Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Decouple podcast, where we explore the science and technologies that can Decouple human wellbeing from its ecological impacts, and the politics that can make decoupling possible.
Welcome back to Decouple. Today I'm joined by Jack Devanney. Jacques is the principal engineer and architect of the Thor con Molten Salt Reactor power plant, and holds a BS and an MS in naval architecture and a PhD in Management Science. Jack's company Thor Khan seeks to use shipyard construction technology to mass produce inexpensive zero emissions power plants to solve the twin problems of energy poverty and climate change. Today we're going to be talking about Jack's most recently published book why nuclear power has been a flop a modern Gordian knot, jack, it's a real pleasure having you on Decouple Thanks for making the time. My pleasure. So jack, I like to kind of ambush my my guests a little bit with a self introduction. You have a kind of a long and storied career, I could get a couple small accolades out of the way there. But pretend you're having a casual conversation with someone who's really interested in chatting with you at a little lunch party. And, you know, let us know a little bit about yourself.
Well, I, I trained it as a naval architect at MIT. The plan was to design the next America's Cup boat didn't work out. When I graduated, it turns out the choice was go to Vietnam or take a deferred jobs. So I went to work for the US Navy, one form or another, worked for three different naval shipyards ended up going back to my department at MIT, the naval architecture, basically worked for the Navy for 10 years, and I saw the Navy system up close and personal it was it was a mess. And the upshot of the whole thing was you had all this paperwork. At the end of the day, the ships were extremely expensive, far, far more expensive than they should be. And in most cases didn't work. I got fed up with that system. And I decided to seek my fortune in the tanker market. And one thing led to another and the next Sorry, no, I was in Korea building very large tankers. What I saw was just blew my mind. Physically, the Korean shipyards didn't look that different from the Navy shipyards, they have the same technology. But they're on different planets. Hey, the Korean productivity was orders of magnitude higher than the Navy productivity. And the ships mostly worked. They were built on schedule. If a ship was delivered a couple of weeks late, that was a disaster, more than a couple of weeks was unthinkable, right? And if a ship didn't perform, yard lost its customer. So it was a new world to me. Then late in life, I got interested in the Gordian knot. And it didn't take very long to figure out that the only way to handle that was was nuclear. But then when I got into nuclear, all of a sudden, I found myself transported back to the Navy system. Right, right. Our problem is we build nuclear reactors from where the Navy build ships, we need to build nuclear reactors the way the Koreans build ships.
Now, you mentioned this term Gordian knot. I think we've all seen kind of beautiful Celtic imagery of this. But can you go a little bit more into what exactly you're speaking to when you when you say that term?
Well, it's the closely coupled problem of global warming and energy poverty, we still have close to a billion people billion humans on this on this planet that have no access to electricity. Another probably half a billion that have at most sporadic access, we need a lot more electricity. But the way we make electricity right now means a lot more co2. So that's the Gordian knot. How do you solve energy, energy poverty and solve global warming? That's my definition of Gordian knot.
Those are two highly ambitious projects to set yourself to. We're here to talk about your book. Again, the working title or the title now is why nuclear power has been a flop a modern Gordian knot, is that correct?
I just I just think of it why why nuclear power has been a flop the working title for a long time as Gordian knot, but it turned into why have things not worked out? And my answer is a little bit different than most people's. And the problem is the nuclear establishment. They're the they're the core problem.
So what I really liked about your book is, you know, in the beginning, one of the many things I liked about the book, I should say is, you start off elucidating the problem and kind of illustrating with some good graphs, the problem of energy poverty, when I read Bill Gates's book, how to avoid a climate catastrophe. I really liked that he used this term that the he's the number 50 and was saying, Listen, that's how many gigatons of co2 equivalent we're putting into the atmosphere every year. If you come to me with a, you know, a new tech a new solution, I asked you what part of 50 is that going to take care of it? For him it helped understand the issue of scale and it made that understandable I think, to me and ways in which I'm a physician, I'm not an engineer. I'm coming at this. You know, gaining some numeracy in a specific topic takes time, but And what I liked was you had some initial graphs again, which which gave an idea of the scale of the problem. And I think that started off with our current electricity capacity generation was something like 2500 gigawatts. And can you just illustrate, is that true? And then what else we would need to get everybody up to a decent level of energy consumption? And indeed what we need to further electrify everything for our climate goals.
Yeah, we're talking just to get everybody up to a decent a electricity consumption. And in terms of quality of life, we're talking about doubling the amount of electricity we're currently making. And then if you start in decarbonizing stuff, well, things build up in a hurry.
