Nuclear Power Isn’t Perfect. Is It Good Enough? | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 516

Nuclear power was destined to electrify the world — until Chernobyl and the anti-nuclear movement stopped it in its tracks. Liberals endorse harm reduction when it comes to the opioid epidemic. Are they ready to take the same approach to climate change? Is it time to give nuclear power another chance? This episode was originally published Sept. 21, 2022. For a full transcript, resources, and more, visit: https://freak.ws/3foayJZ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  This administration has been very clear for the first time in the history of the United States federal government, we have made harm reduction the central tenet of how we need to move forward.

• 0:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Rahul Gupta. He is Director of National Drug Policy at the White House.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  The mission basically is to reduce the prevalence as well as the harms from illicit drugs across the nation and address it from a global standpoint.

• 0:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Gupta talks about harm reduction, what is that? You could think of harm reduction as not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You could think of it as public health realism. Do you remember the Just Say No anti-drug campaign from the 1980s? Harm reduction is pretty much the opposite of Just Say No because Just Say No has not been working.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  We're seeing over 108,000 Americans dying in any given year from either a drug overdose or poisoning.

• 1:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Most of those overdoses are from opioids, including black market fentanyl. Gupta is also an internal medicine physician and he has a lot of experience with opioid deaths. He used to be Public Health Commissioner of West Virginia.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  When I became Commissioner of Health, West Virginia had the highest death rate from overdoses historically. It was very important for me to look at why that's happening.

• 1:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  He commissioned an analysis that covered every West Virginian who died of an overdose. Half of the victims who had received medical treatment, Gupta found, could have been saved.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  A significant amount of people who had died from an overdose did not receive the lifesaving drug naloxone, and that went back to access affordability, but also stigma.

• 1:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Naloxone, also known as Narcan, is an emergency drug that can stop an overdose as it's happening. When public health advocates talk about harm reduction policies for what they call opiate use disorder, near the top of the list is access to naloxone. But there are other policies. You may remember hearing about this in a two-part series we made in 2020 on the opioid epidemic.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  We're all harm reductionists here. So we advocate for safe injection practices, the needle exchange. Opiate use disorder is treatable. It's not a death sentence. It's not. It's a medical condition and it's treatable.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  So the first thing is to keep patients alive. I think anytime you lessen the stigma associated with addiction, you increase people's opportunity to step out of the shadows and ask for help. And I'm for any modality that gets people to that point.

• 2:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Harm reduction has been gaining support, mostly in liberal cities and states. New York City just opened the first supervised injection site in the US where people can use heroin under medical supervision. Many other places are considering similar moves. And so I thought it might be time to ask a question that may seem strange at first, maybe even a little crazy, but here goes. If harm reduction can keep people from dying of a drug overdose, should we apply the same logic to other tough problems? Think about this one. Human beings all over the globe are using more and more electricity.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Producing that electricity typically creates a lot of pollution and greenhouse gases. Cleaner energy sources like solar and wind power don't have nearly the capacity to meet the demand. There is no perfect solution. So is it time to think of a good solution? Is it time to apply harm reduction to energy policy?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  We talk to Democrats and we have this great kumbaya moment about how much we care about climate. And then they say they don't support nuclear.

• 4:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, is it time to fully embrace nuclear power?

• 4:06Speaker 05

  We literally wouldn't have the climate crisis that we have today if we had stayed on that track.

• 4:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why did so many people turn against nuclear in the first place?

• 4:16Speaker 06

  The China Syndrome was nonsense and should have been described as such.

• 4:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  But nuclear power had other enemies, too.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  They did it with a check from the head of Arco Petroleum.

• 4:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once upon a time, they said electricity from nuclear power would be too cheap to meter. Today, is it too safe to ignore?

• 4:54Speaker 07

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are a number of misconceptions about nuclear power. Let's start with a simple image, that huge hourglass-shaped cooling tower with steam billowing out the top. Spooky, right? Just about every article you have ever seen about nuclear power has been accompanied by a photograph of a cooling tower like that. It has essentially become a symbol for nuclear power.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  It's a terrible symbol because a lot of coal plants have the cooling towers and a lot of nuclear plants don't have them. But I know that's what people think of.

• 5:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Joshua Goldstein. He is a professor emeritus of international relations at American University. He recently co-authored a book called A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow. In the book, he busts a variety of nuclear power myths, and he highlights the countries that have built a lot of nuclear reactors, countries like Sweden and France.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Sweden and France both in the 1970s were affected by the energy crisis in which the Middle East conflicts had led to a shut off of oil exports. And suddenly, there were lines at the gas stations and so forth. It was a big political issue at that time. So Sweden just built a dozen reactors or so in short order, same thing France did. And there- Carbon emissions dropped by half just in 15 years. And their economy doubled in that time and their electricity use doubled.

