937: Oliver Stone | Nuclear Now

23:19Right. The leakage. From your stove all the way back to the well, that thing is leaking. And like you said, all the nuclear waste, all spent nuclear fuel from the United States, which is 20 % of our energy generation from what I understand, over the last 60 years, all of that is what fits inside the Walmart that you mentioned before. So it's really just minuscule amount. I mean, the average human is thrown away probably more crap over the course of their life just in terms of plastic bags and stuff that's going in their kitchen garbage than all of the nuclear fuel ever spent by the United States.

23:51Younger people like you are the ones we're talking about. This conversation was not possible a few years ago. Now, I'm not an expert. I believed that nuclear was bad when I was younger. People like Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda, I looked up to them, and I still do. But the problem was that there was no consensus for nuclear. The lobbies were terrible. They didn't really advertise themselves. The only people who could have really said something were scientists, and many of them didn't quite understand what it was. You know, Wyoming has its coal industry. Texas has its oil. They all have consensus.

24:25They have a following. It's very difficult for nuclear. That's why I wanted to make this film. This is one of the few films that talks about nuclear energy. If you could look at all the movies that are ever made from the beginning of time, they were horrible. All the horror movies of the 50s I grew up with, even up to X-Men. I mean, you get bit by a radioactive spider, you become Spider-Man. It's bullshit, the whole thing. They make radioactivity into the most dangerous thing in the world. And it scares people. That's what the movies have done. And they continued with Three Mile Island, what was it called?

24:57China Syndrome, Sinus Syndrome, and Silkwood. And don't forget Chernobyl, the HBO series in 2015, scared the shit out around the world. It was seen by everybody. Again, vast exaggeration. We went to Russia to visit Rosatom. We got a lot of information from them. They're very good, Rosatom. There's a 250 ,000-man agency, men and women agency. They do a lot of good work around the world. They export quite a bit. And they're probably the best in the world. France has an agency, China. You find that most of the best way to really approach nuclear is with some government public control, public responsibility.

25:39Because we put it in the private hands in the United States, Westinghouse and General Electric. Westinghouse went bankrupt. General Electric is still doing it. But they make much more money from oil, coal, and the other things. So they build turbines and they build all the good stuff. And they have a small nuclear contingent. They're doing good stuff. They have what they call a small modular reactor coming up with Hitachi, the Japanese firm, and it'll be out on the market within three, four years. Looks good. Could be used very well, but it's still small. It's not producing the same kind of gigawatts that the big ones do, but it's still there.

26:14But it's all private is what I'm trying to say. The government is, they have the Department of Energy in this country and they have helped a lot. And all the presidents have been, the last four presidents have been for it from Bush on, but it's not really putting the amount of weight that we could do to make this happen on a big way. Right. Yeah. We have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, but we don't have the same thing like Rossetom or France's agency, where it's just like, this is a priority for national security. It's just kind of, it more regulates and maybe inhibits.

26:45The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not actually, has not given any go-aheads to anything in 60-some years. I mean, they're really bad. If a government agency is going to be like, let's say, the FDA, you could criticize the FDA because there are many issues, but they promote new drugs, which has led to many improvements. We need more of an FDA kind of approach to let this thing happen. And they make it very tough for the smaller companies. That's why they get smaller, because people don't want to invest big money if they're going to run into the regulatory commission. Nuclear plants, you brought this up sort of at the top of the show, nuclear plants, they produce something like 100 times the power of a solar plant per whatever acre per square foot, however you want to measure it.

27:29But there's nighttime, there's winter clouds. They make solar impractical. Nuclear reactors take up something like one fifth of the space. Wind produces more than solar does, but it's only still about a quarter of the capacity of nuclear. And I did a little bit of math, and I think this is also in your film. You need 4 ,000 turbines spread across the land and plenty of wind in that place to equal one nuclear plant. And I don't really know anywhere where the wind blows across that big of a piece of land 24-7 without interruption. I don't think it exists. And don't forget the other problem, because what's the backup for renewables?

