E2: The Untold History of Nuclear Energy

26:35They didn't have any oil to refine, so they shut down because of the Arab oil embargo. And so public service in New Jersey told Westinghouse, we're going to cancel our order. And then they're paying Westinghouse, I don't know,$100 million or something like that for the cost of canceling the order. And that was the very first cancellations of nuclear plant orders. and it sort of started a trend. So I tell people, can you imagine the Arab oil embargo, a time when oil prices go up by a factor of four, actually slowed the growth of nuclear energy in the U.S. and ended up helping to stop it. So by 78, we stopped ordering nuclear plants again.

27:15A lot of it was partly the demand wasn't growing as fast as it was expected. Basically, after rapidly achieving economies of scale over 20, 30 years, it almost as suddenly became cost prohibitive to build a nuclear plant. And this was before all of the disasters, environmental pushback and regulation. So the second factor in nuclear's downfall is simple. It's the economy, stupid. That's one of the things that surprised me most in the research and our conversations and why I said earlier that the narrative in which the nuclear industry would have been totally fine if it weren't for environmentalists and the NRC falls apart a little bit.

27:50Economic considerations were a real concern, and they weren't caused by anything other than typical market forces. But regulation was certainly a bottleneck, if not the only one. Regulation has been a hot-button topic as it relates to the nuclear industry for a long time. A framework called Linear No Threshold, or LNT, has been around since the AEC was getting started. It says that there is no safe dose of radiation. To understand why radiation became such a focus, Rod Adams argues that you need to go all the way back to the 1950s, the year before the first nuclear power station opened at Shippingport, and to the people who stood to lose the most from cheap, abundant nuclear energy, the oil industry.

28:33You almost have to be impressed by their foresight. According to Rod, the Rockefeller Foundation, whose fortune gushed from Standard Oil's wells, was behind the bogus research that led to L &T. In 1956, some very influential parts of the oil and gas industry helped to finance a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the most credible body of scientists available in the U.S. They paid the whole cost of the studies. They even supplied the chairman of one of the committees of that. They had six different committees, and almost every one in the group had been financed, had grants or educational things or whatever, paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation.

29:14And they produced a report that said that every dose of radiation down to a single gamma ray, a single ionizing event, raised the risk of cancer, and there was no safe dose. And that was published on June 13, 1956. the Rockefeller Foundation continued to support what was called the Bayer, the biological effects of atomic radiation. Bayer worked through about 1963 or so, built a lot of foundation, produced educational materials. I mean, that was one of the things the Rockefeller Foundation was investing in, was education. They had a lot of people in the medical field. They had money to spread all over.

29:52And by the early 60s, it was pretty solidly embedded in the scientific community, everything else, that every dose of radiation caused the risk of cancer. So that was kind of a background thing. And, you know, like anybody else who wants to influence the public, they kind of pulled their hands away. They wanted to make sure that they didn't have, nobody really made the association. It was all about protecting the oil business. You know, they didn't hide the fact that they claimed that they were doing great things by helping the public understand about radiation. Listener, they were not doing great things.

30:29A number of studies since have disproven the National Academy of Sciences findings, including a 2018 study in Genes and Environment that said of the 1956 LNT findings, this spurious hypothesis was not based on solid data. It actually found that low-dose radiation from atom bombs actually elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals. Low doses of radiation cause radiation-adaptive responses that actually strengthen the body. The paper's author concludes, For many reasons, L &T must be revised or abolished with changes based not on policy but on science. According to Rod, what won out was narrative, not science.

31:14He calls out that Arthur Salzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, was a member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees and was present at the 1954 meeting. That fact probably contributed to the successful publicity effort of the NIS-Bear Committee reports. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, they say. The truth is, though, we all live amid background radiation day to day. It's part of life. Radiation isn't necessarily unsafe. It's just unsafe in high doses. There is a threshold below which radiation is safe, and they argue that we should use that as our goalpost when designing safety regulation.

31:54But that thinking has not prevailed. The LNT framework became codified into ALARA, as low as reasonably achievable, in 1977, after the NRC was established. Now regulation required that a plant must do anything it could reasonably do to reduce the possibility of radiation exposure. even if those radiation exposure levels were far below what a person experienced in day-to-day life. This regulatory ratchet led to ballooning costs towards, quote, radiation safety, with incredibly dubious benefits. That is an insanely asymptotic standard to build towards. As low as you go, you can always go lower. Typically, LNT and Alara are discussed as onerous standards imposed from outside the industry.

