Pod Insights Search Engine Why are people excited about nuclear power again? About this episode Nuclear energy was a taboo for decades, but it’s coming back, it’ll power AI data centers for Google and Microsoft. What does new nuclear technology look like, and why do the nuclear optimists believe this new tech is superior? Meltdowns, reactors that can fit in your backyard, and one podcaster’s heroic attempt to describe nuclear fission.
Rachel Slaybaugh https://www.dcvc.com/team/rachel-slaybaugh/
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow https://www.rebeccatuhusdubrow.net/ (check out her book Atomic Dreams https://bookshop.org/p/books/atomic-dreams-the-new-nuclear-evangelists-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-energy-rebecca-tuhus-dubrow/ce3182ebe44591db?ean=9781643753157&next=t)
Adam Stein https://thebreakthrough.org/people/adam-stein
Search Engine’s episodes on data centers: Colossus 1 https://open.spotify.com/episode/06HYk7QD52Kju7ME9HeCAt & Colossus 2 https://open.spotify.com/episode/0rW2fNRTVsS36GevhrBj6B?autoplay=true
Support the show! https://searchengine.supercast.com/
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:42 PJ Vogt? Not to freak you out, I know there's a lot going on, but here's a fairly obvious additional problem on the horizon: the rising cost of electricity.
1:54 PJ Vogt? Our electricity doesn't just come from nowhere. We have to use resources to generate it. In the US, the electric grid is mostly powered by coal and natural gas. And lately, for the first time in 20 years, our demand for that electricity has been spiking. Some of that spike is driven by AI and data centers. They're often the villains of the story. But it's actually not just them. It's also from a lot of things that everybody actually wants. More electric vehicles, more induction stoves, more factories that have been electrified, hooking up to the grid instead of directly burning fossil fuels for power. The spike in demand isn't just raising the price of electricity. It's also generating more emissions.
2:36 PJ Vogt? Since even an electric car running on electricity, that electricity is generated in part by burning fossil fuels. So that's the problem. And one of the solutions people have started discussing as a way to solve this is actually nuclear power. Nuclear power, which in the 1980s and 90s was kind of a taboo, has become much more popular in recent polling. These days, a majority of Americans, about 60%, are in favor of it. Some of this is being driven by an understanding that nuclear technology itself has gotten safer. And some of it is just people's fear of climate change outweighing, or at least reweighing, their fear of nuclear disaster.
3:18 PJ Vogt? In any event, nuclear power seems to be very much on its way. Today, in America, nearly 20% of the electricity we use comes from a reactor somewhere. Tomorrow, we'll probably be using much more nuclear power. What's happened here is that a group of people I was not paying attention to, nuclear optimists, have started to win the national argument. I wanted to hear from these people and learn what they believe. That's our episode this week, along with just a history of nuclear itself. How it was discovered, how society lost faith in it, and what its future might look like here. I want to start with a person I spoke to named Dr. Rachel Slaybaugh. She first encountered nuclear energy back in the early 2000s, when public sentiment
4:02 PJ Vogt? towards it was much more in the basement.
4:04 Speaker 02 In high school, some Navy guy came and talked to us about nuclear reactors. And I talked to my high school guidance counselor. I was like, oh, what about nuclear engineering? They were like, that's a dead field. Don't do that. I was like, OK, great. But in college, I got the opportunity to do a research thing as a freshman. And it was just, you know, you interview some labs and they interview you and you get matched. And I ended up working at the research reactor on campus at Penn State.
4:32 PJ Vogt? Wait, sorry, they have a research reactor? Penn State?
4:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:36 PJ Vogt? Great school, but also a great party school.
4:38 Speaker 02 Yep.
4:38 PJ Vogt? They, they have a nuclear reactor at Penn State?
4:42 Speaker 02 They do.
4:44 PJ Vogt? I'm sure there are more STEM-oriented listeners who knew all this already, but Dr. Slaybaugh explained to me that there's about 25 American college campuses, mostly big schools like UT Austin and Kansas State, where undergrads futz around with small nuclear reactors, research reactors, learning how they work. They're not producing significant energy. You can't melt down the quad with them if things go wrong, but they're real reactors. So you're working on a research reactor at Penn State? And like, what's happening in that room with the research reactor?
5:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I started out in educational outreach, and so I learned all about nuclear energy. And I was like, wait, a thing the size and shape of a coal plant that doesn't emit air pollution? I was like, why don't we do more of that while these other clean electricity sources have more time to scale up? So for me, I learned about nuclear, and I was like, this seems like a very obvious environmental choice. And that's how I got here.
