Transcript: Going Deep on the Energy Crisis and Nuclear Power with Mark Nelson (Part 1 of 2)
Transcript of Podcast #13
Below is the full transcript of this episode. You can listen to the audio here:
Liberty:
Hi, Mark. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.
Mark Nelson:
Good to be here.
Liberty :
So first, I think the best starting point is probably to provide a little context to the listener about who you are, where you come from, where have you've studied, where have you worked, where you're doing these days? What's your background, especially with nuclear power?
Mark Nelson:
Sure. So I'm born and raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, fly over territory in the United States. Your listeners from other parts of the world may know us best for the terrorist bombing using fertilizer in the mid nineties. I was downtown in daycare at the time, but we're also a state that has a big aviation industry and cattle and farming and oil and gas. So that's my origin. Then I studied at Oklahoma State University, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and Russian language and literature. Interesting combo. No, I have no Russian family background. I'm just interested in Russian piano music, so I decided to study it because I could.
Liberty
Awesome.
Mark Nelson
And then I went to study in Cambridge University for my graduate studies and that's when I was switching over from dreams of building rockets or riding rockets all the way to nuclear power plants right here on earth.
Liberty
Awesome. And as you see, you switched at a certain points. So did you ever believe the main narrative about nuclear? Oh, it's old stuff. It's dangerous. It's too expensive anyway. Is there anything that you can remember that changed your mind? You might have to reach out to the archives of the mind, but is there a moment or did you always believe it was the thing to do?
Mark Nelson
Like most young men who are already, you might say the opposite of risk averse, we have a reckless nature and we discount risks. Risks are what other people tell us they're afraid of, but young people like thrilling sports and exciting things and fast cars and stuff like that. So I'm definitely not alone in saying I was never scared of it, and may have been able to repeat that other people think it's scary, but it would've never caused me doubt, which by the way, is a terrible difficulty. It's an actual handicap that has to be overcome in learning to talk with the public that is coming to nuclear as a risk seeking young man rather than arriving at it through a sudden realization or transformation of attitude, because it makes it hard to connect, at least at first, with why people could be scared of something that's so exciting.
So, no, it's just the conversion was just, I thought energy was mainly oil and gas. Then it was about saying on your electricity bill, yes, I want wind turbine electricity from the plains of Oklahoma. That was energy to me, and it was coming back to energy through something exciting and new that brought me to nuclear.
Liberty
Right. Was it mostly an intellectual realization with the engineering background? Was it looking at the numbers and wow, this thing is orders and orders and orders of magnitude more concentrated power than everything else we have with a tiny amount of uranium, a small footprint? We can power the world. What was it kind of more like that, or was more this emotional stuff you're talking about? This it's exciting, it's cool, it's the frontier.
Mark Nelson
Part of the joy and burden of being trained as an engineer, and especially in my case, like many of us coming from multi-generations of engineers in the family, the numbers are running in the background all the time. What numbers? I mean the approximate scale of things all the time. Somebody says something about how bad or good a thing is, and any engineer listening is automatically putting together a picture of whether that's important or not, or big or not, or fast or slow relative to other things that are fast and slow and can be either calculated, estimated or measured. So, that's always there. I would say what happened was I was worried that there would not be enough adventure left in fast planes or rockets. If I had come to the end of my undergraduate degrees just a few years later, I think it would've been impossible to stay away from a SpaceX.
In fact, some of my most talented peers went straight to SpaceX after graduation and have done extraordinary things. Somehow it just hadn't captured me yet. My dreams of space and big growth and fast things, and it was starting to fade a bit. It already then was clear that the future of aircraft in many ways, well it's drones. So the piloting part is gone and it just was less interesting. I really direct my attention to exciting things. I don't know, is that a character flaw or not? I'm not sure. So when I turned back towards earth a little and got lucky in finding some post on the internet about how these magic [inaudible 00:04:47] that they don't want you to know about. Well, I saw that and thought, oh yeah, nuclear. I remember hearing a bit about nuclear. I visited Los Alamos National Labs as a kid, just as a little [inaudible 00:04:56] trip.
I spent two summers there even. I spent a summer there in this case before deciding on nuclear energy as a path. I spent a whole summer there and it still didn't quite capture my intention. I've been to Hiroshima Memorial in Japan, the peace Memorial, and it's still ... I mean, maybe people can say, oh, well that's different. That's nuclear weapons, not nuclear energy, but certainly most of the world seems to think they're kind of in the same bucket. That still wasn't enough. The events of March, 2011, I was overseas when it happened in a developing country. A man walked into our village with a boombox on his shoulder with a radio and we listened to the reactor meltdowns. That still didn't capture my attention, for good or for ill. I even had visited the Chernobyl Museum in [inaudible 00:05:36] and still nothing had caught quite my attention.
Those were all history. Those were all backwards looking, things that had already occurred. I'm looking for the future. It was just a crappy little post on the internet. Gosh, I really wish I had a better conversion moment or a conversion story or an inspiration moment, but it was just seeing that in the context of needing to choose a future path and realizing, wait, I could do engineering things where we have this massive cultural problem, this communications issue probably, a huge scientific development issue. And each reactor, the longer it takes, the bigger the career it might be. It's a problem so big, it could last me a lifetime. From that moment, I was hooked. That was it, just reading a post on the internet, seeing a few minutes of a video and I was hooked.
Liberty
It was the future vision. So many people are backwards looking, but we need those people who are looking forward and trying to build a better future. That's the next thing I want to talk about is the psychology of nuclear power. It feels to me like humanity has discovered one of the most powerful forces in the universe and how to harness it. But because of a bunch of accidents of history, it kind of got all tangled up with a bunch of stuff where we never fully took advantage. Like nuclear power came with nuclear weapons and the idea of nuclear war. For a whole generation, the two were linked, impossible to separate. It was all about the bombings in Japan, the H bomb test and the Cold War.
Mark Nelson
In fact, the linkage goes deeper than a lot of us young people want to acknowledge. Countries like Sweden had to choose whether to give up their nuclear weapons development program along with their nuclear reactor program. Spain was another country who, under a dictatorship, was developing a nuclear weapons and a nuclear energy program. We can keep going and finding all these countries around the world that were working on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. In fact, you know what's really hard to find? It's to find countries that were not working on both simultaneously, at least initially.
Liberty
Right, which is probably why this torium avenue never got explored that much because it was harder to make weapons with it.
Mark Nelson
Well, we'll set that aside for a moment. Let me just say there's a second stage that's interesting. There's a number of countries that, at the point that they felt either safe enough or uninspired enough that they dropped their weapons program, they also turned entirely against their nuclear energy and started stripping it out.
Liberty
But on the psychology, there's this whole generation that had this in mind. Then I feel like the younger generations get an echo of that, just only through their parents, through their culture and all that. Then my generation, what's my introduction to just the ideas? The Simpsons. I had this theory that they only tried to be funny and they had no intention of anything with it, but the way they portrait it-
Mark Nelson
And now they're pronuclear. Now the show is back to showing pronuclear elements pretty frequently. It's kind of crazy.
Liberty
Oh, really? I've haven't watched in like 10 years.
Mark Nelson
I haven't either, but if there's a nuclear clip, I watch it for sure.
Liberty
Well, that's good to know, but all of the ideas loaded up in my subconscious were all about these plants run by a bunch of idiots, nuclear waste stripping everywhere, two headed fishes. Who's it benefiting? Well, a sociopathic billionaire. All of the things that you kind of load up at 10 years old or something, it's all negative.
