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Let’s get Pennsylvania back on track to energy independence · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:07
  Mainstream media has betrayed our trust.
• 0:10
  Rather than tell us the whole story about the important issues of the day, they tell us only what they want us to hear.
• 0:16
  Your hosts, Tom Harris and Todd Royal will bring you the other side of the story.
• 0:27
  Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources tells us that, quote, Pennsylvania is the birthplace of commercial oil production, thanks to Colonel Edward L.
• 0:38
  Drake.
• 0:39
  Drake drilled the first well specifically intended to produce oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859.
• 0:45
  His success launched a global industry upon which most of our modern lives depend.
• 0:51
  Unquote.
• 0:52
  Well, Pennsylvania certainly is blessed to lie in the heart of the Appalachian Basin, where in 2004, the discovery of the Marcellus shale in Washington County led to widespread development of organic rich shales a mile or more deep.
• 1:06
  But all this is under continuing threat from politicians who regularly bow to environmental extremists who, of course, want to end the state's use of the important fossil fuel resources.
• 1:17
  Leaving the surrender is current Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, whose inclination is to spend big, tax more, count out to the public sector union leaders, and pick winners and losers in the marketplace.
• 1:30
  Resulting, of course, like everywhere else in the world in a huge budget deficit.
• 1:35
  And even though Shapiro has said that he was, quote, sick and tired of losing to Ohio, the governor continues to miss opportunities to help key businesses that drive progress, such as coal, natural gas, and steel.
• 1:47
  To help us understand what Pennsylvania is doing wrong and what they need to do differently to prosper, we've invited Gordon Tom, an energy senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation to be our guest today.
• 1:59
  Gordon is also senior advisor for the CO2 coalition in Arlington, Virginia, and the primary editor of the best selling book, Inconvenient Facts, the science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know about.
• 2:10
  And you know, we've had the author of that book, Gregory Wrightstone on our show a number of times.
• 2:15
  As an energy writer and consultant, his clients have included the natural gas and nuclear power industries and the operator of the nation's largest high voltage transmission system.
• 2:25
  Gord was also, and this is something we're going to ask about.
• 2:27
  He was also an executive in the electric utility and nuclear power industries.
• 2:32
  He led communication teams in the recovery from the Three Mile Island accident, that nuclear reactor, and the development of an electric transmission project.
• 2:40
  So welcome to the show, Gordon.
• 2:42
  I see that you're the winner of the Cicero Speech Writing Awards as a Toastmaster.
• 2:46
  I'm kind of curious about that.
• 2:48
  What are the Cicero speech writing awards?
• 2:51
  Well, I mean I'm happy to hear that you're a Toastmaster because I I'd start out as a writer for a newspaper, did that for 11 years.
• 3:00
  And I was always considered myself, and I still do really consider myself mostly as a writer.
• 3:04
  So the one of the first things they did was throw me in front of a when I took a PR job at a nuclear power plant, one of the first things they did is throw me in front of a uh television camera, and I was scared to death, right?
• 3:16
  So I decided I better learn something.
• 3:19
  So I joined Toastmasters, which was very helpful, very helpful.
• 3:23
  But in any event, the Cisro of Speechwriting Awards is uh sponsored by I think a PR company out of Chicago, and it's an annual thing, and you if you write a speech, you want to enter it, you just do it.
• 3:34
  And I think you might be an entrance fee or something.
• 3:36
  I haven't done that for a long, long time, but I I did win a couple of their awards.
• 3:40
  It wasn't it was not not really all that big of a deal.
• 3:44
  I'd written there a couple of speeches for um, I think one of the speeches was for a uh chairman of the board of a natural gas drilling company to need who needed a speech written.
• 3:55
  So I did that for them.
• 3:56
  Yeah, well, I wish I wish more energy experts joined Toastmasters because uh a lot of the subject matter experts are not very good communicators, you know.
• 4:06
  There's a little bit of a if you're not used to it, you know, it's a little bit of a trick to it.
• 4:09
  It's not rocket science, if but uh practice makes a big difference.
• 4:13
  Oh, for sure.
• 4:14
  Yes, it does.
• 4:15
  Hey, can you tell us um since you you worked with Three Mile, and can you tell us about your role, the communication teams in the recovery from the T three mile and accident?
• 4:24
  Yeah, just as a refresher, the TMI accident happened in uh March of 1979, and uh about a little over three years after the accident, uh they were looking for to replace somebody on their communications team down there.
• 4:40
  And uh so I I left my newspaper job and took that role in media relations to start out at uh TMI.
• 4:48
  And um that was in the early 80s, and it you might be interested to hear that the communications team at Three Mile Island grew very quickly from one person at the time of the accident to about 40 people because they had they had a they ended up having a visitor center, you know, video people, photographer.
• 5:08
  I mean, the the demand for information at TMI in the aftermath of that accident was huge.
• 5:14
  We took hundreds of literally hundreds of reporters through that plant every year.
• 5:20
  And uh, so our you know, most of our time was spent putting nuclear power into into context, the risk of nuclear power into context, right?
• 5:30
  For the and spoiling it down for the general public so that they can understand it.
• 5:35
  And uh so I spent a lot of time working between nuclear engineers on the one hand and uh, you know, the the local mother or PTA member or whoever was worried about the operation of the plant.
• 5:48
  So that's that's what I did.
• 5:50
  I'd love to do a follow-up view on this, and just can you kind of explain?
• 5:54
  Because obviously it was a little bit of a perfect storm.
• 5:58
  China syndrome comes out with Jane Fonden, Michael Douglas.
• 6:01
  Um my former boss who I was with for four years, told me stories about going into the reactor, and he talked about how it was contained, and he would tell me he would just tell stories.
• 6:14
  He said it was just not a big deal.
• 6:16
  It worked how it was supposed to work.
• 6:17
  It was a human error.
