The Jordan Harbinger Show
1277: Isabelle Boemeke | The Rad Future of Nuclear Electricity
29 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: Why is nuclear power still stigmatized despite its benefits?
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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today's guest has a wild resume. She's an international fashion model who became a nuclear power influencer. Yes, a fashion model and a nuclear expert. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, folks. She goes by Isodope online. That's pretty creative. I'll give you that.
While most of us were doom-scrolling climate anxiety memes, humans are the virus, fire skies in China, highways in Hollywood that look like Blade Runner. But is it Blade Runner 2049 or the old one? Anyway, she was asking the question, what if the thing we're all terrified of is actually the thing that saves us? Nuclear. Nuclear.
The word that makes everybody think Chernobyl, hazmat suits, glowing three-eyed fish. But what if everything we think we know about nuclear is wrong? In her book, Rad Future Nuclear, Isabel Boimka argues that nuclear electricity and energy might actually be the cleanest, safest, densest, most reliable shot we actually have at a sustainable planet.
And she does it with humor, sass, a little more scientific rigor than most of the people yelling at each other on the internet. So how does a model become a nuclear energy evangelist? Come for the fashion, stay for the fission. How does an international model become a nuclear power influencer? It's a weird career path. And I say that as somebody who also has a weird career path.
What happened there?
Yes. Well, first you go on YouTube and you watch how to become a nuclear energy influencer starting off as a fashion model.
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Chapter 2: What safety statistics challenge the fears surrounding nuclear energy?
throughout my entire life is I try to be useful whatever that moment requires. And in the case of becoming a nuclear energy influencer, I was trying to be useful and help solve climate change in whatever capacity that I could. And so I guess you get creative when you feel the need to do something. you know, about a really big problem that you have no idea how to begin to solve.
And I remember my desire to do something about climate really was inspired by seeing images of the Amazon on fire back in 2019. And this was the same year that there were huge Australia fires and also California fires. I think those are the original orange sky photos that went all around.
Yeah, those are scary. I remember when the fires were in LA and people were driving along, was it 101 or whatever it is, or the 405? They're driving along and the fire was just right up to the side of the highway because the grass was burning. And I remember my friend who's been on the show, Darren Brown, he's a mentalist. He told me he was...
driving to go do shows in LA and he's like, I've never, this is like what hell must be, right? You're just driving through a tunnel of fire. And I don't know why they didn't close the highway. I guess they just felt like they couldn't. It was absolutely insane. And the Getty was gonna burn and then they said, no, we have this crazy fireproof.
I mean, it was like, why are we thinking about how to fireproof art and buildings in extreme ways? I mean, yes, the stuff in there is priceless, so it's a good idea, but also like, man, maybe we should manage the problem itself I know your career started with climate change fears, but I think a lot of Gen Z, they have climate anxiety. Would you say you had that or is that overstated?
I think it was definitely climate anxiety. And I think back then I couldn't have pointed at it and said, I have climate anxiety.
Yeah.
But even before then, I really thought I didn't want to have kids because why bring them into such a messed up world?
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How does nuclear fuel compare to fossil fuels in terms of energy density?
And then next to that open space would be more jungle and then a little house. And then we saw fires, like tons of fires. And we're like, why aren't the people panicking? This is a huge fire. And then we realized they were just burning the jungle down to get the land. And then they were going to put their cows on there or farm on there or something like that.
And the fire was right up to the road. I mean, it was really intense and huge. And I'm thinking like, there's no way these don't get out of control here and there. So you have Hollywood highways, you got the bushfires in Peru. I've been to China, especially 15 years ago when it was really, really dirty and it looked like winter, even though it wasn't because of the smog clouds. It's gross.
You see the fires, you see the skies, you see the highways and you just realize like the humans are the virus. Remember that hashtag? Humans are the virus.
Well, I disagree with that sentiment because I think it's also behind a lot of this feeling that we can't make the world better. I think a lot of this sentiment that humans are bad and we've destroyed the planet, it drives also a lot of apathy. It does, yeah. And quite frankly, it also drives bad policies that actually harm humans.
But it's funny because people who don't believe in climate change, they'll say, oh, climate change started this fire whenever the news came out recently that the Palisades fire in L.A. were caused by an arsonist. They'll say, oh, I thought it was climate change. But, you know, nobody's saying that climate change is starting the fires. Obviously, the fires start because of, you know.