So it was I think, was 2500 occurrent. If we want to get everyone up to a European level of consumption, that's another 2500. Can you go into some of the specifics, though, you know, I think you said, around electrifying, certain processes, desalination, maybe even carbon capture and storage, that's where you're getting to your your number, which is 10 acts of recurrent install generation,
a lot of it just decarbonizing the current fossil fuel markets, transportation, industrial processes, etc. You're very quick, quickly up into 789 10. And then you throw in population growth on top of that, and then you throw in these more aggressive, Decarbonization things, and then you throw something in for the sale. It builds up very quickly. And if you're really going to solve the problem, you're talking something like 25,000 gigawatts down the road.
Yeah, because there's a lot of talk, I think, within the kind of climate concerns circles of you know, we have everything we need, you know, and we just need to get started, you know, and I think a real underestimation of the scale of the problem and, you know, I follow the work of bots love Smeal, who's, you know, one of the world's premier experts in energy transitions. And I mean, at times I throw my hands up in the air I just think this is this is an lunatics quest early when you look at those kind of numbers and and the timeframes we're trying to work with. But you know, at least it's, it's useful. And I like that your book laid out the scope of the problem. Let's dive into things a little bit more, I think, in terms of the story that you tell, maybe the original sin is, is the linear no threshold hypothesis and how that led to our current regulatory framework, which took something that had been very successful. I think in the 60s, you're arguing the nuclear power was doing great. It was cost competitive with coal, something went wrong there. But the underlying mechanism for that was linear, no threshold, if I've read your book correctly, can you can you give us your take on how we got to accepting linear no threshold, which again, as a physician is really bizarre for me, because the dose makes the poison as paracelsus said, historically, that's kind of our guiding light in terms of understanding toxicology LNT flies in the face of that, but tell us a little bit about LNT how it came to be and, and why it's holding us back.
The whole thing started shortly after World War Two, when people became very concerned about controlling nuclear weapons, and in particular, trying to get rid of nuclear weapons testing. The problem for the people who are worried about that is that the fallouts were very low radioactivity and those rates compared to background. So you were adding just a trifle. I mean, in the worst year, in the UK, they got 0.15 millisieverts at about 10%. of background and the pre war prevailing assumption among the radio biologist and the people that actually worked with radiation was that once you got down to a certain level, you just couldn't measure, there was nothing that you could discern, in terms of things, there was a kind of a level at which the harm was being matched by repair processes. But if you kept that kind of philosophy, then there was nothing really bad about the fallout in terms of health hazard. And the people that wanted to fight the nuclear weapons testing had to come up with a weapon to do so. The book goes into some detail about the Rockefeller Foundation, it's machinations to a push LNT via theory that there was going to be genetic arm, and that was based on some fruit fly experiments.
They were motivated to push this theory because of I think you're arguing because of the guilt that they felt about having contributed to the weapons program, I think you get a story of one of the physicists from the Manhattan Project, coming to the Rockefeller Foundation saying, Hey, we couldn't have done this without you guys. And that was a real moment of moral
reckoning for them. One thing I should say, right now, Chris is the book is a is a work in process. And versions, which get posted on the website reflect that the version that's now on the website is quite different from the hard copy version that was printed some six months ago. And in fact, it's it's a it's it's the result of me learning. I've become something of a bug on nuclear energy. History. And I've learned some things that that surprised me. One of them was that it's clear that the Rockefeller Foundation's motivation wasn't to protect oil wasn't big oil controlling the Rockefeller Foundation. fact, the Rockefeller Foundation and big oil was very tenuous relationship if there was any. But it was quite clear that, that they felt guilty because in funding theoretical physics to 1930s, they have funded just about all the Manhattan Project greats. More importantly, and specifically, they had funded Lawrence's cyclotron. I think it was Berkeley, that was critical in the development of the bond. And when Lawrence write a nice letter to the foundation, thanking them for their support, and pointing out that without it, there would be no bomb. Well, that didn't sit well with the President and the trustees. And they realized that they had a responsibility to make sure that they control this horrible thing that they had to help create. And that's when they started playing games with genetics and and very successfully, the current versions, the book lays that out.
Now you have a great section where you talk about statistical deaths and sort of killing people statistically, in medicine and in public health. We talk about quality of life adjusted years, it's very different if you know, everyone who is born will die. Yeah, I heard a a commentator he was he's someone who actually kind of defends fossil fuels. But you know, there's this assertion that one in five people are dying because of fossil fuels. And, and he was taking people to task because he was saying, you know, listen, we have to look at at life expectancy. And overall, yes, fossil fuels kill a lot of people with air pollution. But it's undeniable that increasing energy has extended lifespan. So it's not quite as simple as that. I mean, I'm someone who can see what fossil fuels have done in terms of, you know, extended lifespans, enabling modern buildings, health care, etc. But I think we need to phase them out. But it was an interesting point. Nonetheless, you go into this in a bit more detail. I think that that's what really lies at the core of LNT. is these these claims, is statistical calculations of massive deaths occurring from trivial releases extended across a large enough population. Could you just give us kind of a quick summary of your take on LNT some of its contradictions, and give our listenership a sense of that?
