Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Rebranding Nuclear Energy — with Dr. Jessica Lovering About this episode Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and co-executive director at the Good Energy Collective, joins Scott to discuss how nuclear energy got such a bad rap, and why it’s actually a great mechanism for combating climate change. Follow Jessica on Twitter, @J_Lovering.
Scott opens with his thoughts on how power corrupts and the importance of counterbalances.
Algebra of Happiness: welcome guardrails.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Scott Galloway? Episode 156. Elvis Presley released Hound Dog in 1956. True story. Every Wednesday night for my kids, I do an Elvis impersonation. I eat too many edibles and I pass out on the shitter.
1:32 Speaker 03 Go, go, go!
1:42 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 156th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Dr. Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and co-executive director at The Good Energy Collective, a policy research organization that is focused on the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of combating climate change. We discuss with Dr. Lovering why nuclear energy is due for a rebrand and how the US's approach to this type of energy differs from other countries. We also learn about the benefits and potential risks of nuclear energy. Okay, what's happening? Well, the ongoing news that's been giving all of us a headache, or is the gift that keeps on giving for business television is of course Elon. By the way, downloads of this episode or of this show and Pivot are hitting new records
2:24 Scott Galloway? because similar to Trump and Fox or Trump and CNN, everybody wants to hear us talk about Elon and Twitter. And what a thrill Elon is tweeting at me again, saying that I get everything wrong. And I just want to call out the elephant in the room here. The sexual tension between Elon and me is palpable. Let's be honest. Elon called me. Anyways, let's get back to it. Musk still hasn't gotten his way in taking the company private and turning the platform into a, some sort of a shitstorm of free speech because Twitter implemented a poison pill, a tactic that was invented in the 80s by mergers and acquisitions lawyer Martin Lipton in order to prevent hostile takeovers. It doesn't really prevent it as much as it kind of slows it down. It means you got to deal with the board.
3:09 Scott Galloway? Effectively, a poison pill, once it's triggered, once, once shareholder breaches a certain ownership level or watermark, in this case 15%, other shareholders are offered the opportunity to buy shares at a discount, basically diluting the person who triggered that or the person who got past that ownership stake. Essentially, it's a way, it's a blocking move. There's just no getting around it. In the case of Twitter and Elon, if Elon takes a 15% stake, Twitter could then turn around and unleash a bunch of new stock at a lower price, diluting Musk's stake. So all of this has me trying to pull the lens back and think more broadly about what can be taken away here and what can be learned. And I think it comes back to an age-old truism. Simply put, power corrupts.
3:52 Scott Galloway? Society has long thrived under the notion, or mostly thrived, under the notion of counterweights and the wisdom of crowds. We are a, we're pack animals, we're social animals, we want warmth, we want touch, we want affection, and we just make much better decisions with other people, whether it's relationships, whether it's regulatory agencies, whether it's your sister, whether it's your mom telling you, "Don't be an idiot," or your dad saying, "If you're not home by 10:00 PM, there's going to be trouble." Greatness is in the agency of others. I don't care who you are or what you've done. Nothing wonderful or great gets built or accomplished alone. We have three branches of government to save themselves from their own destruction. There's a reason for checks and balances.
