them to melt down and they'll melt down right through the eight inch thick steel pressure vessel, then right down through the eight foot thick containment building and then through the earth right down to China.

Well, at Three Mile Island, we actually did have a meltdown. The cooling system did fail, and the fuel elements did melt down. And they melted their way about two inches into the eight-inch thick steel pressure vessel, and it stopped right there. It didn't go through the vessel, let alone the containment building, let alone to China. Okay, it's just bullshit. Okay, the Fukushima plant.

Okay, now here, so Three Mile Island is the only mega disaster in human history in which no one was hurt. Okay, now Fukushima, of course, 28,000 people were killed by the tidal wave and the earthquake.

Okay. Nobody was killed by the nuclear reactor. Okay. While there was some radiation released, no one outside the plant gate got harmed by a dose that was even remotely health endangering. And there was nuclear waste stored in ponds near the Fukushima plant. And in fact, that is probably where the radiation that was released was released. The, but the,

Even there, in a disaster in which an entire city is destroyed, okay, no one is killed by a nuclear power plant. And several of the nuclear power plants were destroyed in the sense of being made inoperable. But no one was harmed by it. Now, right now in Ukraine, the Russian tanks attacked the Zaporozhye nuclear power facility. They bombarded

The containment buildings, they did not breach them. So people were afraid there was going to be a nuclear disaster from that. These were literally being fired at by tanks, artillery, and they weren't breached. Now, by the way,

That is because the containment buildings used by nuclear power plants are actually modeled on the submarine pins that the Germans had used in World War II, which were exposed to ferocious Allied bomber attack and never breached. That's another story. Anyway, so we- You're going to talk about Chernobyl though? Yeah, now Chernobyl. Chernobyl did not have a containment building.

Okay, period. Didn't have a containment filter. And it wasn't a light water reactor. Chernobyl was a graphite moderated reactor that was water cooled, but moderated by graphite. Okay. And it did not have this strong reaction.

a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity that is the rickover reactor since they're moderated solely by water if the water overheats the reaction has to shut down they cannot proceed physically the chernobyl reactor was graphite and it actually had a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity and it didn't have a containment and so they

did these goofy experiments and they had a steam explosion, which was able to blow open the reactor and the ordinary building surrounding it. Okay. You know, and now you had hot graphite exposed to air. So the Chernobyl was not only unstable, it was flammable.

And then you had a mechanism, which is combustion of the graphite to scatter the nuclear waste up into the air and evaporate.

scattered around and then you had um some fallout produced but that was a result of of basically um well number of things um one being that it wasn't a light water reactor second that it had no containment building and third is ridiculous management and and disaster control i mean i

The Soviets, you know, believed that nuclear war could be fought. And so they had distributed in many centers iodine pills so that in the event of nuclear war, people could be protected from fallout. So they actually had these things existing in their civil defense system. They didn't use them because it would look bad.

Okay, so the ultimate, I mean, there's engineering causes that I've named that are the cause of the Chernobyl accident, but also, frankly, the harm that was done is basically an example of harm done by the Soviet system.

Definitely. The economist George Reisman had this line, which was, you know, he just made the point that Soviet everything was a hazard to human life. Like you just think about how many people die from Soviet toasters was his example. Exactly. Or Soviet apartment building construction. Oh, yeah. I mean, unbelievable compared to it. Yeah. And even I think what's your sense of the death toll with Chernobyl? Because it's not I mean, people have the idea of it's millions of people. It's nothing resembling that. No, it's not.

There are about 100 odd people who were actually killed at Chernobyl. Then there was a radiation release, but the conclusion that 4,000 people will die eventually of Chernobyl is based on the linear no threshold hypothesis. And it's probably way off. I mean, I can imagine several hundred, but not 4,000.

By consequence, and once again, this is an example of how things can be done right or things can be done wrong. In China, where they operate coal-fired power plants without reasonable anti-pollution measures, there's something like a million people die every year from the emissions of those plants. You would have to have a Chernobyl happening practically every day.

to literally every day for 4,000 times 365 is like a million or so to match the annual toll in China from fossil fuels used incorrectly, okay?

I take issue with some of those studies, but I definitely do agree. It's by far the safest thing. And again, this is a total abuse. It's not like Chernobyl. As you said, this was never on the table for us. We never tried it. It's like...

in an abusive attempt and then this incompetent regime so i mean the numbers are irrelevant to us because they're not possible right so but even there like even the worst case scenario done by the worst people is tiny compared to the dangers of other forms of energy so obviously there's nothing resembling uh safety we got to wrap up but i just want to give you an opportunity anything else you want to say about this issue that the public should know about well i just want to um

expand on one of the points in my book, which is people say natural resources are limited. Actually, I believe that natural resources do not exist. I think there's no such thing as a natural resource. There are only natural raw materials. Fossil fuels were not a resource until people

discovered how to use them, how to drill oil and find it and create machines that would run on the product. You know, no general staff in Napoleon's time would have looked at the oil capacity of a country as part of its relevant natural resources. OK, fossil fuels became a natural resource when we developed the technology that could produce and use them.

