Isabelle Boemeke

34:45Like what started... Three Mile Island was the nail on the coffin. Okay. I don't remember what year that was. 1979. Okay. So I like to say that the first sin of nuclear technology was that nuclear fission, which is the process of unlocking the energy inside of atoms, which is used in nuclear power plants but also in bombs, was discovered in 1938 in Germany. Worst time ever for that discovery to take place. And so immediately governments went, especially the American government, went into making a bomb because the fear was that Hitler was going to build a nuclear bomb. And the world would look very…

35:32Or he started… started did it wasn't going very well and it was also like this like he killed all the jews is that so many of the scientists were jewish and he was kind of like no but imagine what the world would look like if hitler had developed nuclear bombs very different and so the united states obviously rushed into making bombs so the world was introduced to nuclear technologies because Because of bombs. Through the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okay, got it, right. You know? And so that leaves a mark. Of course. So there is already that fear. Lots of the environmental organizations started as anti-nuclear weapons organizations.

36:14Greenpeace's first action was trying to stop a nuclear weapons test. Later on, they developed into being more broadly pro-environment. Right, right. But a lot of the environmental movement itself had its beginnings as an anti-nuclear weapons movement. And it was because for the first 15 years of nuclear technologies, only the military could build and operate nuclear reactors everywhere in the world. And so it was very tied up. The electricity side of it and the bomb side of it were very inextricable. It was. And people couldn't get over that. and so i imagine you know especially world war ii was so psychologically impactful to the whole planet i think every culture you know seen images of you know the far far ranging horrific images whether out of germany whether out of japan and i probably the culture was in a tender place and so the idea of exploiting nuclear probably was not that palatable it was like this is this technology is tied to big government it's tied to the military it's it's tied to all the things that later in the 60s and in the 70s people became against that that anti-establishment feeling you know right like anti-vietnam all of these movements were brewing together anti-vietnam war anti-nuclear women's liberation i mean all of this was kind of happening at the same time and it was very much the sentiment of f the government and nuclear was seen as big government and i talk about this in the book i would have probably been anti-nuclear back then too we didn't know that much about the technology like we didn't know if these plants were going to explode every few months but just to be cynical because i think about things in this way as well like for in my view like i have noticed throughout my life that when there is like an incredible like a vehement pushback against something without a lot of like as you're saying three mile island which is the one that everybody knows about first right was 1979 and already you're saying there was they were developing this very anti-nuclear sentiment yes so in my view when i see that and there's not a lot of data to base it on, right?

38:42It's more like a psychological, right. In my, in my experience, many times there are systems that are being threatened, like existing, like monetary streams, like existing paradigms of capital that are being threatened because why else? Like, so that's what I'm just wondering. Was there some kind of push? Not that we would even know you know from the gas and oil industry to sort of create this pr storm against nuclear i mean they i'm just gonna say this they definitely liked it you know exactly and they took advantage of it now did they start the anti-nuclear movement i don't think so you don't know though i don't know but i can tell you two pieces of information so first one is and this story ties back to diablo canyon in california but that's the power plant that you helped save yes point it out so when diablo can was first being proposed in california they wanted to build it in like a set of dunes called nipomo dunes i always mispronounce it was this like beautiful landscape the sierra club was against it because it was such a pristine stretch of you know dune they wanted to protect that that landscape but the president of the Sierra Club was actually pro-nuclear because he was a nuclear scientist himself.

40:10Oh, wow. Yeah. And he saw it as a great replacement for fossil fuels. However, because the environmental movement was already becoming pretty anti-nuclear, his support for Diablo Canyon being built at this other location, which is where it stands today, which is close to San Luis Obispo in California, led to a huge fracture within the club. And one of the guys who worked there, this man named David Brower, he left to start his own organization called Friends of the Earth. And Friends of the Earth's main difference from the Sierra Club at the time was that it was anti-nuclear. It was founded as an anti-nuclear organization.