4:37 Scott Galloway? Shoshana Zuboff had an excellent Twitter thread about just how dangerous it is when one person holds too much power. And in regards to Musk, she wrote, "We obsess over one man and his whims because we don't yet have the democratic rule of law needed to govern our information spaces." Specifically, I think she's talking about social media. Without law, power is dangerous. And I think she's really on to something here. There is, you know, we are in sort of a uncharted territory here with no swim lanes. And people conflate that with innovation. You know, be careful what you ask for here. The example here is Zuckerberg and teen depression or elections. Look, folks, that just hasn't worked out well for us. She also told The Washington Post that Twitter in the hands of Musk is incompatible with
5:22 Scott Galloway? democracy. What happens when one person aggregates this much wealth and power? Corruption follows, and their empathy diminishes. I just don't, I think this guy is increasingly punching down, and I think there's evidence that his empathy is in fact diminishing. Sure, we can point to classic examples throughout history, but look at our tech space for, for, for fuck's sake. The share of tech IPOs with a dual-class shareholder structure has exploded from 3% in 1981 to 46% in 2021. And some, the pendulum has swung back to founders, and they've decided, I know, I just want power. I don't want stupid shareholders who put in the same amount of money as me to have the same voice. I need additional voice. I need Kremlin-like democracy where I want to listen to your opinion until I disagree
6:07 Scott Galloway? with it, and then my opinion wins, even if I only own 4% of the company. A dual-class shareholder structure. Essentially gives all of the control of the company and voting rights to the insiders. What could go wrong? Well, we've seen what goes wrong. And that is, do you think Mark Zuckerberg would still be around post Cambridge Analytica? Do you think with teen depression, we would still be listening to these people say, "We're proud of our progress," or "We need to do better," or them hiring hundreds of lobbyists to delay and obfuscate the damage they are doing to the Commonwealth, to our teens, to our discourse? I don't think so. This, this type of power corrupts. Mark Zuckerberg controls 13% of Meta, but he controls the company. And we've seen how the platform has crumbled under his reign
6:50 Scott Galloway? and continues to pollute our information ecosystem. Adam Newman ignored all signals that maybe he should rethink his strategy. His board is really just a group of enablers, and his bankers just wanted fees. Whatever ayahuasca big gulp he was sipping on here, he made sure everyone else had a straw as well. And boom, the company fell apart. It was supposed to go public at 50 to 70 billion. That was hallucination. I think it's at somewhere between 3 and 4 now. Even founders who are not damaging the Commonwealth participate in this sort of control. Shopify CEO Toby Lutka, for example, is increasing his voting share from 34 to 40%. Why? Because he'd just rather have more power. Elon Musk taking control of Twitter would be like throwing gasoline on a fire.
7:35 Scott Galloway? Do we really want a man with no governance to control our flows of information? Doesn't listen to his board, doesn't listen to his better instincts, doesn't listen to any notion of grace, punches down, doesn't appear to have a lot of close relationships in his life, any sort of guardrails, doesn't really give a flying fuck about the government or what the SEC thinks. And then here's the thing, young men and investors, and a lot of investors kind of conflate all this with leadership. No, it's not. It isn't. It is a total tearing at the fabric of our society. And those, those pesky things like the rule of law are the reason, and the SEC is the reason that Elon Musk is worth $200 billion. Those, those laws that get in the way of you being a baller
8:19 Scott Galloway? are the reason why we have a functioning society. Are some of them wrong? Are some of them overdone? Yeah, but when you're taking tax credits from the government for your electric vehicles, when you are hiring graduates of state-sponsored universities like they're going out of business, and then you pee south from California to Texas so that you don't have to reinvest in that ecosystem. Well, the balance between being an innovator and a leader and any sort of respect for the protocols and our laws, and I realize how boomer I sound, is way out of balance, way out of balance. You want the Wild West? Well, the Wild West was full of death, disease and disability until sheriffs showed up. And once you aggregate a lot of land, you decide you don't like the sheriff.
9:00 Scott Galloway? You want the rule of law, you want to play by the rules while you're getting wealthy, and you want someone to enforce those rules. So unlike Russia or China, the government can't step in and just shut you down or show up and say, hey, a guy who's more powerful than you has decided they want the plant that's producing the nickel. No, you're big fans of law and regulatory capture and being subsidized by taxpayers. But then if it gets in the way of your id, oh, my gosh, let's start railing on government. This is not healthy. This is a terrible example, in my viewpoint, for young men. Everybody needs guardrails. Everybody needs people that they can call and check their instincts again. And government needs to be that instinct or that check, if you will,
9:45 Scott Galloway? for the players in the ecosystem. We went after Michael Milken and we put him in jail. And it sent a very strong signal to the rest of the financial markets that if you play by the rules, great. And if you don't, we're going to stick your ass in jail, regardless of how wealthy you are. I believe that Michael Milken was put in jail for less than what Elon Musk has trafficked in. And is this a good thing? Where our government has effectively been overrun, that once you get to a certain point of wealth, you are no longer subject to the same rules and regulations and standards as the rest of us? That creates a kleptocracy, and that is where we are headed. We are starting to lose signal here. Signals are that we are part of something greater, and that connective tissue of that greater thing is our government.
10:29 Scott Galloway? And yeah, it sucks to be a grown up. It involves taxes. It involves playing by certain rules that you may or may not agree with. We have lost the script here. It is time for the government, specifically the SEC, and move in and show who's boss. And who's boss? All of us, all of us, as manifested in the greatest, most noble organization in history, the United States government.