Yeah, I mean, you know, you hear these people say, Oh, well, coal is killing 30,000 Americans a year. What they're really saying is that coal increases the mortality rate by 30,000 people per year. But the question is, How much? How much life is lost? I think one, Bernie CO and my, one of my spiritual mentors, estimated that it was like 23 days was the average loss of life expectancy for an American due to coal pollution, at numbers is is very wiggly. But the point is that it gives us something to compare with, when you just talk about killing people, well, everybody's going to die. So the question is, is how soon if you have a technology that reduces mortality by how much does it extend life? So life expectancy becomes the key metric, not how many people died? Because we're all gonna die.
So in terms again, of linear no threshold, I think most of my audiences is quite familiar with the term and some of its contradictions. But can you just give us your, your take on it, you you go, I think in three or four chapters, you really deep dive the literature, you look at some of the key studies that, you know, have been used to claim it's true. And you look at some of the problems with the methodology. I think that's kind of an interesting question. You talk about the null hypothesis in relationship to the LNT. Can you can you go into that for the listeners,
I mean, the book does go through a sample of the studies and hopefully a balanced sample, what you see is that time and time again, you see strong nonlinearities within the lab tests and and in high background radiation areas, just everywhere, animal tests, even fruit flies, despite the early idea that everything was linear, and Well, that was based on very high dose rates. And when they tried to extend that down to even those rates that are far higher than you would ever get in a in a reactor plant release. The linearity hypothesis just just didn't hold up. To me the most impressive study was done in Corolla India. And there you had certain areas, there's very high background dose rates as much as 70 millisieverts per year. This is due to the high quantity of thorium in the sand. And they, they looked at it, it was 1980 to 1995 looked over 100,000 people, and they had a sample of people who only received two or three millisieverts per year. And they had other people who have received over 40 millisieverts per year, so 600 Plus millisieverts and 15 years, and the people that had 600 millisieverts in those 15 years had a slightly lower cancer rate than the people that had two and a half million seabirds per year. So basically, there was there was no effect strong non linearity. And when you look at a nuclear power plant release, very rarely does the public ever get 40 millisieverts. That's the reason why, in the in the three releases that we've had, the only people who got more than 40 million seabirds, with very few exceptions, were the first responders plant workers in the case of Chernobyl liquidators, but the public never saw 40 million seabirds, the same those rate that showed no increase in cancer in India. So the whole idea that a power plant radiation release is a catastrophe just isn't supported by the data. No, I
mean, in terms of that data, it seems like the researchers are under tremendous pressure to make their data fit a linear model. And often that'll lead to things like omitting certain subsets of the data or reclassifying various doses, in order to you know, that it just seems like they're starting with a hypothesis in place that they're trying to prove, rather than having that more objective, scientific process of accepting, you know, if there's a contradictory finding, it should knock your theory off the wall, right? I mean, there's so many studies, right, and I've read through several of them, you know, it's hard to get your bearings, when you look at the underlying methodology. And you find these kind of patterns in terms of the pro LNT literature, and some of some of the manipulations that are being done. Again, in terms of recording groups and things like that, it's, it was interesting to see the mechanism by which this Orthodoxy is, is being held in place.
Yeah. And what's interesting is, is nuclear establishment is a strong supporter of LNT. Even when their own studies, did you racy or do he studies a come up with numbers that are contradictory to LNT. And then they they either suppress it or try to avoid it, I think early on, AC decided that, Oh, well, we've got such a perfect system, we're never going to have a release. So who cares what the model is for what the harm of releases because we're not going to have one. And so in 1959, they blithely accepted LNT. But the problem was that put them in a bind. Because if you if you believe LNT, and you can combine it with a whole bunch of very conservative assumptions about where the, what the weather is, and how big the release is, and etc, etc, you end up killing 1000s, maybe 10s of 1000s of people from a release. So once they they accepted LNT. And they accepted this super worst, worst, worst worst case, and they were in a bind. Now I we, we can't have a release. So we go under come up with a argument that says we're not going to have a release. So we do this probabilistic risk analysis and come up with numbers like one and a million reactor years, blah, blah, blah, and basically tell people why the probability of very least is so low, you don't even have to worry about it. But it's a really stupid line, because it's it's clearly false. It was proven false at Three Mile Island have proven false, Chernobyl proven false at Fukushima. So people live properly lose trust in these guys. And I mean, I
think the most hilarious incident you brought up to illustrate that, because you know, they're basically trying to identify all the potential threats that could lead to a core casualty or mountain, as you're saying, and then trying to give them a probability of occurring. But you talk about the Browns ferry incident, can you? Can you tell our listeners about that, and how that would be a hard thing to calculate a probability for it?
