It's still surprising that electric utility companies didn't push harder to build cheaper energy infrastructure, that is nuclear. Would be interesting to interview one of the legacy utility execs, to learn their view on this.
I’m a big supporter of nuclear, but claims made in this episode of no deaths or injuries resulting from the three major nuclear disasters is patently false. Ignoring the wildly exaggerated claims of 60,000 exposures using the discredited LNTM model, there were still 60 deaths attributed to the Chernobyl disaster in the seconds and months that followed. This segment totally glossed over that fact and if you are going to persuade the masses to swallow the nuke pill you’re peddling, you could have presented this tragedy in the best light possible
Love the series, thank you! I'm a high-schooler who's interested in the field, and it's great to see more people coming to their senses and realizing nuclear is the way to go.
You missed a huge part of the history of the US nuclear industry that is crucial, production of U3O8 (Tri uranium octoxide). U.S. civilian nuclear power reactors purchased 40.5 million pounds of U3O8e (equivalent) from U.S. and foreign suppliers during 2022. The U.S. produced 0.194 million pounds of U3O8 in 2022, and it was a very good year compared to 2021, when the U.S. produced less than 0.021 million pounds of U3O8. For the first half of 2023, the U.S. produced less than 0.01 million pounds of U3O8. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the U.S. had a coherent national energy policy based around nuclear power. The AEC did way more to promote domestic U3O8 production than they did to promote nuclear power plants. By 1980 the U.S. was producing almost 44 million pounds of U3O8 per year. That entire industry is gone now, and you don't run nuclear power plants on fairy farts, it actually takes quite a bit of U3O8. You can build all the new nuclear plants you want, and the USA will still be dependent on foreign sources of energy.
Don't worry Australia and ANSTO (The Australian Nuclear and Science Technology Organization) is coming to your rescue with Next Gen Tech for U3O8 refining!
I was a pro-nuclear enviomentalest going to school in San Luis Obispo in 1976 when Diablo canyon nuclear power plant was being built. I was not getting much traction saying what should be protested was the coal power plant a few miles North also on the cost. My concern was the CO² from the coal plant could over time could cause catastrophic global warming. If you guys though you guys were out of step supporting nuclear recently think about it back then. Also, was also in the Army ROTC and very anti nuclear weapon during a big nuclear weapon build up.
Thanks for all your hard work. So many lessons to learn and apply. The human failures and the egos and greed and fear that drive folks to abandon integrity and lie to themselves and others are part of the real fight that destroys the freedoms and abundant blessing available to nations and civilizations. It may all come down to the individuals of each nation and how much they appreciate the truth.
if the oil crunch and refiners shutting down led to electricity demand dropping it means large scale adoption of EVs is the best thing that could happen for nuclear :-)
All of the arguments against nuclear power that you listed were in reality caused by trying to force nuclear power generation technologies used at the time into a power distribution model that had not evolved since the very first days of coal power stations. The too much cheap power causing ecological damage is wrong IF environmental usages of electrical power such as environmental inflows for rivers as well as drought proofing were used to regulate the power grid during times of low power consumption. In addition the 19th century model of power distribution is archaic and not only expensive but also a defence weakness in time of military conflict. The things being done wrong or effectively against nuclear safety and efficiency are so numerous that you could almost write a book the size of War and Peace just listing and explaining them. The US government has done little to assist the global use of nuclear energy and it appears that if a country wants nuclear power then China, Russia, the UK or France would be the place to go. In Australia nuclear power generation is currently ILLEGAL! That is how good US propoganda has been BUT there is a majority of citizens stirring for change.The future is and MUST be nuclear or wars such as Ukraine will continue to arise and cause more climate damage than any nuclear accident ever could.
You can't hope to revive Nuclear Power without recognizing that we ALREADY started to have a "nuclear renaissance" - back early in this century, before Fukushima.
I'd love to see a follow up comparing and contrasting this with other countries. I know France has a fairly successful nuclear industry, but even for them it hardly seems that spectacular. And both the Soviets and Chinese have nuclear power, but they don't seem to have had that much more luck with it than we did. Why haven't they been more successful than we were?