• 6:19
  Can you kind of go over a little bit for our audience while serious kind of give some of the facts behind what really took place?
• 6:27
  Yeah, right.
• 6:28
  And not to understate the seriousness of the accident.
• 6:32
  It was serious.
• 6:32
  It was it mounted about 50% of a 100-ton fuel core.
• 6:37
  That's a lot of uranium, right?
• 6:39
  And but at the same time, the safety systems worked, even though the operators made some mistakes in the process.
• 6:47
  There's a lot of lessons drawn from that.
• 6:48
  It was a combination of operator error and mechanical malfunctions that caused the accident.
• 6:55
  But the radiation was was contained in the containment building and in the reactor vessel.
• 7:01
  There were uh releases of low levels amounts of radiation from the plant, but that was all monitored.
• 7:08
  We they knew how much was out.
• 7:10
  In fact, it was interesting.
• 7:12
  One of the monitoring devices they used would they would sample uh milk, goat's milk.
• 7:17
  There happened to be goat farms nearby, and they would sample milk and and measure whatever radius radiation picked up by goats.
• 7:26
  After the accident, they found radioactive iodine and some goat's milk.
• 7:30
  Very low levels, not harmful.
• 7:33
  After the Chernobyl accident, what was that in I think '86, somewhere in that neighborhood.
• 7:40
  Um we got a lot of calls from around the world, literally, uh, as media people, media relations people at Three Mile Island, we've got a lot of calls from reporters around the world.
• 7:49
  Well, tell us about the Chernobyl accident or how would you recover from the Chernobyl?
• 7:52
  Of course, we hardly, I didn't even know how to spell Chernobyl at the time.
• 7:57
  But our environmental affairs people at Three Mile Island found radioactive iodine in goat's milk after the Chernobyl accident was three times higher two weeks after the accident at Chernobyl.
• 8:12
  It was three times higher than after the TMI accident.
• 8:15
  So that it was still very low level, not harmful, but that just gives you an idea of how on the one hand, how serious the Chernobyl accident was, and on the other hand, how minimal the impact of the TMI accident was.
• 8:30
  Yeah.
• 8:30
  It's it's interesting that after Chernobyl, it led to a retraction in the United States from nuclear power.
• 8:37
  Yeah.
• 8:38
  But it didn't in Russia, they kept operating the other three reactors, right?
• 8:42
  So I thought it was kind of ironic, especially since what happened at Chernobyl physically cannot happen at American reactors.
• 8:49
  Exactly.
• 8:51
  Total different design.
• 8:52
  And there's a similar reaction, I think uh after the Fukushima accident at uh in Japan.
• 8:59
  Yeah.
• 8:59
  And uh, you know, and uh I actually traveled to Tokyo after that accident uh to give a presentation on communications issues in nuclear power, and um I taught I was presenting to mostly nuclear peop, yeah, nuclear power people and regulators over there in in Tokyo.
• 9:20
  And uh they asked me, well, what do we have to do to uh restart our reactors?
• 9:25
  And after having heard that how they were talking, I said, Well, at this point, it doesn't sound to me like your government has the political will to restart your reactors.
• 9:34
  Um they didn't like that, but that was the truth.
• 9:38
  They just didn't have the political will.
• 9:40
  They certainly have the technical ability, and there certainly was no reason not to restart, no rational reason not to restart them.
• 9:46
  But yeah, that's the key, no rational reason.
• 9:50
  Right.
• 9:50
  You know, it's the same thing with the radioactive waste storage.
• 9:53
  I mean, in Canada, we had something called the Seaborne Report, and it actually looked at how safe was it to store high.
• 10:00
  level waste deep in the Canadian Shield.
• 10:02
  And they said, well, the Canadian Shield hasn't moved for hundreds of millions of years.
• 10:07
  So yeah, it's it's very safe.
• 10:09
  But they decided that it wasn't politically safe.
• 10:12
  So there's quite a difference between the actual technology and what they communicate in many cases.
• 10:18
  Right.
• 10:18
  Yeah.
• 10:19
  The high level waste from the TMI accident, which is mostly you know reactor parts and damaged fuel was packaged up in stainless steel cast.
• 10:31
  Oh yeah.
• 10:31
  And I used to say to people that stainless steel cask full of that nuclear waste is safer than a propane tank in your backyard.
• 10:38
  Oh absolutely it is yeah I've I've been next to the ones made by Orno or Rano I say their name incorrectly where they're it's concrete encased in iron with steel you could I've talked to some of those folks and they go you could hit this could be hit with a bomb and it's it's it's going to be fine.
• 10:59
  Yeah it's that's a really great example Gordon that yeah any anything like a generator holding natural gas or your propane tank go look at what a Rondo does with uh you know unspent fuel I don't like to call it nuclear waste I anybody who says that there's some danger in that I it's just you're just not being truthful.
• 11:21
  Yeah they're not either either not being true they just flat out don't understand.
• 11:25
  Yeah yeah absolutely I'm going to use that propane example I'm I'm I'm gonna borrow that propane example from you.
• 11:33
  Every time I go to have one filled up and they I bring it back in my car unsecured right I'm rolling around back there I've done the same thing with I sit there and I go this is the most ridiculous me and my wife just dropped the protein you've got this most ridiculous thing in the world.
• 11:51
  Well it it also strikes me and this is the question to both of you I mean wasn't the containment structure an engineering success because didn't it hold the hydrogen bubble?
• 12:01
  Yes absolutely yeah yeah exactly 100% gentleman uh the gentleman I worked for in my previous position uh as part of his role I believe with Westinghouse and others has gone inside of there I guess they do some he's like you you put on the protective gear you walk inside you you see where it's contained because you check a box and he goes it's truly he's like you can do it in a matter of minutes he goes it's not a big deal and he said he said that's engineering based on the 70s not even in engineering now which is pretty pretty stunning yeah and yet with that movie with Jane Fonda nuclear got a black eye and and is it right that they didn't actually build nuclear reactors for decades afterwards.
