[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," we'll explore the controversial topic of whether the US needs more or less nuclear power.

- The picture that people have of radiation as a super potent toxin that creates Godzilla monsters and that when you're exposed to it is just wrong.

The real risks with these accidents are often that we overreact to them.

- Nuclear is absolutely not a circular economy.

- Sure.

- Because all the material other than the very tiny, tiny fraction that became energy is waste.

[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," is it time for more nuclear power.

[Announcer] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by Microsoft and The University of Texas at Austin.

- I'm Scott Tinker and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn and illuminate and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

The US has over 50 nuclear power plants that produce about 20% of our electricity, and 50% of our carbon-free electricity, yet nuclear's future is uncertain and controversial.

Today, we'll talk about the three nuclear accidents that have occurred, the link in some people's minds between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, and we'll talk about nuclear waste.

My expert guests are Dr. Arjun Makhijani is a nuclear engineer against nuclear power.

He's president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and co-author of "Nuclear Wastelands."

Michael Shellenberger is founder and president of Environmental Progress, the best-selling author of "Apocalypse Never," and "San Fransicko" and a former anti-nuclear activist.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," is it time for more nuclear power?

So, we're gonna start with safety, big topic, big public concern around nuclear, for sure.

Let's talk about real accidents that have happened, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi.

What happened, what happened in those?

- In Chernobyl, there was a nuclear reaction, a runaway nuclear reaction, and the reactor exploded.

It didn't have a secondary containment.

There was a meltdown, a similar, different mechanism, slightly in Three Mile Island, but it had a secondary containment, and while the hydrogen caught fire or exploded, it was contained inside, so the release of radioactivity was limited.

In Fukushima, of course, there were three explosions, and a massive release of radioactivity, but there, the people were evacuated right away.

- Right.

- Both Fukushima and Chernobyl imply massive costs.

The costs of cleanup at Fukushima are somewhere in the 300 to $700 billion range.

- Amazing.

[Dr. Makhijani] That's a huge number.

- The drivers of these things though, Chernobyl was in the plant.

Fukushima, different thing happened there.

What went on there, Michael?

- I should say that I was born 1971, so Three Mile Island occurred in 1979 when I was eight years old, Chernobyl in 1985, and so I grew up in real fear of these nuclear accidents, and in fact, remained in real fear about them until I spent time reading the best available science on the accidents, particularly Chernobyl, and also interviewing public health experts.

In particular, I've done a lot of work profiling the founder and head of something called the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, Jerry Thomas, who's at Imperial College London, who's done the most comprehensive review of the public health literature.

And what's so shocking when you read the research on Chernobyl is just how few people had died.

Fewer than 50 people died putting out the fire after it occurred and in the few months afterwards.

- And that's the worst of, I mean, Chernobyl is way worse than Three Mile Island.

- Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, nobody died at Three Mile Island.

According to Dr. Thomas, nobody received a dangerous dose of radiation at Fukushima, much less died.

You have to put it in context where according to the World Health Organization, six million people die every year premature deaths from ordinary air pollution.

Two to three million of those are from people breathing smoke from burning of biomass in poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, so for sure, we should always be concerned about these accidents, but I think the picture that people have of radiation as a super potent toxin that creates Godzilla monsters, and that when you're exposed to it is just wrong.

The real risks with these accidents are often that we overreact to them.

So in the case of Fukushima, when I visited, and I've been there twice now and interviewed people nearby, went right up to the reactor core, they were washing trees, washing tree trunks, which is absurd.

They were scraping topsoil off, which is absurd.

And we knew it was absurd and pointless to do that because the British Medical Journal had done a study of people who lived near the so-called contaminated topsoil, and found no dangerous levels of radiation, so there was a huge overreaction.

So really when we talk about the wasted billions spent on the cleanup, that's the cost of fear of nuclear power, not the cost of nuclear power.

- So Fukushima was driven-- I'm a geologist.

There was an earthquake, big tidal wave wiped things, so it wasn't a reactor problem like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

- Yeah, the actual causes of the accidents were different, but all the reactors have severe accident vulnerabilities.

They actually need power grid supply to operate all their cooling systems, so when that's gone, the emergency diesel has to come on to operate the cooling system.

Now, when the tidal wave came, the emergency diesel went, and so they lost the cooling, and that's when you start to get a meltdown.

Let me give you an example of what a nuclear reactor really is.

It's a tank that generates heat equivalent to about 30 million people in one tank.

