Scrambling for Energy Security: Navigating Unstable Energy Supplies Amidst Global Conflict with Chris Keefer

energy crises have a way, I think, of rubbing our faces down into the foundations, physiologic needs, you know, fire shelter, water, heat, security. We are in interesting times again. And the way I try and understand this historical moment is to go back to the energy shocks of the 1970s. The driver of the great nuclear buildout that we saw in the past, two-thirds of them were built in the 70s and the 80s. One tanker load of LNG is equivalent to about a month's nuclear capacity. So if you're running a nuclear power plant for a year, that's 12 tankers of LNG you don't need. As we face down another energy crisis, nuclear has a very, very important role in places where it's not nice to have, but need to have. You're listening to the great simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today, I'm pleased to welcome back to the show Dr. Chris Kieffer to discuss how recent events in Iran and the Middle East, especially damage in the natural gas fields and infrastructure, are reprioritizing energy security everywhere and how nuclear power could possibly fit into those changing strategies. Dr. Chris Kieffer is the host of the D-Couple podcast, as well as a practicing emergency physician in Toronto, a medical instructor and a lifelong advocate for social and environmental causes. He is also the founder and president of the Grassroots Nonprofit, Canadians for Nuclear Energy. In this conversation, Chris offers a depth of very rapidly spoken information on our changing global energy portfolio, including how unique decisions over the past few decades have shaped, for better or for worse, the energy situations of various countries today. Drawing parallels to the energy crisis of the 1970s, Chris highlights how similar circumstances have brought about the rapid construction of nuclear power plants in the past, but questions whether Western nations have the political will, the financial capability, the civic capacity to repeat this again today. Ultimately, Chris emphasizes that by looking to our recent energy past, we might actually be able to glimpse some of the forces shaping our energy future as we crest the peak of the carbon pulse. Dr. Chris Kieffer, welcome back to the great simplification. Nate Higgins, it's great to be back in times that feel anything but simple. I love that you're actually a doctor and that you're doing this for pro-social, pro-future, your own curiosity, non-professional reasons to get this story out. So you were on the show maybe two years ago to talk about nuclear power. And this past week, we were initially set to record this episode on broader nuclear energy, but events in Iran. And I will timestamp this conversation. It is Sunday morning, March 22nd, 9am central, kind of completely turned our original script on its head as this war is doing for much of the world. In the last couple days, the United States slash Israel bombed one of the largest natural gas fields in Iran. And then there was a retaliation to Qatar gas field, sending the world further into the throes of an energy crisis. Your expertise, and the other reason I've invited you is that there's a lot of nuclear experts or nuclear bashers in my universe, but you've kind of risen above the fray in my estimation because you know a lot, but you're pretty balanced. And you know the arguments from both sides. So I'm glad to have you back. But before we dig into nuclear power, I'm wondering how you think the events of the past several weeks are now affecting national priorities in terms of energy resources and energy security, as opposed to low carbon and the conversations we've had in the past decade. And how are we seeing that shift play out across different countries in the world? I mean, I think we're coming off of a period where we've been at the lofty heights on top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We've, you know, I think it's the 2010s to the 2020s. Every source of primary energy went from peak to trough decreased by about 90%. The cost of capital is almost free after the global financial crisis. We had some pretty, I think, easy times. And we were able, had the great privilege to be able to spend a lot of that time, I think, worrying about higher order issues. This discussion itself is a product of energy surplus. Yes, yes. But you know, themes of esteem, self-actualization, like this is where our heads have been in terms of, you know, politics, ideology, you know, the cultural motif of this era, the zeitgeist, if you will. And energy crises have a way, I think, of rubbing our faces down into the foundations of that pyramid, Maslow's hierarchy, physiologic needs, you know, fire, shelter, water, heat, security. So we are in interesting times again. And, you know, the way I try and understand this historical moment is to go back to the energy shocks of the 1970s. And, my God, same cast of characters, US, Israel, Iran. And to look at the response to it, because I think our modern energy infrastructure is so deeply explained by that initial set of shocks in the 70s and the responses that we had to them. Some of those were nuclear, looking at Europe, for instance. France didn't build nuclear reactors for fun or because it was easy or because, you know, fissioning heavy atoms is cool. They did it because they didn't have coal, they didn't have, well, they didn't have much coal, they didn't have gas. They had ideas, as they, as they famously said, they had an engineering state, they had a political economy that enabled them to build 54 large gigawatt scale reactors in something like 20 years. The UK, Norway, went gangbusters, you know, taking offshore drilling into deep water, shall we say, cold, deep water. Germany carried out a masterful bit of diplomacy locking in gas from the evil empire across the Iron Curtain and really securing Europe and building a lot of resiliency into that system. In the US, you know, we had an oil to coal transition. Basically, every part of the world responded to a crisis and created what ended up being an energy glut. And again, that frames this kind of easy times we've had in the early 2000s. And so in terms of predicting the future, I don't feel like I'm much good at that. But I try and understand the future by understanding the past. And I think I'm a little scared, Nate, because I don't think Europe, for instance, is in the same, doesn't have the same sort of preconditions to respond as skillfully as it did. And I think it really did respond masterfully to the 1970s oil shock. I don't think it's got, you know, the same amount of oil and gas in those drained reserves, or the same amount of human capacity, human resources that it did that again, was able to do something as magnificent really as the French nuclear buildup. Or ability to expand debt or the complexity of the materials that are required and the social license and all those things. Yeah, you're right. Yes, sir. There's so much to talk about, Chris. Let's start here. The energy conversation of the last few weeks in the news has been primarily dominated by crude oil disruptions and the strain of hormones. But why is natural gas and especially liquefied natural gas, LNG, also huge and important levers in the rapidly changing global energy situation? Well, I mean, gas, not speaking just about liquefied now, but gas in general is about 20% of global primary energy, liquefied natural gas, 3%, 4%, sounds marginal, but it's become incredibly important to a number of different countries. And paradoxically, this is kind of for energy security reasons. And, you know, in the context of a volatile Middle East, it's hard to think of something as energy insecure as the brass lefond industrial city, the site of the LNG natural gas liquefaction trains that are, you know, concentrated on this little peninsula off of the Arabian peninsula itself. It's about 80% the size of Connecticut, that little Qatari, I don't want to say something like a pimple, but it's like a little bump off of Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Peninsula. And this gas field, I believe the largest in the world, and this incredible concentration of high technology in order to densify that by 600x, put it on ships and carry it across the world. Wait, just so when we have natural gas as a gas, when they liquefied, it's a 600 times compression? Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah, it's marvelous. And it's happening in a hot country, right? 40 degrees C sometimes, they have to get it down to minus 162 degrees Celsius, if my memory serves me. And presumably they use some of the natural gas to do that? 10% of it, yeah. And I mean, they've got plenty lying around, so it's not really an energy return, energy invested, a kind of anxiety for them. But each of these natural gas trains, maybe 10 billion dollars, a pop of capital investment, and I believe the Qataris have 14 now, and they were in the midst of a big expansion, 77 million tons per annum produced last year, they were aiming to get up to about 140 million tons per annum by 2030. We were told that we were about to have a gas glut, a liquefied natural gas glut. And so more and more developing countries were signing up and saying, okay, well, you know, we have insufficient energy reserves ourselves, this looks like a great way for us to bake in energy security. Again, Qatar had been a very reliable partner, for instance, to Pakistan, which currently imports 99% of its LNG from Qatar, well currently imports none because of force majeure, and now Iranian missile attacks on the complex. But all that to say, this had become a really, really important part of the equation for countries again, like Pakistan, like South Korea, like Taiwan, like Japan, I mean, Japan has been the source of capital that's really financed and caused LNG to lift off. I've all been looking at this as a really useful commodity. Again, one liquefied natural gas tanker carries as much energy as a nuclear plant running for almost a month. What? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that works both ways. It boggles the mind both ways. You know, it boggles the mind both ways. You know, you live in Canada, I'm in the US, and we can't help but look at the news and look at how it impacts prices and responses and reactions in our countries. But there are many countries in the world that the percentage of their GDP that is energy imports is quite high. And so what's happening here with both oil and gas has massive impact. You mentioned Pakistan, Thailand, you know, many Latin American countries and islands have a very large percentage of their GDP has to go to energy. So all of a sudden, energy security becomes an important question. But you mentioned force majeure. How many people were thinking that that was plausible? Especially Europe, they signed these huge long term deals with Qatar. And now, okay, sorry, there was an act of God, a war, and we can't deliver it to you. What's going on there? What do you think? I mean, it's major. It's a shock and it's not just energy. I mean, LNG is used for a lot of things. It's, you know, during the 1970s oil crisis, oil was used for electricity generation. Now LNG is used for that purpose in countries again, like Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan. But it's also things critical petrochemical feedstocks, various plastics. One of Vaslav Smil's, you know, pillars of civilization, ammonia fertilizer. So the second and third order effects are just massive. But I wanted to take a second, Nate, just to go back again to why these importing countries thought it was a good idea to build gas infrastructure. And if you make that assumption that Qatar is a firm source of supply, and again, they prove themselves to be reliable partners to poor countries like Pakistan during the Russia energy crisis, they honored those contracts, those long-term contracts to Pakistan, which they, you know, got a little premium on because Pakistan was, you know, didn't have great credit, but they continued those shipments. But so why are these importing countries doing that? And I think a key thing about gas, liquefied natural gas that really makes it distinct from oil, is that on the producer's end, it is incredibly complex and difficult. So we just talked about that like $10 billion of investment per liquefied natural gas train, these are the, you know, industrial processes that compress and freeze that well liquefy that gas, get it down to 100 minus 162 degrees Celsius. Massive, massive investment, massive concentration of capital investment and complexity. But on the receiving end, it's relatively simple, right? You can have this floating storage and regasification unit, basically an LNG tanker, and it receives a gas shipment coming from Qatar. And on the deck of the ship, there's the infrastructure to warm the gas back up. It's a lot easier to warm something up than cool it down to minus 162 degrees centigrade. You can just do that running seawater over a heat exchanger, regasify it, you got to manage pressure and things like that. But then you have a short little pipeline over to a combined cycle gas turbine. And of all thermal power plants, if you just are looking at this from thermodynamics, it is a beautiful thing. We're talking about getting towards 60% efficiency. For reference, a nuclear plant is about 33% thermally efficient. A coal plant, maybe 40, 45% if it's, you know, ultra supercritical steam. But the fact that you have two thermodynamic cycles that you have a gas turbine, and then you're capturing that waste heat, boiling water, and then running it through a Rankin turbine, a steam turbine, you get you capture so much of that energy. And while that sounds really complex, combined cycle gas turbines have actually proven to be the easiest thing to build when it comes not to renewables, you know, wind and solar, very easy to build. But in terms of you're going to build a thermal station, nukes really hard, coal pretty damn hard, combined cycle gas turbines, pretty easy, because they truly are made in factories, you know, that the most expensive component is that gas turbine, you know, made by Siemens, Mitsubishi, Giavernova, shipped to site and really snaps together like Lego on site in, you know, 24 to 36 months, you have a incredibly thermally efficient power plant. And if you are living under the illusion as Pakistan and Korea and other countries were, that LNG was a reliable energy secure form of energy, because we have freedom of navigation, and we've had this wonderful end of history period that we seem to be coming to the end of, that was a good bet. But again, I think that duality is really important. Oil, I think really simple on the production side, especially conventional oil, complicated when you receive it and refine it, and LNG sort of flips that script. And so that's why again, a bunch of rich and also medium and even low income countries like Pakistan decided to make a big gamble on LNG and why in the context of this crisis, not just the force measure at Razlifan, but also the Ukrainian drone strike on the Russian LNG tanker, the Arctic metagas in the Mediterranean about to transit through the Svez, just I think sending such shockwaves through LNG markets and through the core assumptions of end users of this form of energy and why they might reconsider nuclear, but we'll talk about that some more. Did you go to Tim Hortons this morning, Doc? No, no, I have a MISPRESSOR machine. I'm only one MISPRESSOR. Holy cow, that was like a nonstop, your own LNG, frankly, my friend. One thing I've seen in the news recently is Pakistan, yes, you just discussed that, but that their imports, their needs for LNG and gas are much, much lower than they would have been five or 10 years ago because they scaled solar so much. Any thoughts on that? Definitely, I think that's a part of the story. Something that's interesting, of course, solar's intermittent, batteries pair very well with solar, no doubt. Oh, so does natural gas. So does natural gas. The other thing that Pakistan's been developing is coal. One of the real challenges though that's interesting again and points towards why they're importing LNG, despite having coal, if you have coal in your backyard and energy security is your fundamental issue and climate is the top of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, sort of concern and you're stuck there at the bottom dealing with physiologic needs and safety needs, you're going to burn your own coal. But the issue with Pakistani coal is it's wet coal in a dry place. So it's in this region of Pakistan called Dar. They don't have a lot of cooling water and they've got this wet lignite coal. It's thermally inefficient. You've got an air condense cool your rank and cycle. And so that's not been a reliable source of them. That's why Pakistan went in on solar, has gone in on LNG, has gone in on nuclear as well. So there's always this kind of per country, there's always interesting factors as to why they're making the energy choices they've made. But I would say absolutely no doubt solar has played a role. But they got a little freaked out because while Qatar did deliver reliably throughout the Russian energy crisis, Pakistan did have a number of contracts that were a little more flexible with European trading houses and the Europeans outbid them on the spot market. And so they were a gas starved in that period and they did learn a bit of a lesson there. While switching to Europe, what are they going to do with the force majeure with they got cut off and chose to cut off their big neighbor Russia with natural gas pipelines and they replaced that with long term contracts with Qatar and other places, including the US. How does this change their landscape broadly? So at last count, according to my math, Europe consumes about 38 exajoules of hydrocarbons oil and gas and produces six exajoules. So they have an import dependence of hydrocarbons of something around 80%. In the good old days, as I said, they were producing in the North Sea, in the Grennegan gas field off of the Netherlands, and had a what seemed to be geopolitical proof relationship with Russia. That's no longer there, as you mentioned. Interestingly, despite not taking much pipeline gas from Russia, Europe still taking LNG deliveries from Russia. They're making again, a sort of virtue signaling top of Mausel's hierarchy position of we're going to stop that now. And they've become incredibly dependent partially in Qatar, but really on US LNG. And it's very interesting in the context of Trump making moves on Greenland. I put the Europeans in a bit of a sticky position when they've now shifted from one evil empire to another in terms of their energy dependence. This is Sunday, March 22nd. On Friday, two days ago, I looked at the natural gas strip futures prices and 18 months out in Europe, it's still over $20 per million BTU versus three in the USA. And negative three in the Permian Basin right now, my friend. Negative three? Yeah. Why is that? Well, because when oil gets hot, you know, there's pure gas plays like the Marcellus, but there's co-production plays like the Permian, and they don't really want the gas, they want the oil that's what's really valuable right around the US. And there's nowhere for it to go. So it's negative. So they'll pay people to take away the gas, so it's negative. So in a world that is approaching the peak of the carbon pulse, not only is income and wealth and climate and other things unevenly distributed, but there are places that are starved for natural gas just for basic needs. And there are other places like you just mentioned the Permian that are having to flare it or dump it or not produce it because we have too much. They pay people to take it away right now. I mean, that's where the data centers are going to go at gas, right? I didn't know that. Wow. So seven times the natural gas price, not just today, but forecast for a year out as of now could go different than that in either direction. How do you maintain an industrial economy with a pretty central input to it at those prices? I mean, you don't. Frankly, in Europe's been undergoing pretty drastic in deindustrialization. Really, I mean, over the last 20 years, but it's really sped up with energy prices spiking. I mean, Germany's the kind of industrial heartland managed to resist a lot of the deindustrialization that the rest of the Western world allowed to happen as a result of globalization. They managed to, again, I guess, kind of admirably hold on to economic complexity and heavy industry and buoy up the European Union. But energy prices skyrocketed after the Russian invasion. They come down a little bit, but we're not going to see this LNG glut anytime soon that was sort of forecasted three months ago with Qatar Upping Production, with the US Upping Production. England, for instance, I believe they closed their last primary steel plant. I mean, this is the heartland of the Industrial Revolution. The prices for England are almost the same. In my opening, what I was mentioning is, again, in response to the 1970s energy crisis, Europe had an incredible amount of capacity, and they had a number of resources. They had intellectual capacity of their nuclear engineers and state capacity and finance capacity to, again, build 54 reactors and electrify heating, electrify the Tejeve, the high speed rail, electrify a lot of industry and get off oil. Similarly, again, the UK and Norway became exporters. 