Uranium was not a natural resource until we developed the science and the technology that allowed us to produce nuclear power. And just as fossil fuels, the mastery of fossil fuel technology involved all sorts of things, mining technology,

creating good steel and so forth. There's an entire long history that had to happen of technological development before fossil fuel power in the sense that we understand it could become a reality, drilling capacities, all this kind of thing. So there's a whole several thousand years of human civilization, technological development enabled the creation of fossil fuel power civilization.

And fossil fuels then gave us enormous powers, including, for example, reliable electricity and many other things. And with electricity, you can have, for instance, aluminum, which you cannot have unless you have electricity. That's why aluminum was unknown to science until 1820. And then this fossil fuel powered civilization of...

of abundant energy, electricity, knowledge of chemistry. Okay, this is what created the potential for nuclear energy and which now could potentially produce energy on a scale dwarfing what is readily available from fossil fuels as fossil fuels did compared to the wind and animal powered world that preceded them. And, you know,

We needed fossil fuels to transcend that earlier world. The trees, the biomass power of England, the trees were becoming deforested until they figured out how to use coal. Coal saved the forests.

oil save the whales. Okay. The idea that we can go back if we want to avoid fossil fuels to go back to the things that were already proving inadequate at the time of the dawn of the fossil fuel age is categorically absurd.

If we're ever going to go beyond fossil fuels, we got to go to the next step up, which is nuclear. And ultimately I believe fusion as well. And it's still in the future. So that's, that's how this thing goes. I mean, I greatly support the thesis that you set forth in your book, the moral case for fossil fuels, that the benefits that they have given humanity are spectacular. And the,

just beyond belief. And now we have an opportunity to benefit humanity in a way, another step as great in its potential as fossil fuels were compared to that of the preceding age. And we cannot forgo this.

I love it. Yeah. And I, you know, my next book, which I'm going to send you very soon is Fossil Future. But a big part of that is it's a fossil future doesn't mean fossil future forever. It means that the next several decades and I think even the next couple of generations are necessarily going to be fossil fueled if humanity is maximizing its potential. But part of that is liberating nuclear. And part of that is, you know, all the innovation that fossil fuels makes possible makes nuclear possible.

And so I'm very aligned. And I love the resources point. This is something I also stress. I like to say natural resources aren't naturally resources, right? They're just naturally raw materials. So just one more thing. I would make one more point if I would. Sure. Okay. Because I actually gave a Zoom seminar to a university class a few weeks ago. And one of the students had read some of my writings of how I, you know,

don't view global warming as existential threat and so forth. I view it as a reality. I think global warming is real, actually, but I don't think it's an existential threat. If the world warms another degree in the next century, it won't make a hill of beans. But that's not it. But I told them, look, let me tell you what the real threat, that humanity does threaten an existential threat, and it's war.

And this was a month ago when those of us who were really tuned in were aware that a war was shaping up in Europe, but many other people weren't quite aware. So it's war. And the thing that could kill you, okay, kill you, wreck your life decisively is war. It won't be, you know,

that the temperature rises another three-tenths of a degree during the remainder of your life or something. And what was the cause of the major disasters of the 20th century? It wasn't climate change and it wasn't resource exhaustion.

Okay. Or overpopulation. Okay. It was this idea that resources are limited, that there wasn't enough for everyone. And so we have to use force to take it from them. That is this idea, which then manifested itself in a variety of forms, but that's fundamentally the underlying idea that drove the world to almost destroy itself in 1914 and 1939. And,

And I think in a certain sense is the underlying idea, which is setting up the basis potentially for another world war. And the only way to prevent this is we have to refute this idea. We have to, and the way to refute it is to create a world of abundance, create a world of abundance. And by using our technology and the people who are trying to put chains on humanity and trying to create abundance,

a situation of limited resources are the greatest danger to humanity because we are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people. And the thing that will make people think there are too many people is that they think there's not enough resources to go around. So abundance will save us.

Great note to end on and just let people know how to follow you and contact you, including any publishers watching who might be interested in publishing the case for nukes. Well, my email is simply Zubrin at AOL.com. I also have a Twitter handle at Robert underscore Zubrin.

All right, that'll do it. I find it amusing that you have the least futuristic email address of all time, even though you're one of the great futurists. Well, you know, see, I'm actually a time traveler. Okay. I don't come from this time. I come from another time. And, um,

It does give me a certain point of view, seeing how things are here. I'm able to view this world a little bit from the outside. But time travel does get old after a while. But in any case, yeah, I was present at the creation, and that's why my email address is Zubrin at AOL.com.

