E1: Let’s Get Nuke-Pilled

23:12can fit inside a football field stacked 10 meters high, and we contain all of it. It is sitting there at nuclear power plants within concrete canisters, and it has never caused any injuries or deaths to anyone. And so we're doing just fine. And that's just the status quo, the way we do things today. There's also an even better solution, which would be to bury our waste deep underground, which is where uranium actually comes from. And we've had plans to do this at a place in Nevada called Yucca Mountain. But unfortunately, this is one of these massive bureaucratic boondoggles, and it is sitting there, not complete because of too much infighting about how to get this done.

23:48Completely caught up in red tape. We know that in other places, Finland, for example, has just finished building one of these geologic deposits, and it's a great alternative. Keep your waste underground, and it's kind of going back to where it even came from. And then the last thing I'll say about nuclear waste is that people talk about, oh, it's going to exist, you know, being dangerous for millennia. And it's true that the alpha radiation that will be around for millennia, but that's not harmful to people. The gamma radiation is what people are worried about in nuclear spent fuel. And that's actually only going to be around for about 500 or 600 years.

24:19And we have some great solutions to do that today with the CASC setup we have or with those geologic deposits. The thing that sticks in my mind when we talk about ways that you just mentioned the CASC is that image of Maddie Hilly, who's a nuclear advocate, pregnant and hugging one of these giant cement things filled with spent fuel, saying to the world, like, look, I'm putting myself and my baby at quote unquote risk here by doing this. And I think the images are so powerful on both sides of the nuclear debate. So I like to see her fight back a little bit with images of her own. Totally. I think it was really cool she did that because nobody really knows what nuclear canisters look like, right, and how we store waste.

24:54We've had The Simpsons. That's showing green goo spewing out of containers. But in reality, it's actually all very neatly contained, very safe on the premises of the reactor site. I love The Simpsons, but I do wonder how much The Simpsons have contributed to anti-nuclear sentiment. because now when I thought of nuclear, I pictured two things. One, that there are people like Homer Simpson operating nuclear plants. And then two, that one Homer operating a plant could cause a huge meltdown. Neither of which is true. So I don't know. I love the Simpsons, but I'm a little conflicted on that one. I don't think it was worth it.

25:26I don't know. All right, myth number three, nuclear power facilitates nuclear proliferation. Proliferation is something people worry about and they should. There's mostly just been this association, though, of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, but they actually couldn't be more different. It is virtually impossible to create nuclear weapons from nuclear fuel. The processes that you go about to create each of them are just so different. Nuclear fuel has actually gone through many, many steps from its original raw uranium format to be able to be in a fuel format. To build a bomb requires a completely different set of processes and equipment.

26:02And you need to have a lot of money and know-how to do this. And then step two is the fact that as a nation and then internationally, we have set up multiple organizations, the IAEA, for example, that keep their eyes on everything related to uranium mining, enrichment, all the processes that you would go about to even get close to creating nuclear weapons. We've done that. That's international peacekeeping on this front. It's just one of those overblown topics, certainly something to take seriously. But I think we've shown that this topic is solved and we know how to handle it and we can handle it.

26:33This is actually a fun fact here that I love to share with people because I was blown away when I heard about it. So let's take the opposite, flip this on its head once again, where you take nuclear weapons and the uranium and the plutonium in those, and you actually turn them into nuclear fuel. And there was a program called Megatons to Megawatts that started in 1995, where we took Russian nuclear weapons, disassembled them, took out the enriched uranium and created fuel. And that powered almost 10 % of our grid for almost 20 years in the US. So really fun. It's like almost the counterpoint here.

27:06There's probably some opportunity to take these weapons and turn them into fuel instead of people constantly worrying about the other way around. Yeah, that's absolutely incredible. Atoms for Peace, USA. I love it. So to recap. Myth number one, nuclear is unsafe and as a result, a lot of people have died from nuclear disasters. That one's false. Either zero or one people died from radiation at Three Mile Island and Fukushima combined. And while Chernobyl was a real disaster, it was the result of bad Soviet technology and procedures that we would never use today. Myth number two, we have no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste.