5:40 PJ Vogt? This early time at the reactor would set Rachel on a path. She'd get her PhD in nuclear engineering. She'd then become a tenured professor at Berkeley, then to the federal government, where she'd work for an agency for advanced research projects in energy. These days, she's a climate investor at a big firm called DCVC, where she invests in nuclear, among other things. 20 years spent on every side of this, academic, public, private. I asked Rachel, as is the podcaster's privilege, to use her expertise to explain nuclear physics from the 101 level up, starting with this: all nuclear power plants right now run on nuclear fission. What's nuclear fission?
6:17 Speaker 02 So at the base level, fission is when a heavy atom
6:23 Speaker 02 Absorbs a neutron. And so the heavy atom is like energetically unstable. And it's so unstable that adding a neutron provides enough energy that it causes that unstable atom to split into two pieces. And it splits into two new atoms and releases more neutrons when it splits. And it releases energy in the form of kinetic energy.
6:51 PJ Vogt? Rachel explained that in a nuclear reactor, atoms are split in a controlled chain reaction. The heat this reaction generates then turns water into steam. The steam spins a turbine and the turbine generates electricity. To Rachel, the exciting part of all this, when she'd learned about it, is what happens next, or actually what doesn't happen. A nuclear power plant does not emit carbon, just water vapor. The big environmental downside to this whole process, of course, is nuclear waste, which we'll get into later. But that brief explanation of nuclear fission, how it works, just that knowledge, once humanity had learned it, was powerful. It contains the seed of everything that would follow.
7:33 PJ Vogt? Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, the entire atomic age. Here is the story of how human beings first figured nuclear energy out. Two scientists worked out on a walk in the snow over Christmas week. Lisa Meitner, who'd fled Nazi Germany that summer, and her nephew Otto Frisch, who'd come to visit her in Sweden. On their walk, they were talking about a letter he'd gotten from a colleague describing the results of a strange experiment. He'd been bombarding uranium, the metal, with neutrons and noticed that something surprising happened. When he smashed neutrons into uranium, he'd ended up with another metal, barium, that's much smaller than uranium.
8:13 PJ Vogt? Scientists already knew at the time that uranium was unstable. What Meitner and Frisch worked out on their walk in the snow was that you could actually split a uranium atom in two. And that when you did, it would release energy, lots of energy. Meitner and Frisch scratched out these first calculations together out there in the snow. It was 1938.
8:32 Speaker 03 And it happened to be in the middle of a world war, so that obviously affected the trajectory of this technology.
8:41 PJ Vogt? This is writer Rebecca Tuhus Stubrow. She wrote a book about all this, including the strangeness of how nuclear power happened to have been discovered at the exact moment when our country was willing to use it as a weapon.
8:52 Speaker 03 There was a famous letter that Einstein co-wrote to President Roosevelt. The letter basically said that this phenomenon had been discovered and that it could be an important source of energy in the future. And then it mentions that there was also the possibility that it could be used to create a really powerful weapon and that there was reason to believe that Nazi Germany was working toward that. So that was basically the impetus for the Manhattan Project. It was spurred partly by fear that Nazi Germany was working on this and would get there first.
9:28 PJ Vogt? We all know how that story ends. The atomic bomb, the US killing hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But after the war, there's this push in America to use nuclear for something besides a weapon of war.
9:41 Speaker 03 So pretty soon after the war, there was a lot of excitement about turning to the civilian uses, building reactors. And there were a few motives for that, I would say. One was, interestingly, this sort of desire to redeem the horror of the atomic bomb. You might think the reaction would have been, wow, this is really scary. We should just avoid this kind of technology at all costs. But in fact, it was the opposite. It was like, we should really use this in a constructive way.
10:17 Speaker 04 At United Nations Headquarters in New York, United States President Eisenhower arrives to make a proposal for the constructive use of atomic power.
10:27 Speaker 03 So in the 50s Eisenhower had an initiative called Atoms for Peace.
10:32 Speaker 05 Fellow delegates, it gives me great pleasure to present to you the President of the United States of America.
10:41 Speaker 03 So it was in front of the delegates from the United Nations at the UN Headquarters in New York. He gives this speech where he kind of reviews the dangers of atomic weapons and the existential threat they pose.
10:55 Speaker 06 The United States stockpile of atomic weapons, which of course increases daily,
11:02 Speaker 06 exceeds by many times the total equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane and every gun in every theater war in all of the years of World War II.
11:18 Speaker 03 But he says, you know, if I just stopped there, that would be a tragedy and we have to look to the possibilities from this new technology as well.
11:28 Speaker 06 It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.
11:42 Speaker 03 And that was kind of the dawn of the nuclear age was what we would now call, I think, techno-optimist. But a very like sharing, let's use energy to pull people out of poverty, let's make this available everywhere. So at first, there wasn't a lot of worry. Generally, the public was on board. There was all this relief that the war was over and excitement about modern prosperity and people were getting all these gadgets and washing machines and dishwashers and I think a general feeling of excitement about modernity and the future. It really was presented quite favorably in the media.