Meanwhile in China - As of February 2023, China has 55 plants with 57GW in operation, 22 under construction with 24 GW and more than 70 planned with 88GW. The China General Nuclear Power Group has articulated the goal of 200 GW by 2035, produced by 150 additional reactors. If all are built they will have many more than the USA! Also they have 1,118 Coal plants that not many people talk about and they are building more of them too at home and abroard!
The view that nuclear power is part of nuclear weapons infrastructure is correct, and it's true for fusion also. As long as you have large scale neutron sources around, you can use them to turn U238 into U235 or plutonium. The anti nuclear movement wants global, or at least Western, nuclear weapons abolition, and to support that they want the end of any industry that can support a weapons program. Their logic is sound, but their goal is insane. The only way to not have nuclear weapons is to eliminate competing nations, which we can maybe do organically over time, through a gradual process of cultural convergence, but glancing at the news (Isreal, Ukraine), I see that'll take many centuries. No sane nation will ever take the hit to national security of relinquishing nuclear weapons before that happens, nor should they. People need to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. That's hard to sell, but it's the truth, and deep down most of us know it.
I have a diferrent view. Let us start with the question who is in power .... Answer: those that do have the money. Q: Were the very wealthy happy with nuclear? Answer: they wanted energy to be expensive and definitely not umlimited so they could get much more money. The evil spirit of Morgan is still there ... Q: So they were happy that nuclear stopped? Answer: even more as they stopped it by bombing Fukushima to scare the world - it was not a natural disaster ! Q: But now they also stopped fossile fuel because of CO2? That does not make sense. A: CO2 is one big lie - there is only 0.035 % CO2 in air while plants need CO2. Windmills and solar panels are an economic disaster as they produce very little energy at a very high cost .... Q: So why do the elite do this? The elite want total control and a world government. They use scarce energy as a means to control and suppress people .... Q: Is that the reason that Thorium LFTR was stopped (by the elite) while it was a very promising alternative design? A: I think that was the prime reason to immediately stop all research so that it took 5 decades before Kirk Sorensen by coincidence found a book on the research done and he brought the lost information back on the table .... But even now you see nothing in the USA while China has 700 engineers working on Thorium LFTR ....
The Magna Carta requires today overhauling - adding to it the right for humans to understand what Energy really is - before any other commandment; “In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).
Hang on. That doesnt sound right! Workers in nuclear power plants have a dose limit of 1mSv vs 1-6 mSv for background radiation. So that doesnt seem unduly overprotective!
48:46 Czarnobyl created a radioactive cloud that spanned thru the europe and was effecting people for years. So hardly a local event. Maybe he meant Fukushima :)
The effect of Chernobyl in Europe was overestimated. Direct exposure was extremely limited, and potential contamination vectors like milk were dumped just to be safe. Basically if you do not eat wild hogs which foraged in forests under the affected area, you're fine.
ChUcKSEADnDead Apart from the cloud and the horrific, reckless handling it by Soviet secretive authorities., it was local. I lived accross few borders from it and it was my second birthday when it happened . Just that authorities didn't warn us, !Norway did. You in the west got to knpw way before us, while the radipactive particle cloud went stright over where i live. Well, i might got a bit exposed, as i'm weird mentally, but my bbrother who was born soon afyer is completely normal)). Yes Chernobyl was a catastrophe and heavily contaminated few kilometres, few 100m damgerously so, but it was local. Victims were the idiotic, uncoordinated response in the wake of explosion, which wasn't a nuclear, but a steam-pressure one. My family friends were among liquidators sent from multiple USSR republics, one likely died from cancer later, but that's not the point. Nature has radiation levels, everything has. And overstepping background, or evenaximum safe limits are less dangerous than it seems. The really harmful stuff is highly radioactive microparticles kicked up in a fission-based material explosion - if ingested or rubbed against you. And being in clise proximity of highly active fission. Other than that, people eat and sold p food from exclusion zone in Ukraine (mushrooms and game) since at least the '90s, before the modern sarcophagus went up. So while it ended in tragic r and fatal radioactive poisoning for unsuspecting first responders without any valid protection, drdrafted to the site without any information what has happened and effects of the material being radioactive for a few tens of thousands of years, it was local. And the soil have been repeatedly dug up by dumb russian soldiers in the most contaminated area without any known consequences. There are still highly radioactive turbines which no-one dares to cut up for scrap metal. However all it is local and pose no immediate danger, unless you act like an idiot and eat dirt.