27:42This one also busted. The amount of nuclear waste is tiny. We know how to handle it. You can hug the concrete around nuclear waste and be totally fine. And there are now even companies using waste as fuel. And myth number three, nuclear power facilitates nuclear proliferation. One, this is less than a concern than people think because of the physics. But then two, we've set up a watchdog and regulatory framework around the world that ensures that it's just not an issue. Right. And I don't want to hand wave these issues away. A big reason that these three areas are now myths is because people put in the work to address them.

28:19And we'll put links in our resource guides so y 'all can learn more. As we'll talk about in the next episode, one of the mistakes that early nuclear advocates made was overpromising. And we want to give the issues the nuance and the depth that they require. But I really think at this point, these three issues don't present cause for concern and certainly aren't enough of a basis for serious people to oppose nuclear. We wanted to speedrun these 101 issues so that we can spend more time on the real challenges and opportunities for nuclear. Okay, so what are those real challenges and opportunities?

28:52We've gone through the easy myths. Now let's dig into the realities. We'll talk about the potential of fusion in a few minutes, but let's go a little deeper on the biggest issues for the miracle technology we have at hand today, fission. This is a wildly complex topic, which is why we're devoting four episodes to fission alone. But based on our discussions with experts across the spectrum, there are three main themes to the challenges with building more nuclear fission. First, and probably thorniest, is the cost and economics of nuclear plants. Nuclear is undeniably more expensive to build initially than any other energy source today.

29:26Can we bring those costs down? Where are those costs coming from? Are there efficiencies to be found in building a bunch of large reactors? And what about new solutions like small modular reactors? We talked to a lot of people trying to bring costs down, and a few things came up consistently that we'll dig into. One, large reactors, the gigawatt reactors that can power about a million homes each, need to be built more consistently, but there are all sorts of challenges that utilities, who are the buyers, face when deciding whether or not to build out a nuclear plant, from construction complexity to financing costs that make it, frankly, an unappealing prospect.

30:00Nuclear has been called a utility killer. Two, what needs to happen on the financing side for new nuclear to be built? For large reactors, should the government ensure against cost overruns or provide more incentives for nuclear buildouts that recognize its role as reliable baseload power? Should utilities team up and share the costs, risks, and upside? For startups, is venture the best source of capital for such capital-intensive projects? And then number three, small modular reactors, or SMRs, and advanced reactors show a ton of potential, but they face regulatory challenges like the fact that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is more comfortable with designs that it's already approved, and uncertainty.

30:41For example, should SMRs have the same requirements around security, including armed personnel on site, as large ones? Can smaller reactors make a dent in our very large energy needs and time? And can advanced reactors get the necessary supply chains up and running? These are some of the questions around economics, and we'll dig into more. One big topic that we'll dig into is, should we build more of the same large reactor design over and over again until we can do it quickly, cheaply, and predictably? Or should we experiment with new reactor designs that take advantage of advances in our knowledge and technology.

31:12The second big challenge is on regulation more broadly. We thought this would be the overwhelming concern, but actually it's only one piece of the puzzle. These are the questions we'll tackle with our guests across both government and the private markets. Do we need to rally to change regulations, or is the regulatory burden overblown? Should the government play a more active role in the development of nuclear capacity, or should we let free market capitalism work its magic? And third, is it up to entrepreneurs to push hard and prove what nuclear can do in order to gin up the support needed to change regulation?

31:47Or should we have Congress and other people saying, this regulation is not working for us today? And finally, the last big challenge we wrestled with in the first half of the season is that issue of popular support. Is it necessary? What would be the knock-on effects that increase popular support for more nuclear. We have it now a little bit. It's kind of diffuse. We talked about it earlier. The numbers are good, but there's not this burning passion and people actually getting up off the couch and going to fight for more nuclear that it might take to build more nuclear. We go back and forth throughout the season on whether or not that popular support is necessary.

