PJ Vogt

Nuclear development in America chilled.

Other countries continued to pursue nuclear, although even that cooled down somewhat after the Fukushima meltdown in Japan in 2011.

A 9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami, which flooded the reactor's seawall.

There was one confirmed death from radiation exposure, but over 2,200 people died in the hurried evacuation away from the plant.

In the aftermath of that, countries like Germany wound down their nuclear programs.

Other countries kept going, most notably France, where today 70% of all electricity comes from nuclear.

Their carbon footprint per citizen per year is much lower than ours.

Four and a half tons per person to R14.

We just took a different path in America.

Nuclear technology is a place where we stopped advancing for decades.

After the break, our second age of much more cautious atomic optimism.

Welcome back to the show.

During the pandemic was the first time I started to become aware of pro-nuclear sentiment developing on my internet.

I saw more people talking about nuclear, positively, openly, in a way that seemed sincere, not just like posters slinging unorthodox takes for clout.

That's when I looked at public polling and learned that America was just much more gung-ho on this than I'd realized from my bubble.

I asked Dr. Slabaugh whether she'd felt public sentiment turn pro-nuclear in the last decade.

Load growth, meaning like the load on the energy system?

Yeah, yeah.

Higher electricity demand.

So spiking electricity demand is making people want to rapidly spin up more nuclear power.