• 12:42
  It was it's just full it was foolishness and I think that's become more clear to more people as time goes by yeah yeah exactly well aren't you saying Todd that that is the ultimate energy source in the in the long term that we'll see a gradual movement to nuclear well we should and and I'm sure Gordon there's a there's a wonderful uh sub stack that I subscribe to called Doomberg and he says he says if aliens came down on earth they would look at us and go why are you not using the greatest energy source known to man uranium and why are you not building uh whether it's AP 1000s or whatever reactor why aren't you building these all over the world that if you really wanted to decarbonize or do any kind of net zero uh or whatever you you know whoever your concerns are about emissions that why you don't use nuclear it would just people these aliens would look at you a bit just with a quizzical look and wonder why you're not doing this yeah there's gonna be a lot of quizzical looks uh years I'm sure yeah Robert Bryce had wrote a book uh about probably 10 or more years ago now uh power hungry and he goes that's a very good book yeah I'll yeah he he talks about the natural gas to nuclear transition and yeah Robert does great work I I want to talk to you though about your state the Keystone state yeah and you know Tom and I God bless Tom did some nice uh research on this beforehand where he talks about uh Tom had shared you know he has you you should have all the ingredients for this booming prosperous economy in Pennsylvania yet I guess supposedly your population's declining 42 of the 67 counties and more more than 1700 of its 2400 incorporated communities reported more people leaving than arriving between 2020 and 2023 love to know what it is now according to the U.S.
• 14:38
  Census Bureau can you give us and our listeners just a bit of a history lesson to show us what has gone wrong sure yeah key um the nickname for uh Pennsylvania is the Keystone state and it's stands to reason when you think about it it it uh for one thing it the uh it was one of the first it was one of the original 13 colonies and it sat right in the middle you know uh of them and it's always been uh central for the transportation of goods to the population uh major population centers of the United States we um we have interstates going through east and west north and south going through Pennsylvania currently going up into New England over into New York New Jersey and so in 1930 we uh Pennsylvania ranked first in population in 1930 we now we now rank fifth uh and you know the the rankings these days is California Texas Florida New York which is 1930 was first is now fourth and Pennsylvania's fifth so we and our and Pennsylvania's congress number of Pennsylvania congressional districts is declined from 34 in 1930 to 17 today so our relative growth has been very slow to other states and so why is that we we have we we we uh in the in in the 30s and 40s Pennsylvania steel mills manufactured the steel for world war two manufactured the steel for skyscrapers being built in in in manhattan and chicago and we had coal mining all over the place part part of the reason for Pennsylvania's relative decline is the exporting of manufacturing jobs hollowed out many of the smaller cities and towns of Pennsylvania I grew up in western southwestern Pennsylvania sitting on top of coal mines literally sitting on top of coal mines surrounded by coal-fired power plants and steel mills johnstown was a mini Pittsburgh uh was I was I grew up 10 miles from there it had Bethel steel in the US steel the two biggest steelmakers in the world at the time they had they had facilities in Johnstown Johnstown now is a nothing short of a disaster economically one of the it's a very difficult place right now and um because the jobs vanished if you go around um lots of lots of people western Pennsylvania of course are steeler fans there are steeler bars all over the world literally I've been to some of them because so many people moved out of Pennsylvania you can go to Florida you can go to Texas and you'll find a steeler bar.
• 17:27
  Do you think it's also I mean obviously you can read in the news about kind of the you know the George Soros TA they got elected in Philadelphia and you know Philadelphia in many ways has become very lawless certainly gone incredibly far left far left mayor far left DA and so that lawlessness obviously just pushes it just pushes folks away do you do you think that Philadelphia is is one of the big reasons that you've seen this decline uh in Pennsylvania oh I don't know about that I I I there is a there's a crime problem for sure uh in Philadelphia and and other other major cities uh and leadership has a lot to do with it and in fact in recent in the last couple of years Philadelphia got a new mayor who's more serious about the crime problem down there and there's been a market improvement so leadership makes a huge difference no doubt about it but um as far as overall economy I if I I don't know this offhand but I think you would find that Philadelphia economically has been doing pretty well as has Pittsburgh um not to say that they don't have their budget issues because they don't have they don't have spending discipline like a lot of a lot like a lot of democratically run uh places do I think you know I leadership makes a huge difference in Pennsylvania we've had weak leadership for years and um that wants to leadership the last two governors have been Democrat we've had now uh eight we're working on 12 years of democratic leadership and they want to satisfy they try to satisfy everybody particularly the left and silly environmental policies now recently I did a story and I talked to people in the energy industry mainly the energy industry about um regulatory reform and what they've been seeing and one executive told me he's seeing more a more reasonable approach among state regulators in Pennsylvania who are since Trump came in because some of these a lot of the state regulations kind of take off on in in federal the federal environmental protection agency and so the federal regulators are becoming more reasonable so the state regulators are kind of taking their lead on that now if it's strictly a state rig maybe not so much but but leadership makes a huge difference and uh
• 20:00
  Um I keep saying, you know, we need uh we we need we need Pennsylvania needs its own version of Trump or something like that to come in and clean house or Elon Musk to take a look at I have a friend who's a CPA.
• 20:14
  He spent six years in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
• 20:19
  And uh he said 20% of the spending in Pennsylvania is waste.
• 20:25
  At least.
• 20:25
  And he didn't he didn't rip that off the top of his head.
• 20:28
  He did a serious analysis with the help of other people.
• 20:31
  And he said 20% of its waste.
• 20:34
  He he tried to pass a number of pieces of legislation, introduced them into the state house to rationalize government.
• 20:43
  In other words, you know, in other words, you don't continue a program unless it's producing something useful.
• 20:50
  As an example, but he had one house representative tell him a Republican, you can't get a re-elected cutting spending.