32:25In the next episode, we trace the history of nuclear in the 20th century, and popular support, or lack thereof, plays a critical role. But where does that leave us today? It's funny. I love this topic. I know it's an area that people disagree on, right? If you look back, popular support, or I should say lack of support, is one of the driving reasons for nuclear to stagnate. But now that we see popular support surging again, will that have the impact we want it to have? Will that actually mean that a utility is going to go sign up for building a nuclear power plant? I find that a little hard to believe.

32:59But that said, there could be other areas that we'll get into in further episodes about where popular support might actually be a bit of the tailwind that's needed to get some of these nuclear projects over the line. Yeah, I think it's probably hard to untangle the impact that Tesla had on the EV market and on powering things with electricity. And so that popular support alone doesn't do anything. But then that translates into subsidies and like all these things that kind of snowball and move in favor of a new technology that nuclear just hasn't had. It has these regulations that, overblown or not, are kind of working against at least building it fast.

33:39And I think there were some subsidies and incentives for nuclear kind of in the IRA. And so the government's kind of coming around there, but not nearly enough to kind of get developers and utilities over the edge to actually build more nuclear. So one of the questions that I'm excited to dig into is just like, how much popular support do you need and where do you apply it? Is it better as this diffuse thing that we all tweet about and like kind of want to see happen in the world? Or do we need to like form groups and form packs or whatever we need to do and like direct that support at a few key areas?

34:10And hopefully this podcast helps at least build nuclear support and understand maybe where those pressure points could be. Right. And I think alongside the explicit support for nuclear fission, it's clear that also there just needs to be a change in the conversation about energy more broadly. We need to go from energy conservation and degrowth to a mindset of energy abundance and that the more energy we have, the better for the prosperity of humanity. And that's ultimately what we all want. We haven't come across anyone who supports this sort of abundant growth and opposes nuclear. Although we will talk to some people who think that solar in particular will play a much bigger role than people expect.

34:50There's not going to be one easy answer. I think one of the questions that I want to ask everybody that we talk to is, what do you think the mix of energy sources will be in the United States by the year 2050? And really get a sense for how people think about it. I don't think it's all nuclear. I don't think it's all solar. I certainly hope it's not all oil, gas, and coal. It's probably a mix of all those things. Or maybe it's all just fusion. Neither of us, and maybe nobody, is an expert in how to deploy commercial fusion because it doesn't exist yet. But I think it's going to be a really fun one for us to dive into because people seem to be really, really excited about fusion energy.

35:28I know I'm excited about it. It's almost like this utopian thing now because it hasn't actually met the reality of all the stuff that we've been talking about, the challenge around economics and regulation and all that. Julia, as someone who's been interested in and passionate about pulling energy from atoms, what's your view on fusion energy? I'm super excited that we're going to take on Fusion alongside Fission in this season because they're just at such different places in their history, in their arc. We're looking at an industry with Fusion that's in its very early innings. It's R &D right now.

36:01It's looking at what approaches are even viable, could even work. What's the best way to eventually get something that's commercially viable? It's a really exciting stage. It couldn't be more juxtaposed from fission in a lot of ways because fission, it's matured from a technology perspective, but it got bogged down in all these other sorts of issues, right, from cultural, economic, regulatory. And so it's just a different set of issues in terms of what's going to allow each of these technologies to be commercially viable, if not flourishing going forward. So I think it's going to be really interesting.

36:34It's a really interesting contrast here in terms of two different industries that are basically two sides of the same coin, right? One is splitting atoms, one is merging atoms together to create energy. So I think it's going to be really exciting. Yeah, I mean, they're both super clean. They're both super safe. But to your point, they were born kind of at the same time. And then the histories look very different from there because we pretty quickly started commercializing fission in the country. And for the past 70, 80 years, we've been trying to figure out how to make a fusion reaction without using nuclear fission or a bomb to kind of start the fusion reaction in a way that produces more energy than you have to put in.

37:11The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Lab last year generated a ton of excitement by shooting lasers to spark a fusion reaction that achieved Q greater than one, which means that we got more energy out of the fusion reaction than we put in. It was like a battery's worth of energy, but it was a historic moment that is still really a long way from commercializing. So I'm excited to dig in with the people who are taking all sorts of different approaches. I think there's as many different approaches to creating commercial fusion as there are startups in the space, somewhere in the 30, 40 startup range.

