Latest / Art of the Question / The Ultimate Case for Nuclear Energy - Prof. Wade Allison - #32

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The Ultimate Case for Nuclear Energy - Prof. Wade Allison - #32 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm really excited for this. think nuclear energy and energy in general is such an interesting and timely topic. And I also believe many people are unfortunately have some negative feelings when they hear the word nuclear. So I hope we can ⁓ clear some of that ⁓ misinformation today, if you will. and I think for starters, it would be, ⁓ nice to, to get to know you and to understand who you are and, and yeah, how did you get here? Well. I first became excited by the story of energy ⁓ when I was 13 years old. That's after all a very formative time in anybody's life. I just so happened to be in France on holiday with my parents and it was a long time ago and my sister and I became rather ill and we went to Geneva. because my parents thought they could get medical attention there. Anyway, we got better. We went into the center of Geneva and there was a big exhibition on atoms for peace. And this was ⁓ President Eisenhower's initiative ⁓ on nuclear energy. And I thought, gosh, that's really interesting. I'm going to go home and study science. I don't come from an academic family at all, but ⁓ I went back and so I then went to Cambridge and then I went to my doctorate. went to Oxford. I did experiments at CERN starting in 1963 ⁓ and briefly in the USA. And I spent my career at Oxford talking about energy and maths and physics and medical physics and so on. And in 1954, the same year as I went to Geneva, the first nuclear submarine was launched, the Nautilus. And in 1956, the first commercial electricity generating station came on the air at Calder Hall, opened by the Queen. But what has happened since then? The answer is essentially nothing, because the world has preferred fossil fuels and renewables ⁓ because they were worried about nuclear. Now, ⁓ Getting over this 70 years of lost time for what I will suggest is the next Industrial Revolution. It's a very serious error ⁓ and that is what I want to hope that our conversation will talk about. Yeah, we will definitely talk about it. yeah, you've prepared some slides for today. Would it make sense to just go through your slides and then if I have any extra questions, ⁓ then I'll just ask them on the spot and maybe once we went through them, ⁓ we can discuss ⁓ what we haven't yet. But I think that that would make for a logical order. Do you agree? I'm not sure that logic. I think ⁓ if we go through your your questions. ⁓ Yeah. And stop me and we can take things from there if need be. ⁓ I think if you're just stuck with the slides, it would make it lengthy and we might not get to what you want to say. So no, that's fine. ⁓ To allow it to break up a bit. Perfect. Okay. Well, maybe what's ⁓ an interesting start is just if we start at the basics, at the definition of what we're talking about. So what is nuclear energy and how does it work? Well, ⁓ nuclear energy, ⁓ as I will show later in my slides, is ⁓ what happens the energy that we can get from the center of atoms. And of course, we didn't know very much about this. And when we did begin to learn, we got worried about, people got worried about the radiation that comes with the energy. that is what I would, but perhaps we can go back to you actually. ⁓ asked about radiation and ⁓ that was where I was going to start from. Okay, let's start there. Let's start there because yeah, have when a lot of people think about nuclear energy or nuclear weapons or anything that has the word nuclear. ⁓ People think about radiation and when people hear the word radiation, we think radiation bad. ⁓ So what is radiation and ⁓ why do people assume radiation occurs when we're creating nuclear energy? And maybe also what's the difference between the radiation doses used in medicine compared to to nuclear accidents, for example. Well, that will come up ⁓ as we go through. Let's just talk about radiation. Yes. And ⁓ if my first slide there is a table, I don't, I won't have many tables. I can have pictures ⁓ to tell the story, but the effect when Radiation shines on living people. ⁓ Three things happen. The first is physics and chemistry. the radiation, ⁓ it acts like a wrecking ball. And it's much more powerful than the ⁓ flimsy forces that hold our bodies together. And it... ⁓ kills ⁓ cells and mucks up DNA and so on. And that's physics. And that is described by quantum mechanics, ⁓ the mathematical probability, ⁓ and it is linear like ⁓ that part of physics is. And that is the same would happen if I have a piece of a copper or a piece of wood or anything dead and I shine radiation on it. It's the same story. But that isn't the end of the story because two other things happened. The second thing that happens is the biological response. When living matter finds that it has been damaged, it does something about it. And we know this, this happens in medicine or if we cut ourselves or we have a graze. Within a few days, ⁓ our body responds and the DNA will be repaired or the cells will be replaced or the tissue responds and so on. in our everyday lives were used to that. ⁓ And the same thing happens with radiation. The reason it's the same thing is because what happens where we take exercise, for instance, ⁓ DNA also gets and the cells get damaged and have to be replaced. ⁓ And this is all part of the normal. the same kind of thing, the same protection mechanisms that work for us for taking exercise or something like that also works with... ⁓ for radiation. And I'll show you more about this later. the third thing, and animals don't know about the physics and they don't know about the biological response that follows it. ⁓ And equally, they don't know about the third thing that happens, which is a social response to nuclear radiation. And that it seems can last for decades. and it leads to fear and panic ⁓ and ⁓ loss of confidence and so on. But animals don't watch videos and they don't know about this. And as we will see, ⁓ they don't know about that either. So ⁓ the story of radiation on living tissue has these three stages. and we've got to deal with the effects of all of them. That's beautiful. Now, ⁓ let me get away from tables. And this is something that everybody knows about. next to x-rays and nuclear radiation in physics is ultraviolet radiation. And it's really not much different. And it has the same effect of busting ⁓ atoms and molecules. ⁓ ⁓ causing chaos with tissue. And we all know about this when we go on holiday, we have to explain to the children ⁓ that sunburn, ⁓ which is cell death, means that your skin may peel, which is ⁓ dead cells being replaced. And in a few days, you recover. ⁓ And if you repeat the exposure, then also in a few days, you will adapt to it. And what's happening is that your biological system is realizing that it needs more resources ⁓ to repair the damage. And so if you're used to going out in the sunshine, ⁓ it ⁓ is able to adapt to greater exposures. And we teach children about this ⁓ and we tell them to be sensible and to enjoy the sun and wear a hat and use a barrier queen. We do not go to the United Nations and ask for their regulations about this. And if you like it, this on a... This is what we have to do. We have to educate the children about radiation. And this is what we have failed to do for 70 years. Right. So that's what radiation does, ⁓ looked at academically and looked at ⁓ from a family point of view. Your next question was. Yes, the L &T model. believe that's a very important one. I'm not going to explain. I hope I'm not going to too long explaining this because it doesn't happen. ⁓ It's not true. ⁓ How it came to be a question ⁓ is part of the problem, but it's a bit of phony science that came in to ⁓ to talk about the effects of radiation. But it is a pretty important reason why we have a wrong understanding of the effects of nuclear. Yes, and it's ⁓ gross oversimplification. What it says is that ⁓ the effects of radiation increase directly in proportion to the amount of radiation that you get. And that is shown on this slide, an A there, by the dotted line, which shows the response increasing slowly, linearly with the stress. But that ignores the effect of biology. And the effect of biology is to make sure that there is no effect of the radiation unless it is above a certain threshold. ⁓ And the threshold there is shown as a red arrow. ⁓ That is the point at which the biology is not able to keep up with the rate of damage ⁓ from the radiation and you start to get significant damage. So the red, the black line there and the red arrow are reality and the dotted line is this ⁓ bogus theory called the linear no threshold. Why that, why we're even talking about that is of course part of the problem. Now, as we saw with the sunshine, with the ultraviolet case, ⁓ as you. have more and more radiation, then the biology adapts and in B there, ⁓ the black line moves to the right and the threshold rises as it gets more used to. And that's ⁓ adaptation and it gets even better. than in A. I won't talk very much about that. The point is really the story is what is that threshold? What is dangerous? Yeah. And is this still being used today in order to determine how much radiation people can safely handle this wrong metric? It's not. It's not being used. ⁓ And that's the problem. ⁓ okay. But I mean that the LNT is being used. So we are using the wrong ones. become clear as I continue in this discussion. ⁓ It's gone up to the United Nations. It's set in concrete in regulations around the world ⁓ in working practices and agreements with unions and all the rest of it. ⁓ That's what is LNT. And it's getting that out of the system. That's the problem. just to give an example of how. Biology is not like physics. Lots of physics is linear, but biology is not. Here's a slide that was sent to me by ⁓ a radiologist in New Zealand who has a puppy and the puppy has done a pee on the lawn and where the... ⁓ where it's concentrated, the grass dies. But where it gets a little bit of the pea, the grass is actually growing much stronger. And of course, we know this sort of thing in our normal lives, but we think, or some people think that in physics, that if you're dealing with mathematical physics, you do things with straight lines. It's rather like saying a house or if you're buying a house and the house seller says, well, the price of the house has gone up 10 % this year and it'll go up 10 % next year and 10 % the year after. And so I'm going to sell you a house because it's going to be worth 10 times as much in 10 years. You know, and I know that the price of houses doesn't work like that. It's not linear. And this obsession with linearity is a nonsense. We wouldn't take that from an estate agent and we shouldn't take that for the case of radiation either because it's safety is a biological problem, not a... Why do you think, where does this obsession with linear come from? Is it just because it's easier and more predictable? Well, certainly that. It's administratively much easier. That's also true that... after World War II and the beginning of the nuclear era, something that was mathematical physics was magic. This was the answer to everything. And so if you're dealing with nuclear, it must be mathematical, especially if you don't understand it, which most people don't. So they bow before mathematics. And in this case, should. Let's look at some data. These are the death, the number of people who, the percentage of people who died as a result of the ⁓ Chernobyl accident, the early firefighters. Incidentally, people always used to talk about Chernobyl, but it's in Ukraine and the Ukraine spelling rather like we now say Kiev. not Kiev, we should be saying Chernobyl. ⁓ So ⁓ this graph shows that the crosses show how the death rate ⁓ of Chernobyl workers rose smartly from ⁓ just like the ⁓ curves that I showed you not linear and not a straight line, but above about 3000 millisieverts down here. There's a threshold and the thing rises rapidly. Now, ⁓ unfortunately from an investigative point of view, we can't do that with thousands of people. You can do it with rats and the a curve shown there is for rats and all life is about the same and the curve for rats follows the line of the crosses for, but there weren't many people who died at Chernobyl, only about 28 from this. from the radiation. So that is a kind of real data that we need to look at. And somehow we've got to get to find out more about radiation without looking at the very weak statistics that we get from accidents. ⁓ Of course, we've got 130 years of experience of radiation. And Mary Curie, whose name everybody knows, she got uniquely two Nobel prizes, one in physics and one in chemistry for her work on radiation. And then spent the rest of her life, a gift to the world on using radiation for diagnosis and cancer therapy. And she said, nothing in life is to be feared, it's only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less. Now, she was very careful. Goodness knows what. how much radiation she received in her life, but she lived out to a full life expectancy of 60s, her age and nationality of 67 years. So people say she died of radiation. No, she didn't, at least she may have