Mark Nelson
And you're forgetting one of the important ones. Nuclear plants are doing something fundamentally evil. They're making energy, which is bad. So if you miss out on that one, you miss out on one of the most important elements of the anti-nuclear movement, the assumption that humans themselves are the disease, that energy is the spreading of that disease, and that stopping energy is one of the most important ways that you can reduce the disease of humanity.
Liberty
Yeah. The romantic environmental view of anything that goes back to the way things were to nature is fundamentally good and I think that moves away from that is bad. Also, it feels like this is a different tension, but I use the example at one point that people think cigarettes are bad. But what's bad about them is they cause cancer and they stink and this and that. But if cigarettes were actually healthy for you, they smell good, they gave you vitamins and there was nothing bad about it, the cigarette itself is not bad. So energy, if it pollutes, that's the bad part. But if you can produce the energy without the negative side effects. But energy has been linked for so long with pollution and with environmental destruction that they kind of use it as a proxy for the bad things.
Mark Nelson
Did that in ... let's push on this a little bit. Here's some crazy things. Something like half of French people, down from maybe 75% a few years ago, think that their nuclear fleet is causing climate change.
Liberty
Wow.
Mark Nelson
Why? Because climate change is bad and bad things do bad things. So nuclear is bad things. So it must be doing climate change. Most French people didn't like nuclear until the last few years, which of course, it's already too late to reverse some of the most severe damage that they've done to their own fleet, trying to copy Germany, but without the competence. But French people thought that they needed their nuclear fleet. They didn't like it, but they thought that they needed it. They just had to decarbonize by getting rid of nuclear. That's the level of discourse about good things and bad things. So I'm glad you brought it up. Look, you were looking for this conversion moment, asking about it for nuclear energy.
I'll tell you what I keep finding is that I've met people who claim to be skeptical and resistant to nuclear energy, but then they say something like, but of course we have to have it, so I guess we have to figure out how to build a bunch of it. And I'm like, you weren't actually against nuclear energy. You just thought that it's immoral to be for it, and you're worried about offending people.
Liberty
Right.
Mark Nelson
Then other people are like, I have no problem with nuclear energy. Nuclear energy would be fine if it just weren't bad at all these things and terrible. Then you start addressing some of them and you say, good point on that, but fortunately, here's an example of why you're not really correct. I see where you're going, but here's the evidence. They don't want the evidence. What they meant was they like to be seen as a person who's filled with facts and not emotion, but they actually have an emotional block against nuclear energy. So facts aren't welcome. They're not looking for them.
You have to find whatever that emotional blockage, that scared child in there that has some traumatic experience that they associate with nuclear energy. In some cases, it's something like, oh, the second Terminator movie with Linda Hamilton going like this against the fence, as she watches a dream version of herself burn to death over her child, and then gets skeletonized by a blast wave. So that stands in for a lot of nuclear horror right there. Certainly you have to have a lot of nuclear horror in your heart in order to film a scene, make it, come up with a scene like that and film it. So finding those triggers, those key things and addressing them becomes really important when you start to understand that the person you're talking to is not ... they don't welcome facts or processes or path to overcome their objections.
Liberty
Yeah. It feels like humanity in general is extremely mimetic. So people look around and figure out what other people believe, what's the smart thing to believe in my circles, and they cannot copy that. But if you scratch below the surface, if you ask about details, you realize they never really thought about it. They're pressing play on the recording of someone else. And someone else may have gotten it from someone else, and you have to go many generations to find the source, and the source may not have good intentions.
Mark Nelson
Well, you know when we'll get rid of this aspect of humanity? Do you know when we'll reform it and be rid of it?
Liberty
Probably never.
Mark Nelson
Never. Yeah, never. Just this morning, my colleague, Maddie Hill, former colleague and manager at Environmental Progress. Now she is part of the campaign for the green nuclear deal here in the US. I work with her on some of our research projects. Anyway, she posted a thread this morning on Chernobyl, timely because of all the violence occurring at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe that may cause an unfolding nuclear accident. So she posted a thread that's doing something really important. It's disentangling the physical accident at Chernobyl, from the memes that came out of Chernobyl. Or the way I'm going to put it from now on, I did a quote tweet to send the thread off. The way I put it is this, there's Chernobyl the molecules and Chernobyl the memes. The molecules killed several dozen people, the memes, millions and counting.
You can't just, even if you shut down every nuclear plant on earth, all of the angst around nuclear that comes from nuclear bombs or just all the weird anxieties that we want to blame nuclear for, they're going to focus on the medical nuclear. They're going to focus on the nuclear waste. So they're going to focus on the nuclear decommissioning activities to shut down all the plants. It's not going away just because the plans aren't there. It doesn't have anything to do with the plants operating. They don't want the plants on as part of wanting all nuclear things go on from the universe.
Liberty
As if shutting down power plants is going to reduce the number of nuclear weapons around.
Mark Nelson
As if shutting down the nuclear plants is going to reduce people's fear of nuclear. It doesn't. In Germany, I keep trying to meet with the nuclear industry, which until the Ukraine war had no hope of survival. None. They just said, quit harassing us. Don't try to save our plants. This is annoying. You're giving our employees false hope, blah, blah, blah. It was not fun meetings. So for years we tried to get them to have some hope and fight back a little. Once we got a meeting where they said, Hey, just stop on the reactors. They're not ... but we have a different problem maybe you could tell us about. We're like, okay. They said, we thought that getting rid of the nuclear reactors would be the end of it, but now they're trying to shut down all of the other consulting activities we do and all the other industrial activities.
They're trying to make the German government divest from its uranium enrichment. I'm like, you have no idea why people are against ... the people against you don't know what a nuclear plant is. They don't know what's inside. They don't care. They don't know what the waste looks like. They're not upset about the molecules. They're doing some spiritual journey on memes and you can't stop them by shutting your nuclear plants. They will not get an emotional burden off their chest. They will churn, especially the professionals, and especially if they're getting money from outside Germany to cripple Germany's energy supply, they're not going to stop just because there's no nuclear plants left to protest. They're going to fight every last thing. They're going to try to shut down your nuclear medicine departments. They're going to try to shut down your cyclotrons. They'll of course try to shut down your enrichment.
Liberty
That's the thing is radiation itself is so weird to humans. Our intuition can't deal with it, right? It's invisible. It's supposed to be-
Mark Nelson
It depends.
Liberty
I mean the average person, and once you study it-
Mark Nelson
No, no, it depends. It's on the edge. It's on the edge. I hear you, but we can certainly decide that we've heard about skin cancer, but we balance that as artificial suntan lotion. Is that maybe worse? And then you go tan, and then you hear a story that says, actually did the real problem in Europe is under exposure to sun because people don't get vitamin D synthesis. Then people kind of like, ah, I'll just kind of moderate. Then you go exposed to the sun. The issue with radiation is not it being there. Certainly Germans love natural high radiation. They go to bod towns, right? Bath towns. Why are they going there? You can heat your own water. Why do you have to go to a hot spring? Why do you have to go to a mineral spring? You can even find your own minerals, but this stuff has radon in it.