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Goldstein was himself a late convert to nuclear power.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  I was an environmentalist, anti-nuclear and all that. But then, once I got into climate change, I had to do the math. How would we actually solve climate change? And realized that the solutions, as good as they are, wind and solar and all that, I'm not against it, but they're just not getting us there. The problem is much bigger than that. And then I hit on nuclear because it's so scalable, because it's so concentrated. So then I started learning about it and realized that a lot of what I knew wasn't actually true. Radioactivity specifically, people have the idea that radioactivity is like a virus, that if it gets out, it can destroy the world or something. It's not like that at all. It doesn't reproduce and it stays in one place.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  If you leave it somewhere for a billion years, it'll still be there, but it'll be actually less dangerous over time.

• 7:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  But most of the world's electricity today, about 80%, is still created by burning fossil fuels. Only 10% is nuclear. Building out a nuclear infrastructure is more complicated and expensive upfront. So richer countries tend to have more nuclear. Nearly 70% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power. In Sweden, it's 31%, with another 45% from hydroelectric power. In the US, where nuclear power was invented, we get just under 20% of our electricity from nuclear power.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  No one country can solve climate change and nobody's gotten all the way there. But what some countries have done is to learn how to generate electricity with very low carbon emissions and therefore not contributing to climate change.

• 8:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, keep in mind that even carbon-free electricity will not solve climate change.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Electricity production is not the biggest source of carbon emissions. If you take a circle and cut it in half. And then cut one of those halves in half, so quarters. One of those quarters is electricity production. One of them is all the agriculture, deforestation, land use stuff and that kind of thing. And then the other half is industrial, transportation and building heat.

• 9:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  But electricity production is certainly a big enough sector to want to fix.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  There's a wonderful app called Electricity Map and it shows you in real time, who is generating electricity with what fuels and how much carbon to generate that per kilowatt hour.

• 9:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And nuclear power is very low carbon. Why? It harnesses the process of nuclear fission, the splitting of atoms within pellets of uranium. That fission produces heat, which turns water into steam, which spins an electric turbine. But the real action is what's happening among those uranium atoms.

• 9:40Speaker 05

  Everything that you love about nuclear power and fear about nuclear power, all comes down to how concentrated it is. It's just so much energy. And that means that you can get so much electricity out of a very small plant and a very small mining operation, very little waste and all of that. It also means that it's scary. It's so much energy, you know, and you can make a bomb out of that energy and so forth. So people are scared of it.

• 10:09Speaker 08

  Obviously, the risk of meltdown is a big concern.

• 10:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Matthew Nydel. He's an economist at Columbia University who works on public health and policy.

• 10:18Speaker 08

  There's not just risks of radiation and potential cancer for those who are exposed. There's also huge swaths of land that get destroyed. And there's also concerns of other fallout from a meltdown. For example, there's been evidence that shows after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, that children that were exposed prenatally to some of the nuclear fallout had worse outcomes as they became adults.

• 10:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Chernobyl is the most famous nuclear disaster in history and it was horrible. Just hearing that word is scary, isn't it? When you hear Chernobyl, it's hard to not think of nuclear power as dangerous. Still, if you think about it in the framework of harm reduction, you may start to dial down the fear and ask a different set of questions.

• 11:11Speaker 05

  The harm reduction idea is appropriate. I always think of it in terms of compared to what?

• 11:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Joshua Goldstein again.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  Either you're going to turn off the electricity, which kills people really quickly, or you're going to burn coal and natural gas to generate electricity, which also kills people a little more slowly. So you have to think of nuclear power, the pluses and the minuses, and weigh it up. Compared to what?

• 11:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 33 countries. And remember, only 10% of global electricity is produced that way. So how dangerous is it? One way to answer that question is to measure the deaths per unit of electricity produced by the various types of energy around the world: coal, solar, natural gas, wind, oil, hydro, and nuclear. Would you like to guess which types of energy produce the most and fewest deaths? Okay, let's go in order. Most dangerous, by far, nearly triple the next source, is coal.

• 12:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Between the mining, the transport, the burning, and the pollution, nothing else is nearly as dangerous. Number two, oil. Not very surprising. It's a dirty fuel. And number three, much cleaner than coal and oil, but still fairly dirty, natural gas. The next three most dangerous are hydroelectric power, actually very safe overall, but its death rate was skewed by a massive accident in China in 1975 that killed more than 170,000 people. Next is rooftop solar power. Very safe, although accidents do happen with installations. Next is...