@@dannydetonator thanks for the first hand report. Though I still wouldn't call it local by my standards if there is a radioactive cloud over half a Europe. While maybe not lethal, you still may want to adjust your everyday life if that happens. I imagine going out during the rain could be a bad idea. And what animals ate and which animal products were consumed probably mattered as well. I read developed countries were be doing great deal of precautions to make it less impactful then it could otherwise been. What economical impact did it have? I guess in the hindsight, things may look overblown, but it's one of those things that could have been much worse if few more things went wrong (explosions, weather conditions). You just may not know at the time.
You give Alex Epstein airtime? The science denier? I guess for you, science is not the best tool for selecting the best ideas about the world. So, how do you choose the best ideas?
I am sorry, but 8 billion people is waaaaaaaaaaay too much for our planet. At most it should be 1 or 2 billion. For one thing, the utterly insane amount of land used for agriculture. The biggest cause of species extinction is habitat loss, and our biggest use of land is agriculture. This is such a huge problem that some environmentalists are going against organic foods, which use more land for the same output. Yes, we can feed, house, clothe, and meet all the other needs of that many people, maybe even more. At what cost?
We need more of that. Even good things need promotion and explanation. And there is no way to do it without someone with different perspective calling it a propaganda.
Last few years people are overusing and misusing terms they have misunderstood or . I for example don't entirely get the word 'lobby', as my language has no no equivalent, so i won't say this is a lobby, but it might be. And in very light way, this might be propaganda, intentional or accidental. Just tell me: definition, meaning of propaganda, once you boldly claim it? Ok, i'll explain: there are many kinds and methods of propaganda, divided in black, gray and white. This might be the last one, but i can't find inaccuracies or misrepresentation this far. See, if something promotes something and paints a certain picture, it's propaganda, irrelevant of facts being true or false. So even telling truth against a lying propaganda is also propaganda. That is, propaganda can be absolutely true, like it or not. Ex.g. everything that gives description or opinion of any war - is propaganda. There is no neutral stance, no unbiased source. That don't make war reporting a lie, while still being propaganda (although one side usually aggressor, use more lies and misinformation than other). My point is, overusing terms you don't understand is silly and ignorant. Saying that somethimg with political consequences and connection is propaganda is meaningless, like saying water is wet, because no presentation on these topics is _not_ one. We need this debate, and i'm not even from US or 'the West'.
@@dannydetonator Yeah, the word choice is priming the conversation in certain ways. When someone uses word like "propaganda" they most certainly want to cast some kind of shade on a material being presented. Or doing so inadvertently by using some familiar word in not the best way.
The problem with nuclear plants isn't that they make nuclear bombs, it's that they are nuclear bombs. If I lived in a world free and safe from war and terrorism....well, maybe. This "miracle" came out of Pandora's Box.
In the time between my comment and your response, Hamas has fired rockets at Israel's nuclear facilities attempting to destroy the storage facilities for the used nuclear rods. A similar attack may be occurring between the Ukraine and Russia. I'm curious how close to a radioactive cloud you are willing to raise your children?@@ChucksSEADnDEAD
I'm surprised you guys didn't discuss the nuclear waste issue. Happy to discuss and share our thoughts. Our nuclear tech startup is solving it on a whole new level. Curio.energy.
hi, thanks for adding subtitles to new episodes. can you also enable them on this episode? thanks to both of you & guests
It's still surprising that electric utility companies didn't push harder to build cheaper energy infrastructure, that is nuclear.
Would be interesting to interview one of the legacy utility execs, to learn their view on this.
Seems like LCOE explains business decisions.