died of cancer, but lots of people die from cancer. She had a full life. ⁓ But there were accidents and a lot too much radiation and is. ⁓ dangerous. And early on in the nuclear story, ⁓ watches and dials were painted with radioactive paint, which meant that you could see, read the instruments in the dark. And particularly in wartime and so on, this was very, very important. It was a big industry. And the girls who painted, they were mainly girls, who painted the faces of these instruments with radioactive paint. It was quite fine work. And then did it with paintbrushes. And to get a good sharp edge on the paintbrush, they licked the paintbrushes. And the radioactive, ⁓ the radium got into their bones and ⁓ it stayed there. and they received very large radioactive doses for the rest of their lives. ⁓ There's a lot of data on this. Needless to say, history, when the history of this was being looked at ⁓ in the 1920s and 30s, ⁓ it became a matter of legal tussle and or became classified. It was not allowed to be spoken about, but now we have the data. So bone cancer is only about one in 400 people die of bone cancer. There were, as it says here, 1339 painters who received less than 10,000 milligrams of dose. Don't have to know what a milligram is, but I'm going to refer to it from time to time. At one in 400, you'd expect ⁓ about three to die of cancer. And in fact, none did. But the 191 painters who had more than 10,000 million gray, 46 of those died of cancer. And there were books and factors of film about the fate ⁓ of these people. And this was very serious. ⁓ But in 1926, they'd realized what was happening and they told the girls to stop licking their paint brushes. ⁓ And this is a scatter plot which shows for one spot for each employee. And the dose is shown running. vertically and the year that they entered the industry is horizontally. And above the horizontal red line, there are a large number of red dots of people who died of bone cancer. But there were nobody below the red line who died of bone cancer. Which again points to the fact that this is not a linear issue. There's a threshold. Yes. But of course we have to follow that. But it also shows that in 1926, the vertical line shows that they ⁓ understood what the problem was. ⁓ died after 1926 ⁓ of bone cancer. So this is all pre-war early stuff. ⁓ Although, of course, some of the deaths were much later. So there's a rough threshold of ⁓ which we can calculate from here, which is about three milligray per day or three millisieverts, there's no difference. Anyway, in 1934, which actually happens to be the year that Mary Curie died, ⁓ the great and the good in the radiation business gathered in Zurich and they with the intention of agreeing what was a safe limit, what is the threshold? And it's not just a threshold, but it's the amount of radiation per day that is important because as we solve the sunburn, it recovers and If it recovers, ⁓ then under almost all circumstances, ⁓ this isn't a carryover to later time. So what's important is radiation per day. And the down. On the bottom here, actually says that the threshold is 0.2 rontogens per day in modern ⁓ units. That's 2 mGy per day, which is 730 times the ⁓ modern ⁓ so-called official public dose today. ⁓ is what we've got to talk about. ⁓ Amongst the people signatories here was ⁓ Dr. Rolf Sievert from Sweden, after whom the unit is ⁓ named, and also LS Taylor, who was the founder of the radiation protection business in the United States. who 46 years later in 1980, when he gave the 1980s Seavert Memorial Lecture, said, this threshold that we wrote down there has not been exceeded. Nobody has knowingly died from a dose. below this threshold in sins. And that includes the war. And we'll look at that in a moment. Now we're 46 years later again. And it's still true that they got the number right. Within a factor of two or three. Funnily enough, I didn't know about this paper. ⁓ until I'd already come up with my own version, which is in my book, Radiation and Reason. Fast forward to this is entirely modern data. This is a modern experiment where take dogs, you can do it with mice, but dogs are better because they have a reasonably long ⁓ lifetime. And take some dogs, and they were given the maximum, actually three million grapes per day, but instead of two, ⁓ for the whole of their lives. What happened when compared with equivalent dogs who were treated in exactly the same way, ⁓ except that they were not irradiated? What is the difference? Well, in the first 3,000 days, Oops, first 3,000 days. Can you see that? Almost no difference. Almost no difference for 3,000 days, which is about 9,000 millisieverts. ⁓ And then they do start to die slightly faster than those who received no dose. And this is actually because the immune system is beginning to buckle under the response of the radiation. So ⁓ this is confirmation of the number of ⁓ the numbers were found. This is modern data. ⁓ Of course, there's lots more. ⁓ And it doesn't matter what kind of radiation you have, ⁓ gamma radiation, it's all the same. Wrecking balls are wrecking balls and the damage that they do is the same. Yeah. So to recap a little bit, we are using the wrong metric and there's tons of evidence to support that it is not a linear issue. It's a threshold that we should definitely stay under, but currently we have a threshold that is 700 times too strict. Yeah. Well, that's right. mean, in a strict LNT thing, there'd be no threshold at all. But the point is that we get radiation from the rocks around us, inside our own bodies. There's radioactivity in your body, which is responsible for about 10 % of the radiation you receive. This radiation comes from space. And these are marked. to about two to three milligrams per year. ⁓ the horse's LNT people said, well, let's say we're not allowed to have more than one milligram per day extra. So that's half or third of what you'd have anyway. So. ⁓ Just to put all this in perspective, ⁓ telling stories to people, not just scientists, but not just everybody, need pictures of what the story is. ⁓ Here's a picture. This is a picture in which the radiation doses are represented by a areas of circles. And if you have radiotherapy, then the radiation dose to the tumor is way above the threshold because you are killing. It works because the cells of the tumor are killed by the radiation. And what happens is you get something like 2000 milligrams a day for a month. And you have to go back again and again and again. Anybody who's had radiotherapy will have the experience that it's very tedious and expensive because you have to do it again and again and again. But in order to ⁓ beat the recovery of