So it's got radiation. So people are specifically going for the natural radiation hotspots. Do they think of it as radiation? No. And if they did, they wouldn't stop going. They would just reprogram that in their brain to not count or they would maybe start liking nuclear more. So we can deal with radiation. It is a relatively new phenomenon, but I just think of some famous images, very late in Egyptian culture, but very ancient by our standards of rays of light coming down from the sun god and hitting us. We can deal with rays. What we can't deal with is our own death and the apocalypse from nuclear weapons.
Liberty
I was trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know anything about nuclear, because once you know, it's very hard. It's the curse of knowledge. A good teacher is someone who can put themselves in the shoes of their students. So I was trying to imagine someone on the street, random. What are they imagining is going on inside of nuclear power plant? There was kind of a bolt of lightning that hit me. It was like, imagine that in there is a nuclear explosion that's being contained, a tiny one, a miniature one. It's almost like an internal combustion engine, but with a bunch of nuclear explosion and you try to contain it.
If there's a mistake or a breach, the explosion just gets out and the power plant blows up like a nuclear weapon. They don't understand that. It's just a pile of stuff that, if you send neutrons, it eats up. Even just educating people about the basics of this would probably reassure a bunch of them. Not as much as we would expect if they were rational about it to begin with, but I think the nuclear industry has done such a bad job of an outreach to people, education. People are walking around and they're against something that they don't even know what it is.
Mark Nelson
The nuclear industry completely misunderstands the nature of the concern. They also completely misunderstand the nature of the professional opposition. The professional opposition is not asking for safer nuclear plans. They don't care. The professional opposition is not asking for different types of nuclear plants. They're not asking for a solution to the way, certainly not any specific solution in any specific spot. So the nuclear industry is used to checklists and order and quietness and not quite secrecy, but staying away from people to not worry them. A lot of people in nuclear are just not creative, experienced socializers. They're not super used to being around tons of strangers in lots of conversations, serious, respectful conversations, and understanding other people's point of view. That shows partly in communications.
Liberty
That's why I feel like my energy journey has been pretty long. I've been following this stuff for maybe 20 years. I kind went through the usual stuff. You kind of start learning about, oh, oil is bad and oh, we got to get off coal. Then you fall into the Amory Lovins kind of rabbit hole where it's like, oh, well megawatts. That's such a good meme in itself.
Mark Nelson
I love this. I love exploring this because in Amory Lovins' day, peace was restored. The empires were falling apart. The great war had already happened. The only thing left was to avoid nuclear war between [inaudible 00:20:01] and America. You could do that by just making nuclear go away.
Amory Lovins came into a world that was already prosperous for him. The only thing to do was to change that prosperity or channel it or reduce it, maybe. He loves a good riched life. He's done very, very well for himself, and he lives in a way that he admits would be difficult, big detached mansion and the hills, lots of energy to get there and get back, whatever. But maybe if his message is so important, it doesn't matter that he doesn't live in a scalable way. So Amory Lovins, his big problem was reducing a thing, not really increasing it, providing for-
Liberty
It's all about efficiency, cutting stuff, making it lighter, and all that sounds very, very good. It's very elegant and it appeals to the engineering mindset.
Mark Nelson
In the time that Amory Lovins started being active and out there, what really happened was nuclear was becoming the cheapest. So the problem was not that nuclear was expensive. So the nuclear is expensive thing.
Liberty
Expensive to build, I guess.
Mark Nelson
But it was cheap to build.
Liberty
Yeah, well probably in the early days.
Mark Nelson
That was a problem that had to be solved. What had to be solved was that nuclear was too cheap. They had to make it more expensive and maybe [inaudible 00:21:16]. So a lot of the people who actually ... I said, it's a binary. Either you do nuclear and it doesn't matter how much you say it has problems, you want it to be there. And then there are the people who don't like nuclear and, no matter how much professionalism they have and how many facts they say, they're going to choose their facts and choose their professionalism around wanting nuclear. So for Amory, he saw nuclear being cheap as part of the problem because he was convinced that somehow it didn't add up and the grid just wasn't that efficient. He was wrong on a bunch of really basic things and was proven wrong pretty rapidly, but it didn't matter because, nearly uniquely, he was not anti-capitalist and he was not anti growth per se.
So it made him a friendly for any energy group or any mainstream group that wanted to go in a different direction or wanted their product to do better versus somebody else without ending business or ending capitalism or ending prosperity. Because there's many people who said things like him, but they actually wanted there to be no power at all. See what I'm saying?
Liberty
Yeah.
Mark Nelson
So he was consumable by the professional public, by a whole generation of baby boomers, graduating from elite institutions and finding their way in the world. He was palatable. He worked well with them. He was not a radical politically.
Liberty
One of the rare, good communicators in the space, and he became a kind of shelling point for everybody who wanted to still do business, but wanted to kind of be on the side of the greens, right? It feels like at the time his vision of, oh, everything's going to be decentralized, small scales. Everybody's got their winter binds and solar panels and batteries.
Mark Nelson
No, no, no fossil fuels, fossil fuels. He was four fossil fuels, but he thought you should burn your own right there in your house or have a bucket of oil for your little generator for your apartment. His intuitions were not good enough. Didn't have engineering training really. So although he had physics understanding and he had thermo understanding, he couldn't grasp intuitively what an AC grid does or even an AC grid with some long single DC ties or whatever. The scaling factor of that system, he couldn't grasp.
Liberty
Yeah. That's the thing. It's easy to picture something in your head, but until you do the math about the scale of it, how many gigawatts of generation do you need to replace this?
Mark Nelson
Or how about this? How about this? Just how low are your losses from having a few large power plants and a few wires to major population centers. Turns out that the loss along this system is really, really small, and it turns out that people's behaviors are reasonably predictable, such that you can add up throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the year. You can understand people's behavior, deal with a little bit of uncertainty from the natural environment, and then you can prepare the right mix of fuels and transmission to meet those needs fairly efficiently. He didn't think that that would happen. Or if we want to be mean, he was just not that smart ever and just got it wrong, and had a whole career based on getting a mistake like that and being able to overcome it by just ... I don't know. You said good communicator. That's maybe a little generous. I think it's more like, in a time where the standards were extremely low, he was at least talking to the public.
Liberty
Yeah. 20 years ago when I got interested in the stuff, I didn't see anyone do a good debate with his ideas and be convincing to me at the time. I want to come back to what you said about nuclear was getting cheap. That's the other big thing. These days it's like, can we even build large nuclear plants in the west or how expensive is it going to be? Are there going to be all these costs over run? The way I look at it in the seventies, when we're building a lot, we were going up the learning curve and down the cost curve. If you standardize on some models, kind of French did instead of the US, where it is a bunch of different models, in theory, you should be able, like any industry, to get economies of scales.
As you repeat a process, you get better at it and you can do it faster and cheaper. But then at some point, things turned around and things started getting much more expensive. I'm curious on your view. Is it all just regulation? Did something get lost in the mix where the west stopped being able to build large projects. What happened there? What was the turning point?
Mark Nelson
There was a big secular trend of getting worse at large projects. So, that's there. Then on top of that, there was a special distinguishing concern with anything radiation related. So I visited a decommissioned nuclear plant yesterday. I mean, decommission down to the dirt. It's just gone, just gone, completely gone. It was there producing millions of people's worth of electricity less than 20 years ago, and now it's completely and 100% gone. So we know how to tear down things really easily, but we're becoming unskilled at construction. But here's the thing. We had a presentation about this decommissioning process and it was clear that the level of concern being given to activities, even peripherally connected with nuclear, was absolutely off the charts compared to anything, even including radiation that wasn't nuclear.