Okay, Zubrin at L.com. All right. Well, I hope to see your book in print soon. And I'm glad that I got a preview. And thanks for coming on Power Hour. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks again to Robert Zubrin for joining me. I'm going to stay in touch with him about this decriminalizing nuclear plan and hopefully

get his help. I know there are lots of people in office who are interested in this issue, and I'm really grateful to Robert for making a contribution, and I want to keep, and I will keep pushing this thing forward, along with pushing forward energy freedom in general. Speaking of energy freedom, we have a lack of it in the world today, which is in part why we have an energy crisis, particularly in Europe.

and then absolute war going on, waged by Russia against Ukraine. I've been a little bit out of writing about current events for the past four or so weeks. I've had a lot of different projects I've been working on, but I have some more time now. So I've been writing recently. Make sure to check out my Substack newsletter, which is at alexepstein.substack.com. You can also sign up by going to energytalkingpoints.com, and you can

learn about all things energy there, use the search function, search for pretty much anything. Highly, highly recommend that. All right, let's see what else do we have. I don't know if I've shown this before, but this is a, I have a copy of Fossil Future in front of me. You can see it's not like the final bound version, but it's still pretty cool to look at. And for, yeah, it's been a long road, but it's been worth it. And it's coming out

May 24th, unless there's some absolute like global disaster. And even then I will do everything I can to make sure it comes up and it's all on track right now. Everything is looking good for that. I'm going to have a lot of advanced copies that I'm going to send out. If you know of any influential people that you think would be open to the message and maybe not familiar with it, let me know. I'm happy to send them an advanced digital copy or an advanced physical copy for sure.

What else? Well, as always, if you have any questions, comments, love mail or hate mail, email me at alexepstein.com. I want to encourage people again, go to energytalkingpoints.com, sign up for my newsletter. Also, you can go to alexepstein.substack.com. I haven't been updating that as much as usual, but I will be doing that more and more going forward. And for example, the latest talking points on Russia and Ukraine and Europe's energy insecurity,

I think are super, super important. Another thing we're seeing is because oil prices are going up, gasoline prices are going up, you're getting this really interesting and I think not honorable reaction from the Biden administration, which

All of its policies and everything Joe Biden has supported energy-wise for the past 20 years is all about restricting the supply of oil on the market. So it's necessarily going to drive up prices. And that's really the point, to make, to in some way force people to not use oil along with the other fossil fuels.

But since it's so unpopular with the electorate, there's this idea, oh, no, we haven't done anything. It's just it's oil companies fault. They don't want to produce oil. They just want profits, et cetera, et cetera. So there's been this necessity to refute a lot of these little fallacies that are just dodges of the kind of obvious big picture issue.

So you'll see those on Energy Talking Points and also on my Twitter. I've been writing some, it's Friday, March 18th right now. I've written a bunch of things on Twitter recently and I'll write some longer things coming up. So just again, use that as a resource going forward. It's also going to be the home of the Energy Freedom Platform, including nuclear decriminalization as I release that over the coming months.

right if you haven't pre-ordered fossil future already definitely do it uh do it earlier rather than later if you want uh you can get big bulk discounts so if you go to my sub stack alex epstein.substack.com you'll see one of the you know top five or six stories is about pre-orders and bulk discounts you'll see information there there are all kinds of bonuses uh that you'll have and i think by the next power hour i'll announce the next one there's a really cool

panel discussion that I'm going to participate in, that I'm going to make access to for a while, exclusive to people who pre-order Fossil Future. And so I'll just say it involves...

two of the absolute entrepreneurs and investors in the world that I admire most. And you will know who both of these guys are, and we're going to have, we're slated to have a really cool discussion in the middle of April, and we're going to record it professionally. And if you pre-order Fossil Future, among many other things, you will get access to that. So pre-order it, tell your friends to pre-order it, spread the word. This is

I spent three years engineering this thing as precisely as I could. I endured all of these delays, sometimes caused the delays myself.

because I believe this is, you know, I wanted to create the ultimate tool for changing minds about fossil fuels, about how to think about energy in a pro-human way and about energy freedom. So I'm really proud of what's been engineered. You know, books are sold as commodities, so you can pay whatever it is, 20 bucks, 22 bucks, whatever it costs in the market, and you can change different minds, many minds, right?

And just by referring people to it, let alone buying it for people. Speaking of buying it for people, there's a really cool project that I'm doing in partnership with Young America's Foundation. We are giving away copies of Fossil Future to students. We're planning on giving away at least 5,000. Students and educators as well can sign up at yaf.org slash fossil future, yaf.org

slash fossil future. And if you want to contribute to this program, if you go to that same website, yaf.org slash fossil future, you can see how to write them a check and just make sure it says something about the fossil fuel future project on it. And then that will help us give away even more of these books. This is another way in which ultimately we're hoping to change tens of thousands, maybe ultimately even hundreds of thousands of young minds and educators' minds on

on this issue. I think we now have the resource to do it. So very excited to spread this around. And it's only two more months. And even if you've been impatient, it's nothing compared to how impatient I have been. All right. That is it for this week. I'm not sure what the next power hour is going to be, but I have a couple of good ideas in the pipeline. So I should be back in not too much time. Until then, I'm Alex Epstein. This has been Power Hour.

Power Hour. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of energy. Power Hour. The antidote to shallow thinking about energy issues.