When you switch it off, you can't turn off the fire.

There's about 7% residual heat the moment you switch it off, so that's the heat equivalent to two million people, so it's very, very, very hot, and so if it's not cooled, that's when you start to get steam, reactions that generate hydrogen, and the potential for explosions.

And hydrogen's been a common factor in all those accidents, and what we had and Fukushima was hydrogen explosions.

- Talk to us, Arjun, a little bit about kind of this next generations of reactors.

Are they safer?

Is there some inherent safety net in them?

The radioactive waste, is it lower volume, lower heat?

What do you see there?

- Each type of reactor has its pluses and minuses, so one reactor that's talked about, for instance, is a liquid fuel, molten salt reactor with thorium fuel, and they say it can't have a meltdown because it's already molten fuel, and that's true, but there are four barriers in the current reactors between the fuel, the radioactivity and the environments.

In a molten salt reactor, all the volatile radio nucleotides already evaporate, so there's one barrier between, so it's got some safety advantages.

It's low pressure and so on, but now, your safety margin is lower, and your waste is a fluoride, which is unstable, and that's created its own problem.

- Interesting.

- There's been one small reactor built like that at Oak Ridge.

It worked pretty well most of the time, but the decommissioning cost of that reactor is estimated at many, many times the cost of the reactor.

- Interesting.

Well, just coming back to kind of, you're both talking a little bit about the actual impacts, deaths in radioactivity we can measure, versus the public perception of these things.

How do you see that in nuclear, and maybe compared to other sources of electricity, even?

- So on the straight issue of the risks of different sources of energy, we have been studying this.

Scientists have been studying for decades.

The most recent study was published in Lancet, and I found that nuclear has the fewest deaths per unit of energy of any reliable power source.

So that may seem surprising, but just think about coal, and petroleum and natural gas.

They emit air pollution and air pollution shortens the lives of six million people a year according to the World Health Organization.

Nuclear power does not emit air or water pollution during the normal functioning of nuclear plants.

When there are accidents, a small amount of radiant particles escape that you have to contain and manage, but as we saw, no deaths from Three Mile Island, no deaths from Fukushima, and somewhere between 50 to 200 deaths total from Chernobyl.

- Right.

- On the facts, it's pretty straightforward.

- Do you see it the same way, Arjun?

- I think when you talk about safety, there's no question that fossil fuels are extremely polluting.

They cause a lot of disease.

They cause a lot of death.

They cause asthma, so on.

We're not talking about that.

We're talking about low carbon energy sources: nuclear, solar, wind.

Now, solar and wind are variable, but they don't cause radiation.

Every nuclear reactor generates about 30 bombs worth of plutonium every single year.

We've got more than 100,000 bombs of the plutonium sitting in the spent fuel at reactor sites, just in this country.

- When I think a bomb, I think of something big, but I mean, the plutonium in the bomb is not much.

- About 1% of the spent fuel is plutonium, and you're generating about 20 tons a year, so the math is not complicated.

It's about 30 bombs worth of-- 30 Nagasaki bombs worth of plutonium.

- Now, that plutonium isn't weapons grade.

You have to do more to it.

- You have to separate it from the spent fuel chemically.

It's a big, dangerous process, but it's been done commercially in France, Britain, Japan, India, Russia, Soviet Union.

There's, today, more surplus plutonium in the civilian sector that's separated than in all the nuclear weapons throughout the world, more than 300 tons, and nuclear weapons stocks are about 250 metric tons.

So yes, most of the plutonium fortunately is in the spent fuel, unused because it's so expensive to use.

- Right, but is that concern, given that there are nuclear weapons in the world for better or worse, no judgment.

- Yes, yes.

- Is that really a concern when it comes to generating no emissions, high dense electricity from nuclear?

Does that offset it, or how do you feel about that?

- Most of us, all of us who were born after 1945 were born into a world with nuclear weapons.

Before we even invented nuclear weapons, we knew that we wouldn't be able to get rid of them, and the reason for that is because say two countries that had nuclear weapons did decide to get rid of them, and then if they went to war, what do we think would happen?

Everybody knows the first thing they would do would be to try to reconstruct their nuclear weapons.

So political scientists have been aware of that issue since before 1945, so we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, so then the question is what do we do with this technology?

So one approach would be, well, you just try to do as little as you can with it.

You wouldn't want to allow the technology to be used.

That was my view for most of my life.

I changed my mind, really because I came to see the limitations of renewables.