1995 was this sort of zenith in Europe, in terms of their response to the oil crisis. Their import dependency on hydrocarbons was 20% then. Again, I'm sort of counting Russian gas as part of that. But it's 80% now. They're in world of pain. And I worry for my European friends. So I don't know if you know Jean-Marc Jean-Covic, he's been on my program a couple of times. I can introduce you. You should have him on decouple. The last time he was on, he said that there are three ways to approach what's coming. One is efficiency, using the energy we have better. But that was before this crisis, right? So we're going to have less energy with which to be more efficient. The second is sobriety, which is choosing to do things differently, using energy differently, walking or biking instead of taking a car and all the other things. And the third choice is poverty. So I actually think that's a pretty good framing. And Europe may have to be the test run of the great simplification on some of the things that we've been discussing over the last few years. It is interesting European energy, like hydrocarbon use, peaks, I believe in about 2005 at 46 exajoules were down to 38 now by reference in terms of that hydrocarbon dependence. And yeah, there were reductions from efficiency. There were reductions due to some energy transition to renewables. But the big one was deindustrialization. And again, that's taken them from 46 exajoules down to 30. So about eight exajoules, it's been a slight reduction, but it's come at the cost again of industry. And I think we're becoming less comfortable as we de-globalize as the world fractures, as freedom of navigation is threatened with the idea of not producing the core ingredients of civilization. Vatslav's mills, four pillars of civilization, steel, cement, ammonia fertilizers and petrochemicals and plastics. If you don't have those basic abilities, it's like Trump said, if you don't have steel, you don't have a country. There's truth to that. Trump occasionally says things that are true. And I also don't want to be chicken little saying the sky's falling, but I'm just saying I think Europe's in for decades of pain and they responded admirably in the last oil crisis. I think they're really going to struggle to mount a similar response. I agree with you. How are these disruptions of the Strait of Hormuz, Israel, Iran, USA, Nexus, how are they changing discussions surrounding the topic of your passion and expertise, the viability of nuclear power? I mean, I think it's early, early days for that. The nuclear industry moves slowly, but certainly the driver of the great nuclear buildout that we saw in the past, currently that we have 440 nuclear reactors operational, putting out about close to 400 gigawatts of capacity. What's interesting, Nate, is if you look at the construction timeline of when those nuclear power plants were built, two-thirds of them were built in the 70s and the 80s. What? Right? Yes. And that's one of the issues is we have an aging fleet. Luckily, these things age well. They age like a fine wine. Often, they're actually performing better as we learn how to operate them better. But yeah, most, I think the average age of a nuclear reactor in the world is 30, 40 years and that's getting you back towards the 70s and 80s. Certainly when construction was started. And so, yeah, as we face down another energy crisis, nuclear is going to become something that it will be sought after by places like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan. They're restarting reactors. If you have reactors to restart, do that right away because that's going to decrease your LNG exposure. Does that apply to Japan and Germany? Yeah. Well, I mean, Germany, people think it's too late. But what is it cost to build a new European pressurized water reactor? How long does it take? What have we seen at Hinckley Point, Flamonville, Eucaloto? We've seen construction periods of 15 years. We've seen on the order of, I don't even know, 15 to 20 billion per reactor. Germany has reactors, they've started decommissioning. But for some of them, the ones that have been lightly decommissioned for an investment of two, three billion, they could have 1.3 gigawatts back online in three or four years. Yeah. So this is a topic I know very little about. And just listen to this for one second if you will humor this. As I mentioned earlier, one tanker load of LNG is equivalent to about a month's nuclear capacity. So if you're running a nuclear power plant for a year, that's 12 tankers of LNG you don't need. Or 20 years, that's 240 tankers you don't need. Yes. Yes. So I know that there are so many different bells and whistles and shapes and sizes and technologies on nuclear. But if you take a standard nuclear power plant, if there is such a thing, there is. Okay, right now in the world with the best technology assuming, and this is a big if, that we have capital and assuming a bigger if that we have the titanium and which is a rare earth that China is no longer exporting and the whole complex supply chain, assuming those two things, how long would it take to build on an all out like, let's do this under the gun, let's do everything we can. Well, kind of in the hubris of the now where we go, you know, those guys had slide rules, we have AI, I think there's this delusion that we could match the pace say of the French in the 1970s. Again, is it historically it was possible, 54 reactors in 20 some odd years, that's not happening now. Like Europe was building at a Chinese level, like we look to China now and we're in awe. And we forget that, you know, in the 50, 60, 70s, 80s, our grids were going by 8% per year. You know, we were doubling the grid every 10 years. We used to build at the at the scope and scale that China builds now. 8% a year. What is it growing per year now, roughly? Well, electricity has been pretty stagnant and flat, like 1% maybe per year. So if you're a utility executive working in the 80s, you had doubled the size, you'd built multiple, multiple thermal power plants. And you were in a rhythm to do that. You'd built two or three coal plants, you want to build a nuclear plant, there's some differences, a lot of similarities, you move that craft labor over those project managers over, you've got a development organization that can pull it off, you built fast, right? The West can't do that right now. Can they restart it? Yes, it's going to be slow and painful. Well, first of all, I answered my question, like roughly how long would it take if there were no other constraints and we dedicated full on resources to it. To do what though? To build a brand new from scratch nuclear plant. A one nuclear power plant. Yes. Okay. So China is currently pulling that off in five to six years per gigawatt. And we know how fast and efficient they are. They are very fast, very efficient. Russia on their exports is getting close to that six, seven, eight years. You know, there's a bit of a, you know, in terms of how we say how fast does it take to build a nuclear power plant. The numbers are juiced a little bit here because what that measures when we say start to finish is first nuclear safety concrete pour to opening the breaker and feeding the grid. There's a lot of work that goes into prepping a nuclear site beforehand, huge amount of excavations, et cetera, and then planning, permitting, all that kind of stuff. That stuff's flexible, right? When we fall to the bottom of Mausoleum's hierarchy of needs, the bottom of the pyramid, we get different ideas about permitting and the speed at which we can, and, you know, nimbyism and things like that. That being said, what is my honest answer? I mean, we're currently building here in Ontario, the only new nuclear construction underway in North America, including Mexico, right? So there's none in the US right now. Yeah, is one small modular reactor. We've dug a great big hole for that. And that's projected to take four to five years. I think actually, let me, yeah, from first nuclear concrete to grid open, about four or five years. I think most of us are a bit dubious about that and are thinking five, six, seven. So there's no plants being constructed in the USA? None. I thought there's just so much in the news. Bill Gates has got approved. Yeah, the news cycle will have you fooled there. There's a lot of talk, a lot of talk. And there's a lot of efforts to reinvent the wheel, right? Because nuclear has run into serious headwinds in the West. And the reason really is we've run into headwinds building any kind of mega project. We suck at building airports. We suck at building bridges. We suck at building subways. We suck at using less energy. Sure. We're good at installing Chinese solar panels. That's an easy low risk construction project, right? We're, you know, windmills a little more complicated, but we're pretty good at that. Building combined cycle gas turbines. As I mentioned, the complex piece of machinery, but pretty easy to snap together. I'd say probably one of the more complex things we've done is building LNG export terminals. But all that being said, we are no longer good at these very, very challenging mega projects in the West. And so the Western industry has been trying to, you know, sort of cheat that, or I'm trying to think of the sports metaphor, a football field, kind of run around that big obstruction by chasing some fantasies. And really, you know, I just put out a piece this morning, and it has to do with sort of nuclear having CCGT envy, envying the combined cycle gas turbine, all this stuff I just mentioned to you. It's modular. It's built in a factory. I mean, a gas turbine is tested in a factory. It snaps together like Lego. That's kind of true of these combined cycle gas turbines. That's why they take 24 to 36 months. Nuclear power plants very different. You know, you need incredibly strong civil works, right? To insulate it seismically. You need cooling systems. You have a lot of quality assurance. You have a lot of regulatory issues. You have a lot of onsite labor. And I think we've been sort of desperately trying to, and nuclear engineer ways out of a problem that's not a nuclear engineering problem. We have great technology in the form of the standardized heavy and light water reactors we've deployed around the world. They work great. But if you can't build them quickly, it kills you because this is capex, capex, capex. And if you blow out your timeline in terms of construction, your cost of electricity goes pretty high. And that has a multiplier effect in society as we're seeing in places like Germany. So this conversation would be very different if this was February 22nd instead of March 22nd, because the story and the zeitgeist of that time was, oh my god, AI is just going to be energy hungry