12:19 Speaker 06 As you can see, we found ourselves deep in the field of nuclear physics. Of course, we don't pretend to be science.
12:27 Speaker 04 We're storytellers.
12:29 Speaker 03 There was a Disney program called Our Friend the Atom.
12:32 Speaker 04 And here to tell you the story of our friend the atom is the author of our book, Dr. Heinz Haber.
12:38 PJ Vogt? This old TV episode viewers would have watched on their sets in 1957 was during the wave of real excitement about our nuclear future. In the clip, Walt Disney himself appears to explain how we're on the precipice of something wonderful, an atomic age, then hands off to a German scientist holding a storybook here to tell us in Disney terms about what's going to happen next.
12:59 Speaker 07 As we developed our story of the atom, we made an amazing discovery. We had a science story, but suddenly we realized that it was almost like a fairy tale.
13:10 Speaker 03 It starts with a man finding a bottle in the ocean and a genie pops out and basically says that the atom has all of these incredible powers and it has risks, but if we can make it our friend, then we'll have all of these wonders in our lives. That was a very, I think, influential piece of propaganda at the time.
13:34 PJ Vogt? That's crazy to imagine like Disney selling nuclear power.
13:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
13:39 PJ Vogt? It's just so weird that they ended up as part of the propaganda of this.
13:44 Speaker 03 I mean, the government was deeply involved at every level, in every stage of this. It was subsidizing nuclear power plants in various ways, in part by giving them backup insurance in the case of accidents. So the government was definitely pushing it pretty hard.
14:06 PJ Vogt? Looking back at the numbers from our era of peak nuclear optimism, roughly the 1960s to the mid 70s, it's just a very different America. The federal government built the first commercial nuclear power plant in the US in 1957 in shipping port, Pennsylvania. But in the 60s, private investment begins to pour in. Slowly, at first, Oyster Creek, powering parts of Jersey, Dresden One in Illinois, Yankee Row in Massachusetts. But it takes off because in the 60s, America's electricity needs were skyrocketing. Nuclear was part of the solution. The big cost was building the plants themselves, but interest rates were low that decade. Great time to finance construction. By the late 60s, US utilities had ordered over 50 new nuclear reactors.
14:48 PJ Vogt? In the next decade, they would order another 196. Everyone thought this was just the beginning. The federal government forecast that by the year 2000, roughly half our grid would be nuclear powered. There would be 1,000 nuclear reactors in America. Of course, that's not what happened. Here's Rachel.
15:06 Speaker 02 You know, it's an interesting thing because the turn sort of happened before the accidents. It was like a little bit happening in combination. Like, there was sort of conservation in the oil shock, so energy growth really shifted, right? We were growing and then conservation became more important and we stopped growing in energy as much. And I'm going to have a pretty US perspective here. The United States, instead of building like one product we're going to build over and over again and get really good at, every reactor was a little bit different from every other reactor. So like reactors never got cheap because everyone was a special snowflake.
15:48 Speaker 02 And so you kind of have these reactors that are just getting more expensive. And then in the 80s, you have super high interest rates. And so now you can't afford to build one of these projects. So electricity demand is flattening, interest rates are really high, these projects have gotten out of control in expense, and so of course, we're not going to build any new nuclear reactors.
16:12 PJ Vogt? So wait, so before there's sort of public catastrophes, the problem is the upfront cost of building a reactor is really high. And so if electricity costs aren't high, and because the reactors themselves hadn't been getting cheaper because people were sort of building a different mousetrap every time, the sort of public energy was against it, not so much because people were scared, but because it's like, those are really expensive to build and we don't need them.
16:36 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then the environmentalist movement in the 70s was kind of anti-energy overall because they felt like having more energy was going to do damage to the environment.
16:49 PJ Vogt? And what was their theory for, like, why did they think more energy was necessarily bad then?
16:56 Speaker 02 It was really like an environmentalist utopia, like, we just want to return to the earth kind of a thing. So we just don't want it to be too easy for people to develop. And it was really this idea of like, we should just use less of everything.
17:11 PJ Vogt? So you had higher interest rates selling construction, but really what you had were environmental activists who were beginning to change the public's mind. In the 70s, nuclear sentiment was beginning to soften. What was really taking off was the idea that you would not want a nuclear power plant in your backyard. Folk musicians were getting very into this. There were no nukes concerts.
17:45 PJ Vogt? And then this movie comes out, a hit nuclear disaster film in 1979 called The China Syndrome.