28:07The perfect partner that's been advertised is gas. So they put gas in, it's an easy backup, and that's methane, and it gets out in the air. So it's not a solution. It's putting more shit in the universe. The nuclear could be a backup. It certainly could be, and it can be worked out. There are all kinds of issues with the grid. Every grid is different. Obviously, India has a different grid than Denmark. You know, one's wind, one's solar. You know, there's a lot of variations on this, and you cannot make a uniform rule. But we have to think about the world. I would say, generally speaking, if you could maximize solar and wind, if you could, and really get it going as much as possible and get a good backup for it, you could get maybe 25 % total of the energy we need in the coming future by 2050.

28:5725%. And nuclear could cover easily 50%, easily, along with hydropower. Of course, a lot of countries still have hydropower. These are the most practical solutions, combinations of this. And of course, there's new energies are coming. We are doing new things. And I try to show that at the end of the film with all the stuff that nuclear is capable of breaking up hydrogen, using hydrogen to bring liquid fuels into the business. So nuclear could be combined with hydrogen to make liquid fuels for airplanes, as the scientist at Idaho National Lab was saying. It's very interesting developments if possible.

29:33We have to go all out on nuclear. We have to use it. It's a magic energy. As Einstein and Marie Curie and Fermi said, it's a magic energy. We've got to be smart about it. It's got uses everywhere. It's the primary solution. Sun, wind, sea, we could take all the salt out of the seawater, you know, we can use massive amounts of water available. And above all, earth, earth being nuclear to me. Those four elements will solve climate change. It would not be an issue even if we had gone ahead with the Eisenhower program and the Kennedy program, but we didn't. As Asia modernizes, so India and China as well, they're going to need something like, well, we, I should say, as a planet are going to need two to four times the current amount of power that we use now.

30:21And the question is, will it be clean? Because if it's not, we're in deep trouble. Yeah, two to five times the electricity. I wouldn't say the power because we have to electrify everything we can. That's why we're doing the cars now. I see. That's very important. But some of this stuff like liquid transportation fuels possible in the future will come through other means, will come through development of the hydrogen and nuclear, I believe. Yeah, the film shows a lot of really interesting nuclear innovations. Smaller reactors that are modular and they kind of could potentially scale down to fit in an office building and have a reactor underneath.

30:57Everywhere. It's really interesting. And so you can scale the stuff way down or way up as needed. Well, we will be able to in the future, which I think is fascinating because you can do something remote, just like we do with submarines, right? There's a nuclear reactor in there, powers the whole thing, the aircraft carrier, same deal. But don't forget one caveat, nuclear reactors on submarines are enriched uranium. Oh, they are? They're military enriched, yeah. I didn't know that. They're not civilian usage. That was part of Rickover's deal. Rickover did cross over and gave us the first Admiral Rickover, gave us the first civilian nuclear reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, which was not enriched.

31:33So nuclear power developed in the first place. How this developed in the first place was submarine reactors. You mentioned Admiral Rickover. Rickover, yeah. Hyman Rickover. He came up with the design, I think, or I mean, I shouldn't say that. He came up with a plan to implement the design. He was the engineer, yeah. It was an engineer. Oh, so he may have actually come up with this. Started off with submarines using nuclear reactors, which I did not know were different levels of enriched uranium. and then civilians. So nuclear actually started at what you would consider small scale in air quotes because it was for use on one particular ship.

32:04Military usage, yes. Yeah. It was the military usage. Right away, they used it for military purposes to build the bomb. I mean, Oppenheimer and all that, they got the Osallamist project. But the Navy used it, the same kind of fuel to make, not bombs, but to make submarines run for 50 years. And then he crossed over that knowledge, I'm saying in the Shippingport, Pennsylvania, by 1958, when he opened Shippingport, he did a great job. And he brought everything in on time, but on budget, he was a tough taskmaster, one of the best we've ever had. We need good people. It has to be handled well. And he did a great job of safety.

32:41Anybody who worked with Rick Oberyn will tell you that he beat his officers up and made them really fucking good people. And we have a great nuclear force. We had one. I know people who worked with him. and they were tip-top people. But now, you know, we lost that generation and we're getting them back. We have to train a new generation. That's what's going on now with all these startup companies.

33:06This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Oliver Stone. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also email me if you can't remember what something's called or you can't find the code. I will happily surface that for you. I am jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Happy to help anytime. It's that important that you support those who support the show.

