for most of human history our species has been trying to solve the problem of energy how do we stay warm and cook our food heat our homes and later how do we power our world and communicate with each other then 70 years ago we found a solution that changed everything an energy Miracle a giant of Limitless power at man's command we found out how to throw a tiny Neutron so hard at a special kind of atom that it would split apart releasing a huge amount of energy in a chain reaction first we mostly use this Chain Reaction as a weapon the shadow of the atom bomb has been across all our lives but then after the war we started using it for more peaceful things to solve our age-old energy problem we learned to control the Chain Reaction creating heat to boil water and spin a turbine and we had electricity a lot of electricity all from this tiny amount of fuel this was the utopian promise of nuclear power clean energy for all using the simple power of an atom within the Adam's heart is not one but many Giants seeking to provide vast quantities of energy to run the world's machines and for a while we loved it the US started building nuclear power plants all over the country power plants started popping up across Japan and Europe soon France will be getting nearly three quarters of their power from nuclear energy all this in a time of oil crisis when fossil fuels are expensive and getting scarce the power of the atom was bringing peace and prosperity abundance but then nuclear turned from Darlene to Outcast there has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union a state of emergency in two of the country's nuclear reactors in the worst nuclear reactor accident today today nuclear power is in Decline and I've been trying to understand why why in an era of climate crisis caused by fossil fuels are we winding down this effective carbon-free energy source what happened to the promise of nuclear energy inevitably I ended up in a conversation with my friend Cleo who makes a show called huge if true she's someone who's reported on this a bunch before and was the perfect person to talk to to help me sort this out why is nuclear energy not like the saving grace of our civilization we like sort of gave up and I don't understand why and I want to understand why this is a great story yes I've looked into this in some ways for various videos um but I've never gone straight at it I've never done the like what the heck happened with nuclear video I feel like I will have a clearer version of the story if we can do it sort of tag team are we going to do the cynic Optimist thing I maybe yes here's the plan I'm going to go down the rabbit hole on why people are afraid of nuclear energy like what is the actual deal here what are the events and the things that freak us all out and I'm gonna figure out okay so what do we do about that how do we use where in the future and we can compare notes to look at like is there a future for this technology and should we actually be as afraid as we are awesome all right oh all right boy I know so much more about nuclear energy than I did a few weeks ago and I'm very excited to share it with you and Cleo is actually on her way right now like she's about to show up to the studio and we're gonna do a little show and tell explainer and it's going to be very exciting um but first I need to thank the sponsor of today's video which is grammarly grammarly is something I've been using for ages it's like a tool that helps my spelling and grammar be better when I'm writing emails and stuff but they just came out with something new it's called grammarly go and it leverages the power of generative AI the thing we've all been hearing about to make your writing better on whatever platform you're writing on you can tell grammarly go that you want to make your writing more exciting more professional shorter and it integrates with all the platforms that all of us rely on from Google docs to Gmail to LinkedIn to whatever wherever you are on your internet browser grammarly go is there to make your writing faster and better a really common prompt for me lately is video titles I will ask like what are 10 video titles for my video about X Y and Z and I get really solid responses we all know that generative AI is Magic and with grammarly go that magic can be applied to your writing the other really cool thing is that it rewrites things like if you write something you're like I want this to sound more professional or I want this to like sound more formal you literally just highlight it and click a button and it will spice up your writing however in whatever Direction you need it to gremly go is a very cool application of AI that is from a company that I've already been using for years and already know is very legit which is grammarly so I'm super into it you'll be amazed at what you can do with this thing so there's a link in my description it's grammarly.com Johnny Harris clicking that link helps support this channel but it also gets you 20 off grammarly premium what this is is grammarly the main product which is the thing that underlines when you misspell a word or when your grammar could be better plus grammarly go which is this new version of grammarly that uses the power of generative AI 20 off it's very affordable and it really can change your world so thank you grammarly for sponsoring today's video I think Cleo is going to be here very soon I can't wait to show you what we learned about nuclear energy let's go [Music] Welcome to our studio hi hi I suppose it's normal background radiation just some radioactive ways what exactly is nuclear energy I don't know but I know someone who does okay let's do this we went deep in this on very different sort of aspects of nuclear energy but we agreed upon three major buckets that are the reasons we believe that nuclear has not sort of become the promise of the future let's call them nuclear's three big problems and they are accidents waste and cost you understand these three and you really understand nuclear's big issue or nuclear's big Solutions I