Alex Epstein
speaker
366 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Apr
Alex Epstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The reason is because there's not much there and it's always easier to oppose progress in a new area than an existing area. That's why they focus on it. But it doesn't make sense. Why are you against drilling in the Arctic? There's so little there. You'd be much more against drilling. It's white. It's white. It's white, but they don't want to get dirty. Well, it's something like that.
But it's always, it's to your point, they're not in it. They're not near it. So they just have this fantasy in their head.
Yeah, you're like, if you go outside there, yeah, you're not like, yeah, maybe we do need some oil here to keep us warm.
On the nuclear, okay, yeah. So nuclear, there's a bunch of different things. But at the core of it, the biggest problem by far is how we make policy with regard to the allowable amount of radiation from a plant. And this is a very important thing. It's the same thing with the air. the air quality issue. It's like, you need to set a standard that is overall healthy for human life.
The worst thing you can possibly do is set a standard so low that it has little or no benefit to human health, but a massive cost. Because it's always hard to limit the kind of natural emission of something to near zero. And in the case of nuclear, it's like radioactivity. In particular with nuclear, it's radiation in the event of some sort of radiation release.
Because part of what they're doing is it's not just radiation under normal circumstances, but radiation in the event of like a meltdown or something like that. And they do what are called probabilistic risk assessments. And when they do evacuations, it's all based on how do you measure the danger of radiation.
So you need very precise measurements of radiation, and then you need very rational policies for weighing those risks against any cost to lower them, right? And so on both counts, we're wildly irrational because we measure the radiation risk 50 to 100 times too high through something called LNT, which is linear no threshold. Then I'll talk about how we do the policy.
With nuclear, think about sunlight, right? Sunlight is like many different substances and phenomena. It's like benign or healthy in certain quantities, and it is deadly in certain quantities. So if you go outside long enough, you'll get sunlight poisoning and die. Does that mean that any amount of sunlight is deadly? No, right?
Because there's a threshold at which it is benign or even, in the case of sunlight, beneficial, right? Because if you've got no sunlight, it's bad. This is true. This is definitely true for radiation more broadly. There's a threshold at which it is benign and even arguably beneficial.
There are lots of interesting studies about places with higher levels of radiation that people seem to have less propensity to different kinds of cancers. And it's very interesting, like the physics of it. But part of it is that the radiation... Like, what's happening is it attacks your cells in a certain way, but then they repair, and it's kind of like muscle building.
Like, do they actually need to be stimulated to a certain extent to do it?
Yeah, exactly. There are different versions of this, but yes. And so what's absolutely true is there's a threshold at which nuclear is safe. But the model that we use to measure nuclear risk is called linear no threshold. which means there is no threshold at which radiation from nuclear is safe. So what that means, to use an analogy of— So that's another zero problem.
But it's a particularly—yeah, it's a really, really bad one, because we set—what we do is we treat it as dangerous at any level, and then we set the level to be—the allowable level to be 50 times lower.
than that of nuclear workers even though nuclear workers have zero sign of any damage whatsoever from their level so it's at least 50 times too low so think about that you have to make something 50 times as your baseline you have to make it 50 times lower so this just is the thing behind so much stuff you have to way over build it you have to have all sorts of backup scenarios to just prevent this
So we need to change the LNT model. And then on top of this, what's even more irrational is we have something called as low as the way we make policy. So we measure danger by this no threshold model. And we make policy by what's called ALARA, which is as low as reasonably achievable, which means we want it as like, and now you can ask,
what is reasonable yeah right that threshold would change as technology advances too exactly but but it needs to be based on a scientific understanding of risk in the first place so if you make a reasonable standard based on a 50 times too high uh 50 times too low level so you're 50 times off in terms of what's safe you're not going to be very reasonable
And in this case, what they do is they basically say, you can go even below. So let's say the standard should be here. It's totally safe. There's no benefit in going below. They put it down here. But then Alara says, you have to put it even lower because there's no threshold, right? So you have to put it even lower if it's reasonable to do so. How do they calculate reasonable?
If nuclear at any given point in time is cheaper than an alternative, then it is reasonable to increase its cost.
Now let's look at what happens in the 1970s. Well, how expensive is natural gas in the 1970s? It is very expensive, right? And oil, which is a major source of electricity, right? We had an energy crisis with the Middle East and around the world. So great, what do the regulators say? Oh, well, nuclear is now too cheap. It's now reasonable to make it more expensive.
So let's even lower the threshold more past the point of no benefit. But then what happens when natural gas and oil and coal get cheap? Do they ratchet back the nuclear regulation? No, they do not. So it's an infinite like ratcheting of totally useless regulation anytime nuclear has any advantage. So it basically prevents nuclear from ever becoming cheaper and makes it prohibitively expensive.
Showing 321–340 of 366 · page 17 of 19
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