Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Nuclear Power The Answer?" with Zion Lights

Transcript

"Is Nuclear Power The Answer?" with Zion Lights · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and this is a dangerous
• 0:06
  idea that has very much waxed and waned in its dangerousness over the course of many
• 0:14
  decades' dizz-dizz, not sure why dangerousness has had an extremist, but roll with it.
• 0:19
  This is all fun and games. Nuclear power. Nuclear energy. What do you think of it? Good
• 0:25
  or bad? Thumbs up or thumbs down. You're not allowed nuance in this conversation. You're
• 0:31
  either in favor of Chernobyl happening everywhere all the time, or you've got your head in the
• 0:37
  sand. You don't realize that nuclear is an essential part of our green future. I have
• 0:42
  been contacted a lot on social media about people saying, well, don't you talk about nuclear
• 0:46
  on the show? You've done lots of stuff about in the environment and about the electrical
• 0:51
  grid. We had soil Griffithon, the wonderful soil Griffith. If you haven't listened to that
• 0:55
  episode, you should. It's kind of mind-blowing about what the next phase of human evolution
• 1:01
  in our energy consumption is. How we're going to have networked suburbs of your car, is
• 1:08
  your battery for your house, and your house is selling rooftop solar to your neighbors,
• 1:13
  and the grid is smart, and all of the energy is renewable. We have this in the palm of our
• 1:18
  hands right now. It's just a matter of making the necessary investments to make it happen,
• 1:23
  and I get super, super excited. Then someone says, well, actually, you've crunched the numbers
• 1:29
  right right now. We can't do that yet and get all the energy we need, so there's still
• 1:36
  a gap missing. Globally, maybe not in some countries. I raised this with today's guest. Maybe
• 1:42
  in countries like Australia, that are bloody hot and blowy and sparsely populated, you
• 1:47
  can do 100% renewable. That may not be the case in Belgium. Maybe Belgium needs a nuclear
• 1:55
  power plant. People say, why is there this kind of taboo around nuclear? Nuclear has to
• 2:02
  be part of the solution. Why aren't we talking about it as part of the solution? I thought,
• 2:06
  do I get on a nuclear scientist-boring person who's going to go, okay, power is, you're
• 2:13
  going to go, power, or by definition, do I not want a nuclear science-boring person? Would
• 2:19
  I pretty much rule out of a podcast, an auditory medium, someone who goes, you wouldn't want
• 2:27
  to listen to such a person? I thought, let's talk to someone who has had the 180 that the
• 2:36
  whole industry is trying to get the regular person to have. Zeyon Light is an activist,
• 2:42
  a science communicator, has spent most of her life being an environmental protester and
• 2:49
  is protestered outside qualified power stations and so on. She was a spokesperson for extinction
• 2:55
  rebellion, the outfit that has been doing all those silly stunts like trying paint on
• 3:01
  paintings and stuff like that on great works of art. As such, she was always very, very
• 3:07
  anti-nuclear because that is just one of the policy platforms of such wild-eyed green
• 3:14
  hippies. I love you, I love you wild-eyed green hippies. And she had to change her part. And
• 3:19
  now she talks about the necessity of nuclear power as being part of the energy mix. She's
• 3:27
  a public speaker, she's appeared on BBC Politics Live and Good Morning Britain and Sky News
• 3:34
  on Andrew Neal's show, such a classic show. And I don't know whether I've been swayed much
• 3:41
  further in favor of nuclear as a result of this conversation, but you may be, all you may not.
• 3:45
  You may say, I see through this charade that Zeyon is trying to present to me. But I hope you
• 3:51
  enjoy this. You can find more of Zeyon Light's writing and argument on her substax. She also has
• 3:56
  a substac. It's ZeyonLights.substac.com. That's Zeyon spelled like Zeyon, Israel, Z-I-O-N, or Z-I-O-N,
• 4:04
  if you're a lesson on America. She's also written a book called The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting
• 4:09
  and she contributed to zero waste kids and something of a normal. I hope you enjoy this chat with Zeyon
• 4:17
  Light's.
• 4:27
  Hi, it's South of London. It's a new Britain, I'm in Devon.
• 4:32
  I do. I know it well. I think everyone knows Devon.
• 4:37
  Yeah, it's a really beautiful part of the world.
• 4:39
  And it has its namesake in a form of baloney. A form of princess meat.
• 4:44
  Yeah, it's a quirky little place.
• 4:49
  And did you ride out the pandemic there?
• 4:53
  I did. It was the best place to be, to be honest.
• 4:57
  I mean, I missed the travel. But when I travel, let's hear that. I like to come back to.
• 5:01
  It's very green. There's a lot of space. And my friends in London really suffered not having
• 5:09
  that kind of outdoor access and small houses, small flats. Yeah.
• 5:14
  Yeah, so I honestly can't complain. The kids were home from school, so we went to the park
• 5:19
  every day. We're right by a valley park. It was, aside from just being very isolated because
• 5:24
  I'm also single parents. So, you know, I didn't, we've seen any adults for several months
• 5:29
  because it was very strict. The lockdown here was very strict. It was, we weathered it okay,
• 5:34
  I think, compared to most people. That can do your head in. Not having access to any other
• 5:38
  grown-ups can't it? Oh, man. Do you know the first time after they lifted it and you could see
• 5:43
  people, or they lifted it temporarily in the end, I cried so much. Just after my friend hugged me,
• 5:47
  I just cried. And I didn't even know that I would. I'd not particularly a person. But it was like,
• 5:52
  oh, someone's touching me, you know, not. It's not the same children. Because you're giving,
• 5:56
  you know, you're giving to them all day long, you're giving to them. And yes, someone, someone hugged
• 6:02
  me and they were, you're crazy, honestly. I don't know. I thought I was, but actually human touch
• 6:07
  is kind of important, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And how old are they? How old are the kids?
• 6:12
  11 and 9 now. Right, okay. So the balance of taking and giving should have sort of tipped
• 6:18
  somewhat more towards the, they'll actually give you something. Yeah. But it was just so much
• 6:24
  to navigate. I was trying to work from home. And then the second lockdown was even worse,
• 6:30
  because they were expected to do school work from home. So they had two separate curriculums
• 6:33
  as trying to help them with and do my work, not seeing anybody, not able to get groceries,
• 6:38
  because you couldn't take kids into stores with you. And I'm on my own and the government didn't
• 6:41
  think about that to rely on people. Yeah, had to rely on people dropping off food for me,
• 6:45
  which by the way, is a very independent person sucked. And I couldn't get online shops,
• 6:50
  because they were all booked for like vulnerable groups, like elderly people disabled, which is fine.
• 6:55
  But they just didn't think about such a thing. I'll look for groups. Am I right? I mean, seriously.
• 7:00
  Oh, it's like, no, but that's amazing. You couldn't take children into shops. It was so strict.
• 7:08
  What were the children supposed to do? Not exist. And they were very strict. You know,
• 7:14
  they policed it. People got fined for for seeing family members or trying to go to funerals.
• 7:18
  They were very strict. It was, yeah. This is the yes minister way of running a pandemic. I have
• 7:24
  a brilliant idea. We're going to not let children into shops. But what were the children do?
• 7:29
  Well, they shouldn't have been born. But also now there's so much research on the mental
• 7:35
  health impacts on children. I mean, I didn't disagree with lockdowns at the time. It's complicated.
• 7:40
  And there was a lot going on. And I didn't want my kids to get covered. But actually, the mental
• 7:45
  health impacts on kids have been phenomenal. And that's still playing out here. We've got serious
• 7:49
  anxiety problems, especially with young children who just didn't socialize for pretty much a year.
• 7:54
  Yeah. And they just didn't think about that at all. Yeah. Well, I mean, they probably did
• 8:00
  think about that. And they concluded that, you know, the number of people who would die from
• 8:04
  having hospitals that had zero capacity left. Well, now we've got, yeah, now we've got people
• 8:08
  dying because they completely shut everything down. So all the waiting lists, you know, for
• 8:12
  serious things like cancer, they just shut it all down. Yeah. And now people have died because
• 8:17
  they're still on these waiting lists because they can't catch up. It's just. Yeah. We have
• 8:21
  the same thing. And then the anti-vaxxers look at the spike in deaths and say, see, everybody's
• 8:25
  dying from vaccines. There's this mysterious increase in mortality. And, you know, that is
• 8:30
  largely because of what you're saying. Yeah. We've got that a bit here too. I don't think it's as
• 8:36
  bad here as it is in in America or Australia. But we do have a little bit of that. Yeah.
• 8:42
  Well, also, the, I think they cut off the time limit of saying that you died from COVID at,
• 8:48
  like, 90 days after you caught it here in Australia. So we have quite a lot of people who are dying
• 8:53
  of COVID-related things. They, you know, they're old. They're in firm. They catch COVID. They
• 9:00
  can't quite recover from it. And a hundred days later, they die. But that's not from the COVID
• 9:05
  technically, according to the statistics. So they go into the all cause mortality. And then the
• 9:09
  anti-vaxxers go. See, it was the vaccine. Right. Yeah. Anyway, we can talk about COVID all.
• 9:19
  God, the amount of, the amount of bloody oxygen that COVID has taken up in terms of our
• 9:25
  opportunity cost of what we could have been talking about when we've been talking about this
• 9:29
  pandemic. It reminds me a bit of Brexit as well, but the, the, the amount of intellectual
• 9:35
  capacity and, like, the station hours that have been diverted into these, these, we'd still going
• 9:42
  and still going. We've had, we've recently had future shortages, things like tomatoes,
• 9:48
  because things are being held up because of paperwork and break, basically rule changes because
• 9:53
  of Brexit. So it's opened up another big debate with a lot of people want a second referendum
• 9:59
  with government won't call one. But equally, I'm just kind of like, just, just stop. Please,
• 10:04
  just stop talking about it. It's been so long. And the thing is, if you did call a referendum,
• 10:09
  and then it probably would now be that people wanted to go back in. That's a whole other mess.
• 10:15
  Like, will the EU even let us back in this government doesn't want to go back in? And what will
• 10:20
  happen to all the people who still don't want to go back in? Will they call a third referendum?
• 10:23
  You know, it's just, I'm just, just, just leave it. Just stop. But it's also, it's constantly in
• 10:29
  a headline still. I mean, Brussels wants to send the clear message to any other member state
• 10:33
  that might be doing such, such a thing. You can't just pop out and then pop back in. So they would,
• 10:38
  they would place the most onerous from coming back in. And then another whole, we use
• 10:44
  negotiation about how you get back in. Yeah. And we've, we, yeah, we'll have lost a lot of the
• 10:49
  benefits anyway, I think, either way. Yeah. But I mean, I just avoid, I tend to avoid talking
• 10:54
  about it because I just think it doesn't really go anywhere. Same with the COVID stuff. You know,
• 10:58
  you could say they did this wrong or they did that wrong. It doesn't really change anything now.