32:40But Brett Kugelmas, the founder of Last Energy, has a different take. He thinks we're looking at a classic case of regulatory capture. What I realized was that around the mid-1970s, the industry turned against itself. And the companies that we thought of as selling nuclear power plants were in fact selling something very different. They were selling fear of nuclear power plants. They were selling safety systems. They were selling radiation protection. And so the industry turned on itself and through rent-seeking behavior, that's a term economists use to say, OK, let's just extract as much value out of what we already built instead of innovating, bringing new things to the floor.

33:20So through this rent-seeking behavior and using a very, very effective tool of regulatory capture, Congress created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with unprecedented powers. They're actually, it's a branch of government that's independent of the executive, right? Like the president can't tell them what to do. And that is an extremely powerful agency. So if you're going to capture an agency, boy, do you want it to be that one. And so the incumbents captured the regulator to insist on ever more protection in order to sell their new product, which was 10 times as lucrative as the old product, to sell fear of nuclear power.

34:00And so after being very, very successful and having done that for 50 years, this is how we can find ourselves in a circumstance where the facts say nobody gets hurt, even when all safety systems fail, three gigawatt scale meltdown simultaneously. And yet emotionally, emotionally, we all feel very different. Alex Epstein wrote an excellent book, Fossil Future, in which he makes the case for fossil fuels. But more than anything, he's an energy realist. He's also very pro-nuclear, and he agrees that LNT and Alara are insane. Then on top of that, nuclear also faces, this is another anti-freedom thing, just a totally irrational danger policy.

34:44And this relates to things like linear no threshold and as low as reasonably allowable. And this essentially, you can think of it as our law says that our goal with nuclear energy should be to minimize its risk as much as imaginable, as much as imaginable. And the way they do this is with pseudoscience, like linear no threshold, treating any amount of radiation as deadly, which is just false. But the other thing is, it's patently illogical to say our energy policy is to minimize the risk of nuclear infinitely, because if nuclear is the safest thing, and if you minimize infinitely the risk of the safest thing, and you don't minimize the risk of the other things, then you just use more dangerous things.

35:33And that's the story of nuclear. So we have this anti-impact policy regime, and then we have this, I mean, you can think of it as anti-radiation policy regime, but this uniquely irrational policy toward radiation-related danger that doesn't apply to, say, the danger of explosion or the danger of a dam bursting or these other things. And so that combination is you can't do anything. We often lump regulation into one big bucket, but there are really two main categories that slowed nuclear down and made it more expensive to build. The first one is specific to nuclear safety regulation related to radiation, as Brett and Alex called out.

36:13That's LNT and ALARA. Then there's a second one, environmental regulation, or NEPA. This one applies to so many big projects, from solar installations to SpaceX launches. The Institute for Progress has a great piece on how NEPA environmental reviews actually harm the environment by slowing down things like renewable energy and nuclear projects. We'll include it in the resources guide. Certainly, NEPA, passed in 1969, contributed to making nuclear buildouts slower and more expensive. Here's James again to explain how the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, began to slow nuclear down back in the 1970s.

36:50But what occurs in starting in 73, 74, 75 is a dramatic increase in environmental regulation caused by a D.C. district court case called Calver Cliff's Coordinating Committee versus the Atomic Energy Commission, which basically says that the AEC, the predecessor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, needs to take the National Environmental Policy Act much more seriously when it comes to nuclear power plants and do much more serious environmental impact statements. these cooling towers generally if you're using a river or a lake to cool with and so on that's just increasing the price but also we see inflation occurring in 1973 1974 75 major supply shortages and labor shortages which means that all of a sudden a nuclear power plant which could have 5 000 or 6 000 you know a workforce of that large of that many workers on the job site became very very expensive to do that and the productivity just starts really decreasing so So what we see is we see the cost skyrocket of new nuclear power plants during this time.

37:55And then Three Mile Island occurs in 1979, which really causes a major increase in the regulatory burden for safety systems. And that decreases the economic competitiveness of nuclear power plants and skyrockets the price and makes them, you know, take years and years and years to finish. I didn't realize the chronology here, but it seems like before we even get to the anti-nuclear movement or disasters, we have a witch's brew of economic and regulatory concerns that made building nuclear harder, slower, more expensive and riskier. Emmett's not one of him's words, so let's ask him to divide up the blame.