• 13:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wind, again, very safe overall. And at the bottom of the list, or the top, if you're looking for the energy source that produces the fewest deaths per unit of electricity. That's right, nuclear power. Even with the famous meltdowns you know about. Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, Fukushima Daiichi in Japan in 2011, and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979. Three Mile Island, by the way, produced zero deaths, but it was scary enough to change the future of nuclear power in the US. Still, on the measure of mortality per unit of electricity produced, nuclear power is

• 13:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  overall the safest source we have. The most common source, meanwhile, is coal, which, as Joshua Goldstein writes in A Bright Future, kills at least a million people every year worldwide, mostly through particulate emissions that give people cancer and other diseases. The other fossil fuels we burn for electricity aren't as bad as coal, but they certainly pollute and they raise climate risk as well as geopolitical risk. Our dependence on oil and gas has meant a long series of wars and occupations. It has meant partnerships with repressive regimes, and it's meant being held hostage

• 14:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  to those regimes when they suddenly decide to shut down the pipeline that's been supplying your fuel for electricity and heat.

• 14:39Speaker 05

  So these are all very problematic things, and the idea that we're going to just use less electricity, that's not going to work for poor people who are just getting out of poverty.

• 14:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Americans may have this sense that we are in a position to decrease energy consumption and therefore production, but we forget that much of the rest of the world just take China and India alone, which is, you know, two and a half or so billion people. They are going to be increasing their energy consumption for how long, do you think?

• 15:13Speaker 05

  Well, decades certainly into the future, and they're increasing fast. And it's a great thing. I mean, the increasing energy use in countries like China and India are lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And it's often all a matter of life or death to have electricity, to have energy. So that's all great, but it's all being done with the cheapest, most available, simplest technology that they can put their hands on, and that's coal.

• 15:43Speaker 08

  There are better alternatives out there.

• 15:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Matthew Nidel again.

• 15:47Speaker 08

  Solar power, the prices just keep coming down, especially in the last 10 years. But there are two main issues with solar. One is that, you know, it's only producing energy as the sun shines. The other thing is that most of our solar energy that's being built is being built in areas where it has the most potential to produce energy, like California. 50% of its grid comes from renewables. So if we want to increase our solar production, any other place we're going to go to isn't going to work quite as well because it's not going to be as sunny.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  We put $3 trillion into renewables, which is great in and of itself, but it hasn't brought the fossil fuels down. It's going in on top of fossil fuels, and that's all because energy use is growing very quickly around the world. We can't have some fancy expensive system that works okay in Germany but is too expensive for Indonesia, right?

• 16:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So in your book, you write that current conventional thinking among environmentalists is that, quote, "We don't need nuclear power. We can build 100% renewables." What's wrong with that argument?

• 16:58Speaker 05

  How's that working out for us, really?

• 17:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, okay, but let's say I want to take the charitable view, and I say, well, look, solar, wind, other renewables are newer technologies, so inevitably the prices will fall and the efficiency will increase. So let's give it time. We know that's the path.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  The price of wind and solar has come down a lot. And they're very cheap now when they produce. But the problem is when they're not producing, then the grid needs to go somewhere else to get electricity. Battery storage is still very expensive. And the amount of storage that you would need is incredibly large if you intend to power a whole society, a whole grid, or the world with just intermittent wind and solar power.

• 17:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is the kind of conversation that leads some people around to nuclear power. It's a conversation invoking numbers and logic versus politics and emotions, which tend to dominate most such conversations. So let's poke a little harder into nuclear power, its benefits and costs. The economist Matthew Nidel points to three key benefits.

• 18:21Speaker 08

  The first one is that nuclear power emits no greenhouse gases. And that's really important for climate change.

• 18:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Number two?

• 18:30Speaker 08

  Another benefit is that there's also no local air pollution. You hear a lot about particulate matter, which is one of the leading causes of death around the globe. And a lot of that's coming from burning of fossil fuels.

• 18:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  And last?

• 18:47Speaker 08

  The third benefit is that, once a nuclear plant is up and running, and that's an important "once" it's up and running, the cost of producing energy is fairly low when compared to other sources of energy.

• 19:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, those are the benefits. What about the key costs? The first is the actual cost in dollars of getting a nuclear reactor up and running.

• 19:14Speaker 08

  It's billions of dollars to build a plant. And one of the reasons it's so expensive to build a plant is the amount of safety measures that you have to take.

• 19:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  The second cost, nuclear plants produce radioactive waste. Storing that waste properly is also expensive. And that brings us to the biggest potential cost, a nuclear meltdown. As we've heard, fossil fuels carry all sorts of risk, but with nuclear, isn't there a risk of destroying the planet?

• 19:47Speaker 05

  There's been one really bad, serious nuclear accident that killed people in all of history, and that was in Chernobyl. It killed about 50 people on site and sickened others. There was a cloud of radioactive material that went spreading around Europe and everyone was freaked out about it. Theoretically, you might have had more cancers, but it's so small that you can't measure it. So that was Chernobyl.

• 20:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, was that Chernobyl?

• 20:17Speaker 06

  We can't be held hostage by the specter of misinterpretation.