• 21:01
  You can't get re-elected cutting spending.
• 21:03
  And that's the uh and that just ended the conversation in that particular instance.
• 21:08
  Yeah.
• 21:09
  It's a tough road, baby.
• 21:11
  So regulations, I understand, is one of the main problems in Pennsylvania.
• 21:16
  Yeah, we have 164,000 regulations.
• 21:18
  164,000 regulations.
• 21:21
  I don't know who in the devil counted all those things.
• 21:24
  But now, in terms of we're talking about data centers.
• 21:30
  Last July, last July, President Trump came to uh Pittsburgh along with a couple hundred uh not a couple hundred, but uh sorry like a couple dozen business leaders and then other political leaders, and they announced these business leaders announced plans to invest 92 billion with a B, 92 billion dollars in Pennsylvania for data centers and energy infrastructure necessary to support them.
• 22:00
  Now, I know you know we it we're used to big numbers being thrown around.
• 22:05
  It's all it's almost become like if it's not a trillion, it's not a number, right?
• 22:09
  But 92 billion dollars is almost 10% of the Pennsylvania gross domestic product.
• 22:15
  92 billion dollars, and these guys saying they're gonna invest almost 10% of the gross domestic product of Pennsylvania.
• 22:22
  That's a big deal.
• 22:23
  Well, it doesn't just happen.
• 22:25
  We all know that people can say they're gonna do it, but whether they do it or not depends on a lot of things, like if they can actually make money doing it.
• 22:32
  That's the big thing.
• 22:34
  So what's happened since what's happened since um that announcement in July?
• 22:40
  Well, there's been at least seven bills in Harrisburg introduced in the state house to regulate data centers.
• 22:48
  Well God to regulate data centers.
• 22:51
  And if you look at them, for instance, there was a six-bill package to regulate data centers, and they were addressing things like energy use, water use, emergency preparedness.
• 23:04
  Now, Pennsylvania, we just talked about Pennsylvania's history of in manufacturing and mining and so forth.
• 23:11
  They have Pennsylvania's had steel mills, coal mines, factories of all kinds, manufacturing of all kinds, harley everything from Harley Davidson to you know, international automobiles.
• 23:22
  What acres and acres of warehouses we have along these interstates, all those people manage energy use, uh water use, emergency preparedness, and on and on.
• 23:37
  Why does data centers have to have special regulation?
• 23:41
  One observer who's a a bit cynical, maybe even more than I am, suggested that whenever they're taught per presenting proposals for legislation to manage quote unquote responsible development.
• 23:56
  He says, he says responsible development to them means no development.
• 24:01
  Yeah, that's what it was.
• 24:03
  Yeah, that's it.
• 24:04
  Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's no development.
• 24:07
  It's yeah, it's a kind of an anti-human you know, view of things.
• 24:12
  So that's a that's extended what it is.
• 24:16
  Do you see uh but obviously they came there because of the Marsella shell.
• 24:21
  There's just there's there's more gas there than you know what to know what to do with.
• 24:26
  Right, right.
• 24:27
  Um see because there's framed the question this way, because there's such massive energy demands from these data centers, uh, and that's where society is going, whether we like it or not.
• 24:40
  Do you see them being overcome for lack of better terms, the Democratic Party and the environmental organizations and just all of these, you know, all of these crazy environmental groups and the NIMBYism that goes on against things like this because you have so much natural gas, you don't even have to hook up to the grid for all of that.
• 25:03
  But the data center right there in the different parts of the Marcella shell and gas goes into data center, data comes out.
• 25:10
  There's no connecting to the grid, there's no need for midstream operators.
• 25:14
  Do you see any, you know, no pipelines, no regasification, no billion dollar natural gas fired power plant.
• 25:20
  It's just here's a data center, there's the gas, plug it in.
• 25:24
  Then I'm being very simplistic.
• 25:26
  And that and out comes the data.
• 25:27
  Do you see it being able to overcome kind of these democratic left-wing environmental organizations?
• 25:33
  This kind of and I love how you said it anti-human.
• 25:36
  Yeah.
• 25:37
  Well, I think there's definitely a reaction going on to all that, and it's uh it's becoming more widespread.
• 25:44
  Even um govern the current governor, Governor Josh Shapiro, uh just a month ago, he agreed to drop a proposal.
• 25:53
  It's a proposal that's now about six years old, I think, almost six years old.
• 25:58
  A proposal for uh Pennsylvania to enter into something called the regional greenhouse gas initiative, yeah, uh which amounts to a carbon tax.
• 26:07
  And he dropped that proposal to get the uh because Republicans held out for four months from signing a bill, uh, a budget bill.
• 26:14
  They went state one for four months without a book without a budget.
• 26:19
  But he he dropped that proposal.
• 26:21
  Now he has his own, and I think he's been, I think he might have been looking for a way to get out of it, and that that gave him a reason to drop it.
• 26:29
  But he he does have his own ideas, proposals for a carbon tax, but people are not so sure he's all that serious about it.
• 26:38
  There's a lot of things going on.
• 26:39
  For one thing, people are getting very concerned about the price of electricity.
• 26:43
  Um Pennsylvania prices for electricity between 2024 and 2025 went up somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.
• 26:52
  My own uh bill went up just this month, another 10 percent.
• 26:56
  So people are getting it's starting to get people's attention, and so of course it's gonna start getting politicians' attention.
• 27:04
  And the some of these politicians that you know it's been their policies to push green energy and so forth that have driven the price of electricity higher.
• 27:15
  Uh they're they're starting to get worried about being blamed for that sort of thing.
• 27:19
  So I think there's gonna be some moderation with Shapiro in Shapiro's own case.
• 27:25
  He next year, 2026, he's up for re-election for governor.
• 27:28
  He wants to win that, and then in 2028, he wants to run for president.
• 27:32
  So he's yeah.