38:31Oh, yeah. So first of all, I'm going to put, I think, the lion's share of the percent, because you have to, in the changing economic conditions in the regulatory environment. Those actually historically happened first. So that's really important. Like NEPA gets put in place around a nuclear power plant, but it wasn't necessarily anti-nuclear. It was just a typical environmental concern. Are these animals going to be hurt by our industrial thing, right? So it doesn't really become anti-nuclear for a little bit, not explicitly. So I'm going to put the lion's share there. I'm going to say that's like 60%, right?

39:08And then I'm going to say the other 40 is going to be the cultural element to it. no politician is going to risk their ass to do something interesting. You know, and neither is the utility industry because they're going to screw up their book and they don't want the headaches. Typically, you hear about Three Mile Island as the turning point. But by 1979, a potent anti-nuclear mix was already at play. The AEC had overpromised on safety. Utilities had ordered too many reactors, expecting energy demand to continue to rise. And then economic conditions changed, and environmental regulation made it much slower to build.

39:48And then, on top of all of that, there was the cultural element that Emmett described. That's the fourth factor, the environmentalist anti-nuclear movement. They got started long before any major reactor issues, and actually, their work helped color the public reaction when the first one did occur. In fact, the movie The China Syndrome, starring vocal anti-nuclear activist and actress Jane Fonda, yep, that Jane Fonda, came out 12 days before Three Mile Island and worked to spark fear in a generation. First, the anti-nuclear movement, then Three Mile Island. We'll play you a clip to put you in the state of mind that people were in when the disaster at Three Mile Island happened in 1979.

40:35The China Syndrome.

40:40It will start with a tremor in a nuclear power plant. Where it will end will depend on three people. I would say you're probably lucky to be alive. Same for the rest of Southern California. Jane Fonda. Let's face it, you didn't get this job because of your investigative abilities. Kimberly, don't fight it. Jane Fonda wasn't working alone. Who was behind the anti-nuclear push and why? One of the biggest players was the same group celebrating Illinois' August decision not to overturn its moratorium on new nuclear, the Sierra Club, an environmental group that was initially very excited about nuclear energy because of its tiny land footprint.

41:19Mark Nelson, founder and managing director of Radiant Energy Group, explains how things turned. You can say that Sierra Club got politicized in the direction of the anti-nuclear bombs and nuclear bombs testing movement. And because that clustered along with, say, anti-population work or anti-human population growth, And it also got clustered in with left-wing, anti-war, anti-industry work. And it happened before carbon was a particular concern. Really, it was a vibes problem. In the end, it just all seems to come back to the bomb. The bomb, the bomb. Why? Because the nuclear plants were seen as part of an industry, a supply chain, an industrial ecosystem that included nuclear weapons.

42:21Very early evidence that we have for Sierra Club members describing, the anti-nuclear ones, describing why and how they wanted to fight nuclear. And eventually they actually had to split off from the Sierra Club in part to fight nuclear, which eventually the Sierra Club came back around and became anti-nuclear. But sort of the older guard of Sierra Club, the ones who had fought in World War II, Ansel Adams, for example, Will Seary, these were pro-nuclear people for exceptionally pragmatic reasons. Well, the anti-nuclear folks said, look, we've got to convince people nuclear plants are dangerous because it's part of the same effort as nuclear weapons.

43:05And nuclear weapons are a sign that humans have gotten dangerous toys. They've gotten beyond their moral capability to act. They've gotten too much power. And that too much power argument very cleanly steps into too much energy. Too much power, too much energy, it's all the same thing. Too much growth. And you can see how imperceptibly to be against nuclear weapons and to be against nuclear weapons testing was to be ready to make an argument against nuclear energy. Emmett was even more blunt in his assessment of the anti-nuclear camp's motivations. In his telling, and the telling of others including Robert Zubrin, this camp viewed nuclear energy as a bad thing, not because it was inherently unsafe, not because of the bombs, but because nuclear power represented the greatest opportunity for humanity's practically limitless growth.

43:58Nuclear's opponents were OG D-cells, folks like population bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who argued for population control under the guise of environmentalism. This is where it gets even weirder, and I'm going to turn it over to Emmett to untangle the web for us. I mentioned before that there's that whole connection between like technological development, population growth, and running out of resources or whatever, that was even explicitly in the calculations that the Club of Rome used in its famous limits to growth report, right? So Hunter Lovins, who worked on that, was the wife of Amory Lovins, who heads the Rocky Mountain Institute.