• 20:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Also, I just want to let you know about some of the episodes we are working on now for the next few months. There's a special series on Adam Smith, the misunderstood philosopher economist. We're working on something about the art repatriation movement and on the airline industry. And those are just the As. We choose topics that excite us, and we hope they excite you, too. Please help spread the word about Freakonomics Radio however you can. We'll be right back.

• 20:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  So first of all, congratulations on Chernobyl and all the accolades that came with it. It's an amazing piece of work, so well done.

• 21:05Speaker 06

  Thank you. Yeah, it's a weird sentence for everybody to say, congratulations on Chernobyl. Every time, people have to be really, I love Chernobyl, and then they always stop themselves.

• 21:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Craig Mazin.

• 21:17Speaker 06

  I am a writer, producer, director. I've been working in movies and television for over 25 years, but most people know me from my most recent credit, which was the HBO limited series Chernobyl, about the disaster that occurred in Ukraine in 1986.

• 21:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is a really small nomenclature question. I'm curious to hear your answer. I often see the Chernobyl event referred to as the Chernobyl nuclear accident. In fact, I'm looking at a page here from the World Nuclear Association and the article is titled Chernobyl Accident 1986. I'm curious, what do you think accident is an appropriate word for what happened there or no?

• 21:58Speaker 06

  From a technical point of view, no. Because to me, I call it disaster, not simply because of the scale, but also because I think in part it was borderline intentional. When you look at what they did, it's hard to call that an accident. Do you call it a car accident if somebody decides to take a turn that's listed at 20 miles an hour at 90 miles an hour? It's hard to say that's an accident. I call it a disaster.

• 22:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  The disaster makes for a compelling and very frightening TV series. Here's how Mazin sums up the key events.

• 22:38Speaker 06

  In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, they were running a safety test. They violated a series of safety rules that we would have in the West that they didn't have. They also violated a series of safety rules even they had. And in doing so, created a condition in this already inherently unstable nuclear reactor that caused it to explode. And even after it exploded, they refused to believe that it exploded.

• 23:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  The main focus of Mazin's show is the aftermath of the explosion. The Soviet cover-up, the scientists and officials who spoke truth to power, the eventual cleanup and containment.

• 23:19Speaker 06

  There is a massive exclusion zone around Chernobyl that exists to this day because the area is still considered rather dangerous.

• 23:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  And can you give a summary of the human toll?

• 23:29Speaker 06

  So you have estimates of death that go all the way from 4,000 people up to a million people. Death also is a tricky thing. Shortened life, is that death? Is it when someone has lung cancer and they worked at Chernobyl and they also smoked? This is a complicated question and the broader health impacts also very difficult to figure out because again, most of them occurred in Ukraine and Belarus and there was not good data there. I think it's safe to say that in terms of lives negatively impacted in a serious way, we're talking about at least hundreds of thousands of people.

• 24:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Craig, you were mostly known for comedies and this was plainly a tragedy. How did you get excited enough about Chernobyl to want to do the research and writing that led you to pitch it to HBO?

• 24:22Speaker 06

  A few initial facts did make me think that perhaps there was a way to tell the story dramatically. The two that really grabbed me, the first one was a simple bit of irony that on the night of the disaster, they were running a safety test. That automatically makes me sit forward as a writer. And the other bit of information was that the man that was assigned to investigate and clean up the disaster, Professor Legasov, committed suicide two years to the day after the explosion. And that also felt very relevant. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a good story, but the more I read, the more I went, oh my God, I have to.

• 25:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what if rather than pitching the disaster, you had instead pitched a series on, let's say, how nuclear power can be a safe, global, clean energy source that will vastly lower carbon emissions and help fight the consequences of climate change? Would HBO want to make a six-part series on that?

• 25:22Speaker 06

  No. And the reason is it's not dramatically interesting. It's just true. And this is where, you know, drama has a purpose. I made a point in Chernobyl during the final episode in the courtroom scene for Legasov to state clearly that nobody else in the world had the problem that that reactor had and that the nuclear power industry everywhere else was so far removed from the circumstances that led to Chernobyl that Chernobyl could never happen anywhere else but in Chernobyl.

• 26:01Speaker 09

  From the KGB, from the Central Committee, and right now, there are 16 reactors in the Soviet Union with the same fatal flaw.

• 26:08Speaker 06

  And yet, still, after the show came out, a lot of people, I don't know if they were nuclear industry professionals, publicists, marketers, lobbyists, were rather vicious about the series, which I thought was stupid. You can't be an effective proponent of nuclear power if you don't acknowledge where nuclear power has drawbacks or has failed spectacularly. You just can't.