want to start with accidents because accidents really are I think the biggest most powerful thing in our popular imagination of why nuclear is scary totally when you think of nuclear power plants at least for me I thought of like Chernobyl Chernobyl is this really scary event that happened in Ukraine in the late 80s when a nuclear reactor melted down and then exploded and spewed radioactive material invisibly into the sky hundreds of thousands of people had to evacuate and it turned the entire area into this like toxic wastelands and it just has this very sort of scary apocalyptic energy to it I mean it's the reason why it's like the subject of this really popular HBO show Chernobyl led to the death of hundreds of people I think a lot of people think it's like come on tens of thousands of people it was really hundreds of people from radiation radiation exactly and then a lot of people were displaced they had to leave and that causes a huge disruption and is a major human cost the numbers aren't massive here compared to other disasters that occur but it's the the spectacle of it like you see this and you see what radiation does radiation is this really weird invisible thing that like you can't see but like suddenly it if you're exposed to it in high doses it can start to like break down the very building blocks of of your cells and just sort of deteriorate your body like from the inside like it's really sort of gruesome and hard to think about and look at and I think that leaves an impression on people this isn't the only event that has happened here in the United States we had a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island 147 000 people had to temporarily evacuate it led to no deaths but I think that's surprising for a lot of people I think it is too again because the spectacle more recently there was a nuclear disaster the third sort of big one in Japan after an earthquake off the coast of Japan it created this like massive tsunami that washed up onto Fukushima and there was a nuclear plant there that got completely overrun and broken down and had another meltdown okay but it's not just accidents think about having this invisible scary thing called radiation and if you are someone who wants to do harm and you get your hands on this stuff you can turn it into a weapon and you're not even talking about controlling nuclear proliferation by focusing on where people get uranium and enrichment and all of that you're you're focusing on once nuclear power plants are built there's a security risk absolutely and you see this in like polls and stuff you have this public opinion poll here in the United States that asks Americans if they think we should use nuclear at all not like should it be the number one source or should we invest in it it's should we even use it as one of our sources and look almost 50 percent of people don't think we should even have it at all like we should do away with nuclear power it's perfectly split yeah it's a 50 50. the percentage of people who say that nuclear power is safe is going down every year and is it 47 percent what happened in 2011 that Fukushima and it didn't me too like I feel this I feel this association with nuclear power because of these events this is Japan and nuclear is in yellow right after Fukushima you see that nuclear power in Japan just gets kind of squashed so I think for me the reason why accidents is like the top of this list is because accidents have this big psychological effect on people I think we need to separate out though risk of accidents which are terrifying from safety of an energy source because those are actually two different things what we really want to know isn't how many accidents happen it's deaths per unit of electricity production so like every electricity source is risky in its own way and you can measure how many people die based on how much energy you make yes this is the data for solar nuclear wind and hydropower okay so what you can see is that they don't have that many deaths per unit of electricity production what this is saying is that these are all really really safe energy sources and nuclear is between solar and wind like this is really important oh wait I didn't even see that nuclear was down there yeah okay this includes all deaths from accidents and nuclears between our two most exciting renewable energy sources And yet when we think of nuclear we think of danger yes if you think about our energy Max how much power we get from different sources of energy holy sh that is fossil fuels here's the data that really drove this home for me so our welding data that's the source of the chart that I just showed did a calculation to really show people how this affects actual humans so what they did is they set up a town called euroville This is a hypothetical town of 150 000 people nice and uravil uses one terawatt hour of electricity per year if you powered euroville for one year with just coal this is the number of citizens of euroville that would die if you chose oil if you powered euroville for one year with just oil this many people would die coal is actually 25 oil is 18. okay one year in a town of 150 000 people those are real humans with families and lives and and jobs if you chose gas three people if you chose hydropower one person if you chose wind nuclear or solar it would take 25 years for one person to die 25 years I think it is totally understandable to focus on how scary accidents are I don't mean to say like look at this data like we're so irrational yeah but I do think that if we really cared about human lives we would be paying a lot more attention to how many people fossil fuels kill and we would be trying really really hard to replace fossil fuels with wind nuclear solar or hydropower as fast as human as possible and this is before we get to climate change yeah this is just production of these energy sources yeah it's not the carbon ramifications that's another reason but it's separate from this I think it's that the accidents are just inherently scary and the same way that like a plane