• 27:34
  So uh we'll we'll see about all that.
• 27:37
  But yeah, we have to go for a break now.
• 27:39
  Our guest today has been Gordon Tom.
• 27:41
  He's energy senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation.
• 27:45
  In the second half of the interview, I'm gonna quiz both of you on something quite controversial.
• 27:49
  The nuclear industry uses the climate scare to sell reactors.
• 27:54
  I want to hear whether you think that's a very good idea.
• 27:57
  So stay tuned.
• 27:57
  We'll be right back after the break.
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• 32:33
  So we're back with Gordon Tom, Energy Senior Fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation.
• 32:38
  He's our guest today.
• 32:39
  You know, one thing that just drives me crazy is how the World Nuclear Association, uh a few years ago under John Rich out of London, England, he said, not millions, but billions of people will be affected across the world if we don't build nuclear reactors because of the horrible climate change.
• 32:56
  You know, and it's funny because I use it as a bit of a joke in my presentations, and I show a slide of the planet Krypton being destroyed, and I say, Yeah, this is like complete fiction.
• 33:07
  So what do you guys think?
• 33:09
  What do you guys think?
• 33:10
  You're you know, you're both very familiar with nuclear power.
• 33:12
  What do you think of them using the climate scare to sell reactors?
• 33:18
  Um, I I in short I I find it disingenuous and foolish.
• 33:24
  Yeah.
• 33:25
  In 1987 or somewhere in that neighborhood, late late 80s, I was still doing uh taking media calls at Three Mile Island, and somebody caught up and asked about I think it had to do with uh it might have been a follow-up on to Hansen's testimony at in Congress.
• 33:42
  Oh, yeah.
• 33:43
  I wasn't even I was vaguely, I was I'm not sure if I was even aware of it at the time, to be honest with you.
• 33:48
  But they asked, they're asking about what wouldn't you want to when you want to build nuclear power plants because of client because of they were calling it global warming.
• 33:56
  And I I just could not bring myself to you know go down that path.
• 34:00
  I said, Well, if you're in if if you're concerned about emissions of carbon dioxide, nuclear power would be a technology to look at because we it emits virtually nothing.
• 34:13
  That's as far as I would go, but I to hang your hat for nuclear power to hang his hat on something as um fallacious is the claim that we're uh damaging the planet by emitting carbon dioxide is uh I think just foolish.
• 34:29
  There's plenty of reasons to do to develop nuclear power.
• 34:32
  Yeah, you know, one of the concerns I have is that you know, the technical expertise and honesty of the nuclear industry, generally speaking, has been very high.
• 34:42
  And you know, for them to then turn and use basically a hoax to support their industry.
• 34:48
  I mean, my concern is that when the climate scare collapses, which it will eventually, and it is right now in the United States, not in Canada yet, unfortunately.
• 34:56
  But I mean, everybody who used it to market their products will be disgraced.
• 35:00
  People will say, you didn't know what you're talking about.
• 35:02
  How can we trust you on other things?
• 35:04
  So I mean, Todd, don't you think that they'll lose their reputation for being technically super competent when the whole climate scare collapses?
• 35:14
  Well, yeah, and I think you the the worry you then have to have is do you get lumped in with renewables?
• 35:20
  Oh, yeah.
• 35:21
  You do you get lumped in as an unreliable technology when there couldn't be a better technology?
• 35:27
  Uh always said with nuclear my years now, you know, not as much as Gordon, but being around so many industry folks and uh whether on the the NGO side or industry, they don't do a very good job of communications.
• 35:44
  They many times too, they can I I have found that they can be extremely arrogant.
• 35:51
  And you're there there's a huge arrogance that we're the smartest guys in the room.
• 35:55
  And I remember I said a few of them before, and like, yes, you actually are.
• 35:59
  You know, I've talked to some reactor developers and EPCs, and you go, I I fully agree with how intelligent you are, but you you still have to go put your product in the middle of someone's neighborhood.
• 36:11
  You whether you like it or not, uh, you still have to go interact with the public.
• 36:16
  It reminds me a little bit of a pro athlete.
• 36:19
  You know, pro athletes who do dumb things to their fans.
• 36:22
  You go, well, somebody's got to come buy these tickets in your jerseys and turn on, you know, buy cable packages.
• 36:29
  You're botting the very no one's not saying that you can't throw a football or shoot a basketball, or you aren't more physically gifted than 9.9 repeating the rest of the planet.
• 36:41
  But we're the ones with the with the checkbooks.
• 36:43
  And the same thing with nuclear, Tom.
• 36:45
  I I the concerns to me would be you guys are you still haven't really learned.
• 36:51
  And secondly, do you you why not tout your technology?
• 36:55
  Why not tout these these plants can run a hundred years?
• 36:58
  Why not tell that they're they always work?
• 37:01
  What and I, if I were these guys, I'd say, come visit our nuclear power plant.
• 37:05
  If you visit a nuclear power plant, Tom, you've never seen something that's this clean and runs this well, and the engineering is this good.
• 37:14
  And yes, the people do care.
• 37:16
  And but at the end of the day, pardon my friendship, the damn thing's always on.
• 37:22
  Yeah.
• 37:23
  It's always on in 60 years, 80 years later, and I know people talk about these high capital costs.
• 37:30
  Okay, yes, it is, but do the math.
• 37:34
  Go amortize it.
• 37:36
  Because at the very least, 50 at the pardon, the longest is 15 years.
• 37:41
  And then you've got another 45, 60, I don't know, 75 years, where it's just printing money.
• 37:50
  So I I would severely caution them.
• 37:55
  I'd say exactly what Gordon just said, and I would severely caution them.
• 37:59
  Yeah, we actually opened it up with climate scare.
• 38:02
  Yeah.
• 38:02
  When John Rich was saying these crazy things, he was going all over the world, and you know, it's it sounded like science fiction.