Humans trying to clear up land either for logging or raising cows or just building something. Or, you know, of course, somebody smoking and throwing their cigarette away. So there's a variety of reasons why fires do start. But climate change is just making it, making the fires more extreme. It's drier. So, you know, obviously fire spreads faster and so on.
But, you know, it's interesting because specifically the L.A. fires, because they're so recent, the ones in Palisades. It couldn't have been totally avoided, but it definitely could have been made better or less severe with a few practices that, you know, you mentioned, the Getty mentioned. Why isn't the city of LA preparing to face those fires as well? Since it seems to happen every single year.
So there are things that can be done like brush management and controlled burns, even things like that that are not at least being implemented. But, you know, it's a huge tragedy and trying to point fingers is kind of useless.
Of course. Let's switch to nuclear here because I think we're not here to talk about fire policy in L.A.
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Chapter 4: What lessons can be learned from Germany's nuclear phase-out?
People are super afraid of nuclear. They think it's bad and dangerous. Why is that the case? I mean, I remember growing up and not really having much of an opinion and then thinking like, oh, we shouldn't do that. I don't know why, but we just shouldn't because Chernobyl. Actually, maybe back up one little step. Is there a big nuclear like there is big oil and gas?
Because you never really hear about the uranium lobby. Does that exist?
If it exists, it's very ineffective because I don't personally take money from the nuclear industry, but there are people who are happy to take money from the nuclear industry and they just won't give any away. So if there is big nuclear or big uranium, I'm not aware of it. But just to step back, why are people so afraid of nuclear?
And it's interesting you mentioned you didn't really know much about it, but you just had this vibe that it was bad. Or dangerous.
Yeah. Or like it's not cool. Like, hey, anything can happen. I remember my mom telling me like Three Mile Island. I still don't even know what that is. But that apparently there was some nuclear thing there. And my parents were like Chernobyl. You know, that's what I remember learning about nuclear growing up because I grew up in the 80s.
Yes, exactly. So I think even your generation, certainly my generation, we don't really know why, but we just have a bad feeling about it. And if you want to go all the way back to the beginning, you really have to go to whenever nuclear fission was discovered.
And this is when a few scientists in the lab found out that by bombarding uranium with neutrons would create the atoms in the uranium to split. And that would release energy. And I'm just really simplifying the history here because it was a lot of people involved and steps and so on. But, you know, this discovery unfortunately took place in 1938 in Germany.
So we were a year away from entering World War II. And of course, the fear automatically became that Hitler was trying to develop bombs using the underlying science. It was very clear already at that time that this technology could be used for making weapons. We're also for making electricity, right? I like to compare it to AI right now, where we are.
It can be, you know, this incredible thing that cures cancer and gives all of this, creates all new jobs. But also it can destroy human civilization.
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Chapter 5: How does nuclear energy infrastructure relate to coal power plants?
That's the fear anyway.
Well, but with the difference being that at the time, this technology was certainly discovered in Germany.
Nazi Germany, to be clear.
Nazi Germany, to be clear. Exactly. Nazi Germany, to be clear. And so Albert Einstein co-wrote a letter to President Roosevelt at the time, urging him to do something about that, to try to get ahead of Hitler. And so the United States started the Manhattan Project, which obviously culminated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And that was the introduction to the world of nuclear technologies. And you have to think about the fact that people automatically started equating nuclear or atomic with a mushroom cloud image, with photos of children crying, you know, running away from crumbling buildings. Imagine the emotional scar that that created in that entire generation that witnessed that.
Yeah, my parents talk about those drills where you stick your head under your desk and then it's like, yeah, you're going to get vaporized. But sure, make sure you don't have a book land on you before that happens or whatever. And it seems like if we'd had a slightly different introduction to this technology, we'd be in a totally different place because.
I would think right now if they were like, hey, we figured out how to split the atom. It's like, wow, every vehicle's gonna be electric. Skyscrapers in New York are gonna be running essentially green, right? Carbon, what's it called? Net zero, whatever. We're gonna have clean cities. We're gonna have clean air.
You're gonna be able to clean up all the garbage everywhere and clean up all the water that's dirty because we have unlimited electricity. man, it would have really turned out differently. We wouldn't energy politics. We would not have a lot of the dictatorships we have now, the Middle East crazies that are still largely living in the Stone Age.