crash is scary it's a spectacle coal and oil is like car crashes it happens way more but we don't really pay attention just genuinely surprised I would have guessed nuclear was higher up I really would have after the question of actual deaths from nuclear power and other energy sources there's also this question of a fear of radiation you see it in the headlines all the time about living next to a nuclear plant or working in a nuclear plant or whatever yep and again the thing here is about our human brains assessing risk so these are a bunch of sources of radiation and this is the Spectrum that's going to help us compare them so what do you get from a typical chest CT scan compared to taking a flight from New York to Tokyo yeah give me one clue so this one is can cause radiation sickness radiation sickness is if you're up at a thousand yeah that's scary guess where are the other things okay I'm going to start with flight versus x-ray like chest x-ray like I get a checks x-ray I go on a flight from New York to Tokyo I'm assuming that a flight isn't crazy so like maybe one and then the chest x-ray is probably like 10. man I'm probably so off all right so I'm gonna go here I'm gonna go here did I do them all so what I'm seeing from your guesses are you are aware that we get radiation from all kinds of stuff from flying from chesty tees from chest x-rays all of that but you have an impression that if you live next to a nuclear power plant or if you work in a nuclear power plant you're like signing up for more yeah and it's probably not like crazy you're gonna get cancer but like you're getting a little bit more radiation than if you're just like living way far away right okay here are the real answers so a couple things make total sense the annual amount received by a worker in a nuclear power plant is lower than the maximum annual dose but a typical dose from living within a few kilometers of an operating nuclear power plant for one year is less than a typical chest x-ray and way less than a typical chest CT scan and less than a flight from New York to Tokyo wow living next to it for a year you're living next to it for an entire year and in one like 10 hour flight you are getting more radiation exposure a a lot more and also this one is super important this is the average total dose from natural background radiation this is what all of us are getting no matter what from living on Earth in our particular solar system that is significantly more than living next to a nuclear power plant um working within a nuclear power plant the major lesson from all of this is most of the radiation exposure that you'll get in your life will be from plane trips and x-rays and natural background radiation even if you lived right next to a nuclear power plant even if you worked in a nuclear power plant wow okay radiation is probably another one of these sort of invisible scary things that we maybe over index on our hesitation about because we don't understand it and I that's how I feel radiation to me is invisible it is scary what it does to us is scary and so I sort of associate like proximity to things that create radiation I.E nuclear
power plant as like oh well that's the source of it if I'm close to it I'm probably getting it because I can't really see it again like none of what I'm saying is meant to imply that that aren't disastrous and terrifying or that radiation in doses that are on the upper end of the spectrum is also disastrous and terrifying I just made a video about cancer it scared the heck out of me but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't also put it into context we should put all of that data into context and comparing deaths to deaths from fossil fuels and comparing radiation to ways that we receive radioactive other ways this is just about putting that risk in context into perspective okay okay wow that definitely like complicates the nuclear is scary because of accidents kind of narrative that I think is very much alive in the in the popular like perception of this energy source the the thing that keeps flowing in mind is that the fossil fuel number like that that is just still very much in my mind right now okay can we move on yes okay wow accidents these other two are I think less huge but still important um one thing that we hear a lot about waste I saw a tweet recently from Greenpeace that was like nuclear energy isn't like viable for the future the waste problem is still a thing and that sort of sent me down this Rabbit Hole the first thing I think of is like Homer Simpson and like green goop like nuclear waste that's like never it's like in a barrel somewhere and it can like sneak out and Destroy everyone I know that is a caricatured version of it but there is a reality that when we do fission when we break apart atoms to make energy there is a byproduct of that in fact I have a chart here actually most of nuclear waste is not like some like scary material but the thing that scares people is actually this little three percent it's the vast minority of what nuclear waste comes out of this process and it is the spent fuel this is scary because this is stuff that comes out and gets put into like big barrels okay and it gets stored on site like at the nuclear power plant every year we make relatively not a ton of this stuff it's about the size of half of an Olympic swimming pool okay so it's not like a ton relative to how much energy we get out of it but like the thing that's scary is that this stuff doesn't go away there's this really clunky chart that you don't really need to look at all the lines on what you need to look at is that x-axis down here yeah you look down here and you just see really really big numbers this is how long this waist stays radioactive and yes you're looking at a number that says one million over here human beings have existed in this form for like 200 000 Years and we're talking about creating a dangerous material that lives on potentially for hundreds of thousands of years if not a million years before it becomes benign again that is a problem