monster and continue. And there was no LNG, Qatari field war with Iran. So back then, and clearly the headlines are different now, I saw lots of stuff that we're going to build nuclear to, the energy is going to be all the above strategy for data centers and everything else. And so many very suave, articulate expositions on how nuclear is the answer. And this is going to be the new renaissance. What are your thoughts on all that? Because I know you actually believed that until you dove deeper into it. I'm still a believer, Nate, but I'm no longer an evangelist. What I'll say is, again, nuclear has a very, very important role in places where it's not nice to have, but need to have. So let's go back to Taiwan for a second in that piece I mentioned earlier. Taiwan had about seven gigawatts of nuclear power capacity, about 21% of its grid nuclear powered. It actually built two advanced boiling water reactors. That's 1.3 gigawatts each. It put them through cold and hot functional testing. It never fueled them or turned them on. It had a referendum and said, we don't want to turn these things on. They phased out the nuclear they had on and they replaced that with LNG imports. And what's the absolute erythmetical poetry here is if you do the math, the amount of Qatari LNG, which is 35% of the LNG that Taiwan uses to power its grid, 50% of that grid is powered by LNG now. The amount of power that those nuclear power plants, if they just turn them back on, can provide is equal to all of the Qatari LNG they're importing. Why aren't they doing that, turning them back on? You know, they did have a referendum just recently in October of 25, where the vast majority said we should turn them back on, but they didn't hit quorum. You need to have 25% of the voting public participate. They're going to turn it back on, trust me. Let's just pause here for a second. So the basics of nuclear energy are not the main focus, especially with world events. But I do encourage people to watch your previous appearance on TGS if they want to dive more deeply into that. But maybe let's just pause here and you can briefly lay out aerial view, the general positive and negatives that come with nuclear power for new listeners that are unfamiliar with that and to refresh my own views. I mean, it all comes back to the world's most famous equation that no one really understands. If you actually punch the numbers in, it gets bonkers, right? But E equals MC squared. So it's energy density. And when it comes to energy security, there's nothing like energy density. So let me run you through some numbers relevant to that equation, Nate, to illustrate this concept. If you think about how much fuel you need to stick in a 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant, it's 100 tons. Does that sound like a lot or a little to you? How much fuel? Yeah, that sounds like a lot. Right, a big number. Ton is big, 100 sounds big. What's interesting is uranium is the most heavy naturally occurring element on the periodic table. Right? And so the volume of 100 tons of that uranium dioxide is about 2.5 to 3 meters sphere. So if you imagine you're at a playground and there's a climbing structure, that's a hemisphere, right? But you've probably seen those kind of geodesic climbing structures that kids play on. That's the kind of volume we're talking about. That's 100 tons. That's 100 tons. Right? Let me keep going with this. Okay, so you have 100 tons. So even when fabricated, not as a ball of uranium dioxide, but fabricated into those elements, it doesn't even take up a shipping container to have a full fuel load for a nuclear power plant. For the fuel load for how long? 18 months. Okay. So let me just quickly do, I suck at quick mental math, but if we said that an LNG tanker a month is what a nuclear power plant displaces. So one container on a ship is the equivalent of what now we're talking 18 LNG tankers of gas, right? But stay with me here. So 100 tons goes into that reactor. Every single day, we're fishing a little bit of that. We're fishing about 3 kilograms, okay, of that uranium heavy metal. And there'll be some plutonium that's generated, but we'll just focus on this heavy metal, right? So how much is 3 kilograms of uranium? What's the volume of that? A baseball is what's being fished every day. So we're carving off a baseball from a 100 ton chunk of... That's what's being fished, yeah. And that provides the energy and it gets turned into waste. But we're still not at E equals MC squared yet. So of that baseball, that 3 kilograms that's being fished every day, a tiny amount of mass is being converted into energy. This is the phenomenological difference of nuclear and why, you know, we're unleashing the strong nuclear force, right? So if you actually do the calc, how much mass is being converted to energy? 3 grams. Wow. 3 grams. And okay, so energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. How big is the speed of light, Nate? No idea. 300 million meters per second. When you square that, that's 90 quadrillion meters squared per second squared. So when you multiply 3 grams by 90 quadrillion meters squared per second squared, you end up with an extraordinary number of joules and the number of megawatts or gigawatts you get out is 25 gigawatt hours per day of electricity. So that equals the plant putting out a gigawatt of electricity. How much power is a gigawatt of electricity? Hard to get your head around. That's a million American homes or 3 million European homes off of 3 grams of mass being converted to energy according to Einstein's equals mc squared equation. Well, that is also indistinguishable from magic. But of course, fossil fuels enabled the construction of all that you just said. 100%. That's impressive. I had not heard it presented that way. I just came up with it this morning after, you know, drinking that espresso, Nate, but I got the numbers fact checked. And some people think you're only an ER doctor. That's right. That's right. All right. So keep going. So the energy density fossil fuel enabled, because we can't use nuclear energy to build a nuclear plant. Oh, we can't do anything without fossil fuels, let's be honest, Nate, other than sort of scratch in the ground and do permaculture. But even then, most permacultures I know are hooked up to some fossil fuels in one shape or four. So one of the big positives of nuclear power is it's unbelievable energy density. Yes. What are some other positives and some negatives? So other positives, I mean, you know, when I organized with a number of colleagues and friends to save our local nuclear power plant here in Ontario, we said, obviously, climate, air quality. There's no emissions produced by nuclear power plants, no air pollution. Medical isotopes are can do nuclear reactors in Canada. Our unique design has this property of producing enormous amounts of medical isotopes, which enable modern health care by sterilizing medical instruments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We put in Cobalt 59, we get Cobalt 60 out, and we use that to sterilize 40% of the world's single use medical devices. So you have absolutely come in contact. I had no idea about that. Yes, yes. And what would we have done if we didn't have the nuclear plant? So there's other ways to sterilize things. You can obviously do an autoclave, end up melting plastic. So your single use medical devices. Right, so other things are more costly. You can use phospho-gene gas, but then you have to get that gas sort of surface area in contact with everything you're trying to sterilize. It's nasty, nasty process. But if you have some really powerful gamma rays coming off of this Cobalt 60, you can just, you know, sort of like putting a bunch of materials on a coat hanger and putting it on a little tramway past this radioactive source, and you can sterilize an enormous amount of medical equipment. Jobs, I'll say jobs is another huge one. Just like, you know, an auto plant in Detroit built in the 1920s provided intergenerational employment for three, four generations until, you know, globalization hit. But that's, that's a narrow boundary view of jobs, because yes, we need jobs to build and maintain these plants. But the larger thing is, is if those plants provide that amount of electricity for how many homes did you say? Well, it depends if you're American or European, but a million homes if you're American, if you're American, two or three million if you're European. Yeah, so if it provides electricity for a million homes, that's doing things for humans that they used to have to do themselves. So it frees them up to do other jobs. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, we're on the positive side here. Let's go for the negatives. You know, in terms of what's holding back, all the positives, right, is that this is a CapEx heavy technology, right? So again, in terms of looking at the LCOE, we're talking 70, 80% of the cost of electricity is paying for the construction, which is complex, big parts, specifications are wild, right? You're sort of building a massive construction project to sort of space level QA. And it's long duration. You don't get your payback for quite a while, whereas natural gas, you get it in 18 months. Doesn't fit well in terms of private markets. Yeah, absolutely. So if you can deliver on schedule, on budget, it takes you 20, 30 years to pay it off, and then your power is dirt cheap after that. And that's why this lunacy of closing perfectly good nuclear power plants that are 30, 40 years old is just insane. Yeah, from an energy perspective and an energy surplus and monetary perspective, letting aside the other perspectives, it makes no sense. You're absolutely right. It's insane. It's completely insane. So all that to say, I mean, wind and solar are CapEx heavy. They're 90, 95% CapEx, but the construction risk is nil, right? And so, and the marginal cost is nil. Nuclear is very cheap to run once it's operating. Your operational expenses are low, your fuel, because again, you're using, you know, one third of a shipping container of fuel every year. It's 10, 13% of cost. Natural gas, you know, you build it cheap, but then your fuel cost is huge. And that used to be a problem before we had negative $3 per million BTU and the Permian. Yeah, so it's just a totally different puzzle. All the costs are upfront, and then eventually it's like virtually zero. So that doesn't work in neoliberal capitalism, right? That works when a country like France in the 60s, a kind of deregiste social democracy says, we have an energy security emergency, and we are going to pull out all the stops. And we're not building this purely for commercial reasons. Yes, it's going to underpin our economic well being for the next 30, 40 years in power. Are