17:58 Speaker 02 Clearly, people were not that excited about nuclear if you have this nuclear meltdown disaster movie. And I haven't watched it for how long? 20 years? But basically, there's a reactor that melts down, and then they try to cover it up. But the the reason it's called China Syndrome is they're like, ah, this plant is going to keep melting down, and the reaction's running away, and it's going to melt all the way through the Earth to China. If the core is exposed, for whatever reason, the fuel heats beyond core heat tolerance in a matter of minutes. Nothing can stop it. And it melts right down through the bottom of the plant theoretically to China. But of course, which is not how nuclear meltdowns work, by the way.
18:38 PJ Vogt? But so they were saying that the radioactive material would burn through the Earth, like when you're a kid and your parents say you can dig a hole to China?
18:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:46 PJ Vogt? That seems wrong.
18:47 Speaker 02 It is not correct. And then I would say the nail in the coffin was Three Mile Island that happened at like, a couple of weeks or 10 days or something after that movie came out.
18:57 Speaker 06 For many years, there has been a vigorous debate in this country about the safety of the nation's 72 nuclear energy power plants. That debate is likely to be intensified because of what happened early this morning at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Max?
19:12 PJ Vogt? March 28, 1979, in Pennsylvania. It's the middle of the night, and something's gone wrong.
19:17 Speaker 06 At about 4 o'clock this morning, two water pumps that help cool reactor number two shut down.
19:23 PJ Vogt? Backup systems come online to fix the problem, except now there's some valve that's supposed to close, and it doesn't.
19:29 Speaker 06 Officials say some Fifty to 60,000 gallons of radioactive water escaped into the
19:34 PJ Vogt? coolant is pouring out of the reactor. The risk obviously is overheating, that the nuclear fuel rods could melt down. The human operators are getting bad information from their gauges. They mistakenly think the reactor is getting too much coolant water, so they cut the water back further.
19:49 Speaker 06 With that system down, there was no way to draw heat out of the cooling water that circulates through the reactor itself. Again.
19:57 PJ Vogt? The fuel rods do start to melt. About half the reactor core will melt before anyone correctly diagnoses the problem. When fuel rods melt, they release radioactive isotopes you would not want to ingest. And the molten fuel itself turns into a dangerous sledge called corium, nuclear lava. You would not want to be anywhere near it. This is the point where everyone's in danger. This is the nightmare scenario. Except at Three Mile Island, the corium was successfully contained. It pooled within the vessel that was meant to hold it in the disaster. Nobody died. And the radiation that was released was small enough that long-term studies have not found clear evidence of health effects in the people who lived by the plant.
20:39 PJ Vogt? The facts of Three Mile Island offer a story, really, about the airbag deploying, the seatbelt working. But that's not how the story of Three Mile Island was metabolized by the American public. Seven years later, of course, there'd be a real deadly nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, Chernobyl. But America had turned on nuclear before that. And Dr. Slayba thinks part of the reason really was this movie, The China Syndrome. People treated it almost like a documentary.
21:04 Speaker 02 And so like, you've just watched this movie, and then there is a meltdown? Like, you would be terrified.
21:09 PJ Vogt? Yeah, and nuclear in particular is like, it's both super complicated, kind of hard to picture outside of, most of my nuclear reactor reference are pop culture. And then, when it breaks, it's so visceral. And so, the way it shows up in your imagination and the way it shows up on a graph are just very divergent.
21:31 Speaker 02 There's a bunch of things here, but if you look at what are the factors that go into human threat perception? Our threat perception was not designed for big, complicated systems, right? It was designed for like hunting animals. And so, things that distort the level of threat we perceive for something is those kinds. So if you think about, okay, it's way more dangerous to drive than fly, but people are afraid to fly and they're not afraid to drive. It's that same thing, but like even more intense. And it feels like it has grave consequences. Like one car accident is, you know, a few people, but a plane crash is a lot of people. It feels like a big consequence.
22:11 Speaker 02 And even if the nuclear consequences actually aren't that high, the news coverage leads us to think something else. So Three Mile Island is an interesting example where no one was actually harmed by radiation in Three Mile Island. Zero. But it felt so scary and, you know, people were evacuating and there was a lot of misinformation. And so the increase of stress-related health effects in the Harrisburg area went up. So there were real health impacts, but it was because of fear, not because of radiation.
22:45 PJ Vogt? Right. It's so strange that part of solving the energy problem is about solving a problem of human psychology.
22:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:58 PJ Vogt? That problem only got harder to solve a few years later, of course, with Chernobyl. Somewhere around 30 immediate deaths. Thousands more expected in the long term from cancer. Of course, the plan at Chernobyl had insane design problems. You would not find it in an American nuclear plant. For instance, the Soviet reactor was a kind of design where if it started to overheat, the reaction would actually speed up, not slow down like in an American reactor. Just a rundown late Soviet experiment. But for many Americans, this kind of mental composite image formed. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, atomic bombs, movies about nuclear death. Nuclear development in America chilled.