10:55 Scott Galloway? Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with Dr. Jessica Lovering.
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13:19 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dr. Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and co-executive director at the Good Energy Collective. Dr. Lovering, where does this podcast find you?
13:30 Speaker 04 I'm in Santa Barbara, California.
13:31 Scott Galloway? Santa Barbara? I see Carnegie Mellon all over your CV. How'd you end up in Santa Barbara?
13:38 Speaker 04 My husband is doing a PhD here, actually, so I'm just working remotely. Yep.
13:43 Scott Galloway? Yeah, fantastic school. I remember going up there for the ISVT, which was a volleyball tournament when I was at UCLA, and there was sand in the dorms. And I thought, this is a pretty good place to go to college.
13:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, search for storage on campus.
13:56 Scott Galloway? So let's bust right into it. And I'll set it up as it's an opportunity to talk about my favorite topic, me. I don't consider myself an environmentalist, but I consider myself a person of science, and the science around climate change is just kind of undeniable. And then, as I started thinking about solutions and what is practical and realistic and could be accomplished, it seemed like all paths led to the same place, and that was nuclear. And specifically, why not more nuclear? So let's use that as a jumping off point. Can you make the case for nuclear's role in combating climate change?
14:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I definitely see that nuclear has an important role to play. It's not the silver bullet in that it's going to be 100% nuclear, but as part of a mix with renewables, hydro, maybe fossil fuels with carbon capture, I think nuclear has an important role. So let me explain why I think that is. So nuclear is low carbon, so it doesn't have carbon emissions or any greenhouse gas emissions when it's operating. But unlike renewables, it can produce huge amounts of electricity. So the plants that we have running today around the US and around the world are over 1,000 megawatts. And if you're not familiar with those sorts of sizes, it powers millions of households, large cities.
15:21 Speaker 04 And so on a very small footprint, so the actual, you know... Acreage of the power plant is quite small for how much electricity it produces. So if you don't have a lot of fossil fuel around, nuclear power can be great for providing electricity for your population, for your industry, for your economy. That's why countries built a lot of nuclear power in the sixties and seventies and eighties. It wasn't about environmental attributes. It was about economic growth and, uh, you know, powering modern society. And now that we do know more about the impacts of climate change and wanting to do a lot more to reduce emissions, um, for climate change and also just for, you know,
16:06 Speaker 04 local air pollution, particulates, um, acid rain, those, those sorts of longstanding problems. Nuclear is sort of becoming popular again, but it still does have, um, legacy issues from those kind of nineteen seventies environmental movements and opposition to it. But it definitely, if your, if your main concern is, is climate change or improving air quality, uh, nuclear seems like a great tool to have in your toolbox.
16:34 Scott Galloway? So my sense is that, and let's talk a little bit about seventies. My sense is that Hollywood, uh, specifically movies with Jack Lemmon or Jane Fonda or, you know, Cher have, to be blunt, just fucked things all up. And that is, if you look at safety relative to uh, carbon emissions, relative to, you know, stability of energy supply, that nuclear needs a rebranding, that I'm having trouble when you just look at the facts, understanding why Germany decided to essentially unplug all its reactors. How did, how did nuclear get such a bad name?
17:12 Speaker 04 So I'll, I'll push back a little bit in my explanation. I think, yeah, culture has a big impact. Um, you know, these mo-, not just the movies you mentioned, but things like The Simpsons. Um, and this, this idea that, that nuclear is very dangerous and sort of, you know, out of control. But that, that culture and that understanding of nuclear didn't, it wasn't just invented by Hollywood. That came from somewhere. And in particular, you know, we have to think about where nuclear came from. It, it really came from, um, for most people, it came from the military. And the first exposure to nuclear energy was related through atomic weapons.
17:49 Speaker 04 And um in the early days of even nuclear power, there was pretty tight uh collaboration between military applications and and civilian applications. Not um you know, it wasn't the military building nuclear power plants, but the same companies had contracts with both. And going beyond that, the nuclear industry was just run in a similar way as military. It was very top down, very hierarchical. There was still a lot of secrecy around nuclear technologies, you know, for some good reasons, for security reasons. Um but it it created this perception of nuclear as still being kind of tied to the military as a, you know.