This town was devastated by the losing a nuclear plant, just about what 60, 70 kilometers north of Chicago, along Lake Michigan. It was devastated by losing the nuclear plant. Recently, there have been fatal accidents at the other industrial facilities in town. All it did was just kill people, blow up a bunch of the factor. These are chemicals. These are carcinogens and it just kind of rolls off people's backs. It's just not a big issue and wasn't prevented by regulation clearly.
So it's the special attention, unique attention given in the west. Even if Russia funds these efforts, they're not like going to get too crazy on their own equipment. This is just for other countries. So this special concern with nuclear, an obsession with anything to do that might be connected with nuclear waste, that helped intensify this slow down in abilities, the slow down in construction time, this splintering of cooperative labor work forces into squabbling groups with different interests, many of which did not have an interest in finishing the nuclear plant projects. Just permit construction. Then designers of nuclear plants that were always tweaking to try to undo the construction slowdowns or respond to the latest safety regulation, or just add more cleverness in ways that also increase the importance of the reactor designer, as opposed to just a provider of blueprints once.
See what I mean?
Liberty
Yeah.
Mark Nelson
Then you lost it entirely. I've been searching around for things that might help. Here's one. What if we just banned computers in the design of nuclear plants? Just banned completely, 100%. What if? And everything had to be done with drafting, and you had to have an intimate connection between drafting and dudes working, and the foreman and the crew. What if we banned cell phones on the work site? No cell phones. If you're a manager, you got to be there. How about that? See what mean? What if we went back to the analog methods that apparently worked in making nuclear plants for a few hundred million dollars and inflated today's costs, that are today still operating and are going to keep operating total life span of what? 80 years, a hundred years, for 20 $30 a megawatt hour. Radically competitive compared to any of the fossil fuels that are blowing up.
Certainly better than firm renewables. So how did we manage that without fancy tools? I think we just have a lot of distractions, and a lot of the people who are in program development, finance up in the high white collar jobs, a lot of them are coming into those jobs with very little hands on experience or engineering intuition. It just means there's this splintering, this Tower of Babble effect in big construction projects, even essential ones that are just really important for long term prosperity, like nuclear.
Liberty
It feels to me, at least in the US, you get the incentives that you put in. So it feels to me like regulators have certain incentives and all of the risk is on one side. So if they say no to everything, if they never approve a new design, a new plant, nothing bad happens because their incentives are only about safety. All of the reviewing that they do for these plants and these designs, they're not paying for it. It's the company that submits it that pays for it, or mostly I think.
Mark Nelson
I hear you. Let me defend the NRC a little, before we can attack it again. Every person I've talked to with knowledge of the people working at the NRC say they're professionals, they are excited about nuclear energy and they want to see it succeed. So none of the things you just said are necessarily false. Just we need to think of it in terms of how do we match up the outcomes we're getting?
Liberty
That's the thing with institutions. Everybody has good intentions, but then you put a certain incentive and then people are going to follow this incentive. If I worked at the NRC, I may do the same thing that they're doing now, but it feels to me anyway ... the analogy I would say is, if the FAA was given the mission, the goal, we never want an airplane crash ever again. That's your only goal. Make it happen. Then what would they do? Well, you don't approve new planes and you start not approving new parts and you are super, super, super-
Mark Nelson
You don't let the old ones operate too long.
Liberty
Exactly, right? You start grounding fleets and all of your risk is in letting anything fly, because something could go bad at any time.
Mark Nelson
This will very important. It gets us back to this main problem. The people fighting nuclear on the basis of cost and safety are not looking for safe or cheap nuclear. They're looking for no nuclear, meaning the framing of the issue where one side says, we have problems with the costs and safety, and the other side says, we'll create a bureaucracy to make the safety problems go away or we'll make a new reactor to make the cost go down. Those weren't good faith complaints.
Liberty
Well, I may misrepresent this thing, but I've heard from the [inaudible 00:31:18], as low as recently possible or something like that.
Mark Nelson
Achievable.
Liberty
Achievable. There's this regulation that basically means at the end of the day, anything that you do to reduce costs, well now you have more margin just reinvested in more safety. So nuclear can never be more cost competitive than it basically is at this point, because any money it saves, well, you could just put that money into more safety and more safety. You have plans that the cost should go down over time if you follow, okay, old plans were more analoged. They add thousands and thousands of wires running all around. In the digital world, you could transfer all of that data. Even if you have tons of redundancy with much to wires, that should lower the cost of at least that part. But because all of the regulations are based on you almost can never change anything. And if you do something that saves money, well, the money saves on these wires has to be reinvested in whatever, a bigger vessel or this or that. It feels to me like that, from the outside anyway. Maybe I'm wrong about it.
Mark Nelson
Well, certainly lots of the new companies and nuclear are saying that that's exactly what they're going to solve. I don't mind a thousand wires. I don't mind a million parts as long as you're good at installing, operating and maintaining them. So this obsession with fewer parts to get better performance, we haven't seen that born out on construction sites, because if you have one on your critical path that isn't going, then that's a bigger disruption than a thousand pieces on your critical path that are going.
Liberty
Absolutely. No, everything else equal, you should want the simpler design, but everything is not equal in this case probably.
Mark Nelson
Yeah. And what does simple mean? I just don't know what simple means anymore. We certainly can operate extremely complicated machinery. We're special. We're special monkeys here on this earth. We can do that. What I don't like is change for change's sake, but I also acknowledge that if you've lost the ability to do the old things, doing even the old things again may be new and may have many of the disadvantages of the new. I would say this. Building reactors is a program. If we don't commit to a program, we're never going to get frequent routine, successful nuclear plants.
Liberty
I think it's probably what's behind my thinking. If there was a long unbroken chain of building a certain type of plant since 40 years ago, well, keep the same design. It works. But if there's a kind of big empty void in the middle and now you have to restart again. You don't have the same workforce, you don't have the same institutional knowledge, not everything is written on a piece of paper. A bunch of people knew a bunch of stuff in their heads. They pass it on to the people they work with. I feel like we probably lost a bunch of that. So we kind of have to restart some of it, probably. So maybe that's a good occasion to try to simplify some designs. But at the same time, I know that the cost of a plant is ... if it takes 10 years to build, I've heard things about how just the interest on the debt that you borrow is like 50% or more of the cost of the plant. So it's not about saving some wires or concrete.
Mark Nelson
It depends. It depends. The plants that are disastrously over budget and delayed in Georgia in the United States are not. They have a decent interest rate. It's not terrible. That's not the issue. The issue is that at many stages, things like pouring of concrete or knitting of rebar were not done correctly. Now we can say, oh, there should have been a way to say, ah, it's good enough for jazz. Well, it wasn't good enough for the nuclear regulators. That nuclear regulator issue, or should a construction company be able to deliver what they claim that they could build? Cause what would that mean about maybe higher risk things? Are they just going to keep not building what they said they would? The blueprints weren't really done when they started and got it approved to build. So that's a bit of an issue. There are a bunch of things that kind of are our fault, if we're saying our to mean in the nuclear industry. There are a bunch of companies that got contracts on that project that were not in condition to deliver on nuclear contracts. They just weren't.
Liberty
And you think it's because of this kind of lack of practice, basically.