23:40 PJ Vogt? Other countries continued to pursue nuclear, although even that cooled down somewhat after the Fukushima meltdown in Japan in 2011. A 9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami, which flooded the reactor's seawall. There was one confirmed death from radiation exposure, but over 2,200 people died in the hurried evacuation away from the plant. In the aftermath of that, countries like Germany wound down their nuclear programs. Other countries kept going, most notably France, where today 70% of all electricity comes from nuclear. Their carbon footprint per citizen per year is much lower than ours: 4.5 tons per person to R14. We just took a different path in America.
24:21 PJ Vogt? Nuclear technology is a place where we stopped advancing for decades. After the break, our second age of much more cautious atomic optimism.
25:11 PJ Vogt? Welcome back to the show. During the pandemic was the first time I started to become aware of pro-nuclear sentiment developing on my internet. I saw more people talking about nuclear, positively, openly, in a way that seemed sincere, not just like posters slinging unorthodox takes for clout. That's when I looked at public polling and learned that America was just much more gung-ho on this than I'd realized, for my bubble. I asked Dr. Slav about whether she'd felt public sentiment turned pro-nuclear in the last decade.
25:43 Speaker 02 Radically, and in a way that sort of came, it kind of came out of nowhere.
25:50 PJ Vogt? Like your perception is it came out of nowhere? Or like as far as you can tell, it really came out of nowhere?
25:54 Speaker 02 Both. I think from in the nuclear industry, it feels like all of a sudden everyone has, it's like, oh, you finally read the data we've been reading is kind of how it feels. And that's not actually what happened. Like, a whole bunch of things have changed. Some of it is generational. Like, there are fewer old greens out there like pounding the pavement against nuclear. Millennials are largely more interested in nuclear because climate change is really scary and they can, you know, read the numbers and they're like, oh, yeah, this thing makes sense. And what has really shifted now is we're back to a world of load growth. And we're like, what are we gonna do?
26:30 PJ Vogt? Load growth, meaning like the load on the energy system?
26:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, a higher electricity demand.
26:37 PJ Vogt? So spiking electricity demand is making people want to rapidly spin up more nuclear power. And one way to do that is to actually just take nuclear plants that were previously shut down and bring them back. It's called recommissioning. Recommissioning old plants is both technically and politically easier than building new ones. So you can get more power faster. Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, Duane Arnold Nuclear Plant in Iowa, and the famous one you've heard of, Three Mile Island, is also coming back.
27:08 PJ Vogt? What I found interesting is that two of those plants are being brought online specifically for tech companies. The power they'll generate has already been sold to Google and to Microsoft. If you'd told me in 1995 that Microsoft would restart Three Mile Island to deal with the rising energy demand, partly caused by teenagers using computers to cheat on their homework, I would have had follow up questions. Of course, the next generation of nuclear isn't just recommissioning older plants. People also want to build newer, more high tech ones, advanced reactors. There's a few different categories, these reactors, some of them very unlike the nuclear reactors I was used to. I'm gonna tell you about them. So some of these advanced reactors fall under a category called Generation Four reactors.
27:53 PJ Vogt? Generation Four reactors are designed to be safer than the reactors we have now. Some use different coolant, some might use a different kind of fuel. But the most interesting ones have this slightly hard to explain quality called inherent safety characteristics. An inherent safety characteristic is one that removes a failure mode from
28:14 PJ Vogt? The equation altogether. So you're removing away that something could go wrong. This is a nuclear policy wonk I spoke to named Dr. Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute. He was walking me through this idea of redesigning reactors so they have fewer parts that can fail. You're not adding another safety system to protect something. You're finding something that could go wrong and just totally removing it from the system. Some advanced reactors might not have a pump in the system at all. It could just use physics to make the fluid flow as it gets hotter or colder on different sides. So then the pump being removed creates inherent safety because the pump miller can fail if it doesn't exist in the system.
28:56 PJ Vogt? Reactors with inherent safety designs are not theoretical. They exist. Other countries like China and Russia have built them. I've looked at pictures of these. They don't always have the iconic nuclear reactor cooling towers. Instead, they often look like industrial compounds filled with a handful of boxy buildings. Some of these gen four reactors are expected to be large reactors. These will be the size of the nuclear reactors you're used to, producing a gigawatt or more of electricity. Full-size plants meant to replace the kind of nuclear power we have now, just safer and more efficient. No large gen four reactors exist anywhere in the world today. Russia has a 1.2 gigawatt gen four reactor expected to come online in the 2030s. China is also expected to be a player in this market.
29:41 PJ Vogt? But at least in the US, Rachel doesn't believe that building reactors at this scale seems very feasible.
29:46 Speaker 02 The big reactors, it's just they're expensive and we have not proven we can build them repeatedly and cost effectively. And because they're so expensive, there just aren't that many groups with a balance sheet big enough to build one of them. And so they're difficult to finance. The cost of financing is very high.