the countries that have that attitude now going to out compete? Well, 100% you have state capitalism in China, you have some version of state capitalism in Russia. You have countries like Korea, where there's a mixed model, right? The market is not absolute king there. And there's a capacity within the state to mobilize around, around certain needs that we have. And we're seeing that political economy shift. I mean, what we've on decoupled podcast started to refer to in terms of some of the emerging trends in US political economy, we call it MAGA, industrial socialism. So the government taking a direct state and mountain pass, rare earth mineral mine, for instance, or looking at taking a direct state in Westinghouse. So there's interesting things going on as we de-globalize and start to say, hey, Ricardian economic theory works great in an end of history world, where there's freedom of navigation and everyone's friends with each other. But as we de-globalize, as we start doing piracy and, you know, blowing up each other shipping, we better make sure we have the basics, the base of Mausole's hierarchy of needs taken care of as much as possible within our country, within a tight network of allies. And so that requires a different political economy. And so I think as that political economy reemerges, nuclear will become more viable. But this isn't an overnight thing. This is going to take a while. And what we're going to see in terms of nuclear additions, we're going to see basically countries that have nuclear running it to the end of its functional life, which is looking to be, you know, arbitrarily, it was determined, okay, power plant, a coal plant, it's dead in 40 years. So we'll just assume that happens to a nuclear plant. What we're seeing when we actually do the QA and look at these plants and do the capsule data of the reactor pressure vessel is, man, this thing is doing very well and has another, we're re-licensing 10, 20 years. These plants are going 80 years, 90 years. What are the components of a nuclear plant that eventually would degrade to the point that it does need to be totally shut down and decommissioned? The concrete or like what parts? No, in the most widely deployed nuclear reactor system in the world, the pressurized and boiling water reactors that the U.S. bequeath the world, that's the reactor pressure vessel. So it's like a pressure cooker and it's what contains the nuclear fuel. And over time, neutron bombardment it starts to brittle metals, you start getting corrosion and things like that. The Russians, interestingly, used a bit of an inferior alloy for a while and they've been annealing their reactor pressure vessels and getting them back into a very good condition. And the U.S. style reactor pressure vessels, as we do very, very careful analysis of them, are holding up exceptionally well such that the regulator is saying, yeah, you can run this thing another 10 years, another 20 years. So in terms of the actual life determining feature, it is the reactor pressure vessel, but we're now looking at these things kind of like a hydrodam as a potentially century asset. So in any case, what's going to happen is countries that have nuclear are going to maintain those plants and keep them going. Countries that were foolish enough to shut down their nuclear, if they're not suicidal, like the Germans, are going to restart as much as they can. But we've already seen reversals of phase outs, say in Belgium, even France was starting to move towards phasing out some of this nuclear fleet, those days are over. Taiwan is going to restart its nukes, Japan is going to restart as many of its nukes as possible. And then countries, I believe in the West as well, are going to embark and they're going to start building nuclear, it's going to be a struggle fest, it's going to take a while to get good at it. Hopefully, with enough necessity as the mother of innovation, we're going to start performing well again, in localities that need it. I'm not convinced the U.S. is going to need it because they've got so much cheap natural gas, but in Ontario, we're going to build some more nuclear power plants for sure. In Europe, they're going to build more nuclear power plants, struggle fest for a while. But who's going to dominate is China. And right now, China has about 60 gigawatts of nuclear power installed, that's 5% of their capacity, not much, frankly, 5%. It's less than solar, less than wind, less than everything else. They're in a major upswing right now, where they've standardized on two reactor designs. They have these industrial clusters, much as they do for iPhones or anything else they build. And they are now stamping these things out. So we're looking at them hitting something like 200, 250 gigawatts by 2040, 2050 versus how many today? We have about 390 gigawatts of nuclear right now globally. So they will build almost as much or two thirds as much as we the whole world has now. Yeah. In the next 20 years. There are some people who think that it's a race for energy access between the U.S. and China broadly for AI. And there's going to be one winner of AGI and all that. And because they have an all the above, although they don't have the natural gas and oil that we do, but they have such cheap electricity and they're building and fueling all this stuff, that they're definitely winning in that race. Because like you said earlier, the market doesn't, the market prices efficiency and just in time profit and doesn't look at energy security and complexity of the way that you're describing. China is in a whole different cycle to what I described in the EU since the 90s when they really peaked in terms of energy sufficiency and then became to be a bit provocative, decadent, nasal hierarchies being at the top of the pyramid. China over the last 20 years has been planning for an energy blockade. They know that when they act on Taiwan as I think the consensus is they will eventually in one way, shape or form the geographically they are screwed. There's this island chain which really limits their maritime access. There's the Straits of Malacca through which all of that Straits of Hormuz oil has to get through one straight then another unless it wants to go all the way around the Indo-Pacific. And they're very prone to blockade, part of why they want Taiwan is so they can have some access and get out freely into the Pacific Ocean. As Canadians and Americans, we forget that we have this unhampered access to two major oceans with no threats of blockade. So China has been planning for this from day one. Nuclear is part of that strategy, although I said only 5%. Even when they get to 200 gigawatts, that's a tiny fraction of their total installed capacity. I mean the thing about nuclear is you run at 90-95% of the time so it ends up being a decent amount of juice. But again, what China has done is planned completely around energy blockade. So that is, it's not just a sort of green revolution. Yes, they built a lot of wind and solar but they're still 60% coal. They have these energy bases in Inner Mongolia and Jingjing where they have 5, 6 gigawatts of solar, 2 gigawatts of wind, some batteries and 4 gigawatts of coal. They hook it up to a high voltage DC transmission line, send it to Beijing to run the EVs. Why do they have all the EVs? Well, because cars use liquid hydrocarbons which they're short on and so they've electrified their economy not for climate. But all in this energy security frame because they're considering things at the bottom of Mausoleum's hierarchy of needs. As you do, I think if you're responsible in this era and if you're a Chinese state that has some degree of central planning, central planning can go a variety of different ways. But if you have a hybrid system, you can benefit from the market but then also subordinate the market to these things. You do things that are a little inefficient. You have a coal to chemicals industry. You make your fertilizer with coal. You make your methanol feedstocks for plastics with coal. It's less efficient. It costs more but you do it because you're preparing for just the kind of thing that we're seeing in the Gulf right now. I think a lot of people listen to the Great Simplification podcast and turn up to 1.2 or 1.3 for best information digestion. They're going to have to maybe slow it down on your podcast. You throw a lot of very articulate words into a minute, my friend. So clearly, well, not clearly because I think the leadership in my country is energy and systems blind. Otherwise, they would have looked at the second, third and third order effects of what's going on right now. But what can the West learn from non-Western countries in terms of the energy security comparisons between LNG and nuclear power, etc.? I mean, I get it. I think I'm going to beat a dead horse here. But I think what we fundamentally need to learn is that we have a political economy that's not adapted to the current moment. This electricity market deregulation, which has not incented reliability in energy security systems or slack in the system, is not suitable to the times that we live in right now, particularly in Europe, but to some degree in the US and Canada. And so I'm not saying, I'm not providing any moral judgment here. I'm not saying the Chinese are great. We should emulate them. But we're fundamentally going to need a different political economy in order to meet the base of Mausoleum's hierarchy of needs, which we have globalized away and deindustrialized away. And so I think that's going to be something that's going to be very, very interesting to watch and see how that happens. Unfortunately, someone who kind of emerged on the political left, the left is in the dizzying clouds at the top of Mausoleum's hierarchy, obsessing over self-actualization and value signaling. We had an environmentalism that was based upon needs and security focused on clean air, clean water, etc. And we've turned into things like climate. Climate is important, but a lot of it is value is virtue signaling. It's the solar panels on your roof. It's deciding what you eat, being a vegan, etc. We're going to have our faces rubbed back into the base of the pyramid and what we need in order to endure as complex societies for as long as we can endure as complex societies. And the political right, the populist right, they're the ones talking about affordability, about energy prices, about the price of gasoline, etc. And so likely this response is going to be coming from the political right and it's going to be flavored in that way. So it's going to be interesting, Nate. What would it take, in your opinion, Chris, to take the West, and I include Europe in that moniker, to get back on track for a true nuclear renaissance? And is that even possible