I’m a big supporter of nuclear, but claims made in this episode of no deaths or injuries resulting from the three major nuclear disasters is patently false. Ignoring the wildly exaggerated claims of 60,000 exposures using the discredited LNTM model, there were still 60 deaths attributed to the Chernobyl disaster in the seconds and months that followed. This segment totally glossed over that fact and if you are going to persuade the masses to swallow the nuke pill you’re peddling, you could have presented this tragedy in the best light possible
Love the series, thank you! I'm a high-schooler who's interested in the field, and it's great to see more people coming to their senses and realizing nuclear is the way to go.
This was super good 🙌
You missed a huge part of the history of the US nuclear industry that is crucial, production of U3O8 (Tri uranium octoxide). U.S. civilian nuclear power reactors purchased 40.5 million pounds of U3O8e (equivalent) from U.S. and foreign suppliers during 2022. The U.S. produced 0.194 million pounds of U3O8 in 2022, and it was a very good year compared to 2021, when the U.S. produced less than 0.021 million pounds of U3O8. For the first half of 2023, the U.S. produced less than 0.01 million pounds of U3O8.
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the U.S. had a coherent national energy policy based around nuclear power. The AEC did way more to promote domestic U3O8 production than they did to promote nuclear power plants. By 1980 the U.S. was producing almost 44 million pounds of U3O8 per year. That entire industry is gone now, and you don't run nuclear power plants on fairy farts, it actually takes quite a bit of U3O8. You can build all the new nuclear plants you want, and the USA will still be dependent on foreign sources of energy.
Don't worry Australia and ANSTO (The Australian Nuclear and Science Technology Organization) is coming to your rescue with Next Gen Tech for U3O8 refining!
Good works guys
I was a pro-nuclear enviomentalest going to school in San Luis Obispo in 1976 when Diablo canyon nuclear power plant was being built. I was not getting much traction saying what should be protested was the coal power plant a few miles North also on the cost. My concern was the CO² from the coal plant could over time could cause catastrophic global warming. If you guys though you guys were out of step supporting nuclear recently think about it back then. Also, was also in the Army ROTC and very anti nuclear weapon during a big nuclear weapon build up.
Thanks for all your hard work. So many lessons to learn and apply. The human failures and the egos and greed and fear that drive folks to abandon integrity and lie to themselves and others are part of the real fight that destroys the freedoms and abundant blessing available to nations and civilizations. It may all come down to the individuals of each nation and how much they appreciate the truth.
awesome series
if the oil crunch and refiners shutting down led to electricity demand dropping it means large scale adoption of EVs is the best thing that could happen for nuclear :-)
All of the arguments against nuclear power that you listed were in reality caused by trying to force nuclear power generation technologies used at the time into a power distribution model that had not evolved since the very first days of coal power stations. The too much cheap power causing ecological damage is wrong IF environmental usages of electrical power such as environmental inflows for rivers as well as drought proofing were used to regulate the power grid during times of low power consumption. In addition the 19th century model of power distribution is archaic and not only expensive but also a defence weakness in time of military conflict. The things being done wrong or effectively against nuclear safety and efficiency are so numerous that you could almost write a book the size of War and Peace just listing and explaining them. The US government has done little to assist the global use of nuclear energy and it appears that if a country wants nuclear power then China, Russia, the UK or France would be the place to go. In Australia nuclear power generation is currently ILLEGAL! That is how good US propoganda has been BUT there is a majority of citizens stirring for change.The future is and MUST be nuclear or wars such as Ukraine will continue to arise and cause more climate damage than any nuclear accident ever could.
Turn up the subtitles!
You can't hope to revive Nuclear Power without recognizing that we ALREADY started to have a "nuclear renaissance" - back early in this century, before Fukushima.
I'd love to see a follow up comparing and contrasting this with other countries. I know France has a fairly successful nuclear industry, but even for them it hardly seems that spectacular. And both the Soviets and Chinese have nuclear power, but they don't seem to have had that much more luck with it than we did. Why haven't they been more successful than we were?
Meanwhile in China - As of February 2023, China has 55 plants with 57GW in operation, 22 under construction with 24 GW and more than 70 planned with 88GW. The China General Nuclear Power Group has articulated the goal of 200 GW by 2035, produced by 150 additional reactors. If all are built they will have many more than the USA! Also they have 1,118 Coal plants that not many people talk about and they are building more of them too at home and abroard!