44:34They were pulling on ideas that go back to the progressive progressive eugenics movement. I mean, this theme has been an enduring one since the 16th, 1700s, right? It is about what is the relationship between industry and nature, and can we continue to keep feeding, clothing, heating, sheltering ourselves over it, right? So they were trading on that, and there's some really dark roots to the progressive stuff, like the guys that founded the Sierra Club, and this isn't the current Sierra Club's fault. In fact, they've done good work trying to distance themselves from their founders' ideology. We're like deeply racist ideas about like people who didn't have Teutonic blood, like couldn't steward the forest because they were like dirty garbage people or whatever.

45:19You know, so it's like that level of thinking. I mean, you just see that all over history, right? Like that's not unique to them. What is unique is that it dawned the veneer of something closer to science when a college is like Paul Ehrlich got involved. He started to premise his ideas. Because Paul Erlich's whole thing is like, I'm going to do population growth scares, but make it less racist. The environmental movement at this time promoted degrowth over growth and popularized mantras like small is beautiful. Renowned environmentalist Amory Lovins said in 1977, If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.

46:04Or even more bluntly, Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb book, giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. The environmentalists turned against nuclear energy because it was too good. It could make energy abundant and cheap, and they were scared of that. And so they did everything they could to damage nuclear's reputation, conflating nuclear bombs with nuclear energy, and leading a popular anti-nuke movement with many figures, from politicians to musicians to celebrities, all vocalizing their support. They primed the public for incredible overreaction to the nuclear accidents that would follow.

46:45The biggest misconception people have of this time is somehow the meltdowns came first, and then because there were meltdowns, people got an anti-nuclear movement. That's entirely backwards. We wouldn't even know about the meltdowns. Maybe only Chernobyl. And even that, just a footnote for the people who didn't live through it, not that it was fun to live through, but it's just like most people on the street don't understand Bhopal and the Union Carbide plant that had a massive leak that killed and made thousands of people, right? But it would be that sort of thing, a local curiosity, local tragedy, individual tragedy for those caught in it instead of a world-defining global narrative, which Chernobyl is.

47:25The existence of the anti-nuclear movement changed the meaning of the few meltdowns that we've had that have come to public attention. So to recap, at this point, the nuclear industry is already collapsing on itself from the overpromising of safety from the AEC, the economics of the time, increasing regulation like LNT and ALARA, and the whole environmental movement. The final nail in the coffin were the disasters which we myth busted in episode one, but wanted to touch on further here. Mark explains how Chernobyl, even the worst disaster, had some unexpected elements. So when I talk to people who are against nuclear and they say Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi prove we can't do it.

48:09Well, I think my experience can be best related in the most extreme story I have about this. San Francisco is close to these big, beautiful redwood forests. And we'd go up in the morning with various runners from around the bay and run up Mount Tam in the morning. Well, I had this long, brutal uphill debate with this British lad, a nuclear physicist, either already had his PhD, was getting it at Oxford and was visiting the Bay Area. And we get all the way up and he's adamant that nuclear is not good enough. It's not acceptable. Fusion's the future. Nuclear vision is too dangerous. And then somewhere around on the way down, I was just fed up.

48:49And I said, look, how can you possibly say that nuclear meltdowns are so dangerous? They didn't even stop running Chernobyl nuclear plant. and he pauses and he says, yes, they did. I said, no, they kept running it for 14 years. It's like, that's impossible. How can you say that? What's your evidence? And I'm like, these are open records. There's no one that's hiding it. IAEA has the production data. What do you want me to recite it to you when we get to the car? And he's just silent for about 10 seconds. He says, so nuclear is not that dangerous? It just, he hadn't realized that the worst nuclear blowup ever didn't realize to even the next reactor a few feet away stopping production.

49:34It's fascinating that even with what I would argue is the only actual disaster in nuclear Chernobyl, the power plant itself, minus the reactor that blew up, continued to operate for years afterwards. People needed the power. Brett, the founder of Last Energy, who we heard from earlier in the episode, came to nuclear in a similar way. But his white pill was Fukushima. So one of the early facts that I learned about nuclear was that Fukushima, despite having three gigawatt scale meltdowns, and every single safety system failing, couldn't manage to hurt a fly. Okay? So, like, that's a fact. But, like, that doesn't resonate well with us.