18:32 Speaker 04 It just feels dangerous. It feels like like a like a weapon. Um and you can see this when we start to have these anti-nuclear movements coming out in in the nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies. They really spin out of anti-war movements. Um they're often the same people and so uh they're, you know, lumping together nuclear power generation with nuclear weapons. And you can, you know, looking at the effects, you can say, oh, that's not fair. That's sort of lumping them, you know, that's confusing two issues. But at the time, for a lot of people, it really didn't seem that way. Like, it was all this big military industrial complex. You'd have these big companies like Westinghouse or John Electric involved in both.
19:16 Speaker 04 Um and so it was really an an opposition to sort of that, you know, big, big military industrial complex. And not necessarily like I am opposed to, you know, using the splitting of atoms to make electricity um per se. And that's really carried forward to today uh in terms of how people think around nuclear. It's very much if you look at surveys, if you look at um still things in popular culture, nuclear is really lumped together with fossil fuels. It's a big power plant, it's owned by big utilities. Um utilities have done a lot of sort of shady things with with financial agreements and subsidies around both.
19:56 Speaker 04 Um and so it's still coming at some together. So in terms of, you mentioned this word rebranding, um. I think we are seeing an interesting shift in the types of people and the types of organizations that are focused on climate change. They're not necessarily the same environmental groups that we had in the past that were very anti-nuclear. I think the newer, more active climate groups are more pragmatic about solutions, are more open to, you know, whatever works. We know that climate change is a really big, difficult to address challenge. And so it's, it's more of a sense of everything on the table. And then the other side of that is, you know, the nuclear industry needs to change.
20:39 Speaker 04 It needs to do a better job of engaging with communities. It needs to sort of restructure itself to not be so top-down, not be so hierarchical. And you are seeing this with, there's been a boom in sort of recent years of younger people going into nuclear engineering. And rather than coming out of the Navy, which was a great source for the workforce in the past for the nuclear industry, now you're seeing a lot more younger engineers being motivated by climate change, being motivated by environmental issues. So the workforce is looking different and that's going to help kind of change how the industry operates and, and hopefully change perceptions of the industry. But it has to be based on something. It's not like you can just do kind of a shiny new PR stunt and everyone's going to say
21:24 Speaker 04 like, oh, nuclear is good now because, you know, I saw these commercials. It really has to change how it operates.
21:30 Scott Galloway? Yeah, it does feel as if nuclear power has this sort of Pentagon, you know, Monty Burns, big government feel to it. And that you're behind a barbed wire fence, you don't know what's going on in there, you just know it's probably not, not cool. And then there's Chernobyl. Give us the Cliff Notes on the actual process of nuclear power generation. And there's no free lunch. What are the downsides and the upsides of producing electricity from a nuclear power plant versus say a coal-fired plant or traditional fossil fuels or other, or, or renewals? What is, what are the pros and cons of nuclear and specific to that technology?
22:12 Speaker 04 So the kind of untold secret about nuclear is that in a lot of ways, it's, it's just like a coal plant in how it generates electricity. You, you have something that creates heat.
22:26 Speaker 04 That boils water to spin a turbine. For a coal plant, that's combustion of coal. In a nuclear reactor, it is the splitting of atoms. So you have a heavy atom, it breaks in two, and that releases a bunch of energy. Um, we use uranium, um, you can also use plutonium. You can also use thorium, um, in some of these advanced reactors. Uh, and so the process of nuclear fission, just the way the physics works, it releases a lot of energy when these atoms break in two. And so there's, it's not that complicated. Um, you do need, you know, these special designs for the reactor core to keep that reaction going, to sort of have a sustained chain reaction. So there's a lot of engineering and physics involved there. But the actual process is pretty simple.