33:36Now for the rest of my conversation with Oliver Stone. It's really kind of exciting to see because I hate to say it, I almost counted nuclear out completely, especially in my lifetime. I just thought there's no way. I know China's building a ton of reactors. I was kind of hoping that might scare the rest of the world into catching up, provided we don't see a nuclear disaster in China to rescare everyone again. Well, even if we did have a disaster, you know, what's wrong with that? That's how progress is made, you know. Just from a psychological perspective, though, of people going, ah, see, it's always, I mean, that's what I mean by that.

34:10That's the problem. I mean, if you have one airplane crash, you're going to give up on the airplanes. You can't do that. You have to have a stick-to-it approach. Obviously, you want to avoid accidents, but accidents are part of the game too, you know. So, I mean, when you say one nuclear disaster in China, it's not likely to be a bomb type thing because it's not enriched. It's more likely to be like a Fukushima, which was a hydrogen explosion, not a nuclear explosion. The only nuclear explosion was at Chernobyl, and that was because they didn't have a containment structure. And as a result, the low-level radiation spread all through Northern Europe.

34:42That's what led to the 4 ,000 assumed deaths from cancer. But we learned from Chernobyl, we shouldn't have shut down. That was a problem. And the Soviets didn't. They moved on and they kept going in there. They've developed a breeder reactor, which I saw it in the Ural Mountains at Belyarsk. It's an amazing reactor. It uses its own waste to make more energy. It's a state-of-the-art. It's too expensive for the market, but it's certainly a breakthrough reactor. And they've had that since the 1980s to 90s. They've done amazing work. Russia and China have to be commended for that. And instead of attacked as enemies, I think if the world is really the biggest problem in the world, I believe, is climate change.

35:23And it's not ideology or territorial fighting or Ukraine, this, that. It's really about climate change. They are our natural partners, natural partners. Well, they have to be. If we had stayed friendly with them instead of this Biden approach, I think we would have had the possibility of breakthroughs on a faster level. Now we're going to go slower because it's the nature of this world. It's very hard. But I consider it, just to sum it up, I consider it a bit like a Cinderella story. Remember the story in the fairy tale? Cinderella's the ugly sister. They put her in the back, mopping the floor in the kitchen.

35:59And the ugly sisters go out there and preen and preen and preen and they want to meet Prince Charming. And finally, at the end of the tale, Cinderella emerges as a beauty. She's been buried all along. This is what I consider nuclear energy is the beauty of this. She's the Cinderella of this thing. Nuclear energy just needs a pair of glass slippers. That's right. I forgot the word, the glass slippers. It's been a minute since you've read Cinderella, I guess. Yeah, I mean, me too. I do have little kids, so I probably got a copy in the living room. People are going to say, yeah, you mentioned Fukushima, but what about that?

36:29I watched the film, of course, and I did some research on this. To clarify for most people who aren't that familiar, most damage in Fukushima was caused by a 100-foot tsunami from Japan's strongest ever earthquake, at least in recorded history. And the plant had pretty terrible design. The seawall was less than 20 feet high. Generators were all on low ground, which is a great idea in a tsunami area because they flooded with water and stopped working immediately. So the plant lost power, which helped the reactor melt down. Essentially, a meltdown means overheating, no cooling from water that was pumped in from the generators.

37:06And like you said, it wasn't the nuclear fuel that exploded. Hydrogen gas built up, and I assume that stuff was pumped out and ventilated or something normally with the generators. That wasn't happening. That then heated and exploded, which blasted nuclear fuel and other radioactive material into the air. But of note, other nuclear plants in the area were just fine because they were designed differently and the generators kept working. So the death toll from Fukushima was actually zero from nuclear and the tsunami itself had 18 ,000 victims. And that still resulted in Japan shutting down almost all of their nuclear plants, which is not - Yeah, they panicked.

37:45Yeah, they panicked. They checked out all the Japanese afterward for years and nobody died from radiation poisoning. So here we go again, you know, the sensationalism. And then now still, you know, with the tritium, the water that they want to discharge in the Pacific. Generally speaking, they're ready to do it and the scientific organizations have okayed it. But there's still this sensationalism from the environmentalists who say, oh, tritium is going to screw up the ocean. This is nonsense. What is that? I don't know what that is. Tritium is a wastewater. It was part of the wastewater that was, I'm not a scientist, but they want to put it in the ocean, which is where it belongs.