30:08 PJ Vogt? And generally speaking, like, is America still leading on the technological development for nuclear? Or is it happening in other countries? Like, what does that look like?
30:16 Speaker 02 I mean, it depends on what you mean. We are in many, many categories, not just fission, but fission is one of them. We're leading on like the innovation. So development of like idea development, inventing the new things. But
30:34 Speaker 02 Mostly China is leading on actually building the new things and deploying the new things.
30:39 PJ Vogt? And why is that?
30:40 Speaker 02 Some of it is the way that we are structured. We have a lot more capital for early ideas and we have a lot less appetite for sort of like first of a kind plants or second of a kind of plants. Things are more expensive here and this is true largely also in Western Europe where we're just not very good at building mega projects of any kind. Like, you know, the Bay Bridge was triple budget, triple schedule. If you add radiation, that doesn't make it any better.
31:12 PJ Vogt? Right.
31:13 Speaker 02 And there are other countries that are actually good at mega projects. And a lot of that has to do with vertical integration of the construction companies. They don't have subcontractors. They have complete designs before they start building things. They build the same thing over and over again, the same way. Whereas we have subcontractors who are suing each other while the project is going on, you know? And it's not only their projects can be more cost effective because they're better at building mega projects. They also have a government with a much clearer top down mandate that just funds the things they want to happen.
31:53 PJ Vogt? In the US, where we don't have a government that builds its own big nuclear mega projects, some private companies are now aiming at a different approach. A few nuclear startups have just decided, okay, what if we made nuclear reactors smaller? Which leads us to our next category, small modular reactors.
32:14 PJ Vogt? Small modular reactors are advanced nuclear power plants that produce anywhere from 50 to 300 megawatts of electricity. Enough electricity to power a big town or a small city. You can see pictures of them online. They run the gamut. Some just look like small factory buildings. Others have swooping solar roofs, Star Wars architecture. The main thing here, though, is the size and the modular part of it all. The theory is that by building the same thing over and over again, to the same specifications in a factory setting, that eventually you can get costs to come down. There was an understanding that one of the main cost drivers for the existing reactors was that you're building almost everything on site.
32:56 PJ Vogt? You're shipping some large components in, but you're basically constructing it like a Lego set on site.
33:03 Speaker 06 So shifting to a smaller size allows you to build a lot more and fully assemble it in a factory setting. The way that most people say this is you're building an airplane instead of an airport.
33:19 PJ Vogt? Meaning, small modular reactors are helpful because their design is standardized. So in theory, you can build them more cheaply at scale in a factory. In Wyoming right now, one relatively small nuclear reactor project has broken ground. It's actually a project from Bill Gates's nuclear startup, supposed to be online in 2030. These small modular reactors, their size also means we can just slot them in to replace older, non-nuclear power plants that we want to take offline. Say, a coal-burning plant, we want to decommission. But there's another challenge people want to try to use nuclear energy for. What about getting power to extremely remote parts of the world? Like, a tiny Alaskan village? This brings us to our last category: microreactors.
34:03 PJ Vogt? Microreactors really are quite micro. Small enough to be easily transported wherever they need to go. Picture a rectangular box the size of the shipping container you'd see on the back of a truck, but sleeker. Microreactors are designed for places that do not currently have grid access.
34:20 Speaker 06 Some of the earliest concepts of microreactors were aimed at powering very small island or very close to the Arctic Circle communities that currently use small diesel generators and have supply chain problems with diesel. Or their diesel gums up when it gets extremely cold and they have no power.
34:42 Speaker 02 So basically, anywhere that you would put a diesel generator is where you would use a microreactor.
34:46 PJ Vogt? I see.
34:47 Speaker 02 And most of those locations are just like not that easy to get to. The logistics of diesel fuel are complicated. Diesel generators are smelly, and they make a lot of local air pollution, and they're loud. Like, diesel generators are not great.
35:01 PJ Vogt? So, microreactors are billed as a clean solution to the problem of powering remote communities. In theory, a microreactor would fit in my backyard in Brooklyn and could power my whole neighborhood. In practice, I don't think anybody's gonna let me do that, NIMBYs. However, Rachel says there are a lot of other possible use cases for a microreactor.
35:19 Speaker 02 As EVs expand and we need EV charging stations kind of in the middle of nowhere, you can imagine applications like, oh, it's probably easier to build a microreactor than transmission.
35:30 PJ Vogt? Right. Is there a world where in 25 years, I'm like, I'm going on a camping trip? I'm going to go to Walmart and buy a nuclear generator for the trip?
35:41 Speaker 02 I think probably not. I think by then, it might be you're going on a camping trip and you have like your EV power station and maybe you plug it into a nuclear charging station somewhere, or maybe you have solar panels with you.