40:49Their first check was$200 ,000 from an oil magnet. There you go. So case in point. Do I think David Brower was a big shill for oil? No, I don't think so. I don't know, but it is like, why wouldn't a fossil fuel tycoon be interested in funding this tiny new organization? Yeah, because you start this ground roots PR campaign against something and like that now, you know, I find that so interesting. I really do. So there's that. And then the second piece is there was this power plant called Shoreham nuclear power plant in Long Island that was actually fully built. it was actually fully built ready to go and the the the movement against it was so strong that they prevented the the power plant from ever opening so it's still sitting there yes it was fully built and never operated because of because of you know efforts but but but pre three mile island this was pre three mile yes it was like around the same time it was like late 70s.

42:01And there is this, I have this in the book, but there is this little ad from a newspaper back then. And it says solar, not nuclear. And it says the Long Island, you know, utility companies trying to build a nuclear plant in your backyard call to say you don't support it, blah, blah, blah. And it was funded by the oil Institute. Yeah, of course. So they've definitely funded all this like astroturf grassroots movements that stopped slow down nuclear for sure that happened of course yeah so can we talk a little bit about why why is nuclear power better like people say solar there's solar there's wind in the book you explain this really well around how much energy can actually be generated per investment like explain one thing that's been in my mind for like the last few days it's how do we know that the technology is better like how do we know that progress is better and in my opinion the best way to frame it is it's it makes people's lives easier but it also makes less has less of an impact on both people and also the environment and nuclear checks all those boxes that's because if you replace say a fossil fuel plant with a nuclear plant you're creating clean electricity doesn't have no doesn't have release greenhouse gases which create climate change it is is the i don't know the scientific language but it's like the unit of energy from a fossil fuel plant more expensive than nuclear?

43:48Like, I guess you have to amortize the cost of the plant and all of that. It's definitely not. No, fossil fuels are very cheap. Right. You know, it's it's still the cheapest if you account for their reliability and so on. So no, nuclear is more expensive. But I would argue like that we don't we don't account for the externalities of fossil fuels. Right. Like we're not accounting for the damage that they cause on human health. Right, exactly. Four million people die. At least, I use very conservative numbers, at least four million people die every single year from diseases and conditions caused by the air pollution that comes from, that's not even from greenhouse gases which cause climate change.

44:25This is just the particulate matter that gets into our lungs and causes heart disease and pulmonary disease. Right, or gets into the ocean and affects the food chain. Totally. The whole impact on the ecosystem. We can't even calculate that. So nuclear is definitely more expensive, but, you know, it doesn't have this, doesn't release particulate matter, doesn't release greenhouse gases. Doesn't have a long tail environmental impact, but it, so it's really just, you know, in the event that there's a nuclear, if there's a meltdown, if a reactor melts down. Yes. Which I want to talk to you about as well, because, you know, and I've told you this before, But when I was a kid, I was, you know, in the 80s and or the late 70s in L.A.

45:14That was, yeah, it was like the height of anti-nuclear sentiment. My mom used to have like Carl Sagan over and, you know, all these people. And it was like everybody was really up in arms about the fact that it seemed like we were moving towards nuclear power. And it was really so. So now we know why. But as you said, Three Mile Island was the nail in the coffin in terms of like the roadmap for future plants. Yeah. So what happened at what happened there and what happens at something like a Chernobyl? I mean, a Three Mile Island was contained to my understanding, right? Yes. And Chernobyl was was not.

45:55So can you explain why those two things happened and what the difference is and what the future threat of something like that is? Yeah. And I think those are great questions. So Three Mile Island was the biggest nuclear accident in the United States, right? It was the only one really we've had and the quote unquote worst one. And how many, sorry to interrupt, nuclear plants currently are operating in the United States? We have 93 reactors. Some plants have two reactors, some have one, but we have 93 reactors. In terms of sheer numbers, that's the highest any country has. So we have 93 and then China has like 58.