and this isn't just like in one facility like this isn't like all centralized in one place like if you look at this map of the US this is where all of these sites are like there are a lot of them so there's a lot of points of failure as time goes on you can see how this could just build up and become like a massive management task I have this very instinctive fear of this stuff yeah I think one of the things that helps is to look at what it is in my imagination nuclear waste this green goop nuclear waste is actually a solid pellet so we are trying to dispose of a solid material that is extremely radioactive at most nuclear power plants we have these they're called dry casks so basically those fuel pellets that look like this go into a column inside a metal rod it's just about half an inch across and then all of those rods together are bundled into a fuel assembly okay then those are put inside of a one of those big cats that you should um and then they're covered in concrete there's an outer shell there's a sealed inner cylinder these things are built to withstand tornadoes and direct attacks and floods and every possible natural disaster that you can imagine and they're certified for about 40 years obviously that is nothing in the time scale of radioactivity people look at the difference between that time scale they're like oh my God hundreds of thousands of years that doesn't mean that there are lots of uncertified unsafe dry casks all around the country like in the research that I was doing I didn't find a single instance of a radiation leak from a dry Cask or a single instance of an attack on a dry cast that liberally meant to do harm yeah that doesn't mean that there couldn't possibly be leaks and it doesn't mean there couldn't possibly be a tax but just in this in terms of what we're really talking about here and risk assessment I think for me it's I'm like cool it's only this big now but what's gonna happen next in the long run other countries are doing what's called Deep geological storage oh wow so what you in theory want to do is assemble those fuel pellets into those fuel rods into those canisters um and these are the canisters are slightly different but then you bury them deep deep underground there are some countries that have already built systems like this Finland is one there are lots of countries that are investigating them this is a technology that is totally difficult and impressive that we can do but it's being tried it's being done this is feasible and in fact if you go back to the chart that we were using you might have heard of Yucca Mountain which was the United States effort to do deep theological Repository Yucca Mountain failed for lots and lots of reasons some local politics but again this is a primarily political problem not a technological one yeah I think that like I definitely feel this sense and I think this is probably a pretty popular reaction to this which is like we have this like hot potato and we like need to get rid of it so we put it in these casks that are only good for 40 years and then it's like that's gonna run out so let's just like bury it in a giant hole and like make it go away but it's still going to be there I think I kind of share the reticence of having a an energy source that just continually produces this as a byproduct even if we do have these these Technologies can you find a way to have it not have a byproduct please actually not quite but so think about this this waste the reason why the waste that we just talked about is scary is that it's radioactive which means that there's energy in this solid yep yep yep that's also a really exciting prospect because there are ways that we can use that energy and not only does that give us an energy source it also allows us to shorten the radioactive lifespan of nuclear weapons of the waste down from potentially thousands of years to if you do this enough hundreds of years so you can use nuclear waste as fuel for more energy you can recycle nuclear waste yes I dived all the way into this in a video that I'm now going to promise is going to be on my channel by the time we air this one so it's live right now on your channel yes you better be because I just I'm promising that it is deep dive on nuclear recycling that I need to watch so here's the visual to just keep in mind this is the way that the United States does this right now okay they mine it it goes into uranium they put it into a reactor and then it creates scary waste and then they have to put it somewhere exactly and ways but that are closed fuel Cycles so we have an open fuel cycle it's one line but there are closed fuel Cycles where various different kinds of reactors can actually recycle nuclear waste so that you're getting more energy out of the nuclear fuel itself and also cutting down on the radioactive God that seems like a game changer and just for all the people out there right now who are saying that seems totally infeasible Japan already does it whoa this is a much too complicated visualization of Japan's nuclear fuel cycle but they've been recycling nuclear fuel for years yeah this is a huge game if this could actually happen at scale like if this could actually be applied then you really cut down on one of what I see and actually feel is like a major stumbling block for this energy source that is a game changer huge of sure huge if true nice that was perfect Okay so we've done accidents we've done waste both of those are really associated with fear of bad things happening in the long run especially and um the third one is like not bad like the third one is just the plain old numbers it's just Cost and this is actually like perhaps like the most cut and dry which is that nuclear costs more than everything else and it's gone up over time like meanwhile you've got this yellow line which is solar and it's just like like there's been so much investment there's been so much innovation in this dipped down look at that that's like we've gotten so good at making solar cheap and it's obviously been invested in by the government but