• 11:01
  We could deal with pandemics going forward in the future for sure. We should be doing that. I don't
• 11:06
  see a lot of that. Yeah, that's right. It's, I did hear Russell Brand recently, a gentleman who
• 11:15
  has become slightly more erratic and eccentric. Not someone I would put up on a pedestal
• 11:23
  as the source of all of my words. But nonetheless, such an articulate and, you know, bouncy
• 11:28
  little guy. I still like listening to him from time to time. And he was on Bill Maas show in
• 11:33
  the States. And he was saying that like in terms of Brexit, that if you give the people who've been
• 11:39
  fucked over pretty badly for a long time, a single binary button that says fuck you or not fuck you,
• 11:47
  then yeah, they might press the fuck you button. Like that's basically Brexit in a nutshell. It's
• 11:53
  not like, do we want to be in or out of the EU or this or that or Northern Ireland and where's
• 11:57
  the boarding going to be? Never give a shit about that. It's like, do you want to say fuck you to
• 12:01
  the people who haven't cared about you for a few decades? Sure. Well, it's more complicated than
• 12:08
  that though, right? He's just like, you're saying, Russell Brad did not encapsulate all of the
• 12:12
  nuance. Well, I love Russell Brown. He was so funny when he came on the scene and I don't know
• 12:16
  what happened to him. He was better when he was just doing comedy. He was brilliant. I don't know
• 12:21
  what happened to him. But, you know, there's a lot of different, if you talk to 10 different people
• 12:27
  who voted leave and you ask them why you will get 10 different reasons. And there was a lot of
• 12:32
  it was misinformation. There was a lot of misinformation from the leaf campaign with Nigel
• 12:36
  Frosge behind it. Not just Nigel. Bloody Bobo driving around in his big double-decker bus saying,
• 12:43
  you know. Well, yeah, yeah, but Nigel really led that campaign. I don't know how much you know
• 12:48
  about British politics, but he basically led that campaign. UKIP was huge then. It was quite
• 12:52
  scary because down in Devon you get a lot of KIPAs. It's not as multicultural and as tolerant as
• 12:59
  cities like London and Bristol. So we had a lot of KIPAs here. I even for the first time in my
• 13:03
  entire life live in Britain had a couple of racist comments which shocked me. Yeah, it got really
• 13:08
  quite nasty. There was quite nasty rhetoric around the campaign. And these people are completely
• 13:12
  misled. You know, you were communities who feel that they're struggling because minorities have
• 13:17
  come in, which is funny, right? Because Devon has the smallest number of minorities in the country.
• 13:21
  But that's why they're more afraid because, you know, exposed to its contact theory and science.
• 13:26
  But anyway, they, yeah, so basically this deal was Johnson, if you back leaves, then I'll
• 13:35
  disband UKIP at the time of the election. You'll get a majority because previously the conservatives
• 13:39
  weren't able to get a majority. And they did with UKIP disbanded, which, you know, doesn't
• 13:44
  exist anymore. All those voters went over to Johnson because he'd campaigned for Brexit.
• 13:50
  And now he's still pandering. The party's still pandering to them just, you know, this week saying,
• 13:54
  we're going to stop all migrants coming in. And it's really honestly just the minority of the
• 13:58
  population. But they need those votes. And it's completely taken over. All the rhetoric, there's
• 14:04
  so many things that we should be talking about, I think, but it's completely taken over. Yeah.
• 14:11
  Yeah. As an Australian, I've been struggling with this, this Faustian act for decades now that,
• 14:18
  you know, we have an incredibly harsh policy towards both arrivals and the virus policy
• 14:25
  towards legitimately resettled migrants and humanitarian refugees. And it's, you know,
• 14:34
  that people say you can't have the one without the other because you're not going to get public
• 14:37
  support for high levels of immigration unless people feel like they can control the borders. And
• 14:41
  so there might be a bit of a bit of that going on. But to see Britain specifically target, like,
• 14:48
  you refugees as being people who made it, as a grandchild, as a child of refugees myself,
• 14:55
  who they were fled World War II. Right. Yeah. And frustrated when my dad was eight years old,
• 15:00
  although it's like, it's calling. Yeah. And it's hateful rhetoric. I mean, I'm surprised
• 15:05
  they can use the language they use. But they, um, they honestly have so little support. They have
• 15:10
  a small faction of people that support them and who, you know, believe all the rhetoric. But most,
• 15:14
  I would still say most Britons are very tolerant and don't recognise. I mean, if you look at the polls,
• 15:19
  if you feel, uh, dejected by their, their rhetoric, just look at the polls, they've never been so
• 15:24
  unpopular. They will be out of the next general election. No question. Yeah. But they won't call one.
• 15:29
  So we're all waiting for next year. They will, even Westminster is voting 60-70% against them. They
• 15:35
  are, they're so unpopular. That was the Camini Prime Minister that they cycled through five.
• 15:40
  They've all had really low pot. In fact, I think Johnson might have been the most popular
• 15:44
  of them all. Um, cheese. That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. Soon next, not popular. And trust was extremely
• 15:50
  unpopular. They hated her and may they hated her too. Yeah. So, um, and that's, that's even their
• 15:54
  own party. You know, they've got about trust. Yeah. They're, she was a little sweaty who was in
• 16:00
  power. Yeah. She was the shortest in British history. It was the shortest. And that was because
• 16:09
  they were struggling to find a candidate. So, Rishi really was the last at the bottom of a barrel.
• 16:13
  They didn't want to. All right. We'll take the well-educated article at Indian bloke.
• 16:18
  Let's do it. Yeah. But, um, yeah. So I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not dejected by it. They'll
• 16:27
  be out soon. And, and I think, I think they've done a lot of damage, but all those things can be
• 16:31
  repaired. You know, the NHS could be repaired. There's a lot of stuff that can be repaired.
• 16:35
  I don't think anything's beyond, you know, savable. It's just really pants to be British at the
• 16:40
  moment. Yeah. For many different reasons. And to be honest, I don't see why asylum seekers would
• 16:45
  want to come here. This is not a welcoming country right now. I don't know if you saw, but all
• 16:50
  this stuff, this staring up, there are actually people, mobs of people going outside centers where
• 16:55
  they found out that asylum seekers were being held temporarily. And they were, you know, chanting,
• 17:00
  had horrible placards. They set fire to some cars, telling them to get out. Imagine going through
• 17:06
  who knows what in their country. And, and thinking, I finally reached the shore on some
• 17:11
  rickety boat. I reached the shore and I'm safe. And then you've got people saying, we don't want
• 17:14
  you to go home. It was, I saw the video and I was, I made me sad, you know, we used to be a really
• 17:20
  tolerant country. I say it's a brown woman who's living here my whole life who has my
• 17:26
  grandparents, right? Not saying they haven't been occasional issues, but I think you'll get that
• 17:30
  in any kind of, you know, you'll, you'll get that in any minority group. They'll always be some
• 17:34
  frictions. That's just people. But generally, very tolerant welcoming people. And yeah,
• 17:40
  I mean, they were probably there was probably a lot of eyebrow raising and hostility when our
• 17:46
  parents and grandparents. Oh, yeah, there was, yeah. It was something of a golden age in the
• 17:51
  maybe high season, early. Yeah, no, there was. And that was the time of, you know,
• 17:55
  Enoch Powell was at large then. He said some awful things. And my parents, my dad said to me once,
• 18:01
  bless him. He said, they'll never accept you. He spoke about white people. They'll never accept.
• 18:06
  You can be friends with them and you can marry one, which I did. But they'll never accept you.
• 18:09
  And he was wrong, you know, he was wrong. But he was, that was his experience and I understood that.
• 18:15
  But at the same time, he was welcomed here as a worker. He was brilliant as a worker. Factory
• 18:19
  workers spent his entire life working in these factories helped to build Britain, you know. So,
• 18:25
  you know, there was, he was appreciated and also not appreciated. And he had a strong working class
• 18:31
  community in those factories where he was accepted because their workers and there's a very kind of,
• 18:36
  you know, working class element back then with miners with factory workers when we had all that
• 18:39
  industry, which we don't anymore. So they were able to look past differences.
• 18:47
  It's funny that your dad would say, you know, they'll never accept you because that was true
• 18:51
  of that generation. And then I feel like our generation has said, actually, no, we all can.
• 18:58
  With this, like, there is glory and majesty and beauty in the melting pot and we are all,
• 19:03
  we do accept each other. And now, I mean, not sound like a comagenely old man, but it's the
• 19:09
  rhetoric that I hear from the younger worksters is actually drifting back to your dad. I hate it.
• 19:14
  I hate it. But I hate it because we spend like the reality, they're never going to accept us.
• 19:20
  It's what I've said about when I listen to you talking about, you know, the Iranian cab driver
• 19:25
  and you didn't feel you could ask, that just makes me sad. Because actually, that's fine to
• 19:29
  people. So on a recent part, I was saying that I couldn't ask him where he was from.
• 19:34
  Yeah, that's the one. But you know, the reason we don't like, I don't like that. I mean,
• 19:40
  obviously, there will be some people at color who don't like it. But for me, you've already
• 19:44
  labelled me and pigeonholed me. But what seems to be happening with younger people is they like the
• 19:48
  labels more than ever. And even I've been in meetings now and you have to start meeting with your
• 19:53
  pronouns. And I just think, why? Just why? Like, if you want different pronouns, I respect that.
• 20:00
  I use it. It takes nothing from me to do that. But there's just so much label. Someone who's
• 20:05
  tried to escape these labels for my whole life, you know, I always have to tick on the forms,
• 20:10
  Asian British. It's changed over the years. British Asian, British Indian, Indian, whatever.
• 20:15
  You know, every form that ever complete has that. And we've just lived with it. We've just,
• 20:19
  you know, what we just accepted it. I only recently found out that in Wales, they have the option
• 20:25
  of English, Indian. And I thought that was interesting because well,
• 20:29
  wow, our Irish was stirring up all this you get stuff. He said, these foreigners, they don't
• 20:33
  identify as English. And I did think that's interesting because I have always identified as
• 20:36
  British. And then it occurred to me that we've never had the option to say English. It's not an
• 20:41
  option on any tick form in England. So, you know, change, change, but fine, whatever, I'll just
• 20:47
  tick whatever box. And now you've got all these people say, we want all these extra boxes is
• 20:51
  really important. And I'm thinking, is that where it's really important? I feel like this is a whole
• 20:56
  generation of people who just sucked it up and lived with it. And actually, we're okay. You know,
• 21:01
  it's just a box to me. It's, you know, I am British. I am English. That's, that's just a fact.
• 21:08
  Yeah. I am, you know, it's all about whether or not you feel accepted and integrated in society.
• 21:14
  And I am and I do. So, yeah, I don't need, I don't really need to change the boxes, but I,
• 21:21
  I look at the hyper focus now on have you put in the right boxes, you know, why, why isn't there
• 21:26
  a third box for these pronouns or whatever? And I just think, is that the way to resolve these issues?
• 21:31
  Is that going to make people more tolerant? I'm not sure it is. And do you see the, so where are you
• 21:36
  from question as being part of the box mentality or part of the anti box mentality?
• 21:44
  Well, I mean, I can't speak for all Asian people or people of color because some people,
• 21:51
  some people do hate that question and I couldn't see why because you can be asked it a lot and it
• 21:55
  can get annoying. But I, I've never minded because I mean, it's not putting me on a box. It's just
• 22:03
  facts. It's just factually, what's your heritage? Okay, my parents migrated here from the Punjab in
• 22:09
  India, but I am British born and have only been there twice when they made me go and frankly, I hated
• 22:15
  it because rurupoverty, rurupoverty is not that fun, by the way, Josh, it's terrible. It's horrible.
• 22:21
  When you have a lovely place to go back to and spend the night. Exactly. Well, they don't, which is
• 22:26
  why they got in a little boat and came to a bit of nowhere and they can speak language, but they desperately
• 22:31
  wanted out and they miss it, you know, they miss their family, but they'll never go back.