I was a major advocate for renewable energy in the early 2000s.

I helped persuade Obama's campaign team to make a big investment in solar and wind, but at that same time, I was encountering conservationists in California who were explaining that, look, to build industrial solar farms, it requires 300 times more land than a nuclear plant.

So I was concerned by the land use and ocean impacts of renewables, and some friends said, "Take a second look at nuclear."

When I did, I realized that really, much of my own anxieties and fears, and those are so many others really had to do with fears of nuclear weapons, so then the question is, does the risk of nuclear weapons being used go up by using more nuclear energy?

And the answer is no, of course not.

I mean, you're talking about a completely different technology.

It's nuclear power plants that produce electricity.

In the future, they'll produce hydrogen gas, desalinate water for fresh water, but there's nothing about, like if we have 100 nuclear power plants or one nuclear power plant in the United States, it doesn't change how many nuclear weapons we have, and it certainly doesn't change the risk of nuclear war.

- Well, let me correct a few things.

[Scott] [laughing] Different perspective.

- Land area is a very important issue.

So we've got thousands of square miles of mining waste throughout the Navajo Reservation which has devastated living over there for many, many people.

The main problem with land use with nuclear and fossil fuels especially is that you have to continue mining them.

- And in all fairness, you have to continue to mine solar panels 'cause they wear out, and we can recycle some of it, but it's not renewable in that sense.

Panels, turbines, batteries, we have to mine, manufacture.

- Yes, mining definitely.

Of course, you're building up any industry, you're going to have some mining.

We have lots of mining with nuclear.

We have lots of mining with the materials.

We have lots of mining with the fuels.

The big difference is solar and wind don't need fuels, and with conventional today's energy technologies, the land use footprint expands forever, because you continue to need fuels which are mainly mined.

- Let's kind of come back to kind of the third part of safety here on the waste.

What are the options for storing spent fuel?

Where have we come with that?

- So what's remarkable about nuclear energy is that it's so energy dense, so this amount of uranium can provide me with all the energy I need for my entire life, including all of my jet travel, all of the energy-intense activities.

Fuel rods made out of uranium, at the end of the process, this is what we call waste.

So as an environmentalist, this is exactly what you want.

You want to have a small amount of fuel, and a small amount of waste that's easy to manage.

So nuclear waste, all the nuclear waste ever produced in US civilian power plants can fit on a single football field stacked 50 feet high.

It's just stored in steel and concrete containers at the site of production, which is the other thing.

If you remember from your high school or college ecological biology class, what you want for circular economy is to have the waste stored at the site of production.

When you externalize that waste into the natural environment, that's pollution, That's what causes damage.

So right now, only nuclear waste is safely contained.

It's never hurt anybody, never will.

- So the density is really important.

Volume is small, it's contained, dry cask or in pools, spent fuel rods.

- You got it.

It's about 18 months in the nuclear reactor.

It's another couple of years in a pool of water where it cools.

It's then put in steel and concrete, right at the site of production.

As an environmentalist, that's what I wanna see.

- Yeah.

So on the nuclear waste, Arjun?

- This is a completely wrong idea of what a circular economy looks like.

If you have waste that's highly radioactive, and you store it on site, it doesn't mean you're reusing it or recycling it.

It's stored on site.

Now in France, they do recover the plutonium, which is 1% of the waste.

[Scott] At La Hague.

- At La Hague.

Uranium is 94% of the waste.

- Right.

- That uranium now contains trace metals that makes it practically unusable.

It's unused in France, so that's not recycled.

So let's put some numbers on the table.

So it's true that the fuel pellets are very concentrated waste, and there are not a lot of fuel pellets for Michael's lifetime of energy consumption, but every pound of fuel that's in a reactor requires about 800 pounds of ore if it's 1% ore, which is good quality, sometimes 1,600 pounds.

[Scott] Uranium ore. - Uranium ore. You've got roughly an equivalent amount of mine overburden.

So if you've got 20 tons of fuel coming out of a reactor every year that's spent fuel, you've got about 20,000 tons of uranium mill tailings, and an equivalent amount of mine waste.

We have got more than 400 million tons of uranium mill tailings and mine waste just in the United States between weapons and power.

- May I ask a question?

So twice now you've mixed together the waste byproducts from nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

What makes you do that?

- It's not a question of mixing together, me mixing together.

Those establishments were created.

First it was the weapons establishment, and the Atomic Energy Commission oversaw both weapons and power, and the upstream part of the weapons and power system, as a