• 26:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  You won a couple Emmys for the series, so congratulations on that. It was very well-regarded. I assume it was widely watched. I'm curious to know what you think is the broader impact, if it can be measured. I'm particularly curious how you think it may have changed or added to the public conversation about nuclear energy, because you were arguing that Chernobyl was an outlier, a terrible outlier that should never be repeated. But don't you think there might be a lot of people who watch the series or who hear about the series and think, oh, yeah, nuclear energy, that's Chernobyl. That was a disaster. Yeah, nuclear is terrible. We should stay away from that.

• 27:10Speaker 06

  I think there's probably quite a few people who watched Chernobyl and then said in a visceral way, I don't ever want to go near a nuclear power plant ever. And I understand that. I did make a point of saying in the aftermath of the show that I am a believer in nuclear power and that if anything, the research I did into Chernobyl made me more of a believer in nuclear power.

• 27:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Craig Mazin's HBO series on Chernobyl isn't the first time that Hollywood has depicted a nuclear disaster. In 1979, Jane Fonda starred in a film called The China Syndrome, which revolved around a meltdown at a fictional nuclear power plant in California. Fonda was a prominent figure in the growing no nukes movement in the US. Here she is in an interview just ahead of the film's release.

• 28:01Speaker 10

  There are alternatives to nuclear energy. I am not particularly impressed by the nuclear industry.

• 28:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here she is discussing why a film about a nuclear plant disaster was of interest.

• 28:13Speaker 10

  We chose the nuclear backdrop because it's a thriller, and it's a good backdrop for a thriller, and it's never been done before.

• 28:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here's the film's trailer.

• 28:23Speaker 11

  The closer they get, the more threatening it becomes. Only a handful of people know what it really means. And they're scared. Soon, you will know.

• 28:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  The China Syndrome opened on March 16th, 1979. 12 days later, one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania melted down. It was the most significant accident ever at a US nuclear plant. No one was directly hurt. Radiation in the area around the plant increased only by a small amount, but the timing of the accident and the film conspired to make nuclear power seem terrifying. Craig Mason again.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think as a child of the 70s and 80s, the specter of nuclear blank was very intimidating and very frightening. Three Mile Island was, I mean, that is the most overwrought thing ever. I think when they did the final analysis, something like, you know, a dental x-rays worth of radiation leaked into the air.

• 29:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  But if you look at what actually happened in the real world as an after effect of the Three Mile Island accident, which again was not very serious, and the China Syndrome, which-

• 29:48Speaker 06

  It was just nonsense.

• 29:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, okay, your word nonsense. I'll just say it was, you know, a very dramatic rendering of a nuclear disaster. But because that came out right as Three Mile Island was happening, it certainly changed the public discourse. And one result of that change in discourse, you could say, is that America pretty much abandoned building new nuclear power plants, or made it much, much, much more difficult. Many other countries decided to back away as well. And it's not like nothing happened instead. What happened instead is we mostly burned coal, which has demonstrably killed millions. So what's your sense or feeling, or maybe even fear-

• 30:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  That Chernobyl may be misremembered or misconstrued as contributing once again to an anti-nuclear sentiment.

• 30:34Speaker 06

  Well, the best that I can do is to speak the truth about it and to just with my own voice, help counter what might be irrational fear that a Chernobyl could happen in the West. We can't be held hostage by the specter of misinterpretation. Three Mile Island was a case of the press run amok and no counterbalance whatsoever. The China Syndrome was nonsense and should have been described as such, but wasn't. The key is to counterbalance what you would imagine to be an obvious and easy misinterpretation.

• 31:14Speaker 06

  And to in fact, talk about how a story like Chernobyl is almost a roadmap to safe nuclear power, because it lists all of the things that are required for a nuclear reactor to explode, and we don't do any of them.

• 31:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nuclear safety, technology and regulations have been significantly upgraded. Still, enthusiasm for nuclear power remained dim. Before Chernobyl, more than 400 reactors had opened around the world. In the three decades since, fewer than 200. Quite a few of those were in Japan. And then in 2011, there was an earthquake off the Japanese coast, its worst earthquake in recorded history. And it triggered a tsunami that killed thousands and swamped the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

• 32:08Speaker 08

  And eventually, this led to a meltdown in the plant between a combination of the damage from the earthquake and the damage from the water that was coming over the walls.

• 32:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  That again is the Columbia economist, Matthew Nidel.

• 32:20Speaker 08

  After that accident happened, there were major protests in Japan and around the world. And one of the efforts of those protests was to stop using nuclear as a source of energy.

• 32:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Fukushima nuclear disaster was the worst one since Chernobyl. In response, Japan decided to immediately shut down all its nuclear power plants.

• 32:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Matthew Nidel wanted to know what effects this shutdown had. He and two co-authors recently published a paper in the Journal of Health Economics called "The Unintended Effects From Halting Nuclear Power Production: Evidence From the Fukushima Daiichi Accident."

• 32:58Speaker 08

  And what we did in this paper was, we were looking at what happened when Japan decommissioned the use of nuclear power plants as a primary source of energy.