46:33France has 57. So the U.S. is still the country that has the largest number. Okay. In the 60s, we were building tons of them. By 1979, there were 120 reactor orders. So we would be building. Yes, we were adding 120 reactors. Then Three Mile Island happens. And this is how crazy it is. the accident happened 12 days after this movie the china syndrome oh came out in movie theaters oh my god and this was a thriller featuring iconic jane fonda but you know she was a journalist who was visiting a nuclear power plant and the nuclear power plant almost had an accident when she was there so she goes around trying to tell everybody you guys this power plant is dangerous and they try to kill the journalists that are trying to tell this i mean it's obviously fictional would you believe that 12 days later a very similar accident to what they showed in the film happened yeah so it wasn't a meltdown it was a partial meltdown okay but how does that happen what went wrong in the case of three mile island it was like some safety systems it's always like safety systems and human errors but basically the fuel got too hot to to continue functioning and in the case of through my island specifically they had a containment dome which is something that most modern nuclear power plants have which is a concrete and steel casing around the nuclear reactor that in case there is an accident it prevents the radiation from going to the environment there was a little bit of radiation that came out but like nominal i mean there's you get that you get that from air flying literally yes so but because of the timing people were freaked the hell out right you know they evacuated i mean how could you not you have this huge hollywood movie coming out and then 12 days later something very similar it's almost like it's a sign from god right that's very strange Very strange.

48:44And we can get into the spiritual, my spiritual interpretation of that. Which is? I think that God, the universe, whatever you want to call it, wanted us to take our time with nuclear technologies. And I think it sent this little warning signs to get our shit together. Because we were under-learned, we were under-prepared, the engineering wasn't there. Well, you know, as with any powerful technology, and I only realized that as I started drawing the parallels between nuclear and AI. Yeah. And thinking, oh my God, this is such a world-changing technology. And the ramifications are huge. And we need to become wiser in how we organize our societies and how we behave towards each other.

49:41Good luck. in order to be able to handle such powerful technology. Yeah, absolutely. Right? Yeah, I wish I had, I don't know, for some reason, I have more faith in sort of the scientists and engineers' minds in the 60s developing this than I do now with sort of how culture seems to be devolving. And, you know, I really, when I think about AI in exactly what you're saying, like this incredibly powerful tool that I rely on all the time. And we don't know what's in store. We don't know how it's going to compound and evolve. And you know, it's, we've got, we're playing with fire and I don't know that I have the faith in humanity at the moment to believe that we can be there for each other or protect you know humanity like the not not even so much the physical like staying alive part but the internal aspect of of who we are and how the point of us being on earth like i don't know i mean that this is a question in my mind right now right it's how do we keep the future human yeah how do we how right because we're entering this we're just rushing into this technology that is so like nuclear in the sense of being godlike yeah but also so unlike it in the sense that we're all using it already and it's new yeah you know when you go into a room and you ask how many of you use ai everybody's gonna raise their hand it's true and and by the way like six months ago maybe half yes like the the rate of adoption is so incredible and and and obviously like the train has left the station.

51:37This is here to stay. And to this point, like we are developing these technologies, whether mining for crypto or AI that are requiring an inordinate amount of incremental energy, right? Like I heard Sam Altman speak at a conference and he was saying, like, we don't have the power. We don't have the, we don't have the electricity. Like what is holding back the advancements of ai is compute like limitations on compute because of of power right and so you have you obviously have two conflicting goals right which is we're trying to replace our fossil fuels with clean energy like nuclear solar all of the clean energy sources and yet we're also exponentially increasing our energy consumption or electricity consumption with data centers.