Yeah, well, what, what they do is, I used to teach probability at MIT. So I'm not in high probability, I wrote a book on Bayesian decision theory. But the problem is that you've got to have data to start computing probabilities or estimating probabilities. And in many cases, we don't have data. So these probabilistic risk analysis, and sometimes they use models to try to come up with the numbers. Sometimes they just put guys in a room and ask them what's the probability of this or that which has never happened? Of course, the answers come back different by, by, by factors of 1000. But somehow those those numbers get into the overall tree. These trees can only do a very, very small number of combinations of events that could cause the thing. So you're bound to not include everything. In fact, all the the releases that we've had so far involve a sequence that wasn't in the PRA, and probabilistic risk analysis, and a classic example that is Browns fairy. In this case, a technician was sealing off a cables going into the cable spreading room, which has to be separated, in case you've got a release, you don't want to get it in the control room. So he was sealing the thing with a poly I think was a polyurethane foam. And to check to make sure that the thing was properly sealed, what he did was he took a candle and looked at the flame. And if the if the candle flame was going in to this area, he knew he hadn't a complete seal. Problem was the flame hit the polyurethane foam, which burst into flame. And next thing you knew the things got out of control. The guys had to scramble to get power to the control room because they lost all the normal power. But you know, where would that be in a fault tree? What would be the probability that you will put on that particular event?
And I'll tell you that it'll never happen now because we have those little candles on or not, can we have lights on our iPhones or whatever, but he was actually trying to test for a draft it wasn't so he could see in the dark. It was right. Okay, so maybe maybe, maybe it's still conceivable there's not an ad for that yet.
But let's say that is that you concentrate on this poultry, and you ignore things like maybe we should have used a fire resistance insulation, you know, so simple common sense engineering gets buried in all this risk analysis, the whole design is aimed at meeting the number. If the NRC says you have to have a number of 1 million or whatever their number they come up with, you got to meet the target. And that becomes the goal of the design, not smart engineering.
And in one example that I found to be a little bit worrisome actually was you were talking about, you know, our wet storage, our used fuel pools were filling up because of the lack of the creation of a centralized facility, whether that was you know, Yucca Mountain or any of the other potential storage options, and that they use pra to justify dense packing have spent
spent fuel pools.
Yeah, I mean, can you can you talk about that, because that actually, as an advocate, you know, that that was a little bit alarming to me in terms of, you know, I know that the risk of these something bad happening in these pools is very low. But I mean, if we pack them densely Can you can you talk about what, what that's the whole story was about?
Yeah, well, the when the when there's the spent fuel pools were built to handle, you know, maybe five, six years of field which would cool for four or five years, and then you would pull it out, you could ever call it and take it to reprocessing or central repository. But of course, reprocessing got kibosh and the central repository never never got past the politics. So a the spent fuel pool started filling up. Well, no problem what what you do is you you put a dry cast storage pad on your at the reactor, but this is this stands the cost of about point 05 cents per kilowatt hour, and the utilities didn't want to pay that cost. So they, they, they, they they petitioned the NRC to do several things one, one was a approved dense packing region, the original plan and the spent fuel pool was was that what happens if the water a dries out a lot of the spent fuel pools are above ground as Fukushima A. So the plan was well we'll keep these fuel elements far enough apart. So that a if the spent fuel pool drains, what the air cooling alone will keep the cladding below the temperature which will burst due to the pressure buildup inside the fuel pens. It was a good plan. But then when they got into this fine and the utilities didn't want to go to dry cast storage because it added a trifle to the cost of electricity. A they went to the NRC and the NRC came back with a pra that said there was our one on one a million on that was 1 million always comes up a chance of release if they did what's called dense packing. Dense packing means that you quadruple the capacity of their spent fuel pool by encasing the fuel elements in in a neutron absorber. So you don't have any credit cloudy problems. But at the same time, now you no longer have air cooling. So if the water drains, you're screwed, but of course, it's only going to be a one in a million chance. Because the PRA says it's a one in a million chance. It's really stupid because the cost of dry cast storage is nothing. And then you're taking this risk of having a big release. Now, of course a big release is not as bad as his people think it is. But still, why take the chance, especially you know, you know what the public relations problem. So I'm with the the Von Hippel on this one didn't get rid of dense packing.
So I think one of the lines you had was the probabilistic Risk Assessment favors fragile, complex designs over robust, simple systems. And that in some ways, this isn't actually making things safer. Because there's so many more you add on twice or three times as many pumps and valves and you just add new kind of failure modes. Is this is this different than say how, like the airline industry approaches risk assessment?