• 38:09
  Um, we wrote a letter actually to them in the in the UK, International Climate Science Coalition.
• 38:15
  We said, look, nuclear power is great for all kinds of reasons, but you're not going to stop climate change no matter how many reactors you build.
• 38:23
  And eventually people are going to realize that.
• 38:25
  We got a letter back from their climate advisor.
• 38:28
  Okay, and he was saying, oh, you know, it's the end of the world if we don't have nuclear.
• 38:32
  They just went on and on about it.
• 38:34
  I mean, in the United States, do they still do that?
• 38:36
  I I'm not totally up to date.
• 38:38
  Are the reactor companies still saying this is a solution to climate change?
• 38:43
  Now that you ask the question, I haven't heard that.
• 38:46
  Oh, good.
• 38:47
  But I you know, I don't follow it that closely either.
• 38:51
  I I haven't heard that.
• 38:53
  I mean, you'll kind of you'll just you'll certainly hear a lot about lower emissions.
• 38:57
  Yeah, you know, zero, either zero emissions or lower emissions, but you know, you you're at least what I, you know, you you really hear the wrap up of there's such a massive demand for power, you build a nuclear power plant, you turn it on, you've got the power.
• 39:13
  You know, it's why do you see three mile and reopening again?
• 39:17
  Because Microsoft realizes the moment I refurbish that reactor, put about a billion dollars into it, get it up and running again.
• 39:24
  It's totally fine.
• 39:25
  That that's what's always so funny to me about this whole argument that no one's made is that you scared the living hell out of everybody, but yet somehow it's fine.
• 39:34
  I'm gonna turn the other one on right next to it.
• 39:37
  Like, yeah, wait a minute.
• 39:38
  Wait, wait, we can't have both ways.
• 39:39
  So if it's the world's worst thing in the and supposedly the waste is so bad, Microsoft grossly over.
• 39:46
  I mean, Tom, grossly overpaid their power purchasing agreement.
• 39:51
  Wait, the one reactor still has that big hydrogen bubble.
• 39:54
  We don't care, it's fine.
• 39:57
  It doesn't make that's what's still a little environmental.
• 40:00
  Climate stuff, you just go it it doesn't.
• 40:03
  I don't have to be a physicist, a chemist, an engineer, uh even a communication specialist.
• 40:09
  I just have to use the tools of critical reasoning to go, if it was so dangerous, why am I turning back on the one right next to it that our guest here has been to numerous times?
• 40:22
  Yeah, it's like the way Bill Gates is pulled away from the climate scare, you know.
• 40:26
  I mean, he needs power, and in some places it's going to be fossil fuels, you know.
• 40:31
  I I'd like to go back to the uh improvement of circumstances in Pennsylvania.
• 40:36
  It's interesting.
• 40:36
  Rachel Gleason of the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, she lists quote over regulation and permitting roadblocks, unquote, among her organization's top concerns.
• 40:47
  She says there's a need for fewer bureaucratic and politically motivated state and federal agencies.
• 40:52
  Now, first of all, Gordon, can you comment on that?
• 40:55
  Because how much of a role is overregulation playing in Pennsylvania's decline from being, you know, the leading country, or sorry, the leading state in a lot of ways.
• 41:06
  Well, uh, I can tell you I've been to energy conferences um uh as recently as a year ago, I can remember.
• 41:16
  And where there were people in the natural gas industry talking about how much easier it is to do business in Ohio, which is right next door to us compared to Pennsylvania, because the regulators in Ohio are willing to work with you if there's a problem, work a you know, find a solution.
• 41:39
  Where in Pennsylvania, there's a tendency to go right to fines to stonewall you to be to slow walk permitting.
• 41:51
  Um I've had a couple of people they wouldn't go on the record for it with me, but a couple people say one of the issues that uh in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is at one time many of the regulators, staff members in that department had had had experience in industry and understood both sides of the issue.
• 42:18
  You know, there was a need to there was a need to regulate, but there's also a need to operate, and you had to find a way to do both satisfy both those demands.
• 42:27
  In more recent years, there's been a lot of graduates out of environmental programs at universities who are lift left wing, and they come out with an agenda, you know, an agenda to uh I don't know what I I hesitate to put words to it because I can't read their minds, but it's it's not conducive to um operating a business, right?
• 42:51
  And quashing squashing fossil fuels, right?
• 42:54
  Yeah, and fossil fuels in particular.
• 42:56
  That's right.
• 42:57
  Yeah, so it's it's a problem, it's a cultural problem.
• 43:00
  It sounds to me like there's a cultural problem in uh in some of our regulatory agencies.
• 43:06
  Yeah, the Trump administration may have found that in the EP at EPA.
• 43:10
  Yeah.
• 43:10
  So how much of this is driven by climate change concerns?
• 43:14
  I mean, is that the major one?
• 43:16
  It's it's so curious.
• 43:17
  It's that's so curious.
• 43:20
  When you back in 2019, when then Governor Tom Wolf introduced his plan to put Pennsylvania into the regional greenhouse gas initiative, which is again a carbon tax, a tax on fossil fuels.
• 43:34
  Uh the DEP, the Department of Environmental Protection produced a document to support that proposal, and they talked about climate change and this and that, but they never got into saying if you do this, it'll do that.
• 43:49
  If you know, they you know they they never and if they did say something along those lines, they never provided data to rack it up.
• 43:56
  They just would say, you know, they would make predictions like, oh, in 50 years, um, the dairy industry will be hurt by climate change in Pennsylvania.
• 44:06
  The dairy industry is going to be hurt by climate change.
• 44:08
  But they had, you know, it was so just so there was no science behind it.
• 44:16
  And now if they talk about increasing, for instance, if they talk about uh, in fact, this one bill I was talking about for data centers, uh, would require data center to use 25% of us get 25% of its electricity from renewable sources, quote unquote, like solar and solar and wind.
