Rachel Slaybaugh

And it splits into two new atoms and releases more neutrons when it splits, and it releases energy in the form of kinetic energy.

So in the 50s, Eisenhower had an initiative called Atoms for Peace.

And that was kind of the dawn of the nuclear age, was what we would now call, I think, techno-optimist, but a very like sharing, let's use energy to pull people out of poverty, let's make this available everywhere.

know it's an interesting thing because the turn sort of happened before the accidents it was like a little bit happening in combination like there was sort of conservation in the oil shock so energy growth really shifted right we were growing and then conservation became more important and we stopped growing in energy as much and i'm gonna have a pretty us perspective here the united states

instead of building like one product we're going to build over and over again and get really good at every reactor was a little bit different from every other reactor so like reactors never got cheap because everyone was a special snowflake and so you kind of have these reactors that are just getting more expensive and then in the 80s you have super high interest rates and so

Now you can't afford to build one of these projects.

So electricity demand is flattening.

Interest rates are really high.

These projects have gotten out of control and expense.

And so, of course, we're not going to build any new nuclear reactors.

building a different mousetrap every time the sort of public energy was against it not so much because people were scared but because it's like those are really expensive to build and we don't need them yeah and then the environmentalist movement in the 70s was kind of anti-energy overall because they felt like having more energy was going to do damage to the environment

It was really like an environmentalist utopia, like we just want to return to the earth kind of a thing.

So we just don't want it to be too easy for people to develop.

And it was really this idea of like, we should just use less of everything.

And clearly people were not that excited about nuclear if you have this nuclear meltdown disaster movie.

And I haven't watched it for, how long am I, 20 years?

But basically there's a reactor that melts down and then they try to cover it up.

But the reason it's called China syndrome is they're like, oh, this plant is going to keep melting down and the reaction is running away and it's going to melt all the way through the earth to China.

Yeah.

Which is not how nuclear meltdowns work, by the way.