like nuclear is expensive and that's a problem is this worth it is the conversation that we should all be having and not from a place of fear but from a place of evaluating what the best bang for our buck is to stop using fossil fuels and use clean energy sources yeah and if that's not nuclear and if we have better Solutions in Renewables awesome yeah like that's great totally but it has to be based on what's best for us not based on calling out one specific energy source and creating an environment of fear around it without context absolutely the question like you mentioned is always how much do we actually invest in creating these energy sources in causing this Innovation and causing this price decline this this chart shows government subsidies for various kinds of energy you've got fossil fuels in blue you got renewable energy and yellow you're at nuclear energy very small and green and you can see obviously that we're investing more and more Renewables which is awesome the question that we have to ask about this chart is how does it compare to the amount of energy that we get from each of these sources because it just perfectly lines up then it's just dollar for dollar investing yeah the answer is when you compare how much we're investing in each kind of energy versus the amount of energy that that Source actually gives us right now what you see is that nuclear is a little bit less than Renewables these days um in terms of our full Energy Mix but it's getting invested in way less yeah which why is that is it because of the fear like it's probably because of these like big concerns that we've talked about I think we're now in a situation where we're operating a lot of old nuclear power plants that are no longer competitive with the new sources of energy that we've been investing in and those new sources of energy are amazing like that's great but we did strangle a potential clean energy source in a lot of ways yeah and so I'm not totally sure to be honest whether that fact that nuclear isn't competitive is because of a loss of innovation and investment that could have happened years ago or because it was never going to be Renewables and kind of at this point it doesn't matter like yeah we are where we are yeah I think that at the very least I would hope that we're evaluating this based on the Technology's ability to help us as opposed to based on a lot of fear-mongering over decades yeah and I think what I found is that the fear and the concerns are really kind of sticky you can't make an HBO mini-series about like an accident at a solar farm I think after talking to you about this I feel like there's a lot more to the story that if invested in if looked into has a lot of potential and that potential maybe hasn't been able to be fully realized I don't know if this wins out in the long run but I think it needs a fairer shot than it's been given I think that's my takeaway too cool for me I'm going to watch this really closely in coming years to see if like this turns around and like we actually do check our fears and realize that there is promise in this energy and we really kind of don't have another choice we have to figure it out and because we're so wrapped up in our fears about nuclear power we didn't even talk about innovation in nuclear energy new kinds of nuclear reactors new kinds of fuels that we might use there's an enormous part of this conversation that's like we can talk about nuclear ads that exist today we can also talk about the future and that's something that I'm really excited to do I think you can only do that frankly after you begin to unpack this part and so what I loved about this is like it felt like you were bringing the concerns that very reasonable people have about nuclear energy but then we were able to talk about the context around each of those because the ultimate question when we talk about energy sources is always compared to what yeah deaths from nuclear accidents in my opinion should always be compared to deaths from other energy sources yeah radiation should always be compared to radiation from other sources investment in Acts should always be compared to investment and why and so I think when we are talking about how we get energy in the future I think this conversation has to be compared to what what kind of future do we want to have and how do we get there yeah all right on my webcams Mr Burns is making me eat all these Drums of toxic waste jeez that's rough there must be two 300 gallons in here yeah and even a teaspoon could cause a fatal tumor hey you want to cut Bola with us tonight okay okay that's it that's the video that is a video that Claire and I have been working on for a very long time talking about for potentially years and now we've finally done it and yes we used overhead projectors and transparencies which is surprisingly useful like I understand why this was like the story of my elementary school life very useful visual display mechanism so another video is over and I need to quickly show you something one sec check out my map poster I mean you can't really see it super well here so let's just hit cut to it there we go okay this is a poster that I've been thinking about for years and is finally real it is a printed thing it's called all maps are wrong and it shows all of the map projections not all of them a bunch of them that we use to take a spherical Earth and put it on a flat plane and I love it and it's beautiful and I got a lot of help designing it from some good friends and some people on our team and it's just a very very special product for me so that is on sale if you want this poster to live on your wall um you can it lives on my wall and will be next to my desk forevermore so that I can look at map projections all day long [Applause] that's a major way that you can support this channel by the way more and more we rely on our community to support our independent journalism we 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you in the next one bye everyone all right impact marathon is over foreign [Music]
2023-05-15