Warm up those angry emails now, folks, would not have all the power and money that they have. And a lot of autocratic regimes sit on huge amounts of natural resources just kind of by design. And I've done shows about this. And so we that might also just never have really happened.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of nuclear waste management?
It was a current day Ukraine. So it's just to say, you know, everything that's related to nuclear accidents in Chernobyl is completely overblown. Another crazy fact, one of the reactors obviously exploded. So nothing, you know, it was shut down. Another one was shut down maybe a decade after that reactor exploded.
But the Chernobyl power plant, there were four reactors originally, and one of them kept making electricity until the year 2000. So there were workers coming in and that's a reactor that shared a wall with the reactor that exploded.
Oh, wow.
So people were coming in. The power plant was still producing electricity because people tend to think generally like everybody died and it became this wasteland and nobody can go in.
Right. Yeah.
And it's just not true.
The exclusion zone, when I look at it on a map, that's why I thought it was in Belarus, because there's something called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which I guess is part Ukraine, part Belarus, part, I don't know, what else? Maybe some Russia in there? I'm not sure exactly. But it's like a grayed-out area on the map with lines through it, depending on the map you're looking at.
And the borders kind of aren't really there because there's no people living in there. Or, I mean, no people supposed to be living in there. Mm-hmm. And there's cities that have like wolf packs in them and wildlife and all kinds of crazy stuff. My buddy went through a motorcycle trip through there. So you can go through it, but it's, you know, nobody's there.
But yeah, you think there's power plants there and it's in a post-apocalyptic disaster zone, but really it's an operate or was an operating power plant with working roads that you could drive through if you actually wanted to do that. And I think it includes part of Belarus, part of Ukraine. Yeah. How long is that out of commission?
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Chapter 7: How does the international community view nuclear energy post-Fukushima?
You get home, you turn on the lights, you charge your phone, charge your computer, do all the things that we do without thinking twice about electricity, right? But electricity is a secondary source of energy. And what that means is that we need to use a primary source of energy to create electricity.
Because, yes, electricity exists in nature, but it's not like we're harnessing that electricity to power our stuff. And so the primary sources of energy that we use to create electricity are coal, oil, methane gas, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear is one of those. So those are all different ways that we can create electricity. There are more, but they're niche.
I'm just going to focus on the biggest ones.
Sure.
And so nuclear is actually the largest source of clean energy in the United States. It's the second largest source of clean energy in the world. And what I mean by that is that whenever we make electricity with nuclear, we're not releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or even particulate matter. So there are no emissions that happen whenever you're creating electricity with nuclear.
But it's still, you know, even though it's the largest source of clean energy, it's still very far from being our primary source of electricity generation. This is still fossil fuels like methane gas or coal in the United States specifically.
If we burn methane, what comes out of that? Do you know?
So methane, whenever we burn it, we don't actually get the same stuff. Coal is by far the worst, right? Yeah, sure. When you burn coal, you get a ton of shit into the atmosphere. Actually, you even get radioactive ash.
From burning coal.
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Chapter 8: What future role could nuclear energy play in combating climate change?
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A lot of people are going to say, you said there's no emissions, but I, you know, I driven past a nuclear power plant before. What are those big smokestacks for if they don't have emissions?
So those are not smokestacks. The smokestacks are different. They're like thinner stacks. And those are usually in coal plants and they're putting out shit into the environment. But the nuclear power plant, you're not actually seeing smokestacks. You're seeing cooling towers. And what's the thing that they're putting out is actually just water vapor.
So nuclear power plants, nuclear reactors actually get very hot. That's how they make electricity. They use the energy trapped inside of atoms. to heat up water, which creates steam. And the steam then spins a turbine that is connected to a generator. And that's how it makes electricity. So nuclear reactors get very hot and they need to be cooled down.
And one of the most popular ways in which they're cooled down is we get water from a large body of water nearby. It can be an ocean or a lake or a river. And you suck that water into a cooling system that goes around a secondary loop in the reactor. So it's not actually touching the reactor. That's where the radiation would be. But it's coming out.
Usually in most nuclear power plants, it also just comes right back out into the lake, river, ocean, just hotter than what it was in the beginning.
Okay. So it's not actually becoming radioactive by going through the power plant.
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