today? Yeah, I mean, and honestly, it's part of the mission of what I do here at DeCouple, right? I say it's easier to build a nuclear plant on budget and on time than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of an eagle. And it's funny because I'm still pro-nuclear, right? I think I'm a lot more subtle and nuanced. And honestly, within the nuclear industry and the nuclear ecosystem and the advocacy space, you know, culture wars, energy wars, not energy wars, sorry, culture wars are a dangerous thing. They're not where we do our best thinking. Energy wars are also a dangerous thing. They are very dangerous thing. But you know, when it comes to thinking about what's the best way to deploy technology that's difficult to deploy, in my mind, we have to really carefully look at history and carefully analyze particularly category errors. As I mentioned, the attempts to do the small modular reactor revolution very much sort of looking over at combined cycle gas turbines, not even knowing it and saying, hey, I want to do that. I want that stuff. How can I make that happen? You know, nuclear because of what I call a bunch of inherent costs. So again, the incredible seismic, qualified civil works that are required, you got to dig a big deep hole, you got to pour a lot of concrete and steel. You have to build a lot of auxiliary infrastructure for cooling water, for emergency core cooling systems. There's a lot of regulatory, there's anti proliferation concerns, all that's baked into the cost of a nuclear power plant. And none of that goes away or gets, you know, proportionally or linearly smaller as you decrease reactor output. And so we've had this whole fetishization of small reactors, the entire history, the iron law of nuclear power and how it's gotten to be economic is by going big. So I really don't see a future for small reactors unless you're willing to pay a pretty high price premium because you have a tiny grid and you still you need it so badly because you have no coal gas, you LNG, you don't trust anymore, you'll pay that premium for a small reactor. But otherwise you build a big reactor. Similarly, we have a fetishization of advanced so called advanced technologies, right? Molten salt reactors, high temperature gas reactors, sodium fast reactors, they're called generation four. They're generation one. These were concepts tried in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They're not advanced reactors. They failed to advance. They weren't economic. Wait, isn't Bill Gates doing some terapower thing on a sodium fast reactor? That's not a new thing? No, no, no, sodium fast reactors. I mean, EBR one and EBR two, the first nuclear produced electricity turned on a light bulb at EBR. That was a sodium fast reactor. So these are ancient technologies. They're cool. They're innovative. You can, they have an interesting narrative and promise. I mean, with a sodium fast reactor, you can breed fuel, you can put fuel in and generate even more fuel than there to begin with. It's really, really cool stuff in terms of theoretical energy returns and energy invested. It's neat technology. There's compelling and beautiful narratives to all this. But when rubber meets the road and reality hits, what we've seen is that these reactor technologies have not been competitive. There's hurdles to jump across, which maybe you'd get to if you poured enough money into R&D and work in the national labs. But private investors and utilities are only willing to do so much of that work until they have a product that's competitive. Lightwater reactors, heavy water reactors cleared that hurdle and have pursued under their own momentum. And unfortunately, these advanced technologies have not. But because we're just in the space where we're not wanting to look at, hey, the issue here is project management, project delivery. That's not cool and sexy. You don't get VC money saying, hey, I want to have a disruption in project management skills. No, you say, hey, I come from a Y Combinator and I have invested in 100 different companies and one of them, 1000X because they had a nifty little piece of software that was more user friendly and everyone went over to do that. And I could ship minimal viable product and fix it as it went. That's not how nuclear works, Nate. So clearly, there is a reason or at least a narrative and a perception why people in Germany and Taiwan and elsewhere have referendums to shut down nuclear. So you didn't get to the other negatives of radioactivity and things like that. Truth or fiction on that. Give us a summary. Both. So when it comes to the bogeymen, like nuclear waste, I'm the first to acknowledge nuclear waste, freshly irradiated nuclear fuel, take it out of a reactor, stand next to that unshielded lethal dose in seconds and then just a brutal gruesome death, acute radiation syndrome, your bone marrow dies, overwhelming sepsis infection, bleeding, you shed your whole gastrointestinal tract lining. Not pretty, right? I didn't need that, but thank you. I mean, I'm a doctor. You were me a little bit. In the 70 years of operating civilian nuclear power plants and handling spent nuclear fuel, we haven't had any deaths related to radiation. And that's because it's something very easy to measure. And we make dangerous things safe. People dial the time falling off of ladders because we think ladders are safe. We make dangerous things safe when we're at the top end of Maslow's hierarchy with complexity and social stability. When we have skills. Yes. So in any case, radiation is a real thing. We need to acknowledge it and it makes handling and storage of waste a challenge, but by no means are most challenging waste stream by a long shot. We have, again, I mentioned the density of the fuel going in, one third of a shipping container fuel goes in, that so much comes out. That's not a large volume. It's solid. It's a ceramic. That's not water soluble. It's clad in zirconium, which is corrosion resistant. There's not a mechanism for it to really get out and harm people and it gets safer as we go, right? So in 500 years, the penetrating radiation is gone. You have to find a way to ingest or inhale, you know, hard, ceramic pellets that are clad and sheathing and then put in these, these, these casts. After 500 years. Yeah. But after 400 years, there's still some risk. There's some. Yeah. But again, it's, it's, it's sitting on a parking lot in a, in a bunch of concrete steel containers. It's not leaking into the atmosphere. It's not, you know, PM 2.5 particulate pollution that's being inhaled and causing heart attacks and strokes and cancers. And it's on a, you know, it's on a basketball sized court at a nuclear plant with a fence around it with a security guard. Well, but, but, you know, my, my whole, I mean, again, I've never really had the time to delve into this and my own research, but my view of the fragility of our economic social system is I worry that if there are disruptions that we don't have the complexity to do all the behind the fence and get people to go there and do all the things and the diesel fuel to keep the generators on. And that sort of gift that keeps on giving a sort of Chernobyl-ish thing is always in the back of my mind. What is your thought on that? Well, I mean, again, every human activity generates a waste stream. And what's harder to manage, you know, human sewage or a security guard with a chain link fence and a basketball sized court with a bunch of steel and concrete canisters on it. I agree. I share your concerns about a great simplification, but some things are easier problems than others or maintaining a coal ash pond that's, you know, eventually that's the reservoir is going to give away and flood, you know, a whole watershed with mercury and other contaminants. So you've come up with any other number of hypotheticals for other sources of waste. So, yes, that exists. But Nate, I want to humor you and I want to go into like the really scary shit, right? We're in a time of war. Iran has an operating power reactor producing energy. I mean, today, my president said we're going to attack the power plants. Yeah. And if that happens, and again, I don't know when this episode will air Chris, probably in a couple of weeks, but Danny Ron is going to retaliate to the DC plants and other plants. I mean, it's like right before coming on this show, the Iranian, I'm not sure what ministry released, here's all the power plants throughout the Gulf that will attack if you attack our stuff. I don't believe that the Baraka nuclear power station in the United Emirates was on that list. But you know, if the Israelis and Americans are dumb enough to target the Iranian, again, gigawatts scale nuclear power reactor, who knows who knows. So let's talk about that hypothetical because that one's probably got you got you got you scared. So first off, we have some pretty good data in terms of worst case scenarios and Chernobyl really is the worst case scenario. So this is an RBMK reactor, Soviet style reactor. It's nothing like we build in the West. And what happened there was you had this crazy power excursion because they were moving a bunch of safety systems running at low power. And then you had a quirk of the technology, which is as water sort of boils off, reactivity can go up. So you had this power excursion, it melted a whole bunch of fuel. There was no containment. So in that explosion, it kicked the lid off. And then the whole thing caught on fire because it was moderated with graphite, which is basically carbon, which is basically coal. And it burned for 10 days and spewed an enormous amount of we call the source term, the fission products, the radioactivity that had accumulated in that fuel, rejected into the atmosphere on a massive plume of smoke and went far and wide towards Europe, right? And it was detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden where someone set up a radiation detector at the plant and said, what the hell is this? Right. So that's kind of our worst case, even if you dropped a bunker buster on a light water reactor, it doesn't catch on fire because the moderators water, not carbon, not graphite. So what were the health consequences of Chernobyl? You have a variety of different sources of information. Greenpeace did a study. The EU Green parties did a study. Unsurprisingly, they found million or tens or hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from Chernobyl based upon their studies. Then you had the UN Scientific Committee on the effects of atomic radiation. You had the Chernobyl Forum. Chernobyl Forum is interesting. The UN Chernobyl Forum, that's eight UN agencies, 30 countries participating, including those maximally impacted Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. And what were their findings? So 30 people died directly from Chernobyl in terms of two of them, just from explosive injuries, blast injuries, burns, and 28 from acute radiation syndrome of 134 people that got really, really high doses. And those were firefighters and plant operators. So of the 134 people that had their bone marrow die and their intestinal lining slough off, basically 100 of the 136 survived, roughly. What ended up happening to them as we followed them and tracked their health along the way? We barely even see an uptick in cancer in that group of maximally exposed people that shed their linings and their bone marrow died. They're dying in car accidents of liver cirrhosis, heart attacks, and their cancer rates are really, because 40% of us get cancer. If one extra person gets cancer, it's hard to detect that. It's not to say it's not happening in that maximally exposed group. Hold on a second. 