Well, I don't know, what the airlines are, the FAA does, but basically, that, yes, it is different. For one thing, the airlines go through physical tests, you, you get a plane certified by flight testing it and during flight testing, you do a lot of crazy stuff that you would never do during normal operations. And that's the way to go. I am a fan of small modular reactors, not because they're small, you don't want to be small in this business small, that's not beautiful, but you can test them. And by testing them, I mean, really wring them out, if you ever reactor that, that costs $4 billion. And nobody really wants to put that thing in a place where it's really stressed, because that's a lot of money. But if you have a 250 megawatt modular reactor, you can take your one of these modules, put it at Hanford, or someplace, and, you know, really put it with the put stress testing on it. That means bypassing some of the layers of defense to make sure that the backup layers work. And that's what basically the airlines do, are, and that's what we should be doing.
You know, I mean, we'll get to this later, but I was I was when I'm thinking about advanced nuclear and what it's going to take for it to actually get up off the ground, we're going to talk about the history of regulation and how it's made it near impossible to get a new design working. But you know, it seems to me like it would take an international collaboration on the scale of something like aitor, for fusion like that, you need to have a central place to run these tests and multiple countries working together. But let's let's not jump there just yet. We are going to we're going to get prescriptive at the end, because I think you're someone who's given this enough thought that you do have a kind of a plan or a vision of a way forward. But let's let's dive deeper into the problem. We've kind of summarized the problem with LNT. And, and pra problems of risk assessment, but let's talk about another mumbo jumbo here, another acronym ALARA. as low as reasonably achievable. Before we get there, though nuclear power used to be cheap, right? It used to be competitive with fossil fuels, even when fossil fuels were dirt cheap. So I don't think a lot of people know that history. Can you can you lay the ground for us there in terms of what things looked like in the 60s when nuclear was entering into a market that was I think, as you argue, very competitive.
It's a it's a remarkable story. In the late 60s, mid late 60s, the price of oil was real price of oil was an all time low. People were buying oil and in the Middle East, for a penny a liter. That's what crude was costing in the Middle East. And because tankers were doubling in size, every few years, etc. The landed cost of crude in the West was $1.50 a barrel. The oil was so cheap, that it was pushing the coal coal was was basically King and in terms of power generation, but with all this cheap oil coming on, they were pushing the price of coal down and they were pushing coal out of the electricity market.
That really surprised me because it just seems crazy to be burning oil for electricity. But I mean, I think that France was was burning quite a lot of oil, because they don't actually have coal nationally, right. And that led to their nuclear buildup. But sorry, don't let me interrupt, keep keep saying the same
thing. What happened was, of course, coal responded, they had all kinds of big drag lines and long wall and everything they could do to push things down. But the combination was that you were looking in the mid 60s at the most cutthroat competitive market that you could ever imagine. And this is the market that nuclear, which was nascent, was just starting down a big, big long learning curve jumped into and did successfully. So you had to be down to around 2.7 Mills for kilowatt hour in order to compete with coal. That's about less than three cents. And in current dollars, when this was a fledgling industry, and it was kind of iffy. But then all of a sudden, qaddafi comes along. And one thing leads to another next thing you know, the price of oil has gone up by a factor of 15. real price. So now we all these guys who took this chance, rather rather aggressive chance on nuclear chance I wouldn't have done if I were them. They all looked like profits. Of course, demand for electricity in the late 60s is growing at 7% per year. So looking at that growth rate, and now we have a boom in both coal and nuclear. And everybody jumps on everybody wants to do a have a nuclear plant. I think in one, one year 66 or 67. We ordered something like 30% of what their current Man was it in the country at the time. And the economics, even the antis recognize the economics. They were really worried about nuclear, because it was so cheap.
JFK, I think, campaigned on building 1000 gigawatt reactors in the States. I think that division in many places was, you know, not necessarily electrify everything, but that electricity should be nuclear. Certainly that was the case in France under the mesmer. Plan, but I heard as well, JFK, and probably that'd be the right timeframe was talking about building 1000 nuclear plants by the year 2000. I mean, that wasn't part of it within his mandate, but it was a vision that that
he was the number one plank in the democratic platform in jfks. election campaign. Wow. Okay. big government, Democrats love nuclear. And one of the things they did is they threatened the utilities, they said, Look, if you guys don't get get on nuclear train, we're gonna we're gonna set up some public utilities to compete with you. And will will wax your, your rears with nuclear, because it's so cheap. They thought it was cheap. And it was cheap. It was cheap at the time, okay. But what happened was that when the oil price boomed, all of a sudden, there was this boom, and everybody needed to get a new coal plant or a new nuclear plant. And whenever the market goes into boom, you lose control of your costs. This happens everywhere. It happens in the in the oil patch, I spent some time in the oil patch, at least twice in my life, each time you had a boom, there's a cost rise towards price. It happens in shipbuilding every 10 years. And so both coal and nuclear lost control of their costs. Instead, the costs rose rapidly. But when the crash came in 1979, not because a Three Mile Island but because of the Iranian Revolution, price of oil, jumping again and sending the world into a recession. Besides all the growth rates had dropped drastically due to the increase in cost of electricity, the real cost of electricity. What normally happens in in a boom and bust thing is that after the vendors get their act together, in this ensuing slump, you get rid of all the weak sisters, you cut your costs back, et cetera, and eventually find out what the real cost of this gadget are or services. And that happened to coal, coal got its costs under control. And in the 1990s, a coal was this cheap is pretty much the cheapest that ever was, despite all the the increase in regulation. But it didn't happen to nuclear. Because during that 70s, when the prices costs were worked out being up, the regulation was matching it under ALARA. as low as reasonably achievable means really means as what can you afford, sir? Yeah, if you're gonna afford it, then you have to do it. And of course, the regulatory ratchet only goes one way. So at the end of the boom, nuclear had these super high costs and couldn't recover. Because the regulatory limits just don't go back down like, like, like a normal market would.