35:56 PJ Vogt? So what I should picture is I'm going to plug the same plug into the same things, but more nuclear might be on the other end of the plug.
36:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:05 PJ Vogt? So that's the dream that Rachel and Adam have, but they're nuclear optimists. So let's talk about some of the obstacles here. The big ones, the ones you do a whole other story on, are just cost and speed. Can we actually make new plants without years and years of expensive delays and cost overruns? The pessimists say no, that solar plus batteries is already cheaper and getting cheaper still. The optimists point out that renewables can't provide the round the clock firm power data centers need. But even the optimists concede that for this to work, they'll need to surmount some real obstacles. A big one, regulation. Over the past half century, for both understandable reasons, as well as frankly, political overreaction,
36:48 PJ Vogt? we've added a mountain of regulation and bureaucracy and licensing requirements that make building nuclear in America very hard and very slow. Particularly if you want to build a reactor that is a novel design, since novel designs need novel regulations to test their safety.
37:05 Speaker 06 So to license a newer advanced reactor design that generally uses slightly different fuel or slightly different coolant fluids, they needed to seek exemptions and prove to the regulator why this change is acceptable, it's safe, it's necessary. And this made the regulatory process very cumbersome. Congress has been trying to get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to speed up its regulatory review for many years. Well, thank you very much. We have a very big announcement today and has to do with nuclear energy and other things. And this is all nuclear. It's a hot industry. It's a brilliant industry. You have to do it right. The recent executive order-
37:49 Speaker 04 From last year said the NRC has to get applications reviewed within 18 months.
37:55 Speaker 06 Well, thank you, President Trump. This is a huge day for the nuclear industry. Mark this day on your calendar. This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation of the industry. America has always, American business always.
38:08 PJ Vogt? Our president, when he's not putting his face on US passports or demolishing parts of the White House or starting wars like a child, have focused on a game of Risk. Sometimes he tries to make nuclear regulation work a little faster. If your uncle challenges you to say one nice thing about the administration at Thanksgiving, there you go. But there's another obstacle besides regulation. It has to do with nuclear fuel.
38:35 PJ Vogt? So here's a question I never asked myself. Where historically has the United States gotten much of its enriched uranium for its existing nuclear power plants? Well, it turns out from a country that we do not have a totally consistently tranquil working relationship with, Russia. Bill Clinton struck an unusual deal with Boris Yeltsin back in the day.
38:58 Speaker 06 Nine months ago, President Yeltsin and I met in Vancouver. And there we laid the foundation for a new partnership between the United States and Russia. It was due to drawing down weapons, actually. Second, President Yeltsin and I agreed that as of May the 30th, the nuclear missiles of Russia and the United States will no longer be targeted against any country. In the megatons to megawatts project, we agreed with Russia that we would draw down our nuclear arsenals. With US assistance, we will continue to process weapons-grade uranium into fuel uranium.
39:42 Speaker 06 And those would be reprocessed essentially into fuel, which we used in our reactors in the US to make electricity. We also signed a contract to purchase $12 billion of highly enriched uranium over the next 20 years.
39:58 PJ Vogt? So the legacy, like post-Cold War, all the sort of nuclear material that would have gone into pointing rockets or whatever at each other, we've been basically importing that nuclear material from Russia to fuel reactors?
40:10 Speaker 06 That material is used up at this point, but we did do that for many years, yes.
40:15 PJ Vogt? But it seems, it seems slightly crazy that we were depending on the idea that things would remain good with Russia. Like, I understand the idea that countries specialize, but it seems surprising to me that we were not prepared for the idea that, like, we would have conflict with a country that we often have conflict with.
40:31 Speaker 06 There had to be some trust in that deal for it ever to work. The bigger concern was drawing down the warheads.
40:39 PJ Vogt? Right, right.
40:40 Speaker 06 And if that could be achieved, then other supply chain risks were essentially considered to be worth it at the time.
40:47 PJ Vogt? Of course, 2022, Russia invades Ukraine. Afterwards, Congress votes for an import ban. No more enriched uranium from Russia for us. We've lost access to our best uranium connect. We're rebuilding our domestic enrichment capacity, but these things take time. The final obstacle we're going to discuss here, one you've probably heard of, nuclear waste.
41:12 PJ Vogt? Nuclear waste, the leftover radioactive material from nuclear reactors, is unfortunately radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. And during that time, it also generates heat, which means essentially you need to find a place where you can bury it very deep underground, in a container that can hold it, and find a local community that's okay being a home for all that. I asked Rachel what her answer is to critics who say that nuclear waste might be just too big a problem to solve.
41:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. How do they feel about waste of other energy technologies and how responsible those other energy technologies need to be for their waste?
41:49 PJ Vogt? Meaning what? Meaning like, we're okay with carbon emissions?