23:12 Speaker 04 Um, now, the downsides are traditionally how nuclear power plants have operated. Um, or the designs that we most use today are water cooled. And, um, water is also the moderator. So that's what, that's what helps the nuclear reaction keep going. Um, the problem with water is that it, it turns into a gas um, at pretty low temperatures, uh, from a, from a dynamics perspective. So, you know, two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. And so for a lot of the system, the water wants to become steam and steam needs to be contained, um, at high pressures, uh, to keep it as a liquid going through the system and cooling that reactor core. So a big challenge with traditional nuclear
23:56 Speaker 04 is that you have these really elaborate systems to hold that, that steam, to keep that coolant pressurized. So these big, big, um, steel walls, these big pressure vessels. Um, and that can be very expensive, particularly the upfront capital cost of building a nuclear power plant can be quite high. Now, nuclear power plants produce a ton of electricity for decades. We're relicensing plants in the U S right now to eighty years. So once they get built, they actually produce electricity pretty cheaply. Because it's so much, it's economies of scale. So even some of these plants we have under construction today that are going over budget, um, kind of feel like boondoggles. When they start generating electricity, it will actually be pretty cheap in the long run.
24:39 Scott Galloway? Mm hmm.
24:40 Speaker 04 But as we've moved towards competitive power markets, called like deregulated or liberalized power markets, it's really hard for utilities to justify that big upfront capital cost, even if the electricity is going to be cheap in the long run. And that's true for anything, for nuclear, for renewables, um, for coal power plants. The one thing that has pretty low upfront cost is natural gas, because all of the cost is in the fuel. But renewables are in the same boat. Now renewables benefit from a lot of supportive policies, so subsidies that help bring that upfront cost down, um, through index, investment tax credit, loan guarantees, things like that. Nuclear hasn't benefited from those types of subsidies. Um,
25:23 Speaker 04 so when I say it's like a, it's like a coal power plant in terms of how it generates electricity, it's also treated like a coal plant in a lot of the regulatory sense. It's not really valued for its low carbon benefits in most places.
25:37 Scott Galloway? But compare the emissions of a traditional coal fire plant. We know the emissions for wind and solar are awesome, i.e. zero or near zero. What are, compare the emissions from a nuclear power plant. My understanding, it's radioactive material versus, versus carbon. Compare the two.
25:55 Speaker 04 So greenhouse gas, life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, same as renewables, um, similar to a wind turbine. Um, what's coming out of the actual power plant, depending on the cooling system, you could have some steam, some, you know, water vapor coming out during normal operations, and then you do have spent fuel at the end. So, um, I won't go into the physics, but basically you put the nuclear fuel in the reactor and it runs for a few years, and then, um, you can no longer sustain that chain reaction. So you need to take the fuel out. But, um, the problem slash opportunity is that about ninety-six percent
26:37 Speaker 04 of the energy in that fuel is still there. Um, so that's why it's hot. Um, it has a lot of radioactive material in it. So you can't, um, you know, just. Handle it with your hands. It needs to go into cooling ponds for a few years and then it can go out into dry cast storage with these big sort of concrete cylinders you see at nuclear power plants.
26:57 Scott Galloway? Mm hmm.
26:57 Speaker 04 And then it can sit there for a while. The actual volume of spent fuel is pretty small. So from the entire history of the US nuclear uh energy industry, all of the spent fuel could fit on a soccer field um about three meters high. Um so it's not a ton of volume because again, we're not combusting fuel. We're using nuclear fission. So it's it's this E equals mc squared. It's very dense fuel. Uh so there just isn't that much spent fuel left over, but it is radioactive. It needs to be handled very carefully. Um and so that's that's been a challenge. We don't have um a place to put spent fuel in the US
27:40 Speaker 04 right now. It's sitting around at power plants around the country. It's perfectly safe in these dry casts, but under federal law, Department of Energy was supposed to take liability, take ownership of it over twenty years ago. Um in other countries, they're moving towards centralized repositories, but also in other countries, um a lot of the other big nuclear countries recycle their fuel. So as I said, ninety six percent of the energy is still in that fuel. And if you recycle it, if you reprocess it, you can get more of that energy out and you also have less waste at the end.
28:14 Scott Galloway? So my first job was at Morgan Stanley. We would raise money for not only um private companies, but also utilities. And whenever anyone brought up the notion of financing a nuclear power plant, it was just not doable because of something called the Washington Power Public System, I think. And it those bonds were referred to as whoops because Washington State had commissioned the construction of several reactors. The cost overruns were so dramatic and the politics so thick that they ended up with these half-built reactors. I'm not sure they ever got built.
28:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:48 Scott Galloway? And it just sort of it just sort of, you know. Contaminated the pond or, you know, someone was pissed in the punch bowl, so to speak. What has happened as a technology advanced such that the construction of these things is more predictable and more cost effective? What's happened on the cost side? I know there's a big upfront expense, capital expense, but you said over the long term, and people can do math, they can pull out their spreadsheet and go, well, if this produces enough cash flows, it is worth it in terms of justifying an upfront expense. What's happened to the actual expense and predictability of constructing these plants?
29:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, so it's different in different countries. The US is definitely the worst offender in terms of costs. And a lot of that has to do with our utility structure. So we don't have a single state utility, unlike most of the other countries that built big nuclear fleets. And that has pros and cons. One of the challenges for how US utilities operated is they tended to build projects on cost plus contracts. So if a project went over, they were still going to pay for it.
29:53 Speaker 04 And in other places where you had a single utility, they tended to be much better at project management and keeping costs contained. These are huge infrastructure projects. It's like building a bridge or a highway, you know, costs go over all the time. So that's not good. And I think it's not intrinsic to nuclear. It's intrinsic to the way nuclear was done in the past. So going forward, what you're seeing with new nuclear designs and new projects that are being commissioned now or under construction now is moving more towards smaller technologies, smaller reactors, and modular designs and factory fabrication.
30:36 Speaker 04 So this makes sense even to people that don't do project management for large infrastructure projects. Just think of the difference between building a cathedral and building a aircraft. So aircrafts are large, complicated machines, but they are built on a factory assembly line. And you can do the same thing with lots of different types of power plants. Wind turbines, quite large, built in a factory setting, even natural gas combined cycle. So the move right now for new nuclear designs is to move towards factory fabrication. Now, there's no guarantee that that's going to bring the cost down. But from what we know of anything else that's built in a factory setting,
31:18 Speaker 04 it's much better odds that this would lead to learning by doing. You'd make improvements to the design. You'd be able to standardize a lot of these processes, you know, train a workforce to build successive units. So that's sort of the hope for new nuclear that it's done this way. And also with how the contracts are done. So instead of doing a big infrastructure project where you say, we're going to pay for it no matter what. If the reactor is built in a factory and you know when it's going to be delivered, you can order it more like a gas turbine where it's, I'm going to pay this price for it and you're going to give it to me in 18 months. Which is how people buy diesel generators, buy gas turbines today, even wind turbines.
32:03 Speaker 04 So moving towards that model where if it costs more than you say you're not going to pay for it, you pay a fixed price. And I think that will, we can actually see that successfully happen. That will change a lot about what utilities are willing to do.
32:19 Scott Galloway? Are the costs and the predictability of cash flows, has that ratio flipped? Or have they become strong enough or evolved to the point where it attracts private capital? I know, I believe that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are, have a startup focused on nuclear power. Do you see private capital coming into the game? Or is this still something the government has to get behind?
32:39 Speaker 04 There's a lot of private capital going in. There are over 60 companies in the U.S. working on advanced nuclear designs of various sorts. Bill Gates is a big investor in Terra Power, which is reactor, which actually has a plan to build their first unit at a former coal power plant in Wyoming before 2027. So things are moving and there's a lot of private money going in. They do need government's support, particularly for the first of a kind. But it's not the government funding the whole thing. And it's a cost share between public and private. And it's also been a competitive process. So, you know, figuring out which designs are most likely to be successful and can be demonstrated on shortest timelines. And just funding sort of the commercial demonstration of the first of a kind plants.
33:26 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
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35:08 Scott Galloway? Who is a role model here? When you look at a country that has, my understanding is France gets a lot of its power from nuclear, is there a role model for who we should be thinking about if we were to decide to start getting more serious about this in the US?
35:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think everyone points to France. They get eighty percent of their electricity from nuclear power, have very low emissions. They've also been able to electrify a lot of other sectors like industry, transportation, because they have so much cheap, cheap electricity and abundant electricity. Another one is Sweden. Sweden's really been at the forefront of not just nuclear power, but also spent fuel disposal. They have opened up their spent fuel repository. Another big one is South Korea. In terms of more recent, South Korea has a very successful nuclear industry in terms of keeping costs down. They have some of the lowest costs and fastest construction times for these huge power plants, so for
36:05 Speaker 04 traditional nuclear power. They also built four 1.4 gigawatt reactors in United Arab Emirates. The first one came online last year. So just in the span of ten years, they were able to sign this contract, start construction, just about bringing the power plant online, and it's going to be generating seventeen percent of UAE's electricity. So that was a very fast-moving project, very successful. In South Korea, there, where they really shone was in project management, and it sounds really boring, but that's, you know, what the industry needed for success, and also heavy manufacturing. So they have these big steel firms that can do these big pressure vessels. But in terms of smaller modular
36:48 Speaker 04 nuclear, we haven't really seen any country do that yet. The US probably has the most, most resources going into that space, and, and so there are a few companies here that are moving pretty fast towards their first commercial demonstrations, happening in sort of the next five years. But most countries that have been successful in nuclear have been successful with the big nuclear.