• 22:34
  They always say, oh, we'll go back. They didn't even like it when we visited them and they took
• 22:38
  me as a teenager. They were paranoid about snakes. They were, they didn't like that. There's no
• 22:44
  lighting after dark, it's pitch black. But I remember saying to my dad, but you lived here. Why are
• 22:49
  you so afraid of snakes? But it's, once you get used to that safety, you don't want to go back
• 22:53
  to that risk and there is risk because people do get bitten and die in India. Millions of people
• 22:57
  come on. There's of all the things that could happen to you in India. There's people in the
• 23:02
  village who tell stories about some person who got bitten and it's horrific. The death is
• 23:09
  horrific, right? And the thing is it's treatable, but the problem in the rural areas is the villages
• 23:14
  don't have access to anti-venom and they're like four hours from the nearest hospital and no one
• 23:19
  has a car. So that's the problem. It is treatable, but once you're there, you're just there in
• 23:23
  your stuck. And once you've lived for a long time with access to health care and education,
• 23:28
  all these things and you go to somewhere like that is very shocking for me, but even for them
• 23:32
  going back. Well, as someone, as someone who comes from the nation that is home to nine of the
• 23:38
  10 most venomous snakes in the world, and who constantly has been beautiful. Yeah, but it's
• 23:42
  different. Don't want to come to Australia because it's different because I'll tell you,
• 23:47
  look, I'll be honest with you, I had that preconception before I came last year, I came to Australia
• 23:51
  to do a tour to talk about nuclear gas to come. And that was my first time going there and
• 23:56
  everybody I know said the same thing, like watch out for spiders. Why are you going there? They
• 24:01
  have all these snakes and et cetera, et cetera. But then I got there and I was like, this is safer
• 24:05
  than like most places, because the cities are completely fine, aren't they? It's when you get
• 24:10
  into the sticks that you've got. So it's very, even in the sticks, I don't think a person has died
• 24:16
  of a snake bite in Australia. Well, yeah, well, in India, the problem is that you're in a village,
• 24:22
  you are surrounded by jungle and they live harmoniously. They know there are tigers and they know
• 24:28
  these monkeys, but they do get occasionally bitten. The difference, people do get bitten here.
• 24:33
  The difference is that we have the money, the public health funds, we're anti-vendom everywhere.
• 24:38
  Yeah. So look, India accounts for almost 80% of global snake bite deaths, with over 64,000
• 24:44
  people dying a year. What I'm saying is I've been to clear many times, and every single day is
• 24:50
  an illness of being run over by a motorbike. No, I know. Look, I know what you're saying,
• 24:56
  because I talk about risk. I talk about risk with nuclear rights. It's not going to do you
• 25:03
  No, no, you're right. You are right, because this is what I talk about with risk with nuclear,
• 25:07
  is that people were afraid because of a few meltdowns, but actually the fossil fuels that we're
• 25:11
  dependent on are, you know, contributing so heavily to so many deaths just from air pollution
• 25:16
  alone. And we just live with that, but we're afraid of a few meltdowns. And that, you know, again,
• 25:21
  that risk, risk perception is wrong because of, and it's normally because of a few scary stories.
• 25:25
  You know, you hear a scary story, so I've got bitten by a snake. It stays with you. It's kind of an
• 25:29
  evolutionary thing, I think, right, danger. Whereas with cars, we all just live with the risk of cars,
• 25:34
  when we know statistically that actually, you know, a lot of people will get into car accidents,
• 25:39
  we'll get hit by a car and we'll die. But it's so normal to us. We don't associate it with,
• 25:44
  you know, some rare scary event that fuels out of our control.
• 25:49
  No, that's right. And I mean, cars are a good analogy to plane crashes as well. I mean,
• 25:52
  a plane crashes and it's all over the news for weeks. And, you know, that is a vanishingly tiny
• 26:00
  number of people and a vanishingly low risk in comparison to the background sort of radiation
• 26:06
  to coin a term of car accidents in place all the time. And maybe, and I've always been partial
• 26:12
  to the analogy of the nuclear accident being a bit like a car crash. It's big and glamorous,
• 26:17
  and it all happens at once and captivates our attention. But we don't pay any attention to the,
• 26:21
  to the people who are dying of pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases because they've been
• 26:27
  inhaling toxic fumes from cars, putting aside climate change for just a moment. But should we
• 26:33
  just start with the safety of nuclear power at the moment because I and many people like me who
• 26:40
  are sort of on the nuclear fence, who you may want to nudge off to one side or another. I think
• 26:45
  I've absorbed now that it's safe, that modern reactors are safe. I haven't been sold on
• 26:54
  why they're actually worth the cost in an era of rapidly developing renewable energy. But let's just
• 27:02
  deal with the safety question first. What is the safety profile of a modern nuclear reactor? Can we
• 27:08
  get a Chernobyl? No, we cannot get a Chernobyl. I wrote an article about this actually for my
• 27:14
  substack on meltdowns and what actually happens in meltdowns, which is vastly different to what people
• 27:21
  imagine happens. And Chernobyl is a completely different example of a meltdown because they used
• 27:30
  a reactor called RBMK and without getting too technical, basically it was because it was a Soviet
• 27:39
  union design and they wanted to use it. They knew that it had flaws, that it was a flawed model
• 27:46
  and they went with that risk anyway. And that reactor was capable of
• 27:52
  exploding, but it was a hydrogen explosion. And therefore there was a lot of radiation released
• 27:59
  by that explosion. Now, no other reactor can explode in that way when they melt down, they just
• 28:03
  shut down. And because of what happened at Chernobyl, all the RBMKs still are used, which are in
• 28:10
  Russia pretty much. They've been upgraded with extra safety systems so that again, they can't
• 28:16
  explode now. So that was a complete one-off. And additionally, the people that died, a few thousand
• 28:23
  people died because of that reaction. It was because of mismanagement more than anything else,
• 28:30
  because they didn't tell people, because they wanted to hide the fact that it had happened. And
• 28:33
  actually the West and World only found out because we can measure and map radiation exposure
• 28:39
  around the world. And we could see this something happening there, but they were even then they
• 28:42
  were denying it. So they kept staff there, they didn't just keep staff there. They invited more
• 28:46
  staff to come and work there in quotations, fix the reactor, which wasn't there anymore. And they
• 28:52
  didn't evacuate the area at all. So people who could have had a mild dose of radiation could have
• 28:57
  been treated with iodine. And they weren't. They weren't even told. Just park all of the obvious
• 29:04
  Soviet malfeasance and ineptitude, because I think people are concerned about the possibility
• 29:11
  of that happening, of something like that happening at all, regardless, even if you had the most
• 29:15
  competent, even if the Norwegians were running it, you still wouldn't want the meltdown to happen,
• 29:20
  even if they were greater, evacuating people afterwards. So, yeah. So it should not be listed.
• 29:25
  And like to basically react to design, like what happens when a tidal wave hits a Fukushima
• 29:29
  reactor? What happened at Three Mile Island? Some are here nuclear advocates saying the latest
• 29:35
  design of, of nuclear reactors and not like that. And basically they can't, like they're, they're
• 29:41
  functionally inert once they go off. And like I don't know, some of them are hebbled bed things
• 29:45
  that have something drop into a cooling pond so that can't melt down or something.
• 29:49
  Yeah, so the new tech is coming along really nicely. And it has, it just has lower risk, I guess.
• 29:59
  But there isn't anywhere that is, the reason I like to talk about fish, just ordinary fish and
• 30:05
  what we use at the moment, which is EPRs or AP1000 reactors, not our BMKs, is because we know that
• 30:12
  they can decarbonize. And for me, that's the most important thing. We need to get off of fossil fuels.
• 30:17
  So why do we need, need nuclear? Well, if we only have renewables, the battery storage isn't good
• 30:24
  enough for us to only rely on renewables, although we need to break that term down because it depends
• 30:28
  on what renewables we're talking about. We can maybe do that in a minute. Fukushima did get hit
• 30:33
  by a tsunami, an earthquake and a tsunami. So it's probably the worst case disaster where just a
• 30:38
  normal reactor, not a flawed design that isn't used anymore, but a normal reactor was hit by
• 30:44
  13 meter high waves and it damaged the emergency diesel generators in the reactor. So they,
• 30:50
  but they evacuated the area. Nobody died. Lots of people died because of the tsunami and the earthquake.
• 30:56
  Nobody died from the meltdown. And actually later report found that the evacuation was unnecessary.
• 31:04
  So they feared a much bigger reaction than actually occurred. So it's not, I mean, you say we
• 31:12
  don't want them to happen. Sure, we don't, but it's still that, that kind of risk analysis where nobody
• 31:17
  died. Lots of people got scared and decided to shut down all the nuclear as a result. But actually,
• 31:22
  more people died from those shutdowns. More, there's masses of data on this. So James Hansen,
• 31:28
  don't know if you've heard of him, he's kind of known as the grandfather of climate change,
• 31:31
  it was the first climate scientist to testify in Congress. Of course, yes, yes. Yeah, to say, look,
• 31:37
  this is happening. He's crunched so many numbers on this. He actually wrote a paper called
• 31:42
  nuclear saves lives as a scientific paper. And he calculated the number of deaths from shutting
• 31:47
  down nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster. So when countries like Germany and Japan
• 31:54
  said we're going to shut them all down now. And he said over a thousand people died a month just
• 31:57
  from those shutdowns because what happened is they went back to fossil fuels. They might have had a
• 32:01
  bit of renewables in the mix, but it's still even right now majority fossil fuels. It's very, very
• 32:05
  hard to wean off of fossil fuels. So that was actually the way you put out the consequences of climate
• 32:10
  change there. Is he just talking about? No, he's just talking about respiratory. Yeah, there's a paper
• 32:15
  on it where he's just so he's taking what it's it's factual as you can get because obviously with
• 32:20
  climate change, there's a lot of variables and it's hard to say whether a specific weather event
• 32:25
  was because of this or wasn't, but with with air pollution, we have masses of data and it is correct
• 32:32
  that many more millions of people died because of these nuclear power shutdowns because France had
• 32:37
  11 sorry, Germany had 11 and they shut they've got three reactors left now, but they've shut 11
• 32:42
  nuclear power plants. There's a lot of clean energy and it hasn't been replaced by renewables.
• 32:46
  They have built lots of renewables and I think that's good and that's helped to bring the cost
• 32:51
  down, but they they still had to back up with something right. So they shut coal and they shut
• 32:56
  nuclear and they found that they ended up reliant on coal and they're burning a lot of coal now
• 33:00
  as you probably saw with the battle of Lutzera. Did you see that? What's that? Oh, so this happened
• 33:07
  recently where they're basically cleared of village in Germany because they want to mine for coal
• 33:12
  there. So a lot of activists back there. Oh, yeah. Gratio went down there. Yeah, but the irony is
• 33:19
  that's the outcome of shutting down nuclear power stations, which are not going to get hit by a
• 33:24
  tsunami earthquake that is not a risk in Germany. It's just misplaced fear and actually people have
• 33:30
  died because of that fear. People will continue to die and that is that is a fact that is not conjecture
• 33:36
  that is based on air pollution alone before you start talking about long-term impacts and impacts
• 33:42
  in other countries because of climate change. The other concern is I can hear the listener thinking
• 33:47
  yes, but what about the toxic waste that lasts for tens of thousands of years and we can get to
• 33:51
  that. So I just want to flag that and park it aside for the moment. I mean, for me once you throw in
• 33:56
  having lived through a preview of what are the next few decades or the next century is going to
• 34:03
  look like in Australia, which is the most vulnerable rich country to climate change. In the form of the
• 34:10
  bushfires in 2019 to 2020 and then floods over the past 12 to 18 months of scales and cost
• 34:19
  and inconvenience and loss of life and loss of just loved ones and everything that people cherish.
• 34:27
  It's relentlessly heartbreaking and it's not going to be fun. Even if you take the most
• 34:35
  moderate estimations about climate chaos and you're sort of a skeptic on this and you think it's
• 34:42
  ridiculous for people to claim that humankind faces an existential threat. At the very least we can
• 34:48
  say it's going to be enormously expensive and a great big pain in the ass and a huge hassle and
• 34:54
  very destabilizing to our politics to be constantly buffered by extreme weather events.
• 34:59
  So for me, the fact that you can park that consideration and still come out in favor of nuclear
• 35:07
  simply on the basis of emissions, like not carbon emissions, but actual emissions that you're
• 35:13
  breathing in and that are making you see is a compelling case for nuclear. It doesn't quite get
• 35:21
  me to the place of believing that it's a better investment given how I mean, I understand why you
• 35:27
  wouldn't want to close a nuclear plant. I'm not sure why you'd want to spend tens or hundreds
• 35:32
  of millions of dollars creating nuclear plants when that same money could be put into renewables.