• 33:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Before the Fukushima disaster, Japan got about 35% of its electricity from nuclear power. That fell suddenly to zero. And how did the Japanese make up the loss?

• 33:22Speaker 08

  They started importing natural gas from China and elsewhere. And what happened as a result of importing those sources of energy from elsewhere is that the price of energy went up. And when the price of energy went up, we exploited the good old law of demand and said that as the price of energy goes up, people are going to use less energy.

• 33:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was their theory, and the data, as it turned out, confirmed the theory.

• 33:49Speaker 08

  Prices of energy went up, neighborhood of 30 to 40%. That varied across the country depending on how much nuclear power they were using before the change happened. And we saw pretty substantial declines in energy usage.

• 34:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Substantial enough so that some people suffered significant consequences.

• 34:09Speaker 08

  As a result of cutting back on their energy usage, they were less protected from the elements, and we saw an increase in mortality, particularly during colder time of the year, when we saw the biggest declines in energy usage.

• 34:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  It wasn't that people were freezing to death from using less electricity in the winter, but the researchers found that the increase in mortality from cold temperatures was mainly due to cardiovascular disease. As they write, "Cold temperatures are related to an increase in blood viscosity and vasoconstriction, harming elderly people in particular." Nidel and his collaborators found that this chain of events, the shutdown of Japan's nuclear plants, the rise in energy prices, and the decrease in energy usage led to an extra 4,500 deaths.

• 34:59Speaker 08

  And if we were to compare that to the actual nuclear accident itself, they only estimate there to be about 130 deaths due to nuclear radiation exposure. So we actually see much higher mortality due to the higher prices than we see to the actual accident itself.

• 35:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nidel's paper was published last year, but it was first released as a working paper in 2019, and that is the same year that Craig Mason's Chernobyl series was released on HBO.

• 35:29Speaker 08

  Our paper came out, a lot of people said to me, are you sure you feel that way? Haven't you seen the mini-series on Chernobyl? And that doesn't affect me here.

• 35:42Speaker 08

  You know, the entertainment industry is making movies or producing entertainment for us. They're trying to make what sells. I hope that the point of research is to try to influence policy in the right direction.

• 35:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, is nuclear policy moving in the right direction?

• 36:03Speaker 04

  The state of California is realizing we do not have enough electricity, period.

• 36:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 36:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is the state of nuclear power in the US right now? There are 93 reactors in 28 states, down from 104 reactors in 2012. Most of these plants were built pre-Chernobyl. In California, there's just one remaining nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  There's two units, so two reactors on one site. It's located on the central coast of California and it's about 20% of California's carbon-free electricity.

• 36:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Kristin Zaitz. She works at Diablo Canyon. She's also co-founder of Mothers for Nuclear, an advocacy group which tries to show that nuclear power should be a key component of modern environmentalism.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  I got an internship at Diablo Canyon kind of on a chance. I had a good friend who made me a cake to celebrate, you know, one of us getting a real job. And he put these little fireworks on top of it. The insinuation was, you know, congratulations, you're going to go work for a place that's going to explode. So I was super nervous going out there and I just ended up thinking, okay, I'm going to go for a few months, I'm going to learn their secrets and then I'm going to come tell everybody what's really going on and then I'll go get a real, real job.

• 37:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  When she was in college, Zaitz recalls, she learned that being anti-nuclear was a prerequisite to calling yourself an environmentalist. But she saw things differently once she started working at Diablo Canyon. She's been there 20 years now as a civil engineer and project manager.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  The nuclear power plant is like a little city and there's jobs for all sorts of backgrounds out there. I am friends with chemists and other types of engineers and financial people, environmental professionals. You know, we even have our own fire department and a medical staff, too.

• 38:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Construction on Diablo Canyon began in 1968 after six years of hearings to ensure it would be safe and sufficiently earthquake-proof. If you look at the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan, the consensus was that it was poorly designed and especially poorly sited, making it vulnerable to flooding.

• 38:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Diablo Canyon was being designed and built, a lot of people were sure that nuclear power was the future of electricity production, a clean and safe alternative to fossil fuels. The technology came about as a byproduct of the Manhattan Project, the huge American World War II enterprise that produced the first nuclear weapons. By the 1960s, nuclear power seemed like the sweetest peace dividend ever. But building out nuclear infrastructure was challenging.

• 39:00Speaker 05

  We started out with these big gigawatt reactors back in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

• 39:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is Joshua Goldstein, co-author of A Bright Future.

• 39:09Speaker 05

  They are large, concrete-laying projects which the West, Europe and North America have gotten very bad at doing. They all go over budget, very slow. It's like, literally, a billion dollars and 10 years before a shovel can ever touch the ground. And so that makes the economics really hard.