38:20And you could drink a gallon of tritium. Several people have told me this. You can drink a gallon of tritium. It has the same effect as eating the banana, which is the same amount of radiation. But they've made it such an issue by sensationalizing it. They've balled it up. Now the Japanese have still not released this tritium into the ocean. I see. This is wastewater from Fukushima. Yeah. Tritium. Yeah. I'm Googling this and it's very sort of low level stuff. I understand that the need for an abundance of caution, essentially, because you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. But also, So it's just from a science literacy perspective, you really do need to decide what you're going to panic about.

38:56Otherwise, we're not going to see nuclear supersede fossil fuels in our lifetime. I mean, maybe as fusion gets closer, people will realize we've got really no other choice. I would just like to see, I wish we could bring Einstein back or Enrico Fermi and see what they'd say. What idiots, you know, they'd be saying what a historical tragedy this is, that you let your ignorant people lead our society into this restriction where you cut off what Prometheus gave us. This is a gift to mankind, a gift. Use nuclear well. It's part of the earth. It's part of what we have. It's frankly the greatest. Uranium is a gift.

39:33I wish we had intelligent people to lead our society, but we don't. We have people who, the scientists have not made a case for it that it's, they certainly for it, you know, they're certainly pro-nuclear, but I've talked to a lot of them in MIT and at Harvard. Somehow they're not getting through because I think there's a general cynicism about science too. I think that people will say, oh, you know, I had my own conspiracy theory about this. I think scientists are this and that. It's true. I think there's a lot of, too much of the superstition is in the air. Of course, they'll blame me, but, you know, on the Kennedy case, I just wanted to refer to the, you know, damn well that Mr.

40:11Biden, on the night of Friday, the July 4th weekend, closed down and stuffed those files, stuffed that fucking action. He illegally killed off the JFK Records Act. The power was given to Congress to open those files. And Biden took it back and basically said, CIA and me, president, are going to decide what to release. Yeah. I don't know much about this. You mentioned it at the top of the show. So I am curious what this is because I wasn't paying a ton of attention to this. Nobody was. All I know is they were set to release some of these documents about the Kennedy assassination, and they didn't.

40:46I don't know exactly how many. I was told 4 ,000. Other people have told me more, far more. And a lot of it's about the CIA and a lot of these people. We know what they want. We want questions answered about which site. These CIA agents were working with the Cubans, this, that. There's names, Joanides. There's a bunch of them. people want to know more about him because they play into the connection with the Cuban operation to liberate Cuba. And you know that all that was concealed from the Warren Commission by Dulles, who was on the Warren Commission. Dulles was the ex-head of the CIA. He'd been fired by Kennedy.

41:21And he said, basically, he never told anybody on the Warren Commission that there'd been all these plots against Castro prior to Kennedy's death. So, I mean, you have to understand there's a lot of linkage there. There's a lot of reason, motifs. There's motives to kill Kennedy because there was a lot of dislike of what he was doing in Cuba. He wasn't prosecuting the war against Castro the way the radicals wanted him to. It opens up a whole lot of issues. But the point was that Biden said, no more. Nothing's coming out. Why? This is 70 years later, right? 70 years? I don't even know. Mostly 60 years.

41:56I'm sorry. 60th anniversary. 60 years later, everybody's dead. You have to ask yourself, what is the danger? What are they scared of? Yeah. Okay. Embarrassment? Okay, let them be embarrassed because the CIA did screw up numerous times on this case. We know that they had a relationship with Oswald for three, four years. This was a significant, and that he was on their radar. They knew all about him. And Angleton, the counterintelligence chief knew about him and kept files secret from everybody else too. There was a lot of cloak and dagger stuff going on. And I think some of that could be embarrassing.