The view that nuclear power is part of nuclear weapons infrastructure is correct, and it's true for fusion also. As long as you have large scale neutron sources around, you can use them to turn U238 into U235 or plutonium. The anti nuclear movement wants global, or at least Western, nuclear weapons abolition, and to support that they want the end of any industry that can support a weapons program. Their logic is sound, but their goal is insane. The only way to not have nuclear weapons is to eliminate competing nations, which we can maybe do organically over time, through a gradual process of cultural convergence, but glancing at the news (Isreal, Ukraine), I see that'll take many centuries. No sane nation will ever take the hit to national security of relinquishing nuclear weapons before that happens, nor should they. People need to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. That's hard to sell, but it's the truth, and deep down most of us know it.
I have a diferrent view. Let us start with the question who is in power .... Answer: those that do have the money. Q: Were the very wealthy happy with nuclear? Answer: they wanted energy to be expensive and definitely not umlimited so they could get much more money.
The evil spirit of Morgan is still there ... Q: So they were happy that nuclear stopped? Answer: even more as they stopped it by bombing Fukushima to scare the world - it was not a natural disaster ! Q: But now they also stopped fossile fuel because of CO2? That does not make sense. A: CO2 is one big lie - there is only 0.035 % CO2 in air while plants need CO2. Windmills and solar panels are an economic disaster as they produce very little energy at a very high cost .... Q: So why do the elite do this? The elite want total control and a world government. They use scarce energy as a means to control and suppress people ....
Q: Is that the reason that Thorium LFTR was stopped (by the elite) while it was a very promising alternative design? A: I think that was the prime reason to immediately stop all research so that it took 5 decades before Kirk Sorensen by coincidence found a book on the research done and he brought the lost information back on the table .... But even now you see nothing in the USA while China has 700 engineers working on Thorium LFTR ....
Fukushima was not bombed. It was a deflagration of hydrogen gas.
Plants already get enough CO2. Would you eat food with 0.35% cyanide?
😂
The Magna Carta requires today overhauling - adding to it the right for humans to understand what Energy really is - before any other commandment;
“In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).
Nuclear; Power to Save the World!
Hang on. That doesnt sound right! Workers in nuclear power plants have a dose limit of 1mSv vs 1-6 mSv for background radiation. So that doesnt seem unduly overprotective!
⚛💊
48:46 Czarnobyl created a radioactive cloud that spanned thru the europe and was effecting people for years. So hardly a local event. Maybe he meant Fukushima :)
The effect of Chernobyl in Europe was overestimated. Direct exposure was extremely limited, and potential contamination vectors like milk were dumped just to be safe. Basically if you do not eat wild hogs which foraged in forests under the affected area, you're fine.
ChUcKSEADnDead Apart from the cloud and the horrific, reckless handling it by Soviet secretive authorities., it was local. I lived accross few borders from it and it was my second birthday when it happened
. Just that authorities didn't warn us, !Norway did. You in the west got to knpw way before us, while the radipactive particle cloud went stright over where i live. Well, i might got a bit exposed, as i'm weird mentally, but my bbrother who was born soon afyer is completely normal)).
Yes Chernobyl was a catastrophe and heavily contaminated few kilometres, few 100m damgerously so, but it was local. Victims were the idiotic, uncoordinated response in the wake of explosion, which wasn't a nuclear, but a steam-pressure one. My family friends were among liquidators sent from multiple USSR republics, one likely died from cancer later, but that's not the point. Nature has radiation levels, everything has. And overstepping background, or evenaximum safe limits are less dangerous than it seems. The really harmful stuff is highly radioactive microparticles kicked up in a fission-based material explosion - if ingested or rubbed against you. And being in clise proximity of highly active fission. Other than that, people eat and sold p food from exclusion zone in Ukraine (mushrooms and game) since at least the '90s, before the modern sarcophagus went up. So while it ended in tragic r and fatal radioactive poisoning for unsuspecting first responders without any valid protection, drdrafted to the site without any information what has happened and effects of the material being radioactive for a few tens of thousands of years, it was local. And the soil have been repeatedly dug up by dumb russian soldiers in the most contaminated area without any known consequences. There are still highly radioactive turbines which no-one dares to cut up for scrap metal. However all it is local and pose no immediate danger, unless you act like an idiot and eat dirt.