37:44Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you wrote a great piece about the marathon going on here, right, in the fusion industry. Can you give us just a little overview of what you learned when writing that piece and kind of what's the state of the union right now with fusion? All right, so with the caveat on the whole season, but this in particular, I am not an expert and that's why we're talking to the experts, but fusion is in this really exciting spot.

38:16so the joke about fusion like the joke about autonomous vehicles before it is that fusion is always just 30 years away every year fusion is 30 years away i think we're in a spot where that's actually not true anymore the thing that kind of sparked me during the piece was that helion energy a fusion company backed by sam altman the open ai guy announced that they'd signed an agreement with Microsoft to, by 2028, provide Microsoft with Fusion Power to run some of its servers, which is wild because most of the best estimates are like, if you're super optimistic, the early 2030s maybe will have commercial Fusion.

38:52They went out and said, 2028. I have no idea if Helion is going to be able to deliver. I think there's definitely some Silicon Valley chutzpah on that and saying we're going to do this thing by this totally improbable time in the hopes that we can actually go out and do this thing. It's a little Ilani. But as I looked more into it, I think we're in this really, really interesting spot in the history of fusion. So the idea for fusion power started right around the same time as nuclear fission, right? Like they were both born out of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. This Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller, took the atomic bomb and said, cool, what if we use the impact of a fission explosion and use that to ignite a fusion explosion and develop a hydrogen bomb?

39:33And it worked. Luckily, we've only done it as a test bomb, the Ivy Mike test bomb, and it blew a crater into the middle of the island in the Bikini Atoll where they tested it. So we're going to dive into the history of fusion energy later in the season, episode seven. What's interesting for now is that it does kind of mirror the history of vision. It started at the same place, and then early on, just like in vision, there's all sorts of experiments on different designs and reactor types. and fusion, there were concepts called stellarators and Z-pinch and magnetic mirrors. And you can look at them like they're all these twisty, complicated, wonderful, like brain children of these beautiful physicist minds.

40:13Then actually all people, the USSR came up with this design called the tokamak. And the tokamak essentially just looks like this big donut. So compared to all these other twisty, crazy designs, it's this relatively simple thing. They're able to use it to achieve higher temperatures, greater pressure, two of the biggest inputs into kicking off a fusion reaction. And because it's a simpler design, easier to scale. So after all this experimentation, the world really kind of converged for a while on the tokamak design. This international race actually became this cooperative thing. Now there's this project called ITER, or the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, that all sorts of countries, countries that are competing with each other.

40:54We have India, China, US, Russia. I think there's 30 something countries all involved kind of putting their best people towards this huge reactor in the middle of France that hopefully by 2035, 2040, the date keeps getting pushed back because imagine building something with this many countries as part of a committee at some point might produce a reaction. But recently in the past couple of years, maybe because of SpaceX's example, maybe because of advances in software and material science and the quality of magnets, maybe just because there was more funding available during the Zerp era and through this bullish decade that we had in the 2010s, there's been this explosion of startups that are kind of reanimating all these designs that were really cool and the physics worked on paper, but we didn't have the software or the materials or whatever to actually make them work in practice.

41:46A bunch of people are trying those now. Fusion energy startups taking all sorts of different approaches. And that's kind of where we are now. I don't know if Helion is going to succeed. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is another one of the leaders. I hope we get a chance to talk to somebody from the team over there because what they're doing is fascinating. But my kind of dumb optimistic take is that somebody, one of these companies that are saying that they're going to get something done in 2030, are actually going to start producing commercial fusion in the early 2030s. Got it. So you mentioned Tokamaks.

42:16What What are the other approaches out there that we're seeing in this fusion race here? How are things going for these different approaches? Yeah, so there are a bunch of different approaches that people are taking now. And we're going to have to talk to the scientists and the founders, really get to the nuts and bolts of what's going on. But broadly, there are two categories, inertial confinement and magnetic confinement. The National Ignition Facility used inertial confinement. That's essentially just having a high-powered laser shooting a ton of energy at a fuel pellet to spark the fusion reaction.