Mark Nelson
Yeah. Lack of practice, big gap, extreme enthusiasm, hubris, misidentifying what went wrong last time, all that sort of stuff. We got carried away with marketing terms and Westinghouse. They make good fuel and stuff, but they had never built the reactor that they based this reactor on. They called it an evolution of another design, but the other design was pretty new and they never built that. Just dumb stuff like that.
Liberty
Just too bad because there are so few being built that, if there's a problem, it kind of tanks the whole thing.
Mark Nelson
here.
Liberty
Yeah, here, not in China. But yeah, that's the thing, right? It's already so hard to get just one project started. If it goes wrong, it goes over budget, you know that everybody anti-nuclear is going to use that in all their materials to try to convince the next one not to be built.
Mark Nelson
But in the end, it does something. It's the hardest energy source, shall we say, that we know how to operate. We know it can deliver an entire nation's worth of electricity reliably over extremely long time horizons. It can do it nearly insensibly to the weather or to natural disasters, and it provides stable, long term meaningful employment to those who work in it. Even the most disastrous nuclear appliance that eventually turn on and are allowed to keep operating pay themselves off. That's pretty wild. Even the most successful wind and solar projects sometimes struggle to make a profit for anyone along the chain, even the original equipment manufacturers. So it's a paradox. That's what I said, I think when there was news recently that NRC had granted Vogel the permission it needed to begin loading fuel at its leisure. When it's ready, it can start loading fuel.
That made a big flurry of, well finally, or man that took so long, we can't do this again. Other people saying, this opens the new nuclear era. Now that we've got this monkey off our back. So on one side, I was like, hold your horses. We're not there yet. We still got to learn to operate this thing well, and we still got to actually turn it on. Then on the other side, I was going to say, look, this thing turning on and starting to crank cheap energy on an ongoing basis, not the construction cost the cheap energy on a daily basis, straight into an ultra high fuel environment, high fuel price environment, gas and coal, both very expensive now.
Liberty
Yeah.
Mark Nelson
That's going to heal a certain number of wounds. It really will. It doesn't mean we're going to do that type necessarily straight up again, but it does mean that in a world where we're looking for successful outcomes, we have a bunch of successful cheap processes that aren't leading to particularly excellent outcomes. At some point, that does matter. Instead, nuclear in the west, we've forgotten how to build and we have destructive delayed, painful processes that will lead to successful outcomes. How do you explain that to people? It's a difficult thing, right?
Liberty
Yeah. You brought up a very good point, I think about the existing fleet and about if you just keep some plants operating. I think it's very easy for a casual observer to say, oh, this was built in the sixties and the seventies. Look at these old plants and think they're so old, they must be at the end of their life. But the more I've looked into it, they look like ships of [inaudible 00:38:19] where every plank has been replaced a few times. It's like [inaudible 00:38:24] where he replaced the head and the handle a few times. Is it the same thing? What's the real age of the thing? There's the year of construction. Okay, fine. But all that matters at the end of the day is, is it safe? Is it reliable? Is it producing well? And for most of these plants, it seems like not all of them, but almost every plant that gets shut down gets shut down for political reasons rather than technical reasons. I don't know if we can-
Mark Nelson
Or economic reasons that were engineered for political reasons.
Liberty
Or temporary, right? Natural gas is cheap for a few years. We don't need that anymore. Natural gas won't stay cheap forever.
Mark Nelson
One of the legacies of Amory Lovins, he helped argue that you shouldn't just allow utilities to build and operate and amortize large efficient plants over a long period of time, because that was hard energy. As opposed to him, he was for soft energy. What does that even mean? Completely meaningless scientifically, but he suckered so many people for whom that was a very convenient or profitable message. He suckered them into thinking he was some insightful guru. Well, let's talk about this shift of DCS effect and it brings up something painful for me, which is that the Germans built their nuclear plants, the ones that they are prepared to shut down in a few days. They built their nuclear plans forever. So what are the easy parts to replace? Little bitty parts, new fuel, new water coming in and going out, some cables. Parking lot can be resurfaced.
Those are some pretty easy things. A little harder, you want to replace the people. But since the jobs are extremely good and if you're not threatening the nuclear plants for shut down or harassing kids out of daycare, which we've heard examples of in Germany for kids of parents of nuclear plant workers.
Liberty
Wow.
Mark Nelson
Yeah. Cancel culture. Anyway, except for that stuff, it's pretty easy to attract competent and effective long term employees. So that it's a little harder than small parts, but a little easier than some of the stuff we're going to get to. Now really harder parts, large pieces. What are large pieces? So in many plants in the world, steam generators are these giant parts that take hot pressurized coolant from the core. Then they boil water using that heat. Then that water boils into steam. Steam goes into turbine, turbine spins, lights go on.
So the large parts, like steam generators, that's a big operation to replace. If we're bad at big operations, we can sometimes mess it up. That has been the death of several nuclear plants. Operations to replace steam generators, where some weakness in the process or problem in installing or trouble shooting has been seized on as a political opportunity to kill the plant or financial reason to kill the plant. Now let's get even bigger, bigger parts. The reactor vessel itself. Can you replace it? Theoretically, if you're like the Germans and you build a massive hatch, you might be able to do something there, but we haven't yet seen a reactor vessel replacement in the plants that have a big reactor vessel. The Canadians have a reactor type that the core is not a reactor vessel. It's a bunch of pipes. You can obviously replace those pipes every 30, 35 years as they wear out, and you can have a more or less new reactor, at least as far as the core is concerned.
What the Russians do, for example, they just say, ah, why do a bunch of modeling. It should be good enough if we heat up the metal and release the tensions that have built up over time from neutrons slamming into them, that leak out of the core. So the neutron and [inaudible 00:41:50] is the concern. Most places in the world, they test the steel, they compare it to similar steel elsewhere. They understand the aging process more and more as the reactors get older. They see that the steel is fine. They're very conservatively sized, massive massively thick pressure vessels. That's fine. The Russians heat it up and it's like rewinding the clock about 10 years on the damage of the steel. It just hasn't been a limitation anywhere on earth.
People have tried to make it a limitation. They've attempted to use it as an excuse to shut down, and they may be successful in getting a large, excellent reactor shutdown in Belgium by saying that the reactor vessel just isn't nice. But even the owner, you talk to them and it's like, yeah, it's kind of like media. It's not popular to keep this. I'm like, yeah, it's not popular to have energy if it seems like you can just keep it, but in an energy crisis, when people start suffering, the popularity may change overnight, shall we say. And in Belgium, there is a big change in sentiment now, as they're coming to the last days of their long delayed, required legal shot off date for all the reactors. It's 50% of their national electricity in a horrible gas crisis, and they have no replacement except for gas and imports from other countries that don't have enough imports or gas.
Liberty
I don't know about Belgium, but I think in the US, another perverse incentive is that some utilities basically make more money, decommissioning a reactor than operating it, sometimes.
Mark Nelson
They make much more steady and reliable, and safe, and politically untouchable money,
Liberty
Which can be valuable. These attributes can be valuable.
Mark Nelson
Again, we're talking about the leadership from a weak, lazy, entitled generation. They're going to expect us to wipe their butts. They're going to expect us to keep them alive in nursing homes and all that other stuff, as they dismantle the equipment that physically supports our prosperity. It's disgusting. It is absolutely revolting. I didn't ask you your age specifically, so I hope I'm not catching you in some of my blast wave, but it's very upsetting.