50:15And so why it doesn't resonate well with us is part of the puzzle. That's like, how did we get up here? How can we all be so emotionally resistant to that fact that nuclear was never a hazard to begin with? Right? Remember, zero safety systems worked. Three full meltdowns, not a single injury. So if there is no hazard, and yet we all say that a meltdown is a catastrophe, It's the epitome of catastrophe. That's a little bit of a clue to how we got to this point. The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima stand out in our collective memory because the idea of a nuclear explosion is so terrifying, and because Americans were primed to be terrified.

51:01But because of that, their role in nuclear's history is often overblown. They were more effect than cause. And if anything, they've been catalysts that have helped nuclear to become so safe. That's why we wanted to look at the history of nuclear, to talk to as many people as we could to understand what actually happened, to pull out the lessons. So let's recap those historical lessons, because I think they're going to be really important for the rest of the season. And particularly in the next episode, when we talk about in the year of our Lord, 2023, what are the things that we can actually do to build more nuclear power?

51:36Yeah, let's do it. Okay, quick history recap. We had the atomic bomb, which was the first basically awakening of this concept of nuclear fission on anyone's kind of the public's horizon, right? Their understanding. You have this little hiatus where people are kind of focused on the weapon stuff, the Cold War is starting. And then finally, Eisenhower says, okay, we have this great technology. Let's use this for the public good. And then he kicks off the atomic age with his famous speech that we're going to have atoms for peace and build a whole bunch of nuclear energy. And we actually do start doing that.

52:11So late 50s, we built the first one. Into the 60s, we're building, building, building, building. Then as we get into the 70s, looks like there's going to be a lot more electricity needed. So we're still building. But then there are a few things that happen that kind of slow us down. So first, there's the Atomic Energy Commission itself. As Emmett pointed out, by overpromising on the safety of nuclear power, by saying that there was a one in a billion chance that anything bad would happen, while at the same time covering up incidents that disprove that fact directly, they set the bar too high, lost public trust, and made nuclear an easier target for both environmentalists and regulators alike.

52:51Next, we have the environmental movement that does kick off 1970 with Earth Day and kind of goes from there. You see the population bomb book come out and people start to rally around small is beautiful. They don't want to see nuclear energy built. The Sierra Club is changing their stance on nuclear energy. And so there is this building momentum around the cultural aspect of being anti-nuclear. Then third, there's the economic reality of building nuclear power plants. This is one that I think hits close to home because it feels so non-obvious. Like today, that is the big challenge with nuclear.

53:28It's expensive and we'll get into why that is and how to fix it. But my perception of the past was always this stuff made sense and it was just shut down. But large reactors are multi-billion dollar decade long projects that can pose an existential risk to the utility companies who order them. Often these utilities exist in deregulated markets where they can't just pass on the cost to consumers. Nuclear has to compete on price with other electricity sources from day one. And if it doesn't win, the utility could go out of business. And it's happened before. Nuclear has been called a utility killer for a reason.

54:02And I would say the last thing here is we do start to see regulation layered in, right? You have NEPA, you have various kind of ratchets as the now NRC is coming in with its mission just to regulate, right? And they're just adding layers upon layers of regulation. And that drives up cost. that web of cost and regulation and financing costs and construction, like all of that we're going to unpack. Then I guess like last and just way less important than I had thought. Although if you do look at kind of the history of nuclear installations, there are sometimes these inflection points. But I think for the overall narrative, the disasters at Three Mile Island, at Fukushima, and at Chernobyl, there's certainly an element and there's certainly color of people's minds.

54:54And I think there's just a lot of residue left over from these things that maybe got overhyped and bent because of all these other factors that we talked about. There's certainly a factor, but we put these last because I think without the other four factors, all but maybe Chernobyl would be non-stories. They'd be footnotes in history. And even Chernobyl, I mean, there have been gas plant explosions and deaths from oil and like all sorts of things all around the globe for hundreds of years, and I can't name another one of those. And so I think, you know, even Chernobyl, the worst of the nuclear disasters, would probably also be a footnote in history if there hadn't been this big movement against nuclear happening at the time and all these other factors that led to its demise.

55:35This list isn't exhaustive, but it gives us a good hit list of issues we need to tackle if we want to make sure that the recent wave of enthusiasm for nuclear doesn't turn into another 1970s. If the nuclear industry is going to learn how to win, we need answers to all of these issues and more. Issues like how to finance these projects, how to build up our construction expertise so we can get down the cost curve, and how to balance free market capitalism with the government muscle often required to get big things built. We're going to spend the next episode going deep into the weeds with the people on the ground to understand how we move forward here.

56:17Thank 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.

56:43Thank you.