42:44Then there's magnetic confinement, which is the approach that iTER and companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems are taking. In this approach, magnetic fields are used to contain the hot plasma and keep it stable for long enough for fusion to occur. Tokamaks are the most common approach here, but there are others like stellarators and z-pinch and magnetic mirrors and levitated dipoles and all the things that they were trying to do back in the 1950s and 1960s, that whether it's because we have better magnets now, whether it's because we have better modeling and simulation software, a lot of those things that never worked or worked on paper, but were too complex, people are now trying again.

43:21So there's magnetic versus initial confinement. And within each, there are a bunch of different designs. Helion is actually trying a hybrid, magneto-inertial. And then there are a number of different fuel types like deuterium, tritium, and helium-3, and more. And so I think of the 30 or so companies that were tracking in fusion, all of them are different combinations and permutations of these different inputs. And just like nuclear fission, I think what we're also seeing is that they're trying to apply to a wide range of applications. So there's companies like Avalanche Energy that want to have a small reactor that you could bring essentially on a camping trip with you, all the way up to Commonwealth Fusion and TAE and Helion that are trying to go grid scale.

44:01It's just a bunch of people taking different approaches and we'll see what happens. Super interesting overview. I am so excited to hear more from the founders themselves and the investors who are thinking about this space. One other angle I'm curious about and excited to learn more on is what will the regulatory framework be like? How far are we in developing that? How are people thinking about standing up a regulatory framework for this new industry? The thing Fusion has on its side is the fact that it's clean, right? And I'm using that word kind of intentionally, but from a branding and reputation perspective, fusion's clean.

44:34It hasn't had the same issues and the challenges that you have to deal with when you're actually operating in the real world like nuclear fission has. So during the environmental movement of the 60s and 70s, fusion wasn't a thing to protest against because it wasn't a thing that existed. And so I think it skipped a lot of that. And the way people are viewing it now is as this kind of hope for this clean, safe, abundant energy future. It's viewed the way that I think nuclear fission would be if nuclear fission were developed today. And so I hope we can take that support and some of the work that, frankly, people in the fission industry are bearing the brunt of to establish a clear framework that fusion hopefully should be able to plug into something kind of even cleaner and easier there than fissions had to do.

45:15But I think it's too early to tell. We need to actually produce this stuff first. Yeah, totally. I was going to go right there, actually, with the public sentiment piece, yet it does feel like it's a total clean slate for nuclear fusion right now. And it makes me wonder if they should drop the nuclear altogether, just go fusion solo? Yeah, I think branding is important. Josh Wolf, who we talked to in the season, wants to rebrand nuclear as elemental energy just to kind of give it a clean slate there. I think names do matter. And I think people within the fusion industry are actually just going with it's a fusion company or a fusion energy company.

45:50I do hope that they do that without throwing fission under the bus. I think when I was doing research for that piece, there was a lot of like, no, no, no, fusion is like the actually safe one, the actually clean one. There's no waste, like all these things and kind of these myths that we busted earlier. I think fusion is maybe trying to separate itself a little bit from vision at the expense of vision. I just want all of our energy sources to get along. Absolutely. Well, we've covered a lot of great ground this first episode, and I'm super excited for the rest of the season. We hope you come out of this episode new-pilled enough to want to learn more, like we've become.

46:24We hope that you understand the basics, that we've put some myths out of your mind, and that you have a good idea of the type of questions that we're going to be wrestling with throughout the rest of the series. We can live in an age of miracles, but it's going to take a lot more than technological innovation. We have a lot of work to do. So in the next episode, we're going to start wrestling with these questions by unpacking the history of nuclear in the U.S., where we went wrong, and what lessons we can take away. I'm excited to do that one with you, Julia. I'll see you on the next episode. See you then.

46:55Thank you for listening and watching to this episode of Age of Miracles. If you like what you hear, please rate, subscribe, and share. And if you're feeling really generous, tell us what you think in the comments. Plus, we have a ton of resources and references in our resource hub if you want to go deeper. And we've linked them all in the show notes below. See you next week.