52:31Right. And here's the thing. They have the money to pay for expensive electricity. So, you know, ironically, they're the ones that are pushing the nuclear electricity. The technology companies. Yes. Because they have the money to pay more for the electricity. Because right now the main argument against nuclear is it's too expensive. It's too expensive for a utility that's selling, trying to sell the cheapest source of energy to consumers, right? But to a data center company that, to your point, the only limiting factor to their entire company's existence is energy they're going to pay whatever price for reliable electricity but you know one interesting thing about nuclear and ai is that with nuclear i started writing the book thinking oh man if only we hadn't discovered nuclear fission during a year before world war ii right and we had developed electricity first and at the end of it i was like i'm thankful that we discovered it back then because it it showed us what the worst possible use of that technology could be and with ai it's exactly the opposite we haven't seen the hiroshima and nagasaki no not yet we don't know what it looks like and so we're all just like wow helpful chat bots you know my therapist or my my like companion and we're just rushing into this thing without knowing what the horrible side, you know, the horrible side of it is.

53:59Right. And so we haven't developed the guardrails, the international cooperation to try to prevent just crazy people from building, you know, civilization, destroying technologies with AI.

54:19before we close the loop on this i want to understand chernobyl yes and and what happened there because i think that is more than three mile island was contained it showed that the safety systems worked right totally nobody died from it there's tons of studies on cancer but it doesn't like it doesn't show an obvious connection obviously it's correlated right i mean like cancer has been increasing since a long time but it could be a thousand different things could be you know glyphosate it could be totally whatever it could be we could go on a whole separate rabbit hole yeah but you have fukushima which is recent 2011 and you have chernobyl yeah so what happened did was this a similar meltdown like meaning is the chain reaction the similar the same in both disasters so they're very different in that there are different technologies so well there are different types of reactor designs and different designs in general so chernobyl was a power plant in the soviet union it had four reactors and back in 87 they were conducting this experiment of what would happen to the reactor in case all outside electricity went down so like the grid goes down what happens to the reactor right however chernobyl had this like weird design flaw where the hotter it got the more unstable it got versus other reactors the hotter they get basically it stops slows down the chain reaction so it becomes more stable okay so it had a design flaw that made it just more unstable as it got hotter it also used some okay so when you want to stop down a chain reaction in a nuclear reactor, you have to put down this like rods into the reactor that stopped down the chain reaction.

56:12They chose a material that initially increased the chain reaction instead of slowing it down. So it was like stupid design to begin with. And then the people who are running the reactor day to day also weren't warned about this design flaw. So they just didn't know what they were doing. Right. And also their power plants didn't have the containment dome, which is what I told you about, which is this big concrete and steel casing around the reactor. Long story short, let's skip like a thousand complicated nuclear physics details, but it caused an explosion. And this explosion sent radioactivity into the air.

56:52It caught on fire because of the materials that they were using in the reactor. So you have this fire that's like just shooting radiation into the atmosphere because they didn't have a concrete dome around it as well, right? And then you also add in the factor that this was the Soviet Union, so they didn't tell anybody about it. And so for days, people were eating contaminated food and drinking contaminated milk. the way that the world found out about chernobyl was because days later this swedish nuclear power plant detects higher radiation levels around them and they're like what the hell they inspect all of the reactors everything is okay so this is how much i love nuclear science they figure out the type of radiation that they are detecting because you can figure out very precisely how much and what type of radiation wow is in the air and they trace the wind patterns for the past few days and they pinpointed it back to the Soviet Union.

57:52And so they called and they got a confirmation. And that's how the world found out about Chernobyl. But obviously too late. They took forever to evacuate people. Yeah. I saw that series, which was amazing. But did you see it? Yes. Yeah. It's entertaining. It's not accurate. Okay. So you remember this part in the series? It's like the most tense part, right? Where the guys go to the basement. Right. Yep. to like drain the water and they go on a suicide mission. Right. All of them survived. Really? Yeah. One of them died like in 2024. Oh, wow. The other one in 2015 from a heart, like nothing related to radiation or anything like that.

58:34So there's a lot of just. Yeah. Dramatization. Dramatization that doesn't really help the cause, you know, but it is an amazing series. Do all nuclear power plants now have this safety dome? Well, there are still a couple of Chernobyl-type reactors, mostly in Russia and Ukraine as well, actually. But yes, all of the modern nuclear power plants, all of them have this dome, which is what Fukushima had, which prevented radiation from really getting into the environment. And we can talk about that Fukushima later. But, you know, when I started telling people I'm a nuclear energy influencer, they would say, what about Chernobyl?