And I mean, tying that into LNT. That's because with this concept of there is no safe release, there's no safe dose possible, then you can regulate it into infinity, essentially. Yeah,
I like to avoid no safe barrows. That's a trap that we've fallen into. If you try to argue for a threshold, you're gonna get screwed, because you got to pick a number, say the numbers 50 millisieverts per year, and below that, there's absolutely no no harm. Well, I can shoot that argument down, and I'll walk you back to zero. But if you pick us a strongly nonlinear thing, you get a function that matches both what happens at high dose rates? And what happens at low dose rates in the experiments? So I argue for a strongly nonlinear dose response, but I don't argue for a threshold.
Right? And that's your is that your sigmoid? No threshold? Is that what you're proposing,
I picked the logistic curve, but you can pick other curves. point is that if you agree with the false dichotomy, it's either linear or there's a threshold, you're gonna lose.
So let's let's talk a little bit more about that regulatory ratchet and kind of what happened in real terms, you've laid out sort of the economics of it, but what did that what did that look like on the ground in terms of these increasing regulations at the at the power plant level? I mean, early on, you were talking about this parallel you were seeing between the US Naval shipyards and the Korean shipyards. So how has some of this regulation driven up costs and and affected? I think, you know, we're going to be having returning guests, Mark Nelson on to talk about what went wrong at Vogel, but I think you do touch on that a little bit with a with a key part at Vogel that, you know, because of a problem with both regulation and just with the quality of manufacture and oversights, you know, nuclear just spiraled out of control. Do you have any concrete examples you can share?
It's good question. I think it's, it's more just, everything builds off the top of my head. I don't have a good precise example. And here's the problem. The right Later has a monopoly. And the way we set things up in the old systems, if you were building a coal power plant, or you had to do is convince a local politician by fair means or foul, and if you couldn't convince them to accept your plant when you went next door, and but the nuclear plants don't have that next door. So there's no competition among the regulators. And so at the same time, you're telling the regulator that, hey, approve this plant, now you're not getting any benefits from that plant, no matter how much carbon free, safe, cheap electricity that plant creates, you see none of the benefits. But if that plant has a problem, hey, you own it. And that means that what you really want to do is not approve anything. But that's tempered by the fact that if you don't approve anything, you won't get any applications, right. And so the game becomes, keep the applications coming in. But once you get that applicant in a don't approve him, or at least no one approving for as long as you possibly can. And of course, the American system, this is exacerbated by the fact that the applicant pays the NRC to review his application, it's something like $300 a man hour. So it just builds up. I don't think there's any single thing I mean, you could look at the do teen double break, as as a classic example of what exactly
that's a pipe that breaks in two spots and
the way they look at it, loca loss of cooling accident. Yeah, they they postulate that a in the main steam and the main coolant line of section of it just disappears, instantaneously. All right, design your plant to handle that. Well, the problem is that we can't simulate that because steel can't break that way. Just that's it's just the characteristics are the physics of steel. And when you postulate this double ended gear team break, a now you have all kinds of pipe with restraints, the spray shoots out, you've got a very rapid coolant loss that you have to handle. And that forces you into a whole bunch of unroll bust, startups for diesels and that sort of thing. So you have this impossible Casualty. That's very costly. So if you want one single example of Yeah, things in the double ended guillotine break, there's been movements from time to time to get that out of the regulation, but they never quite make it.
And that's what again, leads to this like highly complex, fragile system around an imagined problem, like a problem is literally physically not. And again, just from what I'm understanding, it's like taking guests like a cigar cutter and cutting a cigar in two places, removing the middle bit. Steel just doesn't operate that way. I mean, you're the engineer or the or the ship owner here. So what's what's fascinating to me here, as we go from this, this heyday, you said we're, you know, JFK was promising 1000 reactors that was the main platform of the Democratic Party. And what we're talking kind of 10 years later, we're in, we've gone through the boom, time and time, and we're already into this kind of bust cycle where nuclear has priced itself out of being competitive. And this is all happening well before TMI. And indeed, no new nuclear plants are commissioned. I mean, I guess, you know, Vogel and summer happened in the 21st century, but for the rest of the 20th century, nothing new was commissioned after What 74?