41:53 Speaker 02 We're okay with carbon emissions. We're okay with fly ash ponds. Not to hate on wind and solar, but there are toxic materials in wind and solar panels that are pretty large in volume. Like, nuclear isn't the only technology that produces waste. And the reason nuclear is so interesting is the energy density is so high. An amount of nuclear fuel the size of a gummy bear is the same as three barrels of oil or one ton of coal. One gummy bear, same amount of electricity as one ton of coal. So it is a real issue that we do need to be responsible for. But we're starting with, it's just not that much waste. And the waste isn't like, off in the air somewhere where it's hard to capture, like we know where it is. It's controlled.
42:39 Speaker 02 We're taking care of it today. And there are a lot of technical solutions. It is mostly a political problem, and I do not want to minimize how difficult political problems are to solve. But the waste can be disposed of, or the waste can be recycled. There are a lot of choices. And one of the reasons we have not solved nuclear waste is it's a problem with very low urgency.
43:07 PJ Vogt? This is actually the part of the nuclear optimist's argument that lands least strongly for me. I just, I understand why there are people who can tolerate unsafe smog in the air, but not nuclear waste in the ground. At least not near where they live. Even if they've been told by very smart people that the containment technology works, I wouldn't live in that neighborhood. I like poking at a radioactive idea. I would not want to live near radioactive waste. But I was also surprised to learn, there are communities in America where the voters feel otherwise. They trust the science more, or maybe they're willing to tolerate the risk because they know it's not just nuclear waste storage they're agreeing to, but also nuclear jobs, and nuclear investment.
43:50 PJ Vogt? And there's now some political momentum towards allowing those places to decide for themselves, to become storage sites, if that's what they want. That's where things stand with nuclear right now. It's safer than we thought it was. The cost and speed of deployment issues are real. The nuclear waste problem is both a technical and a political one. All those things are real. All of them might not matter much because of the iron fact we opened our story with: Demand. Any energy source you can think of that you might want to use instead of nuclear, environmentally friendly or not, is being recruited for the great data center wars of the mid 2020s. The data centers have already purchased out to 2030 every gas turbine that the world can produce.
44:33 PJ Vogt? The interconnection queues for adding new generators to the grid are overflowing. The demand is huge. Renewables can be part of the solution, but if data centers continue to buy the output of even existing nuclear plants, then we need to replace that energy for the rest of the market. And if we can't buy new gas turbines because the data center companies have already purchased those, then what other option do we have? We have returning retired plants, such as coal plants, to the market, which is happening in some cases, or building renewables. But nuclear has to be part of that equation if we're going to even meet this demand curve.
45:16 PJ Vogt? And if we don't meet the demand curve, then prices are going to keep going up. So we need to build, and we need to build quickly.
45:26 PJ Vogt? Dr. Adam Stein of the Breakthrough Institute. We'll have links to his work and to other guests in our show notes.
45:43 PJ Vogt? This story we just played you about nuclear, it's actually part of a very informal series we're going to return to this year: Energy Year at Search Engine. Rising electricity costs and all the weird and interesting ways people are trying to solve that problem, we're just really curious to learn and explore more here. If you're curious about geothermal, about solar, about the grid itself, we're working on some stories for you. And if you're someone who we can learn from about these topics, please shoot us an email: [email protected] .
46:14 PJ Vogt? Lastly, if you're just confused as to why AI is sucking up so much of our energy supply, please check out our series Colossus. We published it just a little while back. It features the great reporter Shruti Pindamaneni.
48:22 PJ Vogt? That's our show this week. I wanted to remind you, search engine exists because of a small, generous, and very mighty portion of our listeners who voluntarily pay to keep the show running. Those are the listeners who subscribe to our premium tier, which we call incognito mode. It costs $7 a month, or if you want to discount, $50 for the full year. In exchange, we offer ad-free episodes, some bonus episodes, we've got one coming down the pipe right now, and discounts on our merch. But the real thing you're doing is you're paying money so that we can keep making ambitious work for you. We are currently planning our next season, trying to figure out what we're gonna do, trying to figure out how many reporting swings we can really take. And the subscriptions now will help us budget then.
49:06 PJ Vogt? If our show keeps you company while you do errands, if it gives you things to think about, to argue with, to have conversations with the people in your life about, if we have offered you value, please consider doing this. If you're not in a position to do that, don't feel bad. We're just glad to have you as a listener. But if you're interested, you can sign up at searchengine.show. Incognito mode, searchengine.show, 50 bucks a year. All right, Armin, roll the credits.
49:38 PJ Vogt? Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. This was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. This episode was fact-checked by Madeleine LaPlante-Dubie. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moore, Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please email us, [email protected] , subject line, "Advertising." If you're a listener and you don't want to hear ads on our show, sign up for incognito mode, searchengine.show. Thank you for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.
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