59:11And I would ask, how many people do you think died from Chernobyl? And they would say 3 million, 500 ,000. and the number of confirmed fatalities from Chernobyl is less than 100, period, less than 100, then of course you have like potential cancers, like deaths from cancers down the road. Which is like a correlation, but you can't prove causation. You can't pinpoint, but the most credible estimates would say 4 ,000, something like that, Which, you know, any death is a tragedy, wouldn't have happened, but shouldn't happen. But how does it compare to fossil fuels? And again, in their normal operation, this is like when things go right with fossil fuels, 4 million people die every single year.

59:58You would need like 200 Chernobyls happening every single year for nuclear to be as dangerous as fossil fuels are. So just, you know, to put that into perspective. And it's also amazing that, you know, we're talking about an accident that happened in 87. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it is. It's like, but it's kind of the definitive nuclear power plant story, you know? Because it's big. It makes it into the news. It's, you know, like it just. There's a series about it. There's a series about it. So how many nuclear power plants are there globally? 400, about 440 right now in 31 countries. And how many accidents?

1:00:37So what's the ratio of accident to power plant? Like how many? So there is this website called Our World in Data, which is very hard for me to say as a foreigner. Our World in Data. I'll say it for you. Yeah, so they have this graph where they compare the safety of different sources of energy. And when you account for all the deaths and the number of, or the amount of electricity they produce, nuclear is as safe as solar and wind. Wow. In terms of deaths per unit of electricity created. Okay. Hydropower is a lot more dangerous. So the biggest energy accident in history was a hydropower dam collapse in China.

1:01:21And also in 79. Wow. You know, but nobody heard about it. The beauty of communism. them exactly and like 200 000 people died from it because it was this huge hydropower dam that as it collapsed it caused the collapse of other dams down downstream from it so it like sweeped entire entire villages and then people died from i mean it was horrific yeah so that is the most dangerous and in the united states we've had hydropower dam accidents that actually killed people and we've had one incident only on nuclear yeah well there there wasn't there was an incident with like like prototype reactors back when they were just testing a bunch of different reactor no but i don't count that i mean like operating yeah like when you talk about like commercial right it's only three mile island right and and you're talking about 93 nuclear power plants nuclear reactors sorry nuclear reactors producing 18 of our electricity 18 yes over the course of how many years at this point i mean yeah in the 50s so we've had like 70 years of we've had 70 years of this technology we have 93 reactors making 18 of our electricity and we've only had one accident that didn't kill anybody wow it seems like a pretty yeah so to that end And tell me like the sort of five bullet points, like rapid fire bullet points about why nuclear is better.

1:02:55So makes clean electricity, doesn't have, you know, greenhouse gas emissions or particulate matter emissions. But my favorite part is that it does all of that with less. So because the energy in the atom is so dense, we need a lot less fuel to make the same amount of electricity. it's a 1 million times more dense than fossil fuels so i talk about this in the book if you get a little pellet of uranium that's the size of my fingertip it's like the size of a gummy bear has the same amount of energy as 2 000 pounds of coal you're kidding me yes wow i had no idea Yes. Or, you know, I know. That's wild.

1:03:41Yes. Or like 150 gallons of gas. It's something insane. Like, you know, like one tiny little gummy bear size of uranium has that much energy potential. And so you need to mine less, so less impact on the environment. Also, nuclear power plants, they're built and they can last like 60, 80 years. Some engineers think that if you obviously keep good maintenance, they can last for 100 years. And so, again, you need to mine less stuff, build less stuff. So nuclear has the least amount of impact on the environment because of that. And I'm really into this idea of how can we maintain human civilization while decreasing our impact on the environment.