Liberty
Oh, I'm 40.
Mark Nelson
Yeah. No, you're good. You're good. We're good. I left out one thing by the way. The concrete, the domes, the giant pressure domes, pressurized containment that keeps any meltdown contained. Well, we've got concrete domes. Maybe not like pressure vessel, like pressure tight domes, but we've got concrete domes that are coming on 2000 years old. So that part, we just keep the concrete up. We should be okay. Keep it inspected, keep it coded if necessary, just keep it in good condition, keep the rebar inside in good condition. We should be good there. They vote pretty conservatively too.
Liberty
Yeah, I can imagine.
Mark Nelson
So yeah, there you go. There's our permanence. One of the only issues that I can see that's a little bit trickier are reactors built that consume as part of their cooling process is scarce water. So I've got some concerns we have to work through on the relative importance of different water consumption in the deserts of say Arizona, where America's largest nuclear plant is, right in the desert. They currently evaporate treated, but undrinkable wastewater from the city of Phoenix. That's a contract where people may say, we need that pee water, we need that poo water back somehow here. I don't know, golf courses or something. Then there may be a struggle over those water rights. But other than that, I'm afraid these nuclear plants are just going to last.
Liberty
On the technical side, which is probably not the side that's going to kill them. While we are on the plants, the next thing I'd like to talk about is the waste, because everybody's thinking of as soon as you mention nuclear powers, yeah but the waste. It's terrible. We don't know what to do. We all know what everybody thinks about it. It lasts for thousands of years. It's weird the double standard there, where people never ask, how long does mercury and arsenic and [inaudible 00:45:39] and all these other pollutants, how long do they last or what's their half life?
Mark Nelson
They ask about this waste as if it were out there killing sea turtles or people or something. They ask about it as if it were an unfolding crisis, and certainly there are plenty of unfolding crises that people don't ask about either. So it's not like it's even mercury that's bio accumulating and organisms in the ocean and showing up in fish that pregnant women shouldn't eat. It's not even an ongoing crisis like that. It's currently well managed and is going to be well managed on the orders of decades looking ahead at the time. There's no fast failure of stuff. They aren't connected systems. They aren't interlinked. There's no way to spread failure in nuclear waste.
So it gets us back to the fact that the nuclear waste is a little bitty mental proxy for little nuclear bombs. And for those who think that the reactors are big nuclear bombs, if you stop the legal ability to move fuel through the reactor, by stopping the legal ability to do something with the waste, you can shut down the plant without banning the plant.
So we've got Taiwan that has China surrounding it with boats, more and more threat every day. There's a city mayor who has it under his power to block the offloading of spent fuel into spent fuel canisters. That has shut down or threatens to shut down a nuclear plant in Taiwan, one of the most energy starved, energy desperate, energy dependent countries on planet earth, and just a mayor with a permitting process is able to put his nation on their knees. It's phenomenal. I'm not claiming to know better than that mayor or whatever, but I certainly know that nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's a stand in for deeper concerns that have nothing to do with the waste at all.
Liberty
I think it goes back to the psychology that we discussed. First of all, people don't know about opportunity costs. They don't do ... well, we got to do this or otherwise that. So people in their head it's like, well between nuclear waste and the perfect world of rainbows and puppies, I'll take the rainbows and puppies. Well, who wouldn't? Nuclear waste is not a good thing in itself, but if you don't produce your power with nuclear, what you mostly get is coal and gas. That stuff has also downsides that are much bigger, that are killing more people with air pollution, that are affecting climate and strip mining for coal and all that stuff as these problems. But people don't don't see the link between the two. If you don't do one, you probably do the other. The other thing that I think it sounds a bit crazy, but I think it's true.
I think people have this fictionalized view of nuclear waste, as if it's in a movie or Hollywood. They think nuclear waste is a bad thing against nature and nature is going to get us back if we produce nuclear waste. So it's almost like it's sentient. If we put it in concrete and steel and we bury it somewhere where the best geologists in the world tell us that nothing has moved for millions of years, well, they can't see the Hollywood music is playing in the background and there's a volcano that's going to pop there or a crack is going to ... as if it's sentient.
Mark Nelson
Like dirty cursed corpse.
Liberty
Exactly.
Mark Nelson
Returning to the surface to punish us for ... It's one of the reasons why I say just let's put off any decisions about burying the waste until after people aren't scared anymore. Finland now has a repository in the earth, but they're also not scared of nuclear waste. I don't accept the argument that Finland is not scared of nuclear waste because they spent 10 years building an underground repository. It's the other way around. Because they're not scared of nuclear waste, they could just get a sensible option done. A little expensive, not physically necessary, but good enough for all involved and a simple enough solution for now, and forever if you make it.
But whatever, maybe we did get back up and use the uranium at some point. Who knows. But my point here is that if we try to do something especially permanent about the nuclear waste while people still think it's something it isn't, people still think it's more deadly than it is. If people still think there's more of it than there is, then we're going to waste a load of money. People are going to try to block it anyway.
Liberty
The more you try to go to the extreme to reassure people, the more you convince them, it must be super bad if you have to build this thing in the middle of the desert. I think in the same way that I try to imagine what the average person thinks is going on inside a nuclear plant, and they think it's a nuclear explosion that's contained. I think people hear about nuclear waste and it's like, oh, that's thousands of years. So they imagine that a tiny grain drops and everybody around immediately dies. So when I start reading a bit more about it, then I realize that the high grade stuff, the super powerful stuff is the stuff that decays the fastest. So the half life of nuclear means that, after decades, it's down by 90%, 99%. I know you wrote some stuff about this. The stuff that lasts for thousands of years is the less powerful stuff, the stuff that emits less radiation. Once you understand that, it's like-
Mark Nelson
You realize that even if the people who were trying to convince you that nuclear waste was dangerous, were so dumb they didn't understand the science. You keep pushing back, you're going to find people whose professional job it was, to both understand the science and misrepresent it to the public.
Liberty
Yeah.
Mark Nelson
That part is something maybe to get a little angry about, a little frustrated.
Liberty
I think we kind of almost talked about it directly earlier, but there's a bunch of interests that make a lot of money if nuclear goes away, or get political power if nuclear goes away. So there's been ... they found that Russia and Putin has been founding green NGOs in different places to argue against nuclear because, well, if you're born dependent on gas-
Mark Nelson
Even as they train hundreds of brilliant young people from around the developing world at a time in their nuclear universities in Moscow, to go home and deliver nuclear programs.
Liberty
Exactly. In the US, some large owner of gas interests have been funding some people to block hydro lines from Quebec going down in the Eastern seaboard.
Mark Nelson
Brings us to an interesting issue. I understand it's quite close to home too, as in you're from Quebec originally.
Liberty
Yeah, I am. As you can tell from the accent, maybe, that's been my journey of learning about power. Growing up, it's only been about hydropower and anything electric is kind of like, oh, it's nice. It's clean. When I start consuming more US media, you're starting well, when you turn the lights on, some coal is burning somewhere. That feels very, very different. But I kind of wish Quebec just went all out and just kept building more and more and exporting more and more, and the people around were receptive to it because that seems to be one of the very, very large sources of very clean power that we have around North America.
Mark Nelson
But we got bad at building in general, just anti-nuclear attitudes to tear down nuclear and stock construction from being done effectively, end up being part of a general inability to build anymore.
Liberty
Yeah.