• 44:38
  Well, they they they present it as though just because that would be a good thing to do.
• 44:43
  There's no justification for it.
• 44:45
  Yeah, and no acknowledgement that it would cost more money, no acknowledgement that you it's first it's physically impossible to get 25% of their electricity from from solar and wind because it's just not available.
• 44:57
  Yeah, yeah.
• 44:58
  There's not that much electricity available.
• 45:00
  Do you think all the new regulations that they're bringing up, the bills and stuff to try to block the data centers?
• 45:06
  I mean, that's essentially what it boils down to.
• 45:08
  Do you think they're driven by the climate thing, especially when they talk about energy?
• 45:14
  I think the personalities who are driving some of this are driven by the climate thing in their own heads, they have it as a real thing.
• 45:22
  I I don't expect these bills to get it go anywhere.
• 45:25
  I'd be very surprised.
• 45:27
  I'd be very surprised.
• 45:28
  Number one, there's a dem there's a Republican leadership in the state senate.
• 45:35
  So do you think this massive windfall of data centers, do you think it'll really happen?
• 45:40
  I think some portion of it probably will, yeah, because there's such a need and such an incentive.
• 45:47
  Whether whether there's 92 billion dollars worth of investments that ever happen, I don't know.
• 45:51
  Yeah, for sure.
• 45:52
  Yeah.
• 45:53
  Now, to end on a somewhat positive note, you say in your December 1st article that, quote, regulatory reform found its way into the newly minted state budget, suggesting the push for common sense regulations is quickly gaining momentum in Harrisburg.
• 46:08
  So can you tell us more about that?
• 46:09
  Is that really as promising as it appears, or is this pie in the sky?
• 46:14
  Well, I you know, like I I don't know if I said this to you or to somebody else recently.
• 46:21
  There seems to be more of an acknowledgement among even the Democrats that electricity has to be affordable, that voters are gonna not getting unhappy about the price of electricity.
• 46:38
  So that alone, I think is going to drive some moderation uh with with some of these people.
• 46:45
  Uh everybody, no.
• 46:47
  I mean, there's some people who don't, they don't care how much money you have to spend on electricity, they're gonna, those are the people who go out and demonstrate in the streets and glue their glue their hands to works of art and so forth, you know.
• 46:58
  But but but but politicians who want to get re-elected, some of them uh especially where they're in competitive districts, some of them are are gonna be moderating, I think.
• 47:10
  Yeah.
• 47:11
  Do you think I'm just curious?
• 47:12
  Do you think those data centers then?
• 47:14
  Because those those are things that can bring a lot of jobs.
• 47:18
  And they the ecosystem that's got to come with it, the wiring, the electrical, um, then it'll create a lot of jobs once the data centers up, but the construction part of it and yeah, yeah, the ecosystem to surround it and the power plants.
• 47:32
  Do you see with with this kind of newfound?
• 47:36
  I don't know how to ask this.
• 47:38
  I guess you see it happening because if you don't do the build out with data centers, electricity prices will go up.
• 47:45
  But yet Pennsylvania is a perfect place to put data centers because you have mild to colder weather, and for listeners, uh data centers really work in cold cold climates.
• 47:56
  I expect Canada to have a proliferation of them versus hotter climates because they they produce so much heat and takes much water to cool them down.
• 48:03
  What what do you do you see that taking place in Pennsylvania?
• 48:07
  These hey, let's bring the jobs and let's bring the economics, but we're trying to balance the higher electricity prices of the higher electric or the higher demand.
• 48:17
  I think if it's done properly, it doesn't necessarily mean to I don't think the introduction of data centers necessarily need need to translate into higher electricity prices if yeah, if there's a uh a reasonable regulation of them.
• 48:30
  For instance, if uh if a data center needs 10 megawatts of electricity and they build a 10 megawatt plant there, why you know the other can and and the data center pays for it?
• 48:44
  I don't think other consumers need to be burdened with it.
• 48:48
  You know, there's now there that there might be reason for legislators or to get involved in that sort of thing to make sure that that happens that way, because I'm sure there's operators of data centers would love to share the cost of their power with other consumers, right?
• 49:06
  Yeah, I'm sure they would.
• 49:08
  That's just human nature.
• 49:09
  Yeah, so yeah, to give you folks a warning as to what could happen if you let the environmentalists continue to dominate, they did dominate in Ontario.
• 49:19
  And Dalton McGuinty, who was the premier uh back back around 2002, we were getting 25% of our electricity from coal, and they were very in it, inexpensive coal plants.
• 49:30
  They were using you know modern pollution technology, they were great.
• 49:33
  He had a news conference where he had a big pile of coal on the table, and he said, Oh, this is old technology, we're gonna get rid of it.
• 49:40
  Of course, it's not technology, it's a resource.
• 49:43
  It depends how you burn it.
• 49:44
  But regardless, they did get rid of it.
• 49:46
  They went to zero.
• 49:48
  And the price of um electricity didn't go up by 30 or 20 or 20%.
• 49:53
  It went up by a hundred percent.
• 49:55
  We had a doubling, at times tripling of electricity costs because we talked.
• 50:00
  Totally got rid of our coal and we built lots and lots of wind turbines.
• 50:04
  So I mean I sort of laugh when I hear you guys complaining about a 20 or 30% rise.
• 50:08
  I say, whoa, I wish we had that.
• 50:11
  Because Ottawa, I should say Ontario is a great example of what happens when environmentalists dominate.
• 50:17
  You know, they make really stupid decisions.
• 50:19
  And the funny thing is Dalton McGuinty, the premier, when he finished being premier, he moved out of the province.
• 50:26
  So he didn't even suffer the impact of his own decisions.
• 50:30
  You know, in fact, he took a job at an American university.
• 50:33
  But Todd, in in Texas, are they being more practical?
• 50:36
  Like there are you really laden down with regulations the way they are in Pennsylvania.