• 35:38
  And although you say that we don't have the batteries for it yet, you know, you talk to very clever
• 35:43
  people and they're talking about having communities that are networked where your electric car,
• 35:49
  you know, in 10 or 20 years, most vast majority of us are going to be driving electric cars that
• 35:53
  are gigantic batteries that will be part of the grid. We'll be able to sell electricity from our
• 35:58
  rooftop solar back to our neighbors when we're on holidays, you know, and there'll be smart grids,
• 36:05
  like the idea that we need that batteries where the technology is increasing so quickly are going
• 36:11
  to be the impediment to us using wind and solar to get ourselves out of the climate crisis.
• 36:17
  Like I don't see where the necessity of. Yeah, so this is where this is why I changed my mind
• 36:24
  because if anyone knows my background, I used to be an anti-nuclear protestor. I was in the environment
• 36:29
  movement from a very young age. I was arrested in my 20s for shutting down a coal fire
• 36:35
  passation here, which is King's North at the time. I've been, you know, involved for a long time,
• 36:40
  and then my last kind of thing was as a spokesperson for extension rebellion. And I was, when you're in those
• 36:46
  groups, you are just, you know, you're afraid of nuclear. That's your anti-nuclear, that's just
• 36:51
  standard, and you promote renewables, which I did. And I started speaking to experts, and again,
• 36:56
  people like James Hanson, who's crunched numbers on this, and he said very clearly, we're not going
• 37:01
  to be able to do it with renewables alone. The storage isn't there. And this was, this was 15 years
• 37:06
  ago, and I would say exactly what you said, there are advances, it will be here, it's around the
• 37:12
  corner. And I've come to the point now, Joshua, I just think we can't wait to turn more corners.
• 37:17
  We've got to do what we know works now. And we're, has been able to carbonize in the world. What
• 37:22
  large industrial grids have been able to decarbonize? We can look at Sweden, we can look at France,
• 37:26
  places that have already managed to get their emissions down. They have only done it with a
• 37:30
  huge amount of nuclear energy and all hydropower. So Sweden hydropower, because it's geographically
• 37:35
  available, France hasn't had that option, so they've had over 70% nuclear in their mix since the 1980s,
• 37:42
  so these are the countries that have managed that are large industrial grids. Now, has anywhere
• 37:46
  managed to do it with just renewables? If there was a case study where I could say, yeah, this is
• 37:50
  possible, let's do this, let's decarbonize, I would 100% support it. But the only case study I know
• 37:56
  where they tried is, they failed, which was Germany. Right, they had energywinder, this was a policy
• 38:01
  to phase out all nuclear and all coal. And it came off the back of the 20, 2011 Fukushima
• 38:08
  meltdown, because they panicked and they said, right, we've never liked it anyway, they had
• 38:11
  Andrew Lemurkel, the Green Party leading the way and they decided, any gewinder, we're going to
• 38:18
  just go with renewables. They pump loads of money. I mean, you say nuclear is expensive, they spend
• 38:22
  billions and billions on renewables. I'm not saying that that's a mistake because, as you say,
• 38:28
  the costs of not acting are far greater and them doing so enabled an experiment to take place
• 38:34
  where we could see whether or not this worked. And what has been the outcome of that? They found
• 38:39
  that they could not, they could not manage without a base load power. That's just, that is where
• 38:44
  the battery storage is at. There are lots of people, clever people saying, this, that, the other
• 38:48
  about battery storage, great, I've been hearing that for 15 years, but it doesn't exist at scale,
• 38:53
  it doesn't exist where you can store it for more than, you know, even a few hours actually.
• 38:59
  Amazing, if they manage to challenge the laws of physics and create something better than
• 39:04
  that, but they haven't yet. It's very different to running a car. It's a bit, actually, if you
• 39:08
  have any, but let's go. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. You must have been charged quite.
• 39:13
  I can't let you go over saying, if they change the laws of physics, there are everyone who works in
• 39:18
  renewables. There's like, there are so many options. I'm not saying that it's an easy thing to flick
• 39:22
  a switch on right now, but battery technology is run as advancing at runaway speeds. You've got all
• 39:29
  kinds of, I mean, you've got hydro storage. You can, you know, use the electricity to pump water
• 39:33
  up a mountain and then use that, that's a way of storing electricity. You've got these salt
• 39:38
  things where they can store it in superheated salt and then that burns water. I mean, there's a
• 39:43
  bazillion different things that people are working on that don't require you to bridge the laws of
• 39:47
  physics to be able to store. Okay, but hang on a minute. I am, when I say that, I'm quoting
• 39:51
  a renowned physicist. I don't know if you know who he is in Australia. David McKay, a renowned
• 39:57
  physicist. He was knighted. He was a British physicist mathematician. He wrote an entire book on
• 40:03
  this called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. He's passed away now, but he he's made that book
• 40:08
  freely available online for anybody to read and it still are. When was that? I mean, even in the
• 40:14
  past eight years, there's been like revolution. Yeah, so it was 2012, 2014, something like that.
• 40:23
  But no, no, no, but in the book where he basically, it's really good. If, if you like data,
• 40:29
  it's really good. It's not about selling opinions, not news articles. He maps out.
• 40:35
  This is how much land we need for X. This is how many materials we need for Y. This is how
• 40:41
  much energy we need, even if we're saying we're going to reduce how much we use. And the numbers
• 40:46
  do not add up if you don't have any kind of base load for renewables, not for a large industrial grid.
• 40:52
  And it's very, very clear data. And I always urge people to go and take a look at it because it
• 40:56
  was one of the things that made me change my mind. And he said the fundamental laws of physics
• 41:01
  will not change in a way that will enable us to to have storage where we can only use
• 41:08
  wind and solar. He said that. Well, and you can say he can say that because you can say he's wrong.
• 41:17
  And you could say lots of other renewables people have said that it's not true. And I honestly would
• 41:23
  say, I don't know if he's proved wrong, I'll change my mind. But the point is that he hasn't
• 41:29
  been done anywhere in the world, right? And Germany has tried, they put lots of money into this.
• 41:33
  And what they found was they still needed a lot of gas to back up renewables.
• 41:38
  So they had the Nord Stream pipeline, which they agreed to, which has now fallen through, which
• 41:44
  means I have a huge energy shortage is affecting all of Europe. And they had to import a lot of coal
• 41:51
  to fill the gap. And now they're just completely back on coal. So the mothboard coal for our
• 41:56
  pastations that they shut down, being we opened, they're mining for coal, they're not they're not
• 42:02
  they're not having blackouts because they have a lot of coal. But they're emissions, they're
• 42:06
  emissions are horrendous. And this is how many years I'm sorry, but how many years of so-called
• 42:12
  green climate policy is that 2011 they began this. And it failed. And I honestly don't think we
• 42:17
  can risk failures. We're talking about thousands of lives. We've just said that just from
• 42:22
  in pollution, this is thousands of lives because they wanted to risk an experiment. Now,
• 42:25
  I'm not against the principle of experimenting. I think it's good. But then we've got to use that
• 42:31
  data and say, do you know what? Maybe we were wrong, which is what I did. I used to go to anti-nuclear
• 42:36
  protests. It was really heavily involved in that movement. And I was utterly, utterly wrong,
• 42:41
  which is why I actually decided to kind of go around addressing this information about it now
• 42:46
  because so much of that is still floating around. And it's different arguments. It used to be,
• 42:51
  it's not safe. Well, now a lot of people kind of don't feel that anymore. A lot more people
• 42:56
  say it's about the waste, but they realise, okay, the waste doesn't harm anybody. Now it's become
• 43:02
  new things like cost. Well, I think there's no cost that's too, you know, no cost is too much
• 43:07
  to fix what's coming. I think if people think it's too expensive, they're really not understanding
• 43:12
  what it will cost us in terms of both financially and human life and just, you know, the impact on
• 43:19
  the one habitable planet in the universe that we live on, the one known habitable planet.
• 43:25
  I just think we need to pump that money in now because, you know, the impact, the impacts as well
• 43:30
  have been assessed of the cost to us of not doing so in its trillions, right? It's going to cost
• 43:34
  the global economy trillions. But I don't really like just bringing it down to cost because I think it's,
• 43:39
  I just, you know, can you put a price on human life and the one planet? I just, I don't know,
• 43:44
  I think it's bizarre. I understand, I understand that governments need to look at costs and there,
• 43:49
  this is where I would, I can discuss costs. There are lots, there's research on cost, right?
• 43:53
  The countries that have managed to build nuclear in, you know, using a standardisation model,
• 44:00
  where they build it basically like, they build one reactor like a Lego model, they get the same
• 44:05
  engineers to build the same reactor again and again on kind of, you know, one after the other.
• 44:09
  The cost does come down significantly and there's a paper on this where that's about the standardisation
• 44:16
  model in Korea where they did that and yes, the first one required a lot of investment and then it
• 44:20
  went got cheaper and cheaper and then you have 60 to 80 years of clean energy, you know, that doesn't
• 44:26
  need any fossil fuel backup. And I'm not saying don't have renewables, I think it's good to complement.
• 44:32
  I don't think it's ever good to put all your eggs in one basket and that is what the scientific
• 44:35
  consensus says of the intergovernment, intergovernment panel and climate change, which is, you know,
• 44:41
  you know, we can talk about opinions all day, do we like this, don't we like this, the intergovernment
• 44:45
  panel and climate change is an incredible feat of humanity, it's the biggest science,
• 44:50
  scientific consensus of any group ever, this is top climate scientists around the world who sit
• 44:56
  down and crunch the numbers, this is why we know the climate change is so bad, it comes from the IPCC
• 45:00
  and they sit down and they crunch numbers and they come to a consensus and they have 99%
• 45:05
  consensus of that data, right? So if you look at the report from 2018, the 1.5 warming report,
• 45:10
  it's called that that report is where they say these are the impacts of climate change. So when
• 45:15
  you talk about impacts, it's all in there. That same report has a mitigation chapter on what we
• 45:20
  need to do to fix it. And if you look at the energy section, anyone is free to reserve at any time,
• 45:25
  the energy section says we can only decarbonize with a combination of nuclear and renewables.
• 45:30
  That is what it says. Now it then has different scenarios for how much of each, some of them,
• 45:34
  quadruple nuclear, some have less, but all of them require both. So you can speak to an outlaw,
• 45:43
  you can speak to individuals who feel that the future will be different and the technology will
• 45:47
  change and they may be correct. But if you go by the current international scientific consensus
• 45:52
  of the top minds that we have working on this, the only reason we know climate change is so
• 45:56
  serious is because of them. They are also telling us that this is how you decarbonize.
• 46:01
  So I'm not going to argue with that. And that is available, freely available data for anyone
• 46:08
  to look at. What are you saying they're saying? They're saying that you need a mix that you're
• 46:12
  going to need. You have to have a mix. Yeah. In order to decarbonize, you have to have a mix
• 46:16
  of nuclear and renewables, which is also what I was saying about. I mean, it also depends on
• 46:24
  the country, right? I mean, you know, you hear a lot from people from nuclear advocates saying,
• 46:29
  or from fossil fuel, fossil fuel advocates and coal in the coal industry. You know,
• 46:33
  what happens when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? Now in a country like Germany,
• 46:38
  there may be times where the entire, for the, in the entire country, the sun is not shining and
• 46:44
  the wind is not blowing. In a country like Australia, it may be the case that where you are, the sun
• 46:49
  is not shining and the wind is not blowing. But as Saul Griffith, who I've had on this show before,
• 46:55
  who's an expert on, on the electrification of the, of the grid and so on and has advised the
• 46:59
  Biden administration on its climate policy, in places like Australia and the United States,
• 47:03
  the wind is always blowing and the sun is always shining, suddenly.
• 47:08
  Yeah. And that locally, you know, you put solar panels on your roof. You'll benefit from that.