42:30but there's never going to be a document that says, you know, this happened and it doesn't work like that. But we know that embarrassments, what the hell, man? This is what it's about. This is what Congress intended, transparency on these issues that are 60 years old. This is what's disgusting. And nobody's been able to pick up on it because he did it very surreptitiously on that Friday night. I don't love stuff like that, of course. I think anything that sort of circumvents our system is usually a terrible idea. He broke the law because he said no more. This was an act of Congress, by the way.

43:02You cannot do that. You cannot undermine an act of Congress and say, it doesn't apply anymore because CIA and I are going to decide what we want to release. By the way, I meant to ask you this because it's such a bizarre little thing. In the film, in Nuclear Now, you mentioned you're in this French nuclear plant and they said, oh, the water's hot. Don't lean over the pool. Keep your cameras away from over the pool. But what happens? Are they worried about something falling into the pool? I believe. I didn't really get into it deeply. No. They don't want foreign materials falling into that pool.

43:33Is it just cooling water? I don't get what that even is. It cools the water, yeah, but they don't want anything coming into it. That's why I asked if I could swim in it. Yeah, I saw that and then they laughed, but of course you don't want to swim in it, but what really is it? And is it like, oh, your camera strap falls in there, they got to send a guy in a suit down to go get it? Is that what happens? Yeah, something like that, I imagine. Yeah, I was so curious about that. They want to keep it as pure as possible. Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. You don't want a corroded part in a nuclear reactor that you didn't find out about until later on.

44:03That seems like a bad idea. Although we have a lot of corroded parts in the sun panels everywhere. Well, yeah, I just mean from a safety perspective, it's probably a really bad idea to have a camera, a lens cap floating around in the cooling pool. Oliver Stone, thank you so much for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. Nuclear Now, we'll link it in the show notes. Well, thank you, Jordan. And always a pleasure to talk to you. You're very smart. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show, about a guy who went from Nigerian royalty to the rugged streets of the Bronx.

44:36Remy Adeleke's life was thrown into chaos after a corrupt government stripped his family of their legacy. Dive deep into his captivating journey from being surrounded by drugs and drive-bys to his inspiring pursuit to become a U.S. Navy SEAL, even though he didn't know how to swim. There's a saying in Nigeria, every day is for the thief. Corruption was my dad's demise. They knew that my father would not stop fighting them. They killed my dad. I went from riches and wealth to the Bronx, man, and it was really, really rough. Once you make the decision to join the Navy, in my opinion, you're giving up any fear of death.

45:13One day I got approached by another human trafficking nonprofit that actually employed former SEALs and former agency guys to go to other countries to rescue kids trapped in sex trafficking, but specifically kids who are being purchased by Americans. When I got down there, my eyes would just, like, open fully, and I just remember being appalled. The parents would sell their daughters to traffickers in the North. I just remember being disgusted. it's such a global issue. But human trafficking is a blanket term. Under human trafficking, you have sex trafficking, you have organ harvesting, you have forced marriage, you have forced labor.

45:51You know, I made the film in order to be able to expose more people to this atrocity of organ harvesting. But the perception of these traffickers is that they're these scraggly, evil-looking, uneducated, you know, on-the-corner type people. And the reality is the majority of people involved on the organ harvesting side of things are highly educated, learned people. The truth needs to get out there. But that's not all. Remy's fight is far from over as he confronts the dark underworld of human trafficking and illegal organ harvesting. To uncover what drives the man who refuses to be defeated, check out episode 868 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

46:33If you want to watch the film yourself, it's called Nuclear Now. You can search for it, and I'm sure there are easy ways to watch it. I want to say I saw it on YouTube and it was like a couple of bucks. Real easy watch. The one update is that since we recorded this, and of course, since the documentary was made, I think they ran into a pretty significant hiccup when it comes to the modular nuclear stuff. So the small scale stuff. Now, I haven't really done a lot of research on this, but it looks like, oh, we're going to have a little nuclear reactor in every building. It looks like that's just kind of maybe not possible or it needs a lot more work than they thought.

47:05So maybe it won't be modular, but I still think nuclear is the way to go, at least so far. All Things Oliver Stone will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or just ask the AI chatbot on the website. Transcripts always in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter. Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect lessons from it, takeaways. If you're a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that.

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48:08If you know somebody who's into nuclear power, interested in maybe the environmental aspects of this, the technological aspects of this, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation.

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