• 39:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Around the world, there are more than 50 nuclear reactors currently being built, most notably in China, India and Russia. Other countries have reversed course entirely. Germany, for instance, used to produce a lot of nuclear power, but because of environmental protests and the political leverage of their Green Party, they decided to shut down all their reactors by 2022. In the US, meanwhile, there are just two nuclear reactors being built in Georgia. So what happened? How did we go from inventing nuclear power to essentially shunning it?

• 40:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes, there was the fear created by Chernobyl and even Three Mile Island, but Goldstein says we shouldn't underestimate the power of the environmentalist movement.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  So it really predates all those accidents. I would go back to 1973, when the Sierra Club, which had always been pro-nuclear power because it's so environmentally, is why I love it, I'm an environmentalist. Then they flipped and became anti-nuclear power. And then they went to Ohio where Ohio was burning coal and was planning to build nuclear plants and the Sierra Club successfully sued and agitated and raised money and got them to shut down most of what was being built there. And today, Ohio is still running on coal. So that's decades of coal, decades of cancer and emphysema, decades of carbon emissions and so forth.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  And I think if you went back before that to the path we were on, we were taking a new technology and we were going to power our cities with it, spread it around the world, and we literally wouldn't have the climate crisis that we have today if we had stayed on that track. And we would have saved all these lives that died from coal pollution.

• 41:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  What made an organization like that change its position so concretely?

• 41:33Speaker 05

  There was a strand, and I remember this from back then, a strand of thought that technology was bad, the population was growing too fast, too many people, people were bad. And the head of the Sierra Club, David Brower, subscribed to that. His predecessor had, I mean, the Sierra Club voted in favor of the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor, twice, the membership. But David Brower was anti-nuclear and shared these beliefs about technology, population and so forth. And he left the Sierra Club and went over and founded Friends of the Earth, which was an explicitly anti-nuclear group.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  And he did it with a check from the head of Arco Petroleum. So, you know, the fossil industry has always had an interest in shutting down nuclear for obvious reasons, it's competition.

• 42:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  In 2016, it was decided that the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant would be decommissioned. Its electricity replaced by renewables. This was the agreement reached between state and local governments, environmental groups, and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which owns the plant.

• 42:51Speaker 12

  The agreement in 2016 to retire and replace it, in which I participated, was an agreement that recognized that increasingly Diablo Canyon didn't fit in a rapidly changing California grid that was moving toward new resources.

• 43:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Ralph Cavanna, co-director of the Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. They like to say that the costs of nuclear power outweigh its benefits. Their argument is that safety isn't the main concern with Diablo Canyon.

• 43:24Speaker 12

  The weaknesses of Diablo Canyon lie in its giant size, inflexibility. In competitive contexts, where winners and losers emerge on the merits of affordability and reliability, nuclear power hasn't been able to succeed, hasn't been able to overcome a host of lower-cost, more reliable alternatives.

• 43:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there's a problem. Energy prices in California are already the highest in the country. Kristin Zaitz again.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  The state of California is realizing we do not have enough electricity, period. Not just not enough clean electricity, but not enough electricity, period, to provide reliable electricity to people.

• 44:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Zaitz has been meeting with California lawmakers across the political spectrum to build support for a nuclear solution to the state's energy problems.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  I have found that Republicans tend to be supportive of our message right away. They might not want to talk about climate, but they're supportive of keeping Diablo Canyon and other existing nuclear plants open.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Then we talk to Democrats and we have this great kumbaya moment about how much we care about climate and then they say they don't support nuclear. So it's tricky. I think there are quite a few Democrats that are changing their tune on this.

• 44:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Indeed. As California energy prices spiked even higher this past summer, Governor Gavin Newsom proposed pushing off the shutdown of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Facility by another five years.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  A lot of environmental groups are opening up to nuclear and outright changing their minds and that's happening faster and faster now. It's like it's no longer taboo to be pro-nuclear energy if you're an environmentalist.

• 45:06Speaker 08

  There's a question of whether people are coming around on nuclear.

• 45:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  That again is the Public Health Economist, Matthew Nidel.

• 45:16Speaker 08

  We're seeing a couple of things happening that might be triggering this. After Fukushima, Japan stopped using nuclear power, also Germany stopped using nuclear power. And what they did was they replaced that energy with something else. And a lot of that was importing natural gas from Russia, especially for Germany. Now we have Russia invading Ukraine and all kind of sanctions going on and now the import of fuel from Russia isn't such a certain thing as it was before. So now Germany's in a difficult position where they have much higher fuel prices, energy

• 45:57Speaker 08

  prices, and they need to start thinking about winter. Same thing in Japan. So now they're saying, maybe we need to kickstart our nuclear power plants because that'll be a way to provide reliable source of energy, again, without impacting climate change and local air pollution. And the important thing is hopefully we can come back with more safety provisions in place that we can prevent any human error that might have contributed to some of the problems at Fukushima.