• 47:12
  And from what I've put on the, he's saying, he's saying the criticism of something like solar panels
• 47:17
  on your roof is what happens when it's raining, right? And I can't power my house using my solar,
• 47:23
  using my, the solar panels on my roof. In a country like Germany, it may be the case that you don't
• 47:27
  have any other options because for, for a thousand kilometers around you, it's also gray and rainy
• 47:33
  and not very windy. But in a country like Australia or the United States, somewhere in a 1,000
• 47:39
  kilometer radius, it's very sunny. So you don't need to rely. Yeah, sure. But what you're talking about
• 47:45
  is, so let's, let's go to cost now because this is an interesting thing to dive into. So when
• 47:51
  you say that renewables are cheaper, are you talking about the cost of an entire power plant,
• 47:56
  nuclear power plant versus a bunch of solar panels? Because actually, the solar panels or wind
• 48:02
  turbines, that that cost for paying for just them is not the full cost. It's what you're talking
• 48:08
  about, which is connecting the grid across a country, which no one has achieved yet, which I'm
• 48:12
  not saying it's, it's impossible. Again, it would be an experiment. Now, I personally don't think
• 48:17
  that we should go against the scientific consensus on what we should do. And I don't think that we
• 48:21
  should risk another experiment because honestly, people have lost their lives because of actions
• 48:25
  of Germany. And not just Germany, Belgium also closed their reactors, France did, although they
• 48:30
  changed their minds now. Sorry, not France, Japan did, but they've changed their minds now and
• 48:35
  they're reopening their reactors. So can we just separate not closing reactors from launching
• 48:42
  reactors? Because I think I do think the calculus is different. I'm with you 100%. Why would anyone close
• 48:47
  an existing nuclear reactor? You've already spent the money on it. It's giving you free energy,
• 48:51
  like leave the damn thing out. But then what you can say is, well, when they close naturally,
• 48:55
  then what will replace them? So Germany did put a lot of money into renewables and they haven't
• 49:01
  managed to replace their base load for nuclear or coal. They just haven't and they've they started
• 49:06
  that program in 2011. So they have had a lot of time and they have spent a lot of money on it.
• 49:11
  I'm not saying that's wasted money. I'm just saying it's a shame that the outcome is at
• 49:16
  their emissions or some of the highest in Europe. And they've got people in Germany rationing,
• 49:20
  being told how long to shower for and to turn off, you know, to turn off their gas stoves after 5pm.
• 49:25
  This is real. That means they avoid blackouts. But is this the way we should be living in winter?
• 49:34
  People are not being able to use the heating. You know, these are these. That's happening everywhere
• 49:39
  in Europe because of Ukraine. It's happening. No, no, no. It is happening every in Europe.
• 49:45
  Some countries are weathering it better and some are suffering more. So because Germany was hit,
• 49:50
  so Germany was hit hardest because of the Nord Stream. But they were really reliant on that. But
• 49:55
  they made that decision to go with gas over nuclear, which was a wrong decision. Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 50:00
  And actually, if you want to think about cost, the cost of Nord Stream, nobody seems to talk about
• 50:04
  the cost. Of course, it was really odd. You know, the cost was substantial. And now they've lost that.
• 50:12
  A new clip. So the cost of a nuclear power plant, sure. You know, a few, a few billion. You've got to
• 50:19
  put that money in. That, that is a cost of paying workers for a lifetime of working at those
• 50:26
  plants because they're very high paid jobs. Anyway, you look, they're unionized jobs over here.
• 50:30
  They are, I believe they are in America. I think in most places, they're unionized jobs. And
• 50:36
  over the lifetime of the plant, you're going to get at least 60 years of clean energy. Day and night
• 50:42
  doesn't matter about weather. That's, that's a lot of money that you gain, right? A lot of benefit
• 50:49
  you're getting for your money. Now, I don't want to, but I want to be careful here because then
• 50:54
  people with same criticizing renewables and I'm not, I'm very clear on that we need all the clean
• 50:59
  energy that we can get. We need fossil fuels is the thing we need to get rid of, right? That I
• 51:03
  spent a lifetime processing, protesting fossil fuels. And I think it's sad that we haven't weed
• 51:09
  off of them. We've had so many opportunities and the technology is there. Um, to, but
• 51:16
  for renewables to get the grid that you're talking about, this is a huge amount of infrastructure
• 51:22
  that doesn't exist. It's huge. The cost of that is phenomenal. And it is not taken into account
• 51:29
  in any costing models. So when you look at the models, they're talking about the cost of solar panels.
• 51:33
  They are cheap. They're made in China. China's China controls the entire solar panel chain.
• 51:38
  They get the polysilicon there. They get the lithium there. They, although there are other places
• 51:43
  now where lithium mining is taking off. Um, and then they, they create them there. They make them
• 51:48
  there, right? And then they ship them broad. Now, I'm not even saying that's a reason not to invest
• 51:52
  in solar panels. That that's where they come from. That's why they're cheap. Okay, fine. But then
• 51:56
  you've got to create an entire grid, which is poles and wires that don't exist, connecting huge
• 52:02
  areas of land, so that you can transport the energy from, yeah, where it's, when it's sunny,
• 52:07
  to where it's not sunny. This has first will never been done before. So there's a lot of money to
• 52:11
  spend. Wait, what do you mean it's never been done before? We had like, you know, in the post war
• 52:15
  period in Australia, we basically had to electrify the entire country and the whole regions of
• 52:19
  the country that, you know, all of the new world countries that aren't old European countries
• 52:24
  have had to build massive grids. We had something called the hydroelectric scheme in the snowy
• 52:27
  mountains. Yeah, sorry. No, I meant wind and solar. It hasn't been done. Right. You know,
• 52:32
  so Germany, right? I mean, it's all, we know how to build poles and we know how to build wires.
• 52:38
  Um, hi, so let's break down the renewables thing, though, because you said hydro,
• 52:42
  hydro is extremely reliable, right? Hydro is, I think renewables is the wrong term, like we use
• 52:47
  renewables. renewables means hydro power, which is really reliable, but only geographically
• 52:52
  possible in some places. Yeah. Um, it means biomass, which is extremely polluting and should not
• 52:58
  be included in those numbers, basically burning wood. Yes, it can be, it can be from, you know,
• 53:03
  wood pellets from, from felt, not, you know, uh, forest that we're going to be cut down anyway,
• 53:10
  but actually the figures show it's often not there's too many loop holes and, but, and the other
• 53:14
  thing is when you look at renewables figures for any country, most of it, like in Britain,
• 53:18
  it's mostly from biomass. It looks like it's coming from wind and solar, which I would
• 53:24
  do. I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would,
• 53:26
  think as biomass, logical material from, well, it is, it is, it is, and then so is biogas.
• 53:32
  Again, biogas can be done efficiently if it's waste that's breaking down anyway, and you're harvesting
• 53:37
  that, that, that, okay, but if you're creating waste and believe, believe it or not, people do this,
• 53:42
  companies do this, they sell it as renewable and it's even been caught out here with renewable
• 53:46
  providers here. They say they're 100% renewable. The mass, most of it is either biomass or biogas,
• 53:52
  where they're getting, um, they create waste to break it down in plants where they then create
• 53:58
  energy out of the methane. So actually creating more waste. So that shouldn't be in there. Wind
• 54:03
  and solar in there, they should be in there, but they are the more tricky ones because they,
• 54:09
  like biogas and biomass and hydropower are, you know, 24, seven reliable, you can just turn
• 54:15
  this stuff out like nuclear and like fossil fuels, but wind and solar do require a lot more
• 54:21
  infrastructure behind them. And that is expensive. And that, but I'm not saying that that's
• 54:28
  an argument against it. That's an argument that people use against nuclear. I don't, I don't agree
• 54:31
  with that. I think we should invest as much as we can in clean energy. These are good jobs for
• 54:36
  people who work in, you know, the gas and coal industry who want to do, they don't want to
• 54:41
  lose their livelihoods, they have lots of expertise, it's bring them over to these clean
• 54:45
  industries. That means you've got to pay the work as it's going to cost you money,
• 54:48
  but you've got to think of benefits to society. And actually if you add all of this up,
• 54:53
  nuclear is not more expensive, right? It's not. And I'm not, I'm not saying this to be
• 54:58
  anterior because this is what people will say, which I don't like getting into it. But look,
• 55:02
  a solar panel. Do you know how long a solar panel lasts? Hello.
• 55:06
  25 years max. So is that in the costing? Turned about wind turbines, same thing.
• 55:12
  30 years maybe. So you've got a nuclear power plant that will last for 60 years.
• 55:17
  So how are you adding up the cost? How are people adding up? They are not looking at the grid.
• 55:22
  They are not including replacement, replacement for all of these panels, which also
• 55:28
  very difficult to recycle. And that needs to really take off actually. And I hope it does,
• 55:32
  for the moment here, they end up in landfill sites. No, it's worse than that, Josh,
• 55:36
  they get sent abroad to poor countries where they end up in landfill sites. And they are toxic
• 55:40
  waste. We want to talk about waste, very toxic waste, mercury, cadmium, leaching out into the land
• 55:46
  because it's not managed. It's not a pot. It's not costed as part of the system. So you can say
• 55:52
  it's cheaper, but it's not in there. Now with you, it's expensive because the waste management is
• 55:57
  costed within. So you have to, you have to have waste management in, in built.
• 56:02
  Right. So just to get to, I want to get to the positives of nuclear and to some of the
• 56:07
  fallacies about it, but to summarize what I'm hearing you say and correct me if I'm wrong is
• 56:12
  that there's a bit of a double standard going on in the way that we look at the various options.
• 56:17
  When people, when people look at the upsides and downsides of nuclear, they take everything
• 56:23
  into consideration of the waste and all of the cost. And when people look at renewables,
• 56:28
  they sort of have a narrower lens. And they're only looking at the right now. And they're not
• 56:33
  also factoring you know, okay, well, what happens to that waste when the solar panel is,
• 56:37
  is passed. It's used by a day to what happens to the energy that it takes to produce the
• 56:41
  subsequent solar panel that you then have to buy in 20 or 30 years time. One more time. So I mean,
• 56:47
  last days we're still running and all that. This happens all the time with people will say to me,
• 56:51
  the biggest argument I get about nuclear is, what about the mining? People think that
• 56:58
  this wind and solar are created out of magic fairy dust because actually there is a lot of mining
• 57:04
  involved. I'm not against mining if it's done correctly and people want the jobs and whatever.
• 57:08
  But let's be honest that they require a lot of mining, right? They require a lot of natural
• 57:14
  resources. Now for me, put that money into something that's going to last a long time because you
• 57:18
  build it once and it's there for a long time and it doesn't need any backup or additional grid
• 57:24
  stuff added to it. For me, that makes sense. But still, I'm not saying exclude anything. I'm not
• 57:29
  saying exclude anything that's clean energy. If you can build it, build it, you know, I've gone through
• 57:33
  it. And I mean, in terms of the cost, like, people, we find money for what we need to spend money on.
• 57:38
  Like, it's just a matter of priorities when, when we have to spend money, we spend money. Australia
• 57:42
  has a very generous rooftop solar subsidy program and a fast tracking of rooftop solar to
• 57:49
  wave a lot of the restrictions that it takes. Like, you can basically hop on your phone. There's
• 57:53
  a government app. You can apply for the right to put solar panels on your roof and you'll get a
• 57:57
  response almost immediately. In the United States, it takes like four months and you have to go
• 58:02
  through a development application process with your local council and your neighbours can object
• 58:06
  and all this sort of stuff because it doesn't look pretty. And, you know, the amount that you get
• 58:10
  paid back in terms of rebates and things is vastly less here. It's a no brainer. And as a result,
• 58:16
  Australia is by far, by far has the highest uptake of rooftop solar, more than a quarter of
• 58:21
  households generate power on their roofs in Australia. And they think that by the middle of the
• 58:26
  century, you know, which, believe it, it sounds like a long way away. But it's only 27 years away.