@@dannydetonator thanks for the first hand report.
Though I still wouldn't call it local by my standards if there is a radioactive cloud over half a Europe.
While maybe not lethal, you still may want to adjust your everyday life if that happens. I imagine going out during the rain could be a bad idea.
And what animals ate and which animal products were consumed probably mattered as well. I read developed countries were be doing great deal of precautions to make it less impactful then it could otherwise been. What economical impact did it have?
I guess in the hindsight, things may look overblown, but it's one of those things that could have been much worse if few more things went wrong (explosions, weather conditions). You just may not know at the time.
You give Alex Epstein airtime? The science denier? I guess for you, science is not the best tool for selecting the best ideas about the world. So, how do you choose the best ideas?
I am sorry, but 8 billion people is waaaaaaaaaaay too much for our planet. At most it should be 1 or 2 billion. For one thing, the utterly insane amount of land used for agriculture. The biggest cause of species extinction is habitat loss, and our biggest use of land is agriculture. This is such a huge problem that some environmentalists are going against organic foods, which use more land for the same output.
Yes, we can feed, house, clothe, and meet all the other needs of that many people, maybe even more.
At what cost?
Marx explains many of these shortcomings better than “free-market “ fans can demonstrate.
This video is a subtle pro-nuclear propaganda.
We need more of that. Even good things need promotion and explanation. And there is no way to do it without someone with different perspective calling it a propaganda.
Yeah let's build more gigawatts of coal plants instead 😂
Last few years people are overusing and misusing terms they have misunderstood or . I for example don't entirely get the word 'lobby', as my language has no no equivalent, so i won't say this is a lobby, but it might be. And in very light way, this might be propaganda, intentional or accidental.
Just tell me: definition, meaning of propaganda, once you boldly claim it? Ok, i'll explain: there are many kinds and methods of propaganda, divided in black, gray and white. This might be the last one, but i can't find inaccuracies or misrepresentation this far. See, if something promotes something and paints a certain picture, it's propaganda, irrelevant of facts being true or false. So even telling truth against a lying propaganda is also propaganda. That is, propaganda can be absolutely true, like it or not.
Ex.g. everything that gives description or opinion of any war - is propaganda. There is no neutral stance, no unbiased source. That don't make war reporting a lie, while still being propaganda (although one side usually aggressor, use more lies and misinformation than other).
My point is, overusing terms you don't understand is silly and ignorant. Saying that somethimg with political consequences and connection is propaganda is meaningless, like saying water is wet, because no presentation on these topics is _not_ one. We need this debate, and i'm not even from US or 'the West'.
@@dannydetonator Yeah, the word choice is priming the conversation in certain ways. When someone uses word like "propaganda" they most certainly want to cast some kind of shade on a material being presented. Or doing so inadvertently by using some familiar word in not the best way.
Not subtle, really. These two people are far too overjoyed to be sincere about a serious topic.
The problem with nuclear plants isn't that they make nuclear bombs, it's that they are nuclear bombs. If I lived in a world free and safe from war and terrorism....well, maybe. This "miracle" came out of Pandora's Box.
They are not nuclear bombs. A reactor cannot undergo nuclear detonation.
Oh, for the love of God, where did these turnip-heads come from?!
In the time between my comment and your response, Hamas has fired rockets at Israel's nuclear facilities attempting to destroy the storage facilities for the used nuclear rods. A similar attack may be occurring between the Ukraine and Russia. I'm curious how close to a radioactive cloud you are willing to raise your children?@@ChucksSEADnDEAD
I'm surprised you guys didn't discuss the nuclear waste issue. Happy to discuss and share our thoughts. Our nuclear tech startup is solving it on a whole new level. Curio.energy.
This is part of a many-part series. They'll get to it, and have mentioned it in other videos they've been in - e.g. the "Moment of Zen" pod.