40% of us get cancer? 40% of us will get cancer in real life. Yeah. I actually didn't know that. Or if I did, I didn't think about it. Yeah. Right. So in any case, what was the main harm that we saw from Chernobyl? It was iodine release, iodine 131. And why is that so dangerous? Well, little kids thyroid glands are growing and the thyroid gland concentrates iodine 50 times higher than what's in the bloodstream. So it just slurps up iodine. If you're in an area that's kind of iodine deficient and a whole bunch of radioactive iodine enters the food chain by settling out in fields and cows, eating grass and concentrating their milk and kids drinking milk, then the kids got a high iodine dose, radioactive iodine. And so what we have seen is thousands of excess thyroid cancer cases in tragically in people who are kids and adolescents at that time. Within what sort of a surrounding vicinity of Chernobyl? I mean, this is in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia in those areas. So what they anticipate seeing over the full course of this is there'll be 15,000 extra thyroid cancer cases. The one silver lining here is that thyroid cancer is the most treated, one of the most treatable cancers that there is. And what's the weird poetry about this is the treatment is actually radioactive iodine. Because again, if this cancer metastasizes all of your body and unless it differentiates like crazy, it still retains that facet of concentrating and picking up iodine. So if you give it more radioactive iodine, you kill the cancer. So in any case, I'm not trying to make light, but I do want to put in perspective what the health impacts of Chernobyl were. The other main contaminant, cesium 137, you know, the most affected areas outside the exclusion zone saw doses of something like 10 millisieverts over 20 years. That's one trauma CT scan. Like if I do, if I were to scan your whole body because you were in a car accident, I'd give you 10 millisieverts in three seconds. You know, those surrounding areas got that dose day by day over 20 years. So we have not seen a measurable increase in deaths from the worst case scenario, which doesn't mean we should be blaséing. We shouldn't have lots of protections in place. But I do want to calm people and I do want to agree with you that if we were to wipe, if Iran was to wipe out the desalination plants in the Middle East, that would have a much higher health burden on the public. But well, many orders of magnitude higher. Yes. Let us hope by the time this airs in a few weeks that that has not happened. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I could. Yeah. So you're so good at this, Chris. You're so articulate and on top of the different issues. Let me switch gears just a little bit. As many of your viewers, my viewers know, I'm of the mindset that human society is going to have to be forced to simplify at some point in the future. As our biophysical reality just can't support the complexity required to be at what you were referred to at the top of Maslow's hierarchy based on that amount of energy surplus. So in the scenario of a great simplification, which I chose that name, roughly, or specifically because of a financial disconnect, but you could apply it to broader society, I think it's going to be important to distinguish between technology that's nice to have and technology that we need to have in order to survive. So in your opinion, in your expert opinion, is nuclear a need to have technology in order to maintain a certain level of of a complex industrial civilization? Yes and no. And that really depends on energy security. So in places that don't have coal or gas or tons of sun, then yes and countries will continue to invest in it and maintain that for as long as these societies are complex. And in terms of complexity, like you said, this sounds like one of the most complex technologies on planet earth. I mean, but we developed it in the 60s and 70s and we have nuclear plants that were built in the 60s and 70s still running. And we have candle reactors, which were built even to get around some of the complex bottlenecks of having heavy forages capable of forging massive ingots into reactor pressure vessels or enriching uranium. So I do think this is technology that's going to be around for a while. You know, obviously, there's some bounds on this great simplification. I agree, like at some point, I mean, everything that is born grows old and dies. And that will be the case with complex human civilization, whether we're annihilated by AI nuclear weapons, energy crises, or just exhausting our resources. But in terms of, you know, the, I guess, the, the deceleration rate of that, I think we will see nuclear power maintained and grown in areas that really do need it. It is a complex technology, but listen, so solar, you know, if you look at, you know, Spruce Pine Mine in North Carolina, where the ultra pure courts is taken to make the crucibles so that you can pull monocrystalline silicon and make chips, but also solar panels. This is a very complex process. That's very, you know, there's one mine in the world, I believe they're bringing a couple out there on the solar panels themselves aren't that complex, but to get them to your house installed or your grid is, yeah, well, manufacturing them is very, very complex. I think we just, you know, fail and a lot of my work in the last five or six years is just trying to get in and, you know, Ed Conway's book, The Material World was such a great deep dive of this, but like we take all the stuff for granted at the top of the Maslow's hierarchy pyramid. And when you do educate yourself, you read Vatsalov's Mill, you get down there and you understand how this stuff, everything is crazy complex, nuclear is complex in its own ways, but you mentioned titanium, not really titanium, zirconium, you know, there's issues, but suffice to say it's a need to have technology in some places. It'll be maintained and grow in those places. And, you know, but it's not going to happen everywhere for sure. So in your opinion, what sort of lifestyles and technologies might also still disappear even if we're able to scale nuclear well beyond our current levels? Yeah. And I mean, I think like when we talked two years ago, I was under this delusion. And I think it's easy to fall into these delusions when we face existential crises, right? To want a magic machine that's going to solve all their problems. And when I was very young, I thought there would be a magic political system that would solve all their problems, right? I mean, that's kind of a, it wasn't a Marxist-Leninist, but I was pretty far left, right? But, you know, when we confront these existential crises, you know, we search around for a solution and we put all of our hopes into it. And we don't want to accept that there might not be a happy ending. So we force a happy ending by imbuing, you know, in this case, nuclear energy, which has a phenomenal narrative with the capability to solve climate change, energy, poverty, and create a utopia. I mean, it sounds so foolish, but that's where I was probably two years ago. I was coming off of that two years ago with you, but that's when this podcast started, you know, the decouple podcast, that was my frame. And so, you know, looking forward at what life may look like in a simplification with or without nuclear, I mean, nuclear is not going to scale and save the day. Absolutely not. It's going to be niche. It's going to be important where it's needed, and it's going to be deployed for energy security reasons. But the kind of lifestyles, I think that's just a broader question of what does a de-globalized world look like? Like we've grown really use, again, because Ricardian comparative advantage and economics and free trade have provided really cheap goods, right? So we've gotten used to that. We've gotten used to cars with all sorts of widgets and wing-dangs in them. I mean, cars are probably going to get a little bit simpler as supply chains constrict. Maybe we have less rare earth magnets and we're going to have to roll the windows down ourselves, right? So it's really hard for me to sort of understand that and communicate that in really broad terms, but hopefully, you know, that little car metaphor might be helpful. So what's been your experience deep in this conversation where there has certainly been a surge in hype about nuclear? And yet, as you mentioned earlier, nuclear deployment is not exactly reflected this uptick in discussion. Why do you think the discourse around nuclear is accelerating so much faster than it's actually deployment? And what's your general take on other people like you that are pro-nuclear, but they're raging enthusiasm for it in the media? Yeah, I mean, narrative drives so much of this. And particularly in the startup space, like we've seen what I call nuclear meme stocks take off. So there's a so-called advanced reactor company called Oklo who are inspired by this EBR, the experimental Brie reactor 2, which was this fantastic experiment, sodium fast reactor that's, you know, treated its own waste stream to extract even more energy and run through. It's a great narrative. It's a really cool idea that you'd be able to take the stockpile of nuclear waste that we've generated, which is actually volumetrically very tiny. But there's potential energy still in there. We could unleash and power the country for maybe 100 years just off of the nuclear waste that we've produced. It's a great story. And you take that story and you run into Sam Altman at Y Combinator and Sam says, you know, tech disruption, that's my frame. These stupid nuclear engineers, like why is it they're struggling? This is a transformative technology, again, three grams of mass is converted into enough energy to power a million homes. What can I do here? How can I disrupt this? Maybe it's