Yeah, last plant was ordered in 74. But until you got into the late 90s, or I guess, almost in 2000.
So that's a that's a 10 year period where this whole thing played itself out. Because you think I mean, I think a lot of the modern thinking on nuclear is, hey, it's so slow. It's kind of like just glacial and how it moves along. But you had so many plants getting built people making waxaa money, because it was so cost competitive ALARA coming in regulatory ratchet prices going through the roof, and then hey, this is no longer economic, we're gonna run this stuff into the ground, or we're not gonna build anything new. It's it's a wild story. Like it's, again, reading on this, it's hardly certainly even believable. Let's move on a little bit and talk about how the nuclear industry responded to this. Because I think, you know, I've had Bret Kugelmass on the podcast, he's highly critical of the nuclear establishment in the nuclear industry. What did they do in the face of pressures around the changes in let's say, in, in dosing and with LNT? Or with ALARA? Is this something that they resist it? Or do they kind of merrily go along with it? How did the the nuclear industry and the nuclear sector respond to these really massive changes?
Well, after 1980, really after 1975, when everything dried up, they didn't see any future in nuclear electricity. At the same time, you had you had this kind of military complex that to build up the national labs. I mean, the national labs are are are $20 billion a year business and they needed a reason for existence. After they were no longer making the bomb, obvious problem they could solve as nuclear waste. So we all have Suddenly, a big problem was clean up and we're spending two and a half billion dollars a year up river for where I am cleaning up Hanford. The problem is that the dose rates in Hanford are lower than they are in in Finland, a lot lower on average. So how do you justify that the only way you can justify that is with LNT. So now the nuclear establishment in order to have these cleanup problems and and waste problems, had to be a proponent of of the hazards of LNT. And low dose ratio, low dose radiation. Otherwise, there's no point in doing all this, it was a waste of money to do all this cleanup. So the establishment became a strong believer and LNT in order to extract the 10s of billions of dollars a year from the taxpayer. I have to say that the guys at the labs that I met are decent, hard working people, and most of them went into the business because they they really wanted to save the world. But they've been caught up in a system which forces them to worry about next year's funding. And next year's funding depends on these bogus problems.
I think tumors Creek was one of the most poignant examples from your book of, you know, the insanity and the wasted resources that are going into this kind of nuclear fear. Could you just tell us the story of tumors Creek?
Yeah, well, to me, it's great. I think it was at the Idaho National Lab, they were moving a cast of water from one of the spent fuel goals when the spent fuel pool was a different kind of pool. But anyway, it was regarded as radioactive this water even though it was just the next two fuel elements. And when they were moving around with a forklift, it was supposed to be drained this this particular canister, but it wasn't completely drained. And so they dribbled some of the water on the pavement for something like a half a mile. And when this horrible thing was discovered, they they decided that the only way to solve the problem was they go a half mile long trench, take all the material in that trench and somehow put it in a approved disposal site. And then they filled it in with some phosphate mine tailings that were currently were used all the time in Idaho for making roads and stuff. It turns out the phosphate tailings were more radioactive than the stuff that they removed.
At enormous cost. Yeah, no, it's it's just wild that story. There's, there's there's there's example after example, many of them are much more costly than than tumors Creek. One in terms of the kind of one way regulatory ratchet here, I think, you know, the response of the Japanese after Fukushima, to lower their safe thresholds, you know, even further on on food and water, for instance, to raise the or something like 10 times lower than even in the EU. You never, you never come back from that it's, you know, you can't really turn the ratchet back the other way. And, you know, part of what your books kind of arguing for is that we need to do that. I mean, how, how do you see us moving that way beyond just public education?
Well, the first thing is you got to get the nuclear establishment educated, as long as the nuclear establishment is telling everybody that these dose rates are are so dangerous that we need to spend billions of dollars to get from three millisieverts per year down to two millisieverts per year. I mean, it's a nuclear establishment that told people how dangerous a these low dose rates are. And, of course, we confirm it by compensating people for background dose rate exposures. That happened in in the downwinders. From the nuclear test, right. It's happening right now, Fukushima, where people are a couple of guys that they have exposures, they're below background, they worked at Fukushima during the casualty, a they're getting compensated for their family is because they died of cancer. The test was, if you receive 50, millisieverts, I remember that exact number. During your employment, and you died of cancer within a certain period of time, you're automatically compensated. Well, people read that is, and then the headline said, jumps admit that the Fukushima radiation rates are mortal. Right. So you start with the establishment, but the establishment is feeding at the public trough. And that feeding depends on low dose rates being dangerous,
you know, honestly, I think even extends into the workforce quite a bit. I was talking with someone recently about nuclear advocacy and how, you know, my thinking around the the workers within the sector being kind of natural advocates, because they understand nuclear energy, what it's the good that it does, and they have a better understanding of radiation and its real risks. And they said, No, no, no, hold on a second. A lot of nuclear workers are absolutely terrified of radiation. And it's partially because of this kind of choreography they go through to avoid like the most minimal minimal, you know, blow background dose rates of you know, put the booty on here, Oh, don't step across that line. You got to do this first go through a gazillion procedures, you know, to get around again, these really insignificant dose rates, just doing that you know, and this this friend of mine who's very well educated on the topic and as a, you know, relative risk educator when she went to visit the the Swiss nuclear fuel repository, and had to go through some of these same sort of choreographies, as I call them, you know, it gets into your head as in psychologically, I think that, hey, this stuff must be so dangerous if we're going to these extreme lengths, and I can't, you know, put my booty on the other side of that line, or in or what right and alarm will go off and on. It's there's a whole psychology to it, but I think must be fairly pervasive within this sector.
