Chapter 1: Why is there renewed interest in nuclear power?
Not to freak you out, I know there's a lot going on, but here's a fairly obvious additional problem on the horizon, the rising cost of electricity. Our electricity doesn't just come from nowhere. We have to use resources to generate it. In the US, the electric grid is mostly powered by coal and natural gas.
And lately, for the first time in 20 years, our demand for that electricity has been spiking. Some of that spike is driven by AI and data centers. They're often the villains of the story. But it's actually not just them. It's also from a lot of things that everybody actually wants.
More electric vehicles, more induction stoves, more factories that have been electrified, hooking up to the grid instead of directly burning fossil fuels for power.
Chapter 2: How has public perception of nuclear energy changed over the years?
The spike in demand isn't just raising the price of electricity, it's also generating more emissions. Since even an electric car running on electricity, that electricity is generated in part by burning fossil fuels. So that's the problem. And one of the solutions people have started discussing as a way to solve this is actually nuclear power.
Nuclear power, which in the 1980s and 90s was kind of a taboo, has become much more popular in recent polling. These days, a majority of Americans, about 60%, are in favor of it.
Some of this is being driven by an understanding that nuclear technology itself has gotten safer, and some of it is just people's fear of climate change outweighing, or at least re-weighing, their fear of nuclear disaster. In any event, nuclear power seems to be very much on its way. Today in America, nearly 20% of the electricity we use comes from a reactor somewhere.
Tomorrow, we'll probably be using much more nuclear power.
Chapter 3: What are the benefits of nuclear power compared to fossil fuels?
What's happened here is that a group of people I was not paying attention to, nuclear optimists, have started to win the national argument. I wanted to hear from these people and learn what they believe. That's our episode this week, along with just a history of nuclear itself, how it was discovered, how society lost faith in it, and what its future might look like here.
I want to start with a person I spoke to named Dr. Rachel Slabaugh. She first encountered nuclear energy back in the early 2000s, when public sentiment towards it was much more in the basement.
In high school, some Navy guy came and talked to us about nuclear reactors. And I talked to my high school guidance counselor. I was like, oh, what about nuclear engineering? They were like, that's a dead field. Don't do that.
Chapter 4: What role does nuclear power play in addressing climate change?
I was like, okay, great. But in college, I got the opportunity to do a research thing as a freshman. And it was just, you know, you interview some labs and they interview you and you get matched. And I ended up working at the research reactor on campus at Penn State.
Wait, sorry, they have a research reactor at Penn State? Yeah. Great school, but also a great party school. Yep. They have a nuclear reactor at Penn State?
Chapter 5: How does nuclear fission work in power plants?
They do. I'm sure there are more STEM-oriented listeners who knew all this already, but Dr. Slabaugh explained to me that there's about 25 American college campuses, mostly big schools like UT Austin and Kansas State, where undergrads futz around with small nuclear reactors, research reactors, learning how they work. They're not producing significant energy.
You can't melt down the quad with them if things go wrong, but they're real reactors. So you're working on a research reactor at Penn State, and like- What's happening in that room with the research reactor?
Yeah, well, I started out in educational outreach. And so I learned all about nuclear energy. And I was like, wait, a thing the size and shape of a coal plant that doesn't emit air pollution? I was like, why don't we do more of that while these other clean electricity sources have more time to scale up?
Chapter 6: What are the advancements in nuclear reactor technology?
So for me, I learned about nuclear and I was like, this seems like a very obvious environmental choice. And that's how I got here.
This early time at the reactor would set Rachel on a path. She'd get her PhD in nuclear engineering. She'd then become a tenured professor at Berkeley, then to the federal government, where she'd work for an agency for advanced research projects in energy. These days, she's a climate investor at a big firm called DCVC, where she invests in nuclear, among other things.
20 years spent on every side of this—academic, public, private— I asked Rachel, as is the podcaster's privilege, to use her expertise to explain nuclear physics from the 101 level up. Starting with this. All nuclear power plants right now run on nuclear fission.
Chapter 7: What challenges does the nuclear industry face today?
What's nuclear fission?
So at the base level, fission is when a heavy atom absorbs a neutron. And so the heavy atom is like energetically unstable. And it's so unstable that adding a neutron... provides enough energy that it causes that unstable atom to split into two pieces. And it splits into two new atoms and releases more neutrons when it splits, and it releases energy in the form of kinetic energy.
Rachel explained that in a nuclear reactor, atoms are split in a controlled chain reaction. The heat this reaction generates then turns water into steam, the steam spins a turbine, and the turbine generates electricity. To Rachel, the exciting part of all this, when she learned about it, is what happens next, or actually what doesn't happen.
A nuclear power plant does not emit carbon, just water vapor.
Chapter 8: How does nuclear waste management compare to other energy sources?
The big environmental downside to this whole process, of course, is nuclear waste, which we'll get into later. But that brief explanation of nuclear fission, how it works, just that knowledge, once humanity had learned it, was powerful. It contains the seed of everything that would follow. Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, the entire atomic age.
Here is the story of how human beings first figured nuclear energy out. Two scientists worked it out on a walk in the snow over Christmas week. Lise Meitner, who'd fled Nazi Germany that summer, and her nephew Otto Frisch, who'd come to visit her in Sweden. On their walk, they were talking about a letter he'd gotten from a colleague describing the results of a strange experiment.
He'd been bombarding uranium, the metal, with neutrons and noticed that something surprising happened. When he smashed neutrons into uranium, he'd ended up with another metal, barium, that's much smaller than uranium. Scientists already knew at the time that uranium was unstable.
What Meitner and Frisch worked out on their walk in the snow was that you could actually split a uranium atom in two, and that when you did, it would release energy, lots of energy. Meitner and Frisch scratched out these first calculations together out there in the snow. It was 1938.
And it happened to be in the middle of a world war, so that obviously affected the trajectory of this technology.
This is writer Rebecca Tuhus Dubrow. She wrote a book about all this, including the strangeness of how nuclear power happened to have been discovered at the exact moment when our country was willing to use it as a weapon.
There was a famous letter that Einstein co-wrote to President Roosevelt. The letter basically said that this phenomenon had been discovered and that it could be an important source of energy in the future.
And then it mentioned that there was also the possibility that it could be used to create a really powerful weapon and that there was reason to believe that Nazi Germany was working toward that. So that was basically the impetus for the Manhattan Project. It was spurred partly by fear that Nazi Germany was working on this and would get there first.
We all know how that story ends. The atomic bomb. The U.S. killing hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But after the war, there's this push in America to use nuclear for something besides a weapon of war.
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