• 58:30
  Two thirds of Australian households will be generating their own solar power. So my, my sort of
• 58:37
  baseline assumption is that if humankind is going to survive to become, you know, if we're
• 58:43
  going to get over this sort of existential hump of like AI and climate and nuclear and nuclear
• 58:50
  weapons, I mean, and all of these other challenges that we've thrown at ourselves in the past
• 58:55
  century. And if we're still around in 10,000, let alone 100,000 years, there's no way that we're
• 59:01
  not going to be 100% renewable, eventually. Would you agree with that? Or do you see new clear as
• 59:08
  being always part of me? So when you say 100% renewable, you mean not the biogas, not biogas,
• 59:13
  just hydropower wind solar? Well, I don't know exactly what it's going to look like in 10,000
• 59:18
  years, but it's impossible to me that we're going to survive as a species if we can't find a way
• 59:24
  to not be alchemists who turn good stuff into polluting shit. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But I mean,
• 59:32
  I think that applies to everything, right? Not even just energy. We've, there's a lot that we need
• 59:36
  to change. But at the same time, so the thing with having the rooftop solar, that's great,
• 59:43
  that's, and it's sad here because we used to, it used to be subsidized and it's not anymore. So very
• 59:47
  few people get panels on their recent. I don't know, it's not super sunny, but here, but
• 59:51
  look, you will still get plenty of sunny days in the summer, and it does benefit people
• 59:57
  in an energy crisis to be able to create their own homegrown energy. So I'm all for that, but
• 1:00:02
  but the reality is that that's not so, so the world is electrifying, and this is good. So here,
• 1:00:08
  we're switching from gas boilers to heat pumps, and there's a huge boom in electric vehicles.
• 1:00:14
  Well, that actually means is that our need for electricity will go up, not down.
• 1:00:19
  So you can generate more on your houses, and you can have some, you know, local solar farms,
• 1:00:26
  or wind farms that generate some of the power, but we are, we are a very energy
• 1:00:32
  dependent species. We're very energy rich species, and we always have been, since the dawn of
• 1:00:36
  time we have been right, since since humankind arrived, we went, right, we're struggling. What should
• 1:00:42
  we do? There's fire. Fire has happened. We don't know why. This is what happened right with
• 1:00:46
  hunter-gatherers. We don't know why, but let's try and use that. It might get a little
• 1:00:50
  bit burned in the process, but it might be beneficial. The ones, the, the, our ancestors who drove
• 1:00:56
  that forward and, and actually used fire and learned to tame it and use it. They, we're here because
• 1:01:02
  of them, you know, they, so they, they found that it warded off predators and flies. It created a
• 1:01:08
  social setting for a hearth, which linguists think is how we develop language, because that's
• 1:01:13
  where storytelling originally came from. Our brains grew bigger because now we could preserve
• 1:01:18
  me, and it was calorie rich now. So our brains grew bigger, making it harder for women to give birth,
• 1:01:25
  because our heads are so big now, and that calorie preservation also meant that we weren't so reliant
• 1:01:32
  on hunting all the time. It didn't matter if you, you couldn't find something to hunt one week,
• 1:01:37
  because you had all this preserved calorie rich food that you, you know, that you'd been able
• 1:01:44
  to create because of fire. And that technology was very polluting. We don't want everybody
• 1:01:50
  using that all the time, but at the time that was drove humankind forward, right? Now I think now
• 1:01:57
  we need, we need fire 2.0. We need the energy density, but without the harmful,
• 1:02:04
  you know, repercussions of air quality and respiratory issues that go with that, and all of that.
• 1:02:11
  And to me, that is atomic power, and that has always been atomic power. And if we discovered it
• 1:02:15
  tomorrow, I think we'd think, wow, we've saved humanity amazing, but because it has this legacy
• 1:02:21
  and history of, you know, all of these perceived problems, and yes, there are problems, but there
• 1:02:27
  are problems with everything, every single thing, every single source of energy has problems,
• 1:02:31
  they all have mining, they all have, they all require resources, they all, they're all very
• 1:02:36
  challenging, difficult to build in many ways. But for me, I really think the only way we will
• 1:02:42
  propel into the future is to recognize that we will find new ways, whether we like or not,
• 1:02:47
  to use more energy, we don't know what's coming next. I mean, when I was a kid, everybody didn't
• 1:02:52
  have a laptop, it was not normal to have your own laptop, and your own mobile phone needs charging
• 1:02:58
  every day, right? Suddenly, we need a lot more energy. So we should insulate buildings, and we
• 1:03:05
  should put solar panels on our roofs and do all these things to reduce where we can, but we will
• 1:03:10
  continue to use more energy. So when you ask, what do I think in the future, I think we'll have
• 1:03:15
  found even more ways to use energy. There'll be new things that we can't even think of now.
• 1:03:20
  And for me, it's really important that that comes from clean sources that we put in place now,
• 1:03:25
  because otherwise, it will just keep coming from fossil fuels, and that we cannot suspend in that.
• 1:03:30
  We cannot suspend that, as you know, we both know. And we shouldn't have to, we shouldn't have to,
• 1:03:35
  because we don't have to have options on the table. A very interesting thought experiment that you
• 1:03:40
  just dropped in there that I hadn't thought about, which is if we discovered it now, it is
• 1:03:43
  interesting to imagine if we hadn't had nuclear, and if every five or ten years scientists were
• 1:03:52
  saying we think we're getting closer to nuclear efficient, the way that they say that about
• 1:03:57
  cold fusion. And if all of a sudden they were like, we've cracked it, we've done it, we've got a
• 1:04:01
  nuclear reactor, it's safe, it throws off massive amounts of energy without contributing to
• 1:04:08
  the climate crisis at all. I mean, it's hard to imagine that we wouldn't just go into super
• 1:04:13
  overdrive. But there's all this kind of legacy of bad storytelling, kind of what we're saying
• 1:04:19
  earlier about people go to Australia and they fear the snakes, you don't need to fear the snakes
• 1:04:23
  fear crossing the road. That's where the risk is. Well, every day we're breathing this air in,
• 1:04:27
  every day we're breathing, and I say to people here when they, we took, so in Britain, we're very
• 1:04:34
  heavily dependent on fossil fuels, about 60% of our mix comes from a board. We have a ban on
• 1:04:39
  onshore wind, which I think is wrong, and we don't subsidise solar panels. I'm not onshore wind,
• 1:04:45
  sorry, does that mean offshore? You can't build, you can't build it offshore, you can't build it
• 1:04:50
  onshore. You can't have a windmill on the on British soil. No, I know. So, you know, it's so nice.
• 1:04:59
  Why? Because of birdies? Well, because neighbours don't like them. Nimbis and sadly. So even in the last
• 1:05:07
  year, I saw this, and I thought it was very, very disappointing. In the last year, the number of solar
• 1:05:13
  farms that were proposed and rejected because residents were against them was the highest in British
• 1:05:18
  history. And we are in an energy crisis, Josh. We are our bills on quadruple what they were a
• 1:05:24
  year ago. And this is the first winter of dealing with that. So I, it baffles me that people don't
• 1:05:29
  understand a really basic thing, which is energy equals life. Energy, we need that. We need lots of
• 1:05:35
  energy. And I'm, I'm all for energy abundant energy rich culture, because I think we should have
• 1:05:40
  cheap. It should be cheap to warm your home. It should be cheap to to cool your home if you're
• 1:05:45
  in a hot country, not here, but, you know, where it's needed. I mean, I think it's, it also,
• 1:05:50
  I just, I just sort of disconnected from it. I just want to double down though on this question of
• 1:05:55
  what, it matters what country you're in. And it really, really does. Like, I mean, I, I've just
• 1:05:59
  come back from New Zealand, where my mum's from, you know, they have the third highest rate of
• 1:06:05
  renewable energy in the world after Norway and Iceland. 80% of their electricity comes from
• 1:06:10
  hydropower and geothermal. But Australia doesn't have geothermal. Only has a little bit of hydropower
• 1:06:18
  because we're the driest inhabited continent. And so, you know, our mix is going to be different.
• 1:06:24
  And Germany does not have a Germany and Britain just don't have Australia's sunshine. And,
• 1:06:30
  but nonetheless, I want to get to waste. I want to get to this question of ways. It seems to be
• 1:06:35
  something, this is the, the only sort of remaining sticking point that I still, that I still feel,
• 1:06:43
  and I still run into it a lot, which is, is it, what is the moral? Like, I understand that,
• 1:06:52
  I understand weighing up the moral upsides and downsides of, you know, what people dying from
• 1:06:57
  particular emissions from qualified power plants. So you want a clean source of energy now,
• 1:07:03
  we don't quite have renewables quite there. And so we need just something to tide us over in a
• 1:07:09
  lot of places, maybe not in very, very sunny windy countries, but certainly in countries that are
• 1:07:14
  cloudy and cool. I can't quite get over the question of whether or not it should just be forbidden
• 1:07:24
  to produce things that are going to continue to be highly dangerous in spans of time that are
• 1:07:31
  completely inconceivable to us over the course of which whole civilizations could rise and fall,
• 1:07:37
  our languages could be lost out, all of our computer data could be lost, we could revert to being
• 1:07:43
  cavemen and women, and we could be just stumbling around in tens of thousands of years. And
• 1:07:50
  their, you know, ancestors from another universe have bequeathed to them stuff that's going to
• 1:07:57
  dispoil their environment and kill them. Is that like, what am I going to want?
• 1:08:02
  So, well, first of all, I think if we don't invest heavily in nuclear now, if we don't build lots
• 1:08:08
  of power plants around the world now, there's no point looking ahead to 10,000 years. That's not
• 1:08:14
  going to happen. You've said it yourself, the technology for renewables might be around the corner,
• 1:08:19
  but right now for most countries right now, and the most emissions in the world aren't coming
• 1:08:23
  for Australia and New Zealand, by the way. And yeah, it's great that New Zealand has the ability
• 1:08:28
  to get geothermal and hydropower, but most countries don't, so what are they going to do?
• 1:08:33
  How are we going to do that right now? How are we going to decarbonize? What we decide now
• 1:08:38
  will have repercussions for those future generations that you're worried about, which is what I'm
• 1:08:43
  worried about. But the waste, so there is a misinformation about waste and a lot of fear about
• 1:08:51
  this idea that there's lots of it and it's super radioactive. This actually isn't true. It does.
• 1:08:57
  So, first of all, yeah, okay, so there isn't a lot of it. There's very, very small amount.
• 1:09:05
  Yeah, but it is. You don't need a lot. Okay, so it's hard to have as highly radioactive.
• 1:09:12
  But first of all, but if you're saying we should never have waste, do you remember just recently in
• 1:09:16
  Australia, they lost that little, yeah, that was not from nuclear waste. That was from, sorry,
• 1:09:23
  it was nuclear waste, but it was from medical waste. So are you saying that we should have no medicine
• 1:09:27
  that you create nuclear waste? No, because the balance of upskating. Yeah, the balance of
• 1:09:33
  upsides and downsides is so cool. We are talking about people dying if we don't switch to clean energies.
• 1:09:38
  Yeah, I mean, look, Australia has a nuclear reactor, simply in order to produce medical
• 1:09:45
  things because people will die right here and right now if we don't produce a microscopic little
• 1:09:52
  capsule full of radioactive waste just enough to produce the, you know, but when we're talking
• 1:09:58
  about, but when we're talking about nuclear waste, it is just, you know, it's a soda can.
• 1:10:04
  From how much? From a power plant. Over what time? I'm trying to remember exact years now.
• 1:10:10
  Yeah, I think over the last two years, I'm of a nuclear reactor is something like a football field
• 1:10:20
  that's a few people something. Yeah, but each, but the waste itself is very small. It's because
• 1:10:26
  it's buried in several layers of concrete and other materials, shield humans or anybody from
• 1:10:33
  the radiation. So you can go up to these canisters and hug them, which I've done, these dry fuel
• 1:10:38
  casks. They they're extremely strong. They've been tested by, you know, planes have been flown
• 1:10:43
  into them and they're not even dented. And they don't harm anybody. It's the main thing from my
• 1:10:47
  perspective is very well managed. There's no case of anyone being harmed by waste ever in history.