1:04:25And nuclear checks all those boxes. It also creates lots of jobs. So like Diablo Canyon in California has over a thousand employees. They all have good salaries. These are multi-generational jobs, right? You have like three generations sometimes working at the same plant. Great benefit to the communities that host them. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So there is, based on what you just said, so these reactors are kind of getting to their, well, they're past their half-lives now, right? So if they last 70, 80, 100 years, they're all kind of going to be being sunsetted around the same time unless we start building more reactors yeah so i mean i'm i'm sure we can maybe find ways to change some parts but yes they're probably all going to start retiring around the same time and even in the last 20 years there were 106 reactors added to the world but 102 were retired so we've kind of stayed in the same place when it comes to nuclear additions i see so yeah we definitely need to start building more not just to replace them but to replace fossil fuels yeah as well So your husband has some adjacencies to the administration.

1:05:48It's an administration that's very behind AI and crypto and kind of American supremacy, right, which power is directly related to that directly. And also, there's kind of also at the same time an anti-clean energy sentiment, right? Like EVs and all these alternatives. So how do these two things dovetail together? What's interesting about nuclear is that it has bipartisan support. That's so cool. So historically, conservatives have always been pro-nuclear because it's tied to government, right? It's like military, yeah. And also just because they hate liberals and they're like, they have a point.

1:06:37They'll say, you're so concerned about climate change. How come you don't support nuclear? And there is no good answer to that. And so they've always been supportive of nuclear. But in the last few years, like Biden administration was extremely pro-nuclear. They passed lots of subsidies and credits, tax credits for nuclear power plants in the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. They also supported the extension of existing power plants like the Albuquerque. Right. And the Trump administration is extremely pro-nuclear as well. So Trump himself passed four executive orders, basically trying to get the United States to become the world's leader in nuclear and has several things in there, but like making the regulatory commission more efficient and faster and basically also getting all these new nuclear companies to go in some federal land like the Idaho National Laboratories and build their prototype there to test it out.

1:07:33Just expediting the process. And so is there a plan to build power plants? So, yes. So right now there are over 70 nuclear startups that are trying to build like smaller reactors. What about like, I was listening to the All In podcast, of course, as usual. This is a while ago. And David Freeberg was talking about like there were some, I can't remember what it's called, but he was talking, there was like a big breakthrough in fusion. Yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. So fusion is like the Holy grail basically of energy in general. It's the opposite process of, of fission. So fission is you're splitting a bigger, a bigger atom, which is nuclear, which is nuclear fission.

1:08:27Right. But the nuclear fusion is you're smashing two smaller atoms together and they are merging, they're fusing. Both processes create energy in the process. And so fusion is like the Holy grail because you don't need, you know, uranium and some other radioactive elements like that it has obviously its own problems and like who knows if it's going to pan out in our generation right there are some breakthroughs like we're finally getting more energy out of it than we're putting in because you need such high temperatures to be able to fuse the the atoms together and so you need obviously a lot of energy to create those high temperatures and so people are like putting all this energy in and getting a tiny little bit of energy right so finally we have that breakthrough so the so the shorter term kind of the the shorter term so in the longer term when the technology develops like fusion could be but in in the nearer term nuclear is by far yeah so fusion in the future who knows whenever it's commercially available i think going from we got a tiny little bit of energy out right well there was certainly a big like you know people got very excited about this because people love innovation right and i hate innovation for the sake of innovation like what is the goal here guys right you know if the goal is to like replace fossil fuels and and have cleaner electricity then then let's just build what we have already so do you think that republicans are like there are republicans who are worried about climate change as well Definitely.

1:10:03Yes, I know some of them. There's this like conservative environmental organization that is concerned about climate change. Not everybody, obviously. I think the conservatives biggest gripe with climate change is that it's sometimes used as a way to try to get people to use less, you know, it's just like it comes bundled with this whole other set of beliefs about how humans should live and whatnot. and they tie it with like socialism they don't like interference they don't like being told what to do they don't like being you know and i think there's a lot of like that as well interesting so it was because it does seem like it's kind of undeniable that climate change is happening i mean right and then you have like every time i talk about climate change i have somebody like well you know who likes co2 plants and i'm like i'm not a fucking plant i don't like are you a plant i don't know i care about humans and you know also we we we off gas enough co2 for the current ecosystem like the plants are fine they don't need more co2 no but like we as a species we evolved at a time when co2 levels in the atmosphere weren't that high yeah with like Like there were periods throughout the history of the earth where CO2 levels were extremely high.