regulation. Maybe I need to kind of deregulate it and it'll set the technology for you. Maybe we need to try these technologies. Maybe they were just abandoned for lack of imagination or conspiracy theories. And so Sam Altman gets together with the founders of Oklo and it organizes a special purpose acquisition company merger and they've worth 500 million and then we're off to the races. And so that company, which attempted a design to try and get it through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and was rejected because of just how unprofessional they were, peaked in a market cap of over $20 billion in fall of last year. And with 125 employees operating out of a small office with no reactor design that's anywhere near approval. But you know, with Trumpian connections, Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy was also on the board, they had a star-studded board, there's kind of whiffs of Pheronose going on here. And so yeah, we've seen this exuberance and we've seen retail investors pouring money into these things because they know that we're going to need energy and nuclear and so they just... And the narrative is good, right? So AI needs 247 power. Nuclear provides that in spades 95%. And you know, the hyperscalers used to be climate concerned. That's really slipping as Trump's policies have come into place. But there's still that hangover. And so there was a real interest in nuclear by these tech companies. And these tech companies have not spent six years deep diving in the technology and really understanding its history, but are caught up in I think some of their hubris and some of the narratives and categories. It's just all over the place. But that key one is between companies selling software and nuclear, which is the hardest of hardware. So again, if you're a Silicon Valley investor and you've made pots of money off of startups, gutsy startups with good narratives that have shipped minimal viable product and then debugged it as they went and turned into something that's like Airbnb or Uber, you kind of look at nuclear in that light as well. And you start trying to apply that same playbook. But you're talking about two fundamentally different things, software and again, the hardest of hardware. There's no putting a buggy product out and debugging it as you go with the nuclear power plant. So there's a lot of different types of nuclear technology, including we've also heard that AI is going to crack nuclear fusion. Can you give us a brief overview of the different possibilities, microreactors, small modular reactors you mentioned earlier? What are the benefits and drawbacks and what's in the middle of the fairway, the things that are most likely going to be viable, affordable and built? Yeah, what's incredible is the kind of zeitgeist we're living in is so full of this hype around small modular reactors and so-called advanced reactors that the position I take, which I think is very evidence-based, which is what has risen to the top and proven itself economic, with the previsal, you've got to build it on budget and on time and we still do that, are large gigawatt scale water cooled reactors. And my thesis is that that's still the case. And the burden of proof is on the people saying, no, no, no, it's tiny little reactors or it's my molten salt reactor, it's my sodium fast reactor, which was tried and didn't do well. Now, it's not impossible that they're right, but what's funny is I face a lot of, well, you know, prove it, Kiefer, and I'm like, well, the proof's lying all around me. So we talked a little bit about small modular reactors and this kind of iron law of scaling. You have so many inherent costs, you have death by a thousand cuts in nuclear, right? So you need a big blood volume if you've got a thousand cuts in your body. Those are regulatory or imposed by seismic qualifications or, you know, quality assurance or you know, nonproliferation monitoring by the atomic energy agency, etc. Micro reactors are even dumber than small modular reactors because you're getting even smaller. So you have a tiny, tiny revenue. So if you start looking at it, and just an easy way to do this is if you have a micro reactor that's producing say like 10 megawatts of electricity, so 10,000 American homes. If you're paying them like $130 a megawatt hour, you're generating about $13 million. And then, and then you have to start dividing that by what are the costs to pay back the cost of capital to, you know, on an hourly rate, pay your operators and you end up crunching those numbers and you barely have enough money to pay your operators and security guards, let alone pay back the cost of capital, let alone build the mega factory that's supposed to be banging out these micro reactors. And if fossil fuels because of this Iranian war have a new floor, all of these projections and proformas are going to probably be more costly. Agree. So I mean, again, suffice it to say micro reactors, they've been tried. The US Army had a micro reactor program. There was a famously, this is cool story, is there a date they had a micro reactor that they made a snow fort with in Greenland? They buried a reactor under the Greenland ice sheet back when they were thinking of being sneaky with the Russians and having intercontinental ballistic missiles under the ice cap. It sounds like some Dr. Evil stuff, but they did a micro reactor there. They had a micro reactor in the Panama Canal. There was a drought. The hydro electricity wasn't so hot there. They moved a micro reactor down there. It powered the Panama Canal for a while. But all these things were just horribly uneconomic. What does it say? I mean, you're a physical doctor, not a psychiatrist, but what is this sort of energy optimism that repeatedly surfaces in our energy debates, especially during periods of perceived existential risk? What does that say about us or what do you think? It says we're afraid of dying, right? We're in denial. We're in denial a little bit. You last came on the show, I believe, two years ago, April 2024. Let me ask you, Dr. Kiefer, has anything changed substantially about your general worldview that you'd like to share? Yeah. I mean, I've gone from being an idealist to a realist in two years. Yeah, for sure. Part of that is a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the difficult times that we're in. I've been called the nuclear Mormon because I wear this cheap suit and pack reports about saving Canadian nuclear power plants and go to Ottawa and talk to politicians and knock on doors. I still think there's a lot of value in the work that I do and have done, but it's less, I'm going to save the world. It's more, I'm going to save 7,200 jobs. I'm going to keep a flow of medical isotopes that are going to sterilize 40% of the world's medical instruments. I still feel very passionately, and I've probably come across as almost anti-nuclear in this talk, but I think there's a massive value proposition. But I think I've adjusted the grandiosity down several notches in terms of the impacts that the technology have and that I can have. But I think ultimately that's a much healthier place to be in. I hear you. I mean, this conversation, we didn't even mention climate change, which is something both of us care deeply about. Funny how that fades when we're into an energy security crisis, eh? Exactly. And we were always headed to this moment. I just didn't think it would happen quite so soon, which is then because of dumb human decisions brought it closer. So, do you have any closing thoughts for our viewers that we haven't covered in this too brief conversation, things you might encourage people to hold as they continue through their everyday lives? We live in dark times, and I think, I'm an Eastern European, I'm half Ukrainian, I've been diagnosed with defensive pessimism. As Ukrainians, our national anthem is, We Are Not Dead Yet. We're this flat country surrounded by great powers, whether it's the Mongols, the Russians, the Germans, the Tartars, whoever else is coming through, we get our asses kicked. And so the safe thing psychologically is to assume the worst. And if it's not quite as bad as you thought, then it's a good day. And so I do have a probably a bit of a propensity towards doomerism. And having obsessed over climate for a long time, I've been there, right? Increasing energy literate, I'm there. Having listened to the great simplification, I'm there, but wait, but wait, I'm in an incredibly positive psychological frame right now. And it's actually like I've readjusted the ordering of what I feel are existential threats. And I may have to now with Iran again, but AI has become something I become quite preoccupied with. And I'm not going to go on a diet tribe there. But this is going to sound completely ridiculous. But there are thinkers who are saying human extinction by AI is possible in X number of years. Let's just pick three years that sounds crazy to some, not to others. It probably is crazy, right? But I'm sort of choosing to live my life as if that's the case. And, you know, I've spent a lot of time not just doing emergency medicine, but palliative care. And I've taken care of a lot of dying cancer patients. And the kind of clarity that comes with an understanding of your mortality is a beautiful thing. And the potential to live your life better. And every moment having poignancy and choosing how to spend your time better has been really powerful. And this is where it gets really dark and into a stoic practice when I think not only of my own mortality in three years, but my son's mortality, he's seven now, he'll be 10 then. I want that kid to have the best goddamn possible life for the next three years. So how am I living my life constructively coming from a bit of a place of psychological doom? I mean, my kid doesn't rot in aftercare anymore. I get there as soon as school's over and pick him up and we go and do stuff, right? I really am trying to cherish time and spend it wisely. Having idyllic times with my family, petting the dog more, I'm sure you feel for that. And so paradoxically, I'm in a very psychologically healthy space despite how dark the times are. But in any case, I'm ranting here, Nate, enjoy the time you have, spend it wisely. See the beauty in that. And that's really where I'm at and how I'm getting through these difficult times. You're a good dude, Chris. Thank you for all your passion and dedication to these topics and to be continued, my friend. Sounds good, Nate. Thanks for having me back. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit thegreatsimplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagens, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batloots, Brady Hyen, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.