• 1:10:54
  Probably the closest was that pellet, which they found because we're very good at finding
• 1:10:59
  radioactive substances. It's very easy to monitor. It's not, you know, it's much easier than to control
• 1:11:04
  than something like air pollution, which is just around us and to continue to know the story.
• 1:11:09
  There was a truck driving through remote, the remote outback of Australia with radioactive pellet,
• 1:11:16
  that was being transported. And it somehow came off the truck and fell in the middle of the desert.
• 1:11:21
  And we're talking about an area like, I mean, Western Australia is like the size of Western Europe
• 1:11:26
  or like half the size of the contiguous United States. And it was just lost in this massive
• 1:11:32
  uninhabited desert. And everyone lost their minds for a little while, although scientists were
• 1:11:38
  saying, look, it doesn't really matter. It's not going to, you know, it's not like it's going to
• 1:11:42
  rehearse anybody in, you know, it'll irradiate a couple of lizards out there, but nothing too bad.
• 1:11:46
  But they did, then after a few weeks, they did manage to track it down and recollect it. So that's
• 1:11:51
  what they're talking about. I can need it in a near stack. Definitely. It's not a lot of pay,
• 1:11:55
  but a lot of work. Yeah. So there isn't a lot of waste. All the high level nuclear waste
• 1:12:00
  produced in the world would fit in a single football field to height of around 10 yards.
• 1:12:05
  Now most of the way, so most of the waste that is produced is just low level. So it's like,
• 1:12:09
  it's same as medical waste, you know, in hospitals where they do radio therapy and things like that.
• 1:12:13
  It's like gloves, lab coat, all of that gets cleaned and decontaminated. That's that's 97% of it
• 1:12:21
  is low or medium level. What's left behind is 0.2%. That's that's the high level waste. And that's
• 1:12:27
  what you have to store for a long time. However, it has a half life, which means it breaks down very
• 1:12:33
  quickly. It's not true that it says radioactive on day one as it is in 10,000 years. It's not true
• 1:12:37
  at all. It's not even in 10 years. It has a half life and it breaks down very, very quickly.
• 1:12:42
  And it is so safely managed that in France, they actually, because you know, France has had a
• 1:12:46
  nuclear program for a long time and they've sort of got their ducks in a row. They actually recycle
• 1:12:51
  it because once it's used, it's, there's still a lot of energy in the fuel. It's just dirty,
• 1:12:58
  so they clean it basically a reprocessing plant, which is based at the power plant, doesn't take
• 1:13:02
  it more space. And they recycle it and they reuse it. And that, you know, a lot of waste, even our
• 1:13:08
  waste, I think has been shipped off there before, without just recycling, which I think is the best
• 1:13:12
  thing for it until it does actually just need storing. So a lot of the time when, when we're storing
• 1:13:17
  it, it's because we're thinking later we could extract that when you use it because it's an energy,
• 1:13:21
  it's a highly dense, you know, uranium is a highly dense energy source. A tiny, a tiny amount
• 1:13:26
  goes a long way, produces a lot of power, which I think is important when you look at mining impacts
• 1:13:32
  because it's just so little that you need. But so just to clarify, so where does your head go when
• 1:13:38
  we think about the amount, all right, each nuclear power plant, that's only, you know, football
• 1:13:42
  field, however much deep, we encase it, we entomb it in very, very safe substances, we store it
• 1:13:48
  somewhere that's geologically inert, like the Australian Outback or the American Outback or something
• 1:13:54
  like that. It's unlikely to have any earthquakes there in the next, how many tens of thousands of
• 1:13:59
  years. Nonetheless, if you embark on a full-scale global nuclearisation program, you're talking about
• 1:14:08
  how many, I mean, thousands. Yeah, so yeah, so we're not thousands, but yeah, more. So in the
• 1:14:14
  countries where they're very, yeah, so in the countries where they're very confident in the nuclear
• 1:14:18
  programs, they are thinking ahead and they're building geological waste depository, so that's Finland
• 1:14:23
  and Sweden. These are already like they exist, they're real, you know, you can go down there on a
• 1:14:28
  tool, actually, I might do that at some point. And they, it's basically the theories, you took
• 1:14:34
  this stuff out of the ground, let's put it back, it's really deep underground, it's completely safe,
• 1:14:39
  and there's lots of space to store it there. And it's not like in 10,000 years, they'll come across
• 1:14:43
  this radioactive waste because the elements down, they're already radioactive, right? That's
• 1:14:47
  where you get uranium from, radioactive, radioactivity is all around us, it exists naturally in nature,
• 1:14:53
  and in some areas it's higher than in others. So they have this program and that, but that's
• 1:15:00
  largely because people, yeah, people are afraid and they don't want it in their backyard and I can
• 1:15:04
  understand that. So they're creating these depositories, but in terms of, you know, you said,
• 1:15:10
  it's safe if there isn't an earthquake or tsunami, well, actually when the Fukushima Daiichi
• 1:15:14
  power plant melted down in Japan, they did have waste stored at that power station. It wasn't even
• 1:15:20
  damaged, it wasn't dented, it's so ridiculously safe, there is, you can't do anything with it.
• 1:15:26
  It's, they test this stuff by flying planes into it, there are videos online where they show it's
• 1:15:31
  called a cask test. Look at a cask test. You actually have to line into it to know that it's not
• 1:15:36
  a damaged biome. You know, when I said to you that they really think of everything and it's all
• 1:15:41
  costed and it's all taken very seriously and well managed, it's actually over the top managed,
• 1:15:45
  I think. So they are cask, if you put cask test in YouTube, you will get many different videos
• 1:15:51
  of people flying these planes into the cask. The cask doesn't even move. They're so ridiculous,
• 1:15:56
  they're safe. They're not, probably in 10,000 years, aliens would say, wow, how did they
• 1:16:01
  accomplish this? It's quite clever and it's very extremely ridiculously safe. I mean, you want to talk
• 1:16:06
  about safety. Let's talk about something that's not safe. Flying, right? Flying is so unsafe,
• 1:16:11
  if you think about it, but we are very good at making unsafe things safe. When you fly,
• 1:16:16
  you're not at risk. You're not at risk. We have made it so ridiculously safe. You don't think,
• 1:16:21
  and I don't think about what's gone into that. How are we shielded from the radiation? How are we
• 1:16:25
  not propelled into, you know, a mountain? How is it so safe to go that fast? That high up,
• 1:16:33
  you know, people did, when it first became a thing, people did fear it, didn't they?
• 1:16:38
  The same as they do with any technology, the same as they did televisions or even electricity
• 1:16:42
  or anything or, you know, anything really because we think of the worst outcomes. But actually,
• 1:16:48
  we have enough history now to look at each thing and say, well, what happened? Is it safe for
• 1:16:51
  isn't it? We're flying. We know that actually is very safe. It's technically a very unsafe thing,
• 1:16:56
  but, and when, you know, most people do fear plane crashes, but actually it's extremely and
• 1:17:01
  likely, extremely, I mean, I understand the point that you're making and that it works with regard
• 1:17:08
  to the risk of nuclear meltdowns, but I'm not sure that it's analogous to the risk of nuclear
• 1:17:15
  waste. It's just in the sense that, so this, yeah, I mean, I think there's a difference between
• 1:17:20
  the risk that I'm undertaking right now for me. And I guess, yeah, a legacy that I'm
• 1:17:26
  bequeathing for almost in perpetuity. And this goes back to what I said earlier.
• 1:17:31
  And it will create so much of it that it's not just a tiny pellet in the desert.
• 1:17:35
  So this goes back to what I said earlier about, you know, how do you decide what's necessary?
• 1:17:39
  You know, most people will accept the risk of driving because they know there's a big risk,
• 1:17:43
  they know it's likely they might have an accident. Lots of people lose their lives that way every year,
• 1:17:47
  but they deem it necessary, right? So maybe you deem flying somewhere necessary, although a lot of
• 1:17:51
  climate activists would say it's not and we shouldn't do it. How would you determine what the risk is?
• 1:17:55
  Well, I would say that energy is necessary. And that it's necessary to get that energy from
• 1:18:00
  clean sources that do not pollute the air that our children breathe and do not cause incredible
• 1:18:06
  health issues with people who have to live around these coal firepower stations. We're, you know,
• 1:18:10
  Britain's important coal all the time. Germany's, Germany's using a lot of coal.
• 1:18:17
  Many places around the world are using a lot of coal. Australia, right? Although I know you're
• 1:18:22
  facing it out, but the health outcomes are so well known. It's almost like the driving.
• 1:18:27
  We're just used to this risk. We want our lights to work. Now I'm trying to say I agree we
• 1:18:31
  should keep our lights running, but we need to transition away from where we're getting that from.
• 1:18:36
  We need to understand the risk of something that we are happy to live with because we've done it
• 1:18:39
  for a long time and because there aren't big scary stories about the waste. But actually,
• 1:18:43
  did you know that coal ash from coal fire power stations is more radioactive than nuclear waste?
• 1:18:48
  And do you know that it has been found dumped in waterways because it is not highly
• 1:18:51
  regulated the way that nuclear waste is? This is a good point. It's a good point to come
• 1:18:56
  to scientists about it. There are lots of things going on here where basically this, this,
• 1:19:00
  a lot of these arguments against nuclear came from a movement that I was very involved in,
• 1:19:04
  which was an anti-nuclear movement that kind of conflated weapons with energy and we were
• 1:19:09
  against it all and I was very misinformed and uninformed and I was against nuclear energy
• 1:19:14
  and waste was one of our talking points. It was an easy way to scare people even though there are
• 1:19:18
  no real stories of people being harmed by it. It's a very easy way to scare people and that's
• 1:19:24
  still continues now even though we live in an industrial civilization where waste is a
• 1:19:29
  bi-product of everyday life, like every day. It's the toilet panel. It has it. Do you not think
• 1:19:35
  that there's a different calculus there? Maybe I'm not explaining it probably, but what I was
• 1:19:39
  trying to say there was radioactive decay is not, people don't understand that radioactive decay is
• 1:19:45
  a thing basically. It's not as highly radioactive now as it will be in whatever you said earlier,
• 1:19:51
  10,000 years, even in 10 years, it becomes less radioactive over time. Oh, I know, how long
• 1:19:56
  does it take for it to become, basically, nothing that someone would have to worry about if they
• 1:20:01
  got curious and started sawing into it with a buzzsaw. So after 40 years, 40 years, you could take
• 1:20:11
  these things apart. The radioactive activity of the used fuel after about 40 years decreases to
• 1:20:19
  about 1,000, sorry, 1,000 of the level at the point when it was taken out of the power plant.
• 1:20:29
  Really? Yeah. So why are we bothering to be so careful with it then? Because people are so
• 1:20:36
  scared. This is what I'm saying, Josh, there was a huge movement against it. I was part of that
• 1:20:40
  movement. I watched it happen in real time. We scared people, we got scared people. I'm just
• 1:20:45
  doing this. Hang on, hang on, hang on. The United States Environmental Protection Agency,
• 1:20:48
  the EPA Jokov, like all radioactive material, radioactive waste will naturally decay over time.
• 1:20:54
  Once the radioactive material has decayed sufficiently, the waste is no longer hazardous.
• 1:20:58
  However, the time it will take for the radioactive material to decay will range from a few hours
• 1:21:02
  to hundreds of thousands of years. Less than 1% will remain radioactive for 10,000 years.
• 1:21:09
  That's of all spent fuel. Right. Well, I don't know what percentage you need to worry about it.
• 1:21:18
  Here's an article in Forbes as well, but their science contributed.
• 1:21:24
  Radioactivity is all about the dose, right? So that little pellet that they found that was
• 1:21:30
  highly radioactive. But some elements in nature are more radioactive than other elements.
• 1:21:35
  When the trick is knowing where the thing is and shielding people from it, which obviously in
• 1:21:39
  that case, they messed up, but no one was harmed by that in the end because we're very good at
• 1:21:44
  detecting radiation. This is saying that the high level nuclear waste, the spent fuel from
• 1:21:53
  nuclear reactors, is required by the US government to be safely stored for a million years.