37:13 Scott Galloway? Do you think the worm has turned? Do you think that a variety of new information, progress in the sector, obviously the urgency of being more open to new ideas or revisiting old ideas? Do you think, do you get, are you hopeful that nuclear comes back online? Because I see in California, they're actually still planning, as I believe, shutdown plans.
37:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think I'm cautiously optimistic. And I think the reason is people have seen that we're not making progress on climate change fast enough or aggressively enough. And so it kind of is bringing people back to reconsider their options. And so even in California, you know, I, I would love to see Diablo Canyon stay open because it's such an important part of the state's low carbon degeneration. And it's hard to decarbonize without it, but I, I don't know. It's probably going to get replaced with gas. But in the longer term, I do think that people are reconsidering. And I think once we start seeing demonstrations of these much smaller, kind of what I call
38:19 Speaker 04 it, community scale nuclear, that can really change people's perceptions. If they can go and visit it, see its small footprint. The other thing that I think is, is starting to get people's attention is the land footprint of renewables. And maybe they are not thinking of it as, as land per se, but we are starting to see a lot more local community opposition to renewables projects. So whether it's big wind farms or solar farms, people are starting to pay more attention to the impacts on ecosystems, on their communities, on their views. And it's getting harder to build those plants. And then the other big thing that people don't really think about is transmission infrastructure.
39:02 Speaker 04 So a lot of renewables means more transmission lines. And it is really difficult to build new transmission lines in the U.S., in Europe, anywhere really. So when you're starting to look at system wide, how are we going to move towards 100% carbon free electricity?
39:21 Speaker 04 It's really hard to do with 100% renewables and especially because of these, you know, community opposition and land footprint and where are you going to put all these plants? And so nuclear can do a good job balancing renewables and also has a very small footprint. And there's getting more interest into adaptive reuse of sites. So for example, coal power plants that are closing, there are these sites, there are brownfield kind of industrial sites, they have power lines already there, they have cooling water already there. They could be great spots for new nuclear that might have a lot of support from the local community rather than opposition because they have a lot of jobs and a lot of, you know, economic benefits without the emissions of the coal plant.
40:06 Scott Galloway? So final question, how do you invest in this space? Both from a human capital standpoint, you're younger, you're interested in combating climate change, you see this as an interesting sector and you want to get involved. And two, if you're an investor and see that there's a lot of opportunity here and want to invest your own financial capital, how do you invest in this space?
40:27 Speaker 04 So there are a lot of companies that you can invest in. Um, I'm, so I'm on the nonprofit side. I'm a researcher. I won't make any suggestions of which companies. We try to stay technology neutral, but you can definitely find them. There's definitely VC firms that focus a little bit more on nuclear or have nuclear in their portfolio. Um, if you're a young person that wants to get involved, I mean, you're welcome to go into nuclear engineering, but you don't have to. A lot of these companies are hiring tons of people across, um, you know, business, uh, policy, they have a lot of government affairs folks, a lot of communications, um, but definitely a lot of business people, um, as well as of course, a lot of engineers and manufacturing specialists.
41:11 Speaker 04 So they, there are a lot of jobs in those, in those places, um, from, you know, a lot of young people working there. So it seems like a fun place. Uh, and there's a lot of just energy, colloquial energy in the industry. So, um, definitely check it out if you're interested in, in getting into climate.
41:30 Scott Galloway? Dr. Jessica Lovering is the co-founder and co-executive director of the Good Energy Collective, a policy research organization that is focused on the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of combating climate change. Jessica is also a non-resident fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub in Washington DC. Her work focuses on the potential role. For advanced nuclear in emerging economies. She completed her doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University in engineering and public policy. She joins us from her new home in Santa Barbara. Dr. Lovering, we really appreciate your time today.
42:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, thanks for having me.
42:16 Scott Galloway? Algebra of happiness. I'm thinking a lot about the importance of guardrails. And I wish I had done a better job. We attempt to conflate or we see masculinity and leadership with breaking down guardrails. And there's some truth to that, coloring outside of the lines. I wish I had sought out and constructed more guardrails when I was younger. I was raised by a single mother. She never saw my report card. I used to get my report card and forge her signature. She never came to a parents' night. She was, and I don't blame her for it. She was busy trying to string together a living such that we would be economically viable. I grew up in what I would affectionately call or generously call an upper, lower, middle class household. My mother never made more than $38,000 as a secretary. And it's not a sob story. We had a nice life.
43:01 Scott Galloway? But I'd wish I had more guardrails. I wish I'd had a father figure that was more present in my life to correct me. I don't think I grew up with very strong values, and I think I paid a huge price for it as a younger man and a younger professional. I just didn't have great character, and that's embarrassing to say. But I didn't demonstrate kindness. I didn't demonstrate empathy. I was constantly, I don't know, I was just sort of a, for a big portion of my life, not a bad person, but just sort of a low budget, low character person. And some men got involved in my life as an adolescent and as a young man, and it made a huge, huge difference for me and impact on me. Guardrails are a wonderful thing, whether it's your parents, engaged parents. There's a lot of evidence showing that Dan Quayle was right.
43:45 Scott Galloway? That two parents are better than one. Now, what he got wrong was it doesn't matter if they're married. It doesn't matter if they're the same gender or not. You just zone coverage with two people around a kid is better than one. They have much better outcomes, especially among, among boys. Those are guardrails. Uh, your parents are guardrails. They are not your enemy. One of the first things I do when I coach young men is I say, reestablish allies with people who are your allies. And most of the time, most of the time, your parents are your allies. And there's this genetic predisposition of pushing away from your parents. When you're a teen, I get that. That's healthy. Some of that is healthy, but also realize at the end of the day, they really are on your side. Regulatory agencies are guardrails.
44:25 Scott Galloway? Friends you can call, friends you can call before making any important, private or personal or, or professional decision. Should I go to business school? Should I break off my engagement? You know, should I call my dad back? I mean, just, what should I do in this relationship? Should I buy a house? Should I invest? I'd like, I, I wish I had learned this earlier in my life. I don't make any important decision professionally or personally, without speaking to other people. It is really hard to read the label from inside the bottle. And as a tribe, as a species, there's just a ton of evidence. There have been very few societies that have thrived off of one person.
45:09 Scott Galloway? One person can demonstrate leadership and can move a society forward. But at the end of the day, they don't accomplish anything without the benefit or the wisdom of others. The reason, there's a reason the president has a cabinet. There's a reason why we have three branches of government to save ourselves from each other. And you, as soon as possible, should try and manifest and try and construct your own guardrails. And guardrails may be the wrong term. Try and put a kitchen cabinet on your shoulder. People you trust, people who care about you, people who care about you enough to tell you when you are fucking up and you are wrong. And what I see with Elon Musk is not only someone who doesn't have anyone in his life that can tell him when he's wrong. He has absolutely no board. Has absolutely no fidelity or respect for regulatory bodies.
45:53 Scott Galloway? And it appears that our society doesn't want to put any standards of decorum or behavior on them. Why? Because we decide billionaires must know better than us? No, they don't. They have more money than us. They don't know better than us. They just have more money than us. Don't make the same mistake a lot of individuals make and they let power corrupt them. And that is always have the humility to check your actions and your decisions. You can decide to ignore advice and do what you were going to do anyways. By the way, whenever I give relationship advice to people, I find they generally just ignore what I said and we're going to do what they were going to do anyways. But anyways, you can do that, but you'll at least understand the downsides and recognize whether you made a wrong decision more crisply. Greatness is in the agency of others. Seek out guardrails.
46:37 Scott Galloway? Seek out organizations and people that will help you stay true.
46:45 Scott Galloway? Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.
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Previous Office Hours: Elon Musk and the Algebra of Deterrence, Amazon’s Third-Party Sellers, and the Dangers of Algorithmic Ads Next Office Hours: The Metaverse, NFTs, and Web3 — with Tonya Evans Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