• 50:43
  Um I wouldn't say laden down, but what they did do is Texas now is the number one state for renewables.
• 50:50
  Yeah, wind especially, eh?
• 50:51
  Wind, especially, they're dramatically catching up to solar.
• 50:55
  Uh the subsidies here, you know, along with the along with the federal subsidies of just it's crushing the grid.
• 51:03
  Um it's it is you're seeing higher electric electricity prices all because of renewables.
• 51:09
  There's a natural gas fund that people actually will not even use as much because they can't they can't justify it.
• 51:16
  They can't because you know, this is an unregular, this is a deregulated market.
• 51:20
  And so the spot price daily, obviously, if I'm solar and it's sunny and it's Texas and it's sunny here a lot, and it's hot here a lot, and I have more subsidies than coal, natural gas, or nuclear.
• 51:33
  I went so really the only build out right now is renewables in Texas.
• 51:39
  There's there's there's one or two gas plants being built, no nuclear being built, they're trying with nuclear power.
• 51:46
  Um, Texas uses about 88 gigawatts, 90 gigawatts of power during its peak demand.
• 51:53
  Uh, I think there's now a hundred and seventy or 180 gigawatts on the grid.
• 51:59
  Those are renewables because as we know, they're intermittent.
• 52:02
  They're here one second, they're gone the other.
• 52:05
  And right now in Texas, which people don't realize is Texas can get dramatically cold.
• 52:11
  Oh, for the next, yeah.
• 52:13
  Uh, you you don't think of it that way because you know, the state's generally hot six to nine months out of the year, but December, January, and February here.
• 52:21
  It I mean, it will be in the teens.
• 52:24
  We're we are we've just we've just had like three or four days in a row where at night time it's been in the 30s and high 20s.
• 52:32
  Yeah.
• 52:33
  Um we've got a we've got a real issue with this grid right now.
• 52:36
  When you when you read about ERCOT, our grid operator, along with PJM and Mysode, typically right now it is ERCOT and PJM and Kzone California that are kind of all battling for which grid is is the least amount of stability.
• 52:51
  Yeah.
• 52:51
  Well, you remember with uh Winter Storm Uri 2021, I believe it was.
• 52:56
  You had, according to the Wall Street Journal, you had up to 700 people die because of the lack of power, massive blackouts.
• 53:03
  And of course, the media went, and this is a question for Gordon.
• 53:06
  The media seemed to go out of their way to excuse renewable power.
• 53:10
  You know, it's interesting because Greg Goodnight with that um the right climate stuff group out of um the NASA retired engineers and and astronauts, he showed very clearly that it largely was wind power, the failure of wind power during that storm that caused the problems.
• 53:26
  Yet we see media, in fact, I can remember on uh CNBC, they had one fellow speaking, and right across the screen, it was not caused by wind power.
• 53:35
  So, Gordon, I mean, you know, do you see that the media go out of their way to make sure that the public are not aware of the media or of the consequences of going to wind and solar?
• 53:48
  Well, some of them exactly.
• 53:49
  I mean, there's just some media, they're just absolutely dishonest, or in some in some cases, some of the personalities are not well informed.
• 53:58
  I don't know.
• 53:59
  Yeah, you know, I I was a newspaper reporter myself for 11 years, and I went into it right before Watergate.
• 54:08
  So after Watergate, you saw started to see a shift.
• 54:13
  I was not that tuned into it at the time, but even in a small regional newspaper where I worked, you started to see I was there 11 years, and toward the end of it, you started to see reporters and some editors get more interested in an enticing headline than in a substantive story.
• 54:31
  Okay.
• 54:31
  Yeah.
• 54:32
  And by the time I got to Three Mile Island, then I saw a CBS reporter plant a for sale sign in front of a house so she could do a as a prop for a story that housing prices were collapsing around TMI when they were not at all collapsing around TMI.
• 54:51
  Yeah.
• 54:52
  Yeah.
• 54:53
  You know.
• 54:54
  So I mean, it sounds like there's a gradual movement though within Pennsylvania at large to move into a more common sense direction.
• 55:03
  And so to end our program on a on a bit of a positive note, do you see this newly minted state budget as a sign that we're moving towards more practical energy policies?
• 55:14
  We we certainly hope so.
• 55:15
  And uh, we're going to take it as a sign for that and and move up um move cautiously along those lines.
• 55:22
  I think there's still plenty of reason for people like us to be putting out uh factual information and presenting context to all kinds of stories, you know, that yeah, yes, there's globe, yes, the the the planet might be warming.
• 55:40
  It has been warming and getting in alternately warming and cooling for millions, billions of years.
• 55:48
  Exactly.
• 55:49
  And there's not anything we can do about it, but we certainly can adapt to it.
• 55:54
  Yeah, you you laugh.
• 55:55
  I had Greenpeace at my door uh a few years ago, and they were saying, well, you contribute to help us stop climate change.
• 56:01
  And I said, Oh, will you please stop the next glacial?
• 56:04
  Because I know that the last one, there's nobody coup could live in Canada because there was two kilometers of ice over my head, and they looked at me, you know.
• 56:12
  My dad used to say that if a lot of these activists spent a little more time learning, they wouldn't be activists because a lot of their causes are just crazy.
• 56:21
  So, yeah, it's a good thing though to hear that Pennsylvania is turning a corner, at least with respect to this, and hopefully get back to common sense.
• 56:28
  So, our guest today has been Gordon Tom, Energy Senior Fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation.
• 56:33
  So, thanks so much for being our guest today, Gord.
• 56:35
  It was an interesting discussion.
• 56:37
  Well, you're welcome.
• 56:38
  I appreciate the opportunity.
• 56:40
  Yeah, sure.
• 56:40
  Well, this is Tom Harrison, my co-host Todd Royal with our guest Gordon Tom signing out from the other side of the story.