• 46:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  In just the past couple of months, both Germany and Japan have made moves to restart or bolster their nuclear power capacity. And what about the US?

• 46:43Speaker 08

  It's also interesting that the Inflation Reduction Act or the climate bill has not only created a lot of incentives for renewables, but for nuclear as well. Hopefully, what we can do is instead of spending a lot of the energy arguing against nuclear, if we can spend a lot of that energy in making nuclear as safe as possible.

• 47:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  In addition to new incentives for nuclear power, the Biden administration has set aside $6 billion to, as the New York Times puts it, "help troubled nuclear plant operators keep their reactors running and make them more economically competitive against cheaper resources like solar and wind power." Going back to how we began this episode, how much of this new direction on nuclear power can be attributed to an embrace of harm reduction? Sure, there are risks associated with the generation of power by nuclear fission, but there are risks associated with any sort of electricity generation and plenty of risks from having no electricity.

• 47:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's worth noting that at the same time California was preparing to shut down Diablo Canyon, they also launched the California Harm Reduction Initiative to fight drug overdoses by funding what are called syringe service programs. It's also worth noting that there are more fatal drug overdoses per year in the US alone than deaths from nuclear power ever.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  The president's been very clear that we need to make harm reduction strategies that have been proven and are high impact like naloxone.

• 48:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  That again is Dr. Rahul Gupta, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Making sure that we have certain service programs, those type of issues in the forefront of making sure we're first keeping people alive and then getting people to help they need when and where they need it without fear or judgment.

• 48:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, I could hear a lot of listeners hearing you say that and think, well, you know, no, Dr. Gupta, I'd rather not move toward more clean syringes and syringe exchanges. Let's move toward abstinence. Let's move toward getting users to not use this dangerous stuff. What do you say to the abstinence argument?

• 49:06Speaker 00

  My first reaction is, look, as a physician, I've taken an oath to do no harm first. And that includes making sure that we're saving lives as many today as we can. So it's all of the above approach, but the first priority has to be for people who are about to die or are dying. Because when we run the numbers, we believe that if we do nothing or we continue to do what we have been doing, by 2025, we will be losing about 165,000 Americans a year, and that is just unacceptable.

• 49:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think it's a legitimate analogy we're making and a legitimate question we're asking of whether if one embraces harm reduction in one realm, that person should consider it in another, even if it's as different as something like energy production?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  I think you raise a really important and good question, which is harm reduction by itself does not have to be limited to healthcare systems or processes. When you look at any one of these macroeconomic aspects that have complex aspects to them, I think it is fair to approach it from a harm reduction aspect. However, I will say this, even more simple things that look so obvious today like seat belts. When they began, they were controversial. They were not so easy to implement, and it did take time. So we have to also, while continuing to develop evidence and data and science behind harm reduction approaches, but also have to have patience to understand that not everyone

• 50:45Speaker 00

  will reach the same end goal at the same time. And that's where we have to have the patience and compassion to understand other points of view, but still not give up the aspect of harm reduction to approach tough policy solutions. As commissioner in West Virginia, we had a nuclear power plant close to us in Pennsylvania, which required us to have a certain level of knowledge and training in both functioning, but also what would happen in case of dysfunction. So I've had to deal with this a little bit. But broadly, you know, when we talk about climate change, we have to think about, for example, the social cost of carbon.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  And unfortunately, the people who contribute the least to this may disproportionately bear the most cost. So the harms from extreme weather events, you know, poor quality of air, poor quality of water, there could be food insecurity, there could be increased incidence of communicable diseases. And so we have to look at it in that sort of context that, at the end of the day, these policies, no matter how complex and macro they are, they ultimately affect individuals. And if they're affecting the most vulnerable amongst us, then we have to think through how to look at harm reduction as a policy.

• 52:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  That sounded like a very diplomatically worded way of saying that you don't think my argument is totally crazy.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 52:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you think? We always like to hear your feedback. Our address is [email protected]. You can also leave comments at freakonomics.com. And while you're there, you can find transcripts, show notes, and information about the other shows in the Freakonomics Radio Network. Coming up next time on the show, the modern world overwhelms us with sounds we didn't ask for, like sirens and cellphone halflogs. What does all this noise cost us in terms of productivity, health, and basic sanity? He screamed at me and he said, "I'm not afraid of sound. I'm not fearful. Sound is making me upset. I cannot control my reaction."

• 53:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Please get your noise out of my ears. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself, and, if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski. Our staff also includes Neil Carruth, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Ryan Kelley, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Julie Kanfer, Morgan Levy, Eleanor Osborne, Jeremy Johnston, Jasmine Klinger, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jacob Clemente, and Alina Coleman. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. The rest of our music was composed by Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 53:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, in the early morning hours of April 20... jeez. I think it's April 26. You'd think that I would remember this.

• 54:03Speaker 07

  The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.