1:11:25We just never happened to live through those. And like all of the issues that come from that, from, you know, higher temperatures, from flooding in certain areas. Listen, I think that humans would survive, you know, if we keep increasing our CO2 emissions and climate change. I mean, the species might survive, but what is that going to look like? And at what cost? But, but it's like, so it's like, is the human species going to survive? probably but what does survive even mean like right we have a couple hundred thousand people who i don't know and and what at what cost you're damaging all these ecosystems and people are having to flee their homes and causing huge displacement issues yeah i mean talk about cost right it's like billions and billions of dollars and I mean, disaster relief.

1:12:16And so, so when you look ahead and you think like, what, what do you, what are your KPIs? Like in terms of moving the culture towards accepting nuclear energy, like, do you, do you set goals for yourself? Like, how do you, what is success look like for you? I did it in the beginning because it was also abstract and people would say, how do you know it's working? I would say, well, people tell me that they changed their mind, but you know, I now have the data. So when I started posting on social media, there was a Gallup poll asking how people felt about their support for nuclear and only 49 % of Americans supported adding more nuclear.

1:12:59Now 61 % of Americans supported and that's in five years. So it's a huge shift. just to give you an idea the highest support for nuclear ever was in 2010 and it was 62 percent so we're one point away from the highest ever level and support so fukushima kind of set fukushima set the set it back set it back obviously like by a couple like a decade plus wow yeah so i think there has to also then be like a a risk tolerance you know which we we we apply to all other things right it's like we apply it to air travel we apply it to anything right now we and and air travel is a perfect example here it is one of the safest forms of transportation that doesn't mean that once in a while you're not going to have an accident right so with nuclear we just don't have that tolerance and the industry feels that way and this is where i disagree with most pro nuclear people i think that's a good thing i like that the nuclear industry is extremely well regulated yeah i like that they're thinking what would happen to nuclear waste a thousand years from now if civilization collapses and we don't know how to warn aliens who are visiting earth but this literally they think about this okay and people say oh this is what's slowing it down and I say, no, no, no, this is the example.

1:14:22This is how we should think about technology. We should be thinking what's going to happen to human civilization regarding AI if a thousand years down the road something happens. So yes, maybe we need to have more risk tolerance, but also because of these few accidents and because of the public backlash, nuclear is one of the safest forms of energy because it's extremely regulated and because they think about every single little thing. Every eventuality. Every eventuality. Like you have to think about the most absurd scenario. I'm telling you, when you go to a nuclear waste facility, they are projecting what's going to happen 100 ,000 years from now.

1:15:05Wow. What happens if there's an earthquake? What happens if this safety thing fails? Because they have to. And they're actively mitigating. They're actively mitigating against all of that. and i'm like and in the beginning i was like oh why are they doing all of this and then i realized wait this is what we should be doing with plastic definitely right we're like we have this country-sized plastic patches in the ocean that are affecting marine life and human life as well i mean a hundred percent of the testicles tested last year had microplastics in them newborn babies yeah why are we not thinking about this with plastic renewables solar panels after 20 30 years they have to be replaced there is no national effort to collect all solar panels so they end up going to the landfill or being sold to poor countries in africa and they're like dismantled by hand by poor kids that are trying to sell parts so like i think that nuclear should serve it as an example of how we think about technology and the impact on both the environment and people as well so good i mean that's perfect to end on perfect that's like a mic drop thanks for all your time this is amazing thanks for tuning in this has been a presentation of cadence 13 studios i hope you'll listen follow rate and review all of our episodes which are available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.