the biology, ⁓ You hit it for five or six weeks of therapy every day, something like 2000. And that's the red circle. If you have radiotherapy, the other cells in your body near the tumor above it or below it or left or right. also receive typically a thousand milligrams per day for a month. And the hair falls out and it's nasty. And occasionally you can get an extra cancer. ⁓ we won't go into that. the yellow circle is something that people, not lab people or people. calculations, but actually members of the public survive. The green circle corresponds to two milligrams per day, the experts in 1934 agreed. No record of harm for if you get a dose at the level of two milligrams per day. And the little white spot, which is shown there, ⁓ magnified. Also, the tiny white dot is one milligram per day, which is the public LNT safety ⁓ recommendation. ⁓ so. When I say that radiation dose should be relaxed, we're not talking about the red and the yellow. We're talking about relaxing it to the green. And none of this data, this members of the public and their friends and relatives receive the red and yellow ⁓ doses. leave and say thank you for the attention that they received from medicine. So ⁓ we can be dead honest ⁓ that this is not something that happens only in ⁓ secret research laboratories. This is something that happens in everyday life for members of the public. Right. So what happened? Why did this egregious exaggeration occur? Well, I realize that most people now don't remember. that the Ban the Bomb marches. People were so frightened of nuclear weapons and the Russians and the Soviet Union and I want to say the Russians now just to remind us that this isn't the bad guys haven't gone away. And everybody joined Ban the Bomb. ⁓ marches and demonstrations. And this went on for years in essentially every country. And there was a threat of unrest, social instability. We're really talking about the politicians being frightened by the ⁓ instability that this the nuclear weapons were causing. And that social instability was the problem. Now, so what the hell do they do? Because they didn't know about what is, I've just been telling you, in fact, it wouldn't have helped much because it's people who needs, it's the children, it's everybody who needs to understand that nuclear radiation is a part of everyday life. Anyway, as a, instant attempt to cover things up. They introduced something called a precautionary principle, which is not scientific at all. It says, you can't be too safe. Well, you damn well can because if you're too safe, then other dangers are incurred. And we'll look at that later on. So the precautionary principle says that you should reduce radiation allure as low as reasonably achievable. ⁓ And it was justified by the ⁓ inept use of mathematics and biology. But to go back to these days in the 50s and 60s, because I realized that most people now didn't experience this. There was secrecy. Nuclear was too difficult for people to understand what sort of an awful inhibition about nuclear, which is completely inappropriate. ⁓ And the whole thing was stabilized, the exaggeration, et cetera, was stabilized because it's an interdisciplinary education failure. You need quite a lot of different, quite simple ideas from different parts of our knowledge of the world we live in. ⁓ And most people, unfortunately, at school, ⁓ learn at university, they learn engineering, they don't learn about biology, and they don't learn about sociology. So these things are kept too far apart. That was a general blindness, still is a blindness to the beneficial doses of health. The yellow circle there corresponds in a month corresponds to 30,000 years worth of radiation at one milligram per day. So ⁓ if you actually look at what people get for ⁓ their health when they got cancer, ⁓ they say thank you for 30,000 years worth of radiation. safe level according to the regulations. Now, of course, all this was welcomed by the fossil fuel industry and later the nuclear industry because nuclear has always been a big threat to ⁓ the oil and gas industry. And we see a living with the consequences of that today in the Middle East. So ⁓ they were very happy with what happened. The nuclear industry, well, they were just frightened. They didn't understand it. They got big danger money from ⁓ working with. They didn't stand up ⁓ to the problem. So nobody, ⁓ almost nobody addressed this problem ⁓ to the world at large. accidents So then you were, were, Fugushima and Chernobyl, there's my still using the old spelling. ⁓ We've already seen some evidence, examples of evidence. look some more. Yeah, I think maybe good to introduce this question a little bit. What people sometimes say is, yeah, even proponents of nuclear energy, They say, yeah, there have been some accidents in the past, but now our technology has improved significantly. So if we were to build nuclear power plants today, we would be able to build them a lot safer than back in the day. But if you look at the numbers from even those accidents back in the day, I believe, I think most people that died in those terrible accidents. didn't actually die from the radiation poisoning. So I think that's very important to mention before we head into this segment. Yeah, and if I think it's a very dangerous argument to say that it will never happen, that's what people in Japan were told. They were told ⁓ that something like Fukushima cannot happen. And if you say something's impossible and then it does, you lost all credibility. I'll come to this later on. So you should never say that. Just need to be a bit more grown up and say that, it may happen, but if it does, it doesn't hurt you. ⁓ People need to understand, well, the evolution, it's evolution, not ⁓ physics. It's the evolution of biology. Biology has had to cope with the task of ⁓ background radiation and oxygen and chemicals and so on. Evolution does this all the time ⁓ with... ⁓ with infections and so on. And it learns from immunization and previous infections ⁓ that the ⁓ biology is protected from ⁓ the infection getting out of control again. So biology is working all the time, constantly adapting. So if you compare, and this is table here, look at repair infection and fire and radiation. Now, the basic energy of infection is negligible. It's not a consideration. Fire is significant ⁓ energy and of course for nuclear radiation it's very high. But the thing is about spreading. Now, the infection spreads and multiplies. And it doesn't just spread, it adds to it, it increases and spreads. And fire also spreads and catches, and other things start burning and so on. So it catches. That doesn't happen with radiation. And the net result