Mark Nelson
Here's what I would say about Quebec. You had a working nuclear plant and you tore it down. And guess what? That nuclear plant does really well in the winter. You know what doesn't do that well in the winter in Quebec? Your hydro, your entire energy system, or at least your entire electricity system, besides fossil fuel heating. So we actually have an issue where, when Quebec needs energy the most, you have the least hydro. That has not stopped you from going to everyone around you to sell contracts for your hydro. People claim that we could tear down New York City's most secure power plant, Indian Point, because we're going to replace it with hydro.
So the second that plant got torn down, those same groups are like, actually we thought over the last 24 hours, we don't like those lines. Got you. Which tells you some of the attitude. This elite money is not even about hydro or lines or anything like that, because the Hydro's already built and Quebec's not building much more. So there you go. Or anymore, I don't think. So you can't even make an argument for more environmental issues.
Certainly they were fine with replacing any point with natural gas. These are the anti fossil fuel environmental groups that were ... but they also block pipelines too. So you actually realize that these environmental groups that tear down nuclear plants, they are weirdly specifically trying to strip away all the energy sources and not replace them. Or at least the ones that work say in a giant winter storm or cold spell, something like that. Here's what's really dangerous about the hydro that New York is going to get from Quebec. I have not seen the contract myself, but I've heard from people who say that Quebec retains the right to not deliver electricity if it's really needed.
Liberty
Yeah.
Mark Nelson
Sounds a little bit danger. Great for Quebec. No, that's solid deal for you guys, because you're going to have shortages because you keep selling a lot of it and you don't have enough in the winter, but that's really bad for the people who are signing up their major metropolis for your electricity, that there's not going to be enough of as long as you need it a lot. As long as everyone's desperate for it, you can't have it.
Liberty
Yeah. The only time you can't have the umbrella is when it rains, right?
Mark Nelson
Yeah, sort of like that, or that your umbrella is super cheap as a perisol, but you would be fine with any number of solutions like walking in a shade when it's not raining. Okay. So here's something else. Ontario is almost completely decarbonized electricity between hydro and nuclear. It's about 40/60 roughly, but they're going to shut down a giant chunk of their nuclear in just a few years. Why? Well, because it was cheaper to buy hydro from Quebec and do natural gas. Well, there's not that much availability and it's not that cheap anymore. So the business conditions have changed, but we still haven't succeeded in getting a reopening of the business case to keep that nuclear plant online.
Of course that nuclear plant is extremely secure energy supplies for Toronto. It's the closest one to Toronto.
Liberty
Yeah, Pickering.
Mark Nelson
Yep. So what are they going to do? Well, hydro from Quebec is going to be a major player except that Quebec doesn't really have extra. Certainly not when the energy is most necessary. And we're going to see that again. We're already seeing that in Norway, where in Norway, here's what everyone knew about Norwegian hydro. There was more of it than you can ever need, and it's crazy cheap. Now there's not enough and it's gone up five, 10X, 15X in price in one year. A year ago, I was in Norway about this time trying to talk to people about, Hey, what about some nuclear? They're like, why would we do that? We make hydro for ourselves. We share some of it. Then we make fossil fuels and, since we're the cleanest fossil fuels, we'll be the last producer.
I was saying things like, well, if your fossil fuels are too much, you might actually have a big economic problem outside. Since your money that you feed yourself with is kind of from investments in that broader economy, this could be an issue that comes back to you. Also, since you're selling hydro to almost everybody, and since everybody else is stripping out their power plants, especially nuclear saying, it's fine. We got Norwegian hydro. Well, that's not great. Then one of the arguments that I tried to make, it just didn't ... Everyone's like climate change, climate change, climate change. I'm like, ah, climate change. You're meaning that the weather and the climate are changing.
Yep. Okay. So if the weather and the climate are changing, do you think that'll change wind and precipitation patterns? Yep. So then you're fighting climate change by getting more energy that use a changing and less reliable source of energy. They sit there and you see it start to crank, and then you're thinking, but you're in a position to make important national discussions happen, depending on who I was talking to. You're actually an important person who should be aware that if climate change is what you're talking about, it can happen. Then you won't be able to get climate energy. It's like they've never even thought of that before. Oh right, rain comes from sky and snow. It could change. But you see the level of thinking? This is what I mean by weak, flabby leadership. They've had it easy and they've just not been good stewards.
Liberty
If I can make a corporate business analogy, it sounds like there's the builder, the founder that builds up the company and then they leave it to their kids who then go through all of that. That's usually when the problem starts happening. It feels like this generation, a lot of the infrastructure that we have came from a long time ago and we've kind of maintained it and added a little bit, but I don't know how we get out of that, because crisis.
Mark Nelson
Yeah.
Liberty
Hydro is great in many ways, but if it's used in the ways that you're describing by removing other good sources and making people dependent on it when it may not come, that's the wrong way to use it. There's the right way and the wrong way to do things, and it feels like everybody's so short term thinking, well, it's probably going to be fine this year, next year. Yeah, but what about 5, 10, 20 years?
Mark Nelson
And if the response to the changes take some time, that's when it gets particularly dangerous, because you can get into these long choke points where not enough power plants were built in a certain period, then they all start to go down. You reframe your power plants going offline as carbon success or whatever, which yet the carbon numbers may go down, but that's not guaranteed because you've replaced carbon fuels with reliable energy. That may be because you're getting lucky and because you're failing to invest. In this case, that's what we're seeing across a lot of Europe.
Liberty
Even a lot of what we'd consider success feels to me like looking at part of the system instead of the whole system. By that, I mean we've deindustrialized so much in the west that the demand for power is kind of plateaued and gone down a bit and we're like, okay, this is a great success. But all of these industries are now somewhere in Asia, running on coal or something of the sort. Basically all of these emissions are still in the system. The big climate wins that we think a bunch of Western country have had has basically just been shipping some emissions somewhere else where the power grid is much dirtier and there's fewer environmental regulations about how they go about it.
Mark Nelson
Well, let's go back to our favorite energy guru, Amory Lovins. He argued that electricity itself was the wrong system and now his organization and even him, he's arguing that electric vehicles are good. You're like, wait, you were saying that the grid was bad. Electricity generation was bad. Local, right sized fossil fuels and renewables were the right thing. You're just flipping around. You were also saying we needed less of everything, but now you're saying we need something that's going to be more of the grid and more reliability required of the grid.
They made that really smooth shift where they went from saying, grids are bad, power plants are bad, utilities are bad. And then they're saying, no, actually it's good now because you can do it with wind and solar. But of course the wind and solar isn't good enough to rely on for a bulk energy system has to work regardless of the season or if it's a bad year or a good year for wind and solar. It ends up mattering quite a lot, indeed that you just went from attacking the grid to saying, we actually need the grid, but you didn't adjust your preconditions.
Why did you decide the grid was bad? Because the big things that were being built by the managers and operators of the grid were the nuclear plants and you didn't like the nuclear plants, so you decided that the thing that was necessary to grow nuclear, which was grid to distribute it to more customers, was bad.
Liberty
It was a proxy.
Mark Nelson
Of course. He used thermo words and he probably understood it in some way, but even then there should have been easy intuition that was showing him that he was wrong on the most critical foundational things, that there's no choice between soft energy and hard energy. You can have soft parts of hard systems, hard parts to soft. It's stupid, stupid dichotomy that he proliferated. Then he should have also realized that, if our fear of which apocalypse is coming switches from his obsession, which is nuclear war, on over to a new obsession, which is the climate change. Well then people are going to not ...