• 1:21:59
  It says that the 10,000 or 100,000 years are the actual timeframes of danger,
• 1:22:06
  but I mean, they're on the side of caution, they're using their years.
• 1:22:09
  I'm just going to come out and say that is so over the top. This is over regulation of
• 1:22:13
  something that is so safe. I mean, I would happily have one in my garden. I would happily have a
• 1:22:20
  casket in my garden. I think my question isn't how safe is it right now for us given the level
• 1:22:27
  of storage? Can it be safe? But what? So what you're saying is that someone could come along and
• 1:22:34
  break into a storage cask with some incredible engineering materials and then do what
• 1:22:42
  be exposed to. Yes, that's right. It could be exposed to something that irradiates there.
• 1:22:47
  City. I mean,
• 1:22:48
  I'm trying to get my head around this scenario. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's unlikely.
• 1:22:56
  There are so many dangerous things to worry about. It's sort of a matter of principle, I guess.
• 1:23:01
  I mean, you're right that if you superimpose it onto the moral calculus of risk and reward for
• 1:23:06
  us right now, it seems bizarre to give a shit about what any civilization in 50,000 years is going
• 1:23:14
  to do with our waste because we have pressing problems that affect real people right now.
• 1:23:19
  Yeah. On the other hand, I just feel like there's a moral, but I, I think what I'm not,
• 1:23:25
  it's taking a step from moralism to, to, I think what I'm not understanding, though, is,
• 1:23:31
  I mean, did start to say this earlier that our lifestyles produce a huge amount of waste. Like,
• 1:23:36
  that's not, that it has a dust waste. It's not, you can't hear the way that they are radiation.
• 1:23:42
  Yeah, but our lifestyles create, you know, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium,
• 1:23:48
  cyanide, asbestos, dioxins, carcinogens. This is just from clinical waste, from, you know,
• 1:23:54
  medical treatment. To me, it's no different, right? The earth has a wound. We created this wound
• 1:24:00
  through fossil fuel use. And now we have to stop using fossil fuels. So what are we going to use?
• 1:24:05
  There is no perfect solution. Nothing is perfect, but we have to transition to clean sources.
• 1:24:10
  And when, when you have the scientific consensus, the international scientific consensus
• 1:24:15
  saying, we need nuclear, they're, they're looking at waste and they're considering that risk.
• 1:24:19
  And they're saying the risk of not switching to that energy source is still worse.
• 1:24:24
  Because of what we are leaving behind right now, right? Like coal ash, coal ash and, and the
• 1:24:29
  air pollution and the impact on the climate, which is by the way, if we want to talk about waste,
• 1:24:33
  fossil fuel waste is being stored in the earth's atmosphere right now. And nobody manages that.
• 1:24:37
  That is not managed. People might want to by trying to create technologies with a socket out of
• 1:24:42
  the atmosphere, but that does not exist yet. We are storing it there right now and we live with
• 1:24:47
  that risk every day. And I don't understand why. So I find your scenario difficult. When it's 10,000
• 1:24:52
  years away, when right now, people are dying because of that, because that waste is not managed.
• 1:24:58
  And that has never been managed. And it will never be managed. And it has to, we have to get rid
• 1:25:03
  of fossil fuels. We have to. And it's unfortunate. I think that it's become nucleus renewables,
• 1:25:07
  which came from the environmental movement that was a part of because we were scared of one,
• 1:25:11
  although that's shifting a lot now. And actually, what we should really be scared of is the killer
• 1:25:16
  that is right in front of us, which is fossil fuels. One hundred percent. There is masses of
• 1:25:20
  research on this. I'm not exaggerating that climate impacts, air pollution, whatever angle you want
• 1:25:27
  to look at. I mean, every time we say no to building any clean energy, an onshore wind farm or
• 1:25:34
  a nuclear power plant, we're exporting that cost to people who have to live by coal fire stations
• 1:25:38
  in other countries where they have, they often the most marginalized communities as well, because
• 1:25:42
  they can't afford to live anywhere else. They have such serious rates of cancer and other health
• 1:25:47
  issues, root issues. If you look up the studies on it, it is heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to
• 1:25:53
  me that it's written, for example, we will say no to its solar farm, we say no to nuclear power plant,
• 1:25:57
  but we will import coal from someone who has to live by it in Poland or somewhere like that
• 1:26:03
  in a poor community. And they can't, I've talked to people who say they can't open their windows
• 1:26:08
  because they're covered in soot. This miles away from the nearest coal plant. That's how bad it is.
• 1:26:14
  No, I get it. I mean, I hear. I hear. I mean, there's something that there's something we're not
• 1:26:20
  understanding about each other's point of view here, because I completely take a point about waste.
• 1:26:24
  I just, there's something. I'm just saying that tiny amount in 10,000 years is not something to
• 1:26:30
  worry about. And if you're talking about technology will be so extraordinary in the future,
• 1:26:35
  then we'll be able to deal with it surely within 10,000 years. It doesn't have to be an
• 1:26:39
  extraordinary to get through concrete if you don't know what it is. I mean, we're talking about
• 1:26:44
  I mean, I mean, a way of dealing with it. Whatever's left, there'll be a technology deal with it, no?
• 1:26:50
  Why wouldn't that be possible? I mean, if everything goes well, then yes,
• 1:26:54
  but if everything goes south, then no. That it is going south because we are not transitioning
• 1:26:59
  to clean energies. Yeah, I know. I get that. It's just like, I don't think that you're quite
• 1:27:04
  rocking the timeframes. I mean, Jesus, like the Enlightenment was 200 years ago. Jesus was too
• 1:27:10
  and Cleopatra were 2000 years ago. The ancient Greeks and ancient Romans were 4000 years ago.
• 1:27:15
  Written language has only existed for five and a half thousand years. If we're talking about tens
• 1:27:20
  of thousands of years from now, there's no guarantee that whoever is inhabiting planet Earth is
• 1:27:26
  going to understand any of the writing systems that we currently use will understand the meaning of
• 1:27:31
  visual science. So you think that future societies will not be capable of detecting radioactive waste?
• 1:27:39
  Yes. That knowledge will be lost. That's possible yet. Over the past spans of time. So we will go back to
• 1:27:47
  how we used to live just using fire or... I don't know what's going to happen in 50 hours.
• 1:27:54
  This is what I'm trying to say. Is there a moral principle in not leaving
• 1:28:01
  shit that's going to last for that long and just dealing with our stuff right now?
• 1:28:04
  We're already doing that to the climate. Well, no, in 50,000 timescales in my lifetime, in 30 years,
• 1:28:12
  what have we done to the planet, 30 years? Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what I'm looking at.
• 1:28:17
  So this all comes down to necessity because what's happening is I hear what you're saying,
• 1:28:22
  but I still think that if you want to calculate risk, it's still worth it because the risks of not
• 1:28:27
  acting are so much greater and the risk of fossil fuels are exponential and we live with those risks
• 1:28:32
  every day. So I hear what you're saying, but it's like, you know, it's like the snake scenario.
• 1:28:37
  Someone doesn't want to go to this country because they might get bit by a snake. Yet many people
• 1:28:40
  live in that country and they don't fear the snakes and the snakes, they're fine. They live with
• 1:28:46
  that risk because they understand, you know, that's the difference. And this is probably because I've
• 1:28:50
  spent years delving into every aspect of nuclei. I've looked at land footprint, which is the
• 1:28:55
  smallest of all energy sources, which I think is important in a small country like Britain.
• 1:29:00
  And I've looked at emissions and I've looked at how long it lasts, therefore how few materials
• 1:29:08
  you need because you don't have to keep replacing it in half the time. I've looked at all of that
• 1:29:13
  and I have made a different assessment to you. You're thinking about some of these ideas for the
• 1:29:17
  first time and that's great. I've been there as well. But this is where I've landed, where I don't
• 1:29:23
  think that that is a huge risk. And I think the bigger risk is right now not acting and leaving
• 1:29:30
  civilizations to frankly, it's just will be such a polluted world. No one's going to care about
• 1:29:35
  a little bit of radioactive waste is what I think the worst case scenario. I mean, it will be an
• 1:29:40
  uninhabitable, won't it? Eventually, if we don't stop, run away climate change, that's the
• 1:29:46
  absolute worst case scenario. Now, I'm hopeful. I like to think well of people and what we can achieve.
• 1:29:51
  I'm hopeful that we all just build lots of clean energy and we like with the ozone layer,
• 1:29:56
  you know, there will be a period where there will be global heating and people suffer and that
• 1:30:01
  that will be terrible and will lose species and things like that. But I'm hoping that then
• 1:30:05
  it will stabilize and we will be able to thrive and have clean air and clean energy and we'll wonder
• 1:30:11
  what we're worrying about just because we're left with a little bit of waste, which is manageable
• 1:30:16
  and it's all about manageable risk from my perspective. Right now, I hope you're right.
• 1:30:21
  I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I hope it's a capable of extraordinary things.
• 1:30:26
  I like to think that, you know, we would look, look, look, can I give you an example from
• 1:30:31
  in the 1980s, they had an oil crisis, not different than, you know, what we're going through now
• 1:30:36
  in terms of how they impacted the country. So they, the Prime Minister, PM Esmer, he said,
• 1:30:44
  I'm going to, I'm going to build loads of clean energy at home. And, you know, this was before
• 1:30:48
  renewables was really on the table. So, you know, they didn't invest a lot in that at the time
• 1:30:52
  where they do now. And he said, we're going to build fifth, we're going to build 58 reactors
• 1:30:57
  and they built them over a period of 12 years as a huge industrial and taking lots of workers.
• 1:31:01
  This is how they got, you know, the industry and everything off the ground. And since then,
• 1:31:06
  since they decarbonized in, in the 1980s, they have had a clean energy mix since then.
• 1:31:12
  And they have not had a Fukushima or a Chernobyl. They have not had any accidents with ways.
• 1:31:16
  They have not even lost a pellet of waste. Right. Right. So, to me, wow, that's incredible.
• 1:31:23
  What if everywhere in the world had done that? Would we have run away climate change right now?
• 1:31:27
  No, we wouldn't. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how we've got to think in terms of the future, I think,
• 1:31:32
  instead of kind of, it's too late. We've got to do, we've got to enact these plans now so that
• 1:31:38
  future generations will have a planet to live on. Can I ask you some first date questions
• 1:31:44
  with which I like to end our conversations for our premium subscribers? It's just like
• 1:31:49
  Rorschach questions. And first thing that comes into your mind, what's your favourite smell?
• 1:31:57
  Beaked bread, freshly breaked bread. What fad have you never been able to understand or trend?
• 1:32:08
  Plastic surgery. Is that a bad answer? No. No. Why? Why? Yeah. What best do I understand?
• 1:32:22
  I don't know. I just think people are humans are beautiful and aging is beautiful and it's
• 1:32:26
  all part of the process and I don't understand why why people go to great lengths to hide that.
• 1:32:31
  Yeah. Yeah. What did you do for your last holiday? My last holiday, I went down south in Devon to
• 1:32:40
  an area that I've never been to called the Southam's. It's a really beautiful area of outstanding
• 1:32:44
  beauty and never been to cool. Fantastic. What skill of your
• 1:32:50
  that was just a little taste of our first date questions, which you'll be able to hear all of
• 1:32:54
  if you subscribe to uncomfortable conversations. Not just the questions, but of course all of our
• 1:32:59
  banter around them, which become a subsequent little episode of themselves. If you do subscribe,
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  you will not only hear that, but you'll also hear no ads on any episode ever. And you'll get
• 1:33:09
  additional content, including opportunities to connect directly with me. You can subscribe at
• 1:33:15
  uncomfortable conversations.substac.com or follow the links in the podcast description. Otherwise,
• 1:33:22
  I'll see you next time on uncomfortions.
• 1:33:29
  you