Well, I know at Argonne a, they measure people going in and out of some of the buildings. And if it's raining, and you're going to this building, a you have to wipe your shoes off, or you'll set off the alarms. And even then, if you have the wrong kind of souls, you'll still set the alarm off. What they're really measuring is, is the alpha particles in in rainwater. You know, it's just nuts. But I think it's, it's the result of the need to have a problem. And that's why we got ourselves into this bind. As long as the nuclear establishment is going to perform do this kind of behavior, you're never going to educate the public. Right?
Right. You got to lead by example, I think, right. So you know, in the time we have left here, let's let's talk a little bit about your kind of prescription or what you see as as the way forward, you are the I think it was the principal architect, behind the Thor con idea, you're in the sector, you're trying to do something, what needs to change for for the concept that you have to be viable to get off the ground. And for nuclear in general,
I would like to be proven wrong, but I just don't see it happening in in the US or EU, because of all these these things we've been talking about. So maybe the only possibility is to find a country that knows it needs a lot more electricity, I mean, a lot more, I mean, multiples more, and it needs it very quickly. And it realizes that his choices is nuclear coal, and have our country that that understands that. In order for them to have all the benefits of nuclear a they have to take a fresh look at all these problems we've been talking about and have to have the guts to be able to say to the NRC and ay ay ay and the nuclear establishment, take a hike, we'll figure out the problem for our by ourselves. I think that's the only hope.
And is that is that conceivable? I mean, we've been talking I think at like national level regulation, but globally with the IAEA, you know, I think they have a lot of weight behind them. Is it? Is it possible for a smaller country to is to say, hey, stuff that we're going to do things our way? You know, obviously, the whole fuel cycle is highly complex. There's lots of international treaties and regulations. Is that is that a viable possibility? You think? Is that conceivable? If there was the leadership in country,
I think so if he had the right and the right leadership, the one thing you'll find out is that somebody will sell you the fuel. And by the way, under the nuclear non proliferation Treaty, which everybody, almost everybody signed, off every country, every signatory, has the right to enrich fuel, and reprocess fuel. And the US is, has signed that treaty. So it's it's just a matter of leadership, whether Thor Khan or or anybody else will find that leadership, I can't tell you.
And in terms of, you know, your ideas around actually building test reactors, getting rid of pra, largely probably probabilistic risk assessment. You know, again, when I was reading your book, that just was something that came to my mind, I'd done an episode on what I call the fusion energy delusion. But we talked a lot about it in that and it just seems like there there should be a sort of transnational testing site even for for some of these advanced, these advanced concepts, because they are going to require a lot of a lot of tweaking to sort of figure them out there that, you know, there's been test reactors in the past that have offered in some of the principles. I think that that the work on is but do you see any possibility there for that kind of collaboration?
national, I highly doubtful. But here's, here's some breaking news. Thor Khan is making progress in Indonesia. And we actually have a test site for the demo plant being looked at right now.
Breaking here on Decouple once again. Okay, well, jack, I think I think we've kind of wrap things up pretty well. Is there anything else you wanted to touch upon or any other kind of parting thoughts again on on the future, right? I've asked Yes, in the past to sort of in broad strokes kind of illustrate what what they'd like to see as a path forward. I think you've largely done that. But if there's anything else you'd like to add this, this is your moment.
The only thing I'd say is that the book is a is a work in progress. So if you if you if you're interested in the book, download a more recent one. Do not buy the book.
Yeah, it is a free, free download. You just have to, I think register on your site. And again, I thoroughly endorse
because it's called Gordian knot bookstore. calm.
Yeah, Green Book calm I thoroughly endorse the book I've read just about every treatise you know, General treatment of nuclear power out there. Lots of really new and exciting ideas and very well written jack. So thanks for taking the time to come on the podcast and I hope to have you on again to maybe deep dive one of the the many elements within the book that we didn't get to touch on today. Sounds good. Alright, bye for now.
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