We've only got enough room for a few apocalypses at a time. Maybe only one, and the young people, they just don't have nuclear war. Even nuclear war gets framed as something that might come about because of climate change or might cause climate change. It's reframed. I'm not trying to say whether climate change is or isn't coming, how bad it will be or won't be, or where, or how evenly it'll be distributed. Just that if that's a concern, nuclear provides stable energy without the carbon.
Liberty
Right. I think it's a good time to talk about wind and solar because that's the other argument that always comes up. It's like, well, we don't need nuclear because look at these charts. It's like, okay, the cost of solar going down super quickly because of wind going down super quickly. Then they show you, well, okay, it's interment. But here's a chart of battery started production around the world and the cost of batteries. They kind of all frame it in this Moore's law kind of thing that doesn't quite work for infrastructure, but still it's been impressive how costs have gone down. But the way I try to think about it is if you look at the system as a whole, I'm trying to think about, well, okay, if you have five or 10% of stuff that's intermittent, the size of the fluctuation can only be so big. But if you have 50% or 70% of solar, and then there's a cloudy day where the moves are going to be tens of percent in each direction, how much storage do you need to buffer that?
Once in a while, these bad periods are going to last for a long time. So then I start thinking, okay, even if batteries get cheap, do we have something better to do with batteries? We're trying to electrify transportation right now. So if we divert a large fraction of battery capacity production for the grid, then EVs are going to come slower. They're going to be more expensive, and we got to include this in the calculation for renewables because, if solar and wind need batteries and they slow down transportation, electrification, all of this carbon and pollution that's going to be released on this side on transportation side is kind of tied to wind and solar. But people would like to keep all those apart as if there's no larger system that's going to be impacted. Anyway, that's a long question, but I'm curious what you think about this.
Mark Nelson
Yeah. So basically the plan is you get into an industry and you promote that and, as it creates problems, you say we'll solve those well. From my point of view, we're getting along a path where solving the problems that are being created from that path is getting harder and harder and harder and more difficult and more dangerous, and might actually not happen. By this, I mean we have made a system of incentives that wind and solar get first priority at almost everything. Then they have been cutting into the long term capital return from the equipment that is still required to make the whole grid work. As the cost of electricity has gone up to pay for the attributes that are missing from wind and solar, the fuel like attributes, shall we say, or the locational option of small compact energy sources that we don't have with wind and solar, as that goes away, there's a bigger and bigger gap left behind that has to be filled. In many countries, dealing with the Russian gas crisis or the global fossil fuel crisis, the answer is desperately turning back on older fossil equipment.
Liberty
Coal, especially.
Mark Nelson
But in terms of storage, we have this problem where the value of storage is dependent on having only a little bit to do a little bit of storage. As you need more and more storage, less frequently ... I mean, less frequently like microseconds and milliseconds and then seconds, and then little bitty buffering that batteries have been brilliant for. As you need minutes or hours, or God forbid, days from batteries, you start only infrequently using some of what batteries can do, and that's not enough to pay for batteries. You need only a little bit to balance the moment to moment variations in the grid. You need a bit more to deal with swings of enough time to call it a backup generator and get it back on, that sort of thing, or call a major electricity user and use your get out of jail free that you sign them up for, a cheaper average electricity rate in order to have them turn off three times a year at your call.
That's the way we've run industrial electricity in a lot of countries for many decades, almost from the beginning in some cases. Well, as that needs to be filled with batteries instead, as we use up our option value, the cards we have in our own deck, then the amount of batteries you need goes up geometrically, but the amount of money to pay for them goes down. So it very rapidly becomes just this extremely expensive intervention to make sure you can keep using very cheap power.
Liberty
Right.
Mark Nelson
But it's also not the problem of whoever just did the solar wind [inaudible 01:05:38]. It's not their issue. Not really. In fact, some of them are starting to add solar in part because of the major tax incentives behind it. Sorry, solar plus batteries, for example, part because of the major tax incentives, but then they have a problem. If you co-locate the batteries with the solar, you're stuck with the downsides of being out in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is. You really need the battery there where people are so you're near their customers, but you also kind of need it in both places and you need a big transmission. Suddenly, the fact that the solar is cheap is not that important to the final cost of the service over time to consumers, which helps drive them off the grid and destroys the economies of scale and makes Amory Lovins right the whole time. Just merely by following his prescriptions. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I suppose.
Liberty
Even if you have storage, it feels to me like storage is more effective with something like a nuclear power plant than with intermittent power because you have this huge fixed cost asset that you want to run at 100%, as much as possible. Well, if you have storage, when there's no demand at night, you charge the batteries and then the next day you discharge them and you keep your nuclear power plant running a lot more evenly. If you have few nuclear power plants, that's not so much of a problem because they're base load. They're always going to run flat out. But if you ever get to a point where nuclear revives and it becomes a huge part of the total power output of a country like in France, then I think storage on top of it makes everything else more effective and more cost effective, it feels to me.
Mark Nelson
You're not inventing anything I have to apologize to-
Liberty
It's kind of what they did with pumped hydro, I think.
Mark Nelson
Exactly. The vast majority of grid storage ever built was built by the same entities that were operating nuclear on the same grids.
Liberty
Why can't we do that anymore?
Mark Nelson
Because it's a large construction. It's a large construction project that disrupts a bit of the environment. Everything that was claimed as the priority. People weren't the priority, industry wasn't a priority. I get it, but it was a critical part of clean energy systems. It's just that, because Amory Lovins thinking says big centralized, disruptive storage is bad, it would just make nuclear plants work better. And since his actual objective was stopping nuclear, then you don't want pumped hydro and you have to redefine the definition. You have to redefine energy sources in terms of whether they help or hurt the argument for hydro, which helps or hurts the argument for grids and nuclear. It's backwards, of course.
Liberty
It's always like, there's what people say is going on and the real game behind. And once the real game that's going on, everything starts to make more sense, right?
Mark Nelson
Yeah, exactly. Now we managed to get through an hour and a half here without talking about how we fix these issues, beyond my jokes about banning cell phones and maybe only paper drafting of designs. We didn't talk about what's coming in the future, what the answer is. I think that we should probably wrap up this first half and then we can come to the second half, but coming future as soon as we can record again.
Liberty
That sounds great. That sounds like a great plan. I still have so much to talk about, so definitely let's do this again.
Mark Nelson
All right. Sounds great. Well, thank you for having me on and I can't wait to see you soon.
Liberty
Thank you very much. Before you go, is there anywhere you'd like to send people, somewhere where they can follow your stuff, something you'd like to point out that's good about the topic, something good to read, to watch, to listen to? Anything you want to plug here?
Mark Nelson
Sure. So I run an energy consultancy, Radiant Energy Group. You can find it at radiantenergygroup.com and you can see some of our topical reports that we've released to the public, including on the possibility of life extending the three German reactors and to return to service the other three reactors that they just turned off. Then you can follow my spicy tweets as I get my anger at bad leaders out online at Energy Bants, that's energy B-A-N-T-S on twitter.com.
Liberty
Awesome. Thank you so much.
I hope you focus in the second part more about the real problems of nuclear instead of the image/marketing problems.
It's intellectually dishonest to mention France as good example and fail to mention that their reactors are down at the moment and France is getting its electricity from European neighbors.