is that infection is extremely dangerous and fire is pretty dangerous. And nuclear radiation is effectively by comparison not dangerous at all. So very few people are hurt in nuclear power accidents. At Chernobyl, 28 people certainly died. not of cancer, should say, but of essentially a breakdown of the biology altogether. We already saw the curve for those crosses on that curve. There were also cases of thyroid cancer, but I put a question mark there because there are people who are not actually quite sure about this. Most of the people who got thyroid cancer were cured anyway. ⁓ And there's a lot of overdiagnosis and so ⁓ on. But it's not a big problem. Nobody died of the radiation of Fukushima at all. And the accidents of Three Mile Island and Windscale in 1957, there are no ⁓ known deaths. either. But, and here we come back to this, neglected dangers of radiation. There are serious social and medical and mental health consequences. ⁓ And what it comes down to is what the United Nations report ⁓ about Chernobyl. recorded that if you tell people in whether they're educated or not, you have been irradiated and we are going to take you out of your home. ⁓ You may not live, but we're going to pay you compensation. That is about as dreadful an effect. that you can say to anybody. And You get, I'll show some more data on this later, but the serious mental effects people. ⁓ it'll break up ⁓ alcoholism, ⁓ people lose the will to live and they think they're going to die. It's not the radiation, it's the panic about the radiation. So because these people were told that something terrible has happened to them and that they are going to die of cancer and all sorts of radiation, related diseases, ⁓ weren't welcoming in social circles anymore, they got depressed, they grabbed too alcohol. ⁓ Is that why they suffered all these? Well, mean, it's the same for any of us. If you go to your family and they say, you know, You don't look very well today. You're all right. And you say, well, yes, I think I am. And if they say it again, which, well, perhaps I'll treat my own, lie down and so on. You can be talked into worrying. Yes. This, course, is how a medieval, a curse in primitive societies and witch doctors work. by ⁓ telling you that you're better or worse than you really are. And it can be real. So for instance, in the placebo effect ⁓ that some of you may know about, if you go in for treatment and you're not actually treated medical treatment, they don't actually give you treatment. then you will get better than if you're not, ⁓ you haven't gone in at all. So when there's a new drug, they have to mix ⁓ people, some of whom get the drug and some of whom get a placebo. And they all think that they've been treated. And it's only by comparing those people. those groups of people that you can show whether the drug actually works. otherwise it can be suggestion for both the people who received the treatment and the people who just got the encouragement. So we are all... That's placebo effect, which is... when you think you're getting help. And there's the not-ebo effect, which is like the curse ⁓ when you are being told that you're going to die. then people get real, ⁓ really suffer. ⁓ They get real medical conditions. Yeah, I believe there's a story about a man who thought he was poisoned or something that he grabbed the wrong pills or something. He thought he was going to die. His heart started pounding. His heart rate went up, blood pressure, like he had all the symptoms of a heart attack. He truly believed that he was having a heart attack. And then in the hospital, they found out they get a call that It was nothing to worry about and then all his symptoms disappeared immediately. So the nocebo effect can be, I don't know exactly what this was, but it's a pretty famous story. should look it up. Also cases like that of people who actually did die because they thought they were going to die. That's crazy. The biology, exactly how this works, we don't know. a literature on the Nosebo effect of actually the effect of cursing people. ⁓ it's interesting to look at the animals at Chernobyl. And of course, they don't know about the physics, they don't know about the biology, and they weren't told anything about the horrific stories because they don't watch television. the extraordinary thing is that the evacuation zone at Chernobyl, that was forecast to be a desert and be uninhabitable for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. And in fact, the animals were not moved and they're thriving. They're much better off because there aren't any humans about. ⁓ They're having a wonderful time. And I imagine that there might be a discussion between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes about this, ⁓ in which Dr. Watson says, but they know nothing. And Sherlock Holmes might reply, quite so, but maybe something we know is actually wrong, so that nuclear radiation is essentially harmless at low and moderate doses. So. The story of radiation, we have to think about children and animals. They have a lot to tell us. Super interesting. Here's a slide. I went to a meeting in ⁓ Washington, in Washington state a few years ago, was it, 1918. And this is a slide which was presented there by ⁓ some Japanese ⁓ presenters. ⁓ presentation. about what happened to human relations in ⁓ Fukushima. And the effect is absolutely disastrous. Of course, the accidents that people think about, there are some more important accidents, because they tell us more. The accident at Goiania in Brazil in 1987 was interesting. Here's the IAEA report on it. It's all there on the internet, but people don't talk about it. There was a medical facility, radiotherapy unit, and the hospital went bust and ⁓ it was sitting there and some thieves broke in and they stole the large lump of metal from the ⁓ radiotherapy unit with the radioactive source. inside. ⁓ It happens to be a caesium 137 source, which is one of the ⁓ isotopes which was released, for instance, for Cushing's. ⁓ And it's a very, very intense source that's used for radiotherapy, because you're talking about the red circle there on my diagram. ⁓ And anyway, they took this source home and... They broke it open ⁓ and ⁓ their children were delighted to see the ionization of the air around the radioactive source. They got into their ⁓ kitchen, into their food. ⁓ The children painted themselves with it. They invited the neighbors in to see. this exciting thing that they had found. then somebody, and in fact it was a physicist who was a geological surveyor who had already a counter and he said it doesn't work because it's saturating. But finally, they did find out the problem. And there were, ⁓ I think, 370 people were affected, but most of them externally. So by washing off and throwing their clothes away and so on, no problems. But there were 70 who had internal, who'd ingested inside. ⁓ And their doses, ⁓ some of were very high. There were six people who died. like the workers at Johnnabil. All the people who died had more than a thousand times the greatest public dose by anybody received at Fukushima. ⁓ But there were no cases of radiation induced cancer in 25 years. Now the IAEA don't talk about this. ⁓ because it doesn't quite sort of match the LNT ⁓ theory. ⁓ But I've spoken to the doctor who reported to the IAEA ⁓ on the data and I've got his slides that he showed to the IAEA. ⁓ There's been no radiation induced cancer in 25 years. Amongst these 70 people, one died of alcoholism, which was induced by mental illness and so on. So it's the same story again. And then of course, there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now people don't like to talk about nuclear weapons at the same time they're talking about nuclear energy, but they should do. They should do and put it on the map. Now, Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed, a couple of months before that, ⁓ 100,000 people died from the conventional bombing of Tokyo. ⁓ You had a thousand planes ⁓ dropping ⁓ tens of tons of bombs, conventional. the center of Tokyo was essentially destroyed in the blast and fire. and Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no different. Well, don't, nobody knows the exact numbers, but the blast and fire were very serious indeed. But what about the radiation? Well... ⁓ there are about 86,000 or were 86,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their children and their health has been followed for 50 years and more since the ⁓ incident. And the first thing to say is that there is no evidence for inherited abnormality. No people with three eyes and 10 fingers on one hand and the kinds of things that the science fiction people ⁓ think or suppose that you could have as an effect of radiation. You cannot imagine a bigger test with humans of 100,000 people and medical records followed for 50, 60 years. ⁓ That is not a problem. What is a problem is that there is cases of additional cancer and leukemia. ⁓ Nobody who had. a dose of less than ⁓ 100, 200 mG. ⁓ There were no extra cancers and only those who received greater doses than that were. So you can look at it was compared the ⁓ data for those inside the ⁓ region of the ⁓ looked at their cancer mortality from 1950 to 2000 compared with people outside, also Japanese, also in the same ⁓ era and how many of them ⁓ died and looking at the difference is 573. That is less than a third of the number who died from the panic evacuation at Fukushima in 2011. Now, the psychological effects of being in the bomb is not taken into account because... The data is obviously much too messy for that. But there is not a big problem from radiation, even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this is not something that people like to talk about because people think it's going too far and that's bombs. So... ⁓ The blast and fire and the fear and panic are the killers. Radiation is not a problem. Blast and fire are very serious. Blast and fire are much bigger than... much bigger than you get from conventional explosives. And I'm not underestimating that in any way, but not the radiation. It's important to understand the difference between renewables and the ⁓ as an energy supply now, looking at the difference between renewables and and fossil fuels and nuclear. And the big difference is the energy density. Now I've got some very brief slides just to give you a sketch. The numbers I show in this are not my numbers. They're anything to do with my belief. They're the result of calculation. They could be wrong by a factor of two or three or four or five, but not significant when compared the energy density of renewables, a thousandth of a millijoule per kilogram. I'll show you where these numbers come from. For wind and solar. That's why renewables are so big. They're so weak. That's why we have to destroy ⁓ vast areas of countryside ⁓ or sea, ⁓ putting up renewables. making them so frail. ⁓ day. fossil fuels were immensely better. And the Industrial Revolution took off when people learned how to cope with ⁓ the using fossil fuels with a thousand times the energy density. And nuclear fission is 10 million times, is a million times more And these aren't, I'll show you where these numbers come from. But looking at the, if you calculate the lifetime, lifetime fuel needed per person, all their food, all their heating, all their transport of a modern person, it's equivalent to 10 million tons of water coming over a hundred meter high dam. or a thousand tons of coal, maybe it's 500 maybe 2000 but something like that or one kilogram of uranium-235. Just one kilogram. Just one kilogram. ⁓ I've got to make these numbers. I need to justify these numbers because they're mind blowing. They are. They're mind blowing for instance in the sense of if you are a military general and you're told that you can have twice as much firepower as the other guys. You think, great, I'm going to win. But if you come to them and say you're going to have a million times the firepower, you are unable to cope with it. And that is one of the things that's happened to civilization is that it has not able, it has not been able to digest a factor of a million. One of the factors of a million should not be seen as a factor of a million, but a factor of a millionth. So for instance, when you look at nuclear fuel, you only need a millionth of the amount of fossil fuel that you need. So if we talk about nuclear waste, the amount of nuclear waste is absolutely... tiny. I mean you can put it in my backyard. It's not all that's ever been. ⁓ It's not a problem. Anyway, when you look at the reasons for Renewables. Well, the point in favour of renewables, they're acceptable, accepted because everybody knows about them. been brought up with the wind and the sunshine ⁓ and they understand them ⁓ and so on. But they're intermittent, they're weak and they're huge footprints and they're environmental. ⁓ credentials are dreadful. If you look at fossil fuels, it powers the economy. It's available 24, coal and gas are available 24 7 or at least they are when things aren't going wrong in the Middle East. The emissions are decidedly poor and there's a problem of climate change and all the rest of it. And the safety is pretty awful as well. But we've lived with that for a couple of centuries now. If look at the nuclear site everything's good or better except when you come down to public acceptability, the fear, poor education and so on. Now, I haven't looked at this, but of course, energy has to come from somewhere. ⁓ And the question is, where does the energy of nuclear actually come from? And it comes from supernovae of a billion years ago. Renewables. The mechanics of Mr. Galileo and Mr. Newton, you can calculate the energy of water coming over a dam or moving and so on. you can see here that you get a thousandth of a millijoule per kilogram ⁓ or even less than that if ⁓ it's moving 15 meters, something moving at 15 meters per second. ⁓ doesn't give you any more. ⁓ And well, there's the wind and the sunshine, but that's pretty awful too. Just a few hundred watts per square meter ⁓ when the wind's blowing and when the sun's out. ⁓ But you can't do very much better on any of those. Of course, you can go for hot gas molecules, because they're moving at the speed of sound and that gives you the energy of steam, but it still doesn't give you a big lift up compared with a thousandth of a millijoule per kilogram. That's where the number came from in that. Yes. So how about fossil fuels? Well, that's an example of chemical energies. And chemical energies, you can look at a Tesla, lithium battery, a lead acid battery, food, burning wood, TNT explosive, ammonium nitrate explosive like the blew up in ⁓ Beirut, burning coal. or petrol or hydrogen. And if you take account of the fact that you air, oxygen, then the millijoules per kilogram are shown in the left-hand column there. they're all between, mostly between one and 10, and that's what I put down in that table. So a thousand times better than wind and water. And that realisation... meant that fossil fuels and the engines you can build with them powered the Industrial Revolution of the last 250 years. Two questions. Where is that energy stored? If I look at a lump of coal, where is the energy? ⁓ Calling it chemistry doesn't, it's just giving it a name. Where is it? Where are the springs and where is it? And furthermore, is that even better? Well, the authority for my next slide is perhaps unexpected and long ago. In 1931, which is 95 years ago, Winston Churchill wrote, looking at the next 50 years, he said, the coal a man could get in a day can easily do 500 times as much work as the man himself. Nuclear energy is at least a million times more powerful still. The discovery and control of such sources of power could cause in human affairs incomparably changes, incomparably greater than those produced by the steam engine four generations ago. Well, it's seven generations now. He was right. Except He was writing for the next 50 years, but he was wrong in time. It only took 25 years because by 1956, the first power station had been built. And 1950, and by then the... In 1955, ⁓ society lost its nerve and considered that this was not acceptable. And the real problem is we've stopped telling the children about energy. You don't, about the energy of nuclear. This would be something that is taught in every school. Not to experts, but to the children for goodness sake. Where is the energy? Where is the energy of atomic, where is the energy of chemistry? And the answer is that the Greeks would have understood that the vibrations of quantum matter depend on the size of the musical instrument. So the smaller the musical instrument, the higher the pitch of the energy. And that's true of ⁓ obviously, of a violin or any other musical instrument. And if you put in the size of an atom, with where the electron is and compare that with the size of ⁓ the nucleus, which is 100,000 times smaller. If you stood on the edge of an atom and looked at the nucleus, it'd be far too small to see. ⁓ And the oscillations of neutrons and protons inside a nucleus. have a million times, that's where this huge factor suddenly comes from. There aren't any more big factors like that. The only other energy that we haven't considered is the energy of black holes and so on. But that only comes when the whole of an enormous thing, but we're not going to be exploiting that for. So this is not very difficult. mean, I'm not going to go through this now. ⁓ But this is if you actually do the algebra, ⁓ you can get the energy of of of energy of coal or the energy of uranium just from this argument. So, I've shown this before, that is where this factor of a million comes from. Yes. I think I'm getting near the end. ⁓ A million years ago, we learnt about fire and that sort of thing. It wasn't just because our brain was bigger. It was because we communicated with one another. And the people who understood lived much better than the people who could only look at the dangers. Rightly, fire is dangerous, but they were wrong and we would not be where we are today if we had ⁓ followed their... So ⁓ we've got to get... We need to get rid of the blind fear of nuclear. and its dumb safety rules. And we want ⁓ understanding, education for everybody and the common sense of safety. In 1957, young Queen Elizabeth was given a bag of plutonium, which the media would have said the most dangerous thing in the world. It's not most dangerous. Oxygen is the most dangerous thing in the world. plutonium and she was invited to feel how warm it was. And I sat down and calculated how warm it is. ⁓ And ⁓ this calculation showed that it would be the same warmth as human flesh. It has the same metabolic ⁓ heat rate as ⁓ normal flesh. it would feel quite pleasantly warm. She's insulated from the radiation by the thickness of the plastic bag that it was in. if radioactivity is ingested, ⁓ like the radium girls and the goyania victims and so on, then there is a tolerance you have to worry about. But the Queen... went on and lived for 65 years. So, yeah, I'm nearly at the end. The story looks like this. Everybody wants to the crisis of electricity done. Nuclear safety costs have been exaggerated by ⁓ bureaucracy ⁓ looking at ⁓ its safety. And this has generated high prices and fossil fuel emissions. And of course, the oil and gas industry have been absolutely delighted. Anyway, I think I'll stop. So actually, nuclear is the only viable energy source. And in the next 50, 100 years, I think you won't find renewables. You'll find countryside looking much better than it does now with no windmills and no solar panels. We will be growing. food inside, as it's already pioneered, particularly in the Netherlands, ⁓ but with energy coming from LED lights, ⁓ energy production all year round, nothing to do with not using the ⁓ solar today and seasons at all. So you can have continuous production of energy and heat and light for then when we eat we will effectively be nuclear powered instead of depending on the weather which is the whole energy story is actually how to get away from the weather. Anyway, I've written two books on the subject. ⁓ The newest is 10 years, 11 years old now. I've got to get right on another on the whole, the story of energy, much bigger that I've describing today. So that I think that's place to stop. Yeah, well, it's such an incredible presentation, Wading. You are so incredibly knowledgeable. And I think it's so important to understand that radiation isn't as dangerous as many people think it is. That's what this conversation has really taught me today, I think mostly. ⁓ I do think like on the education side, I do think most people are aware of the fact that nuclear energy is really efficient. So I think people do have an understanding that it's very powerful if used correctly. I think most people are scared that it's too powerful and what happens when things go wrong. And I think it was such a beautiful demonstration of showing that even if things go horribly wrong, especially in the case of the use of a nuclear weapon, the worst possible ⁓ thinkable scenario, ⁓ even then that the actual dangers of the radiation weren't really as significant. ⁓ what I also like to point out is the argument I raised earlier from people who are pro-nuclear, They don't even seem to be aware of the fact that radiation isn't so dangerous because the argument on the pro-nuclear side is always, yeah, these accidents that happened in the past, they were terrible. However, with today's technology, something like that is less likely to happen. But your argument is that even you never know whether an accident will happen, even if it's less likely today than it was 50 years ago. It can always happen, but if an accident happen, it won't be as bad as people think it is. And I think that's really important because in general, when we are using a creating nuclear energy, if things do go well, which they most of the time do, if the power plant doesn't go up in flames or whatever happens to it, people aren't really or aren't exposed to radiation at all. Right? With the energy it generates. Not the people in the power plant, not anywhere. That's one other thing that we haven't touched on. And in a way I'm glad about that. And that is money. If you are frightened, imagine you are Henry Ford and you build your first Model T Ford. And you say it's got to be gold plated, bulletproof, and I'm going to produce one. just to show I can do it. That will be the most expensive car you can possibly imagine. Right. And if he had done that, he wouldn't have succeeded. So money is not important. If you understand the safety and you build lots of them and so on, nuclear is not expensive. It doesn't involve where ⁓ minerals, there's plenty of uranium, uranium dissolves in the sea, there's a lot in the seawater, it's accumulated there. And then there's thorium, which could also be used. And you don't have to go in for nuclear fusion, which ⁓ has extra problems, and ⁓ as far as one can see it, no significant benefits. So the money problem is invented by us, by society that's frightened of wanting everything to be gold plated and very safe. And it's not necessary. So it's not going to be, 100 years from now, it will not be expensive. And it wasn't expensive when the first... nuclear power stations were built either. Yeah. And so it is your prediction currently that in 50 years from now, we won't really be using any fossil fuels or renewables. We will all be using nuclear energy. Does that mean that you are hopeful for the future and that people will change their minds about nuclear energy? I'm very positive about the future. I mean, I've got I've got six grandchildren. The eldest has announced his engagement. And so I'm all for for young people, I think, that are fantastic, but they've got to learn about the world they live in and throw away some of the regulations which are not suitable for life. Yeah. I hope like part of it will be just the fact as countries start to discover how powerful nuclear energy is, that eventually it'll be an arms race, but in the positive sense of the word, because as soon as China starts building these and we see that the power output of China will increase by a thousand fold, we in the West would be obliged to follow what they are doing as well. That's happening now. China is building more nuclear power stations than all the rest of the world put together. Exactly. Yeah. So I think that will force our hand basically and in a positive sense. If we don't grab it, then the Chinese will be selling us nuclear power stations. Is that what you want? At a price where we can't say no? I think that's a very serious possibility. But I ⁓ we should work with the Chinese ⁓ who, not like Russia, they haven't ⁓ dominated their neighbors in the way that the Russians or indeed the British did in the past, ⁓ or in the Dutch before that. ⁓ ⁓ Let's grow up a bit and teach our children that life's really exciting. I think that's a beautiful way to end it. Is there anything we missed that you think is still very important to mention or something that you would like to emphasize? Yes, but then I won't be able to stop. That's it. All right. Well, I think it's so important that we indeed educate our children, but not just children. think even I was already a pro-nuclear energy, if we do it in a way that makes ⁓ sense, of course, but I learned so much today. ⁓ I thought radiation was a lot more dangerous than ⁓ it turns out to be. So I'm very happy that ⁓ I got this education today and I hope this episode will help more people understand that nuclear energy is indeed the way to go and the way to move forward. ⁓ would like to take this moment and thank you again for the incredible conversation and I really appreciate the time you put in, not just in talking to me today, but also in preparing these slides. It was absolutely wonderful and I'll make sure to put links to all your books in the show notes. Is there any other... place I should mention maybe a website or another place people can go to keep up with your work and maybe that third book ⁓ you were talking about? Well, I would like, I should say no publisher would publish my books so far, but I need a publisher. ⁓ I should say Radiation of Reason has been now It's been translated into five languages since it happened. So I need, I'm 85, but this is what I do. And I want the opportunity to come and speak and talk and discuss as we have done today. And thank you very much for the opportunity. problem is I don't get enough opportunity. to talk about this at meaningful length. People want a two minute ⁓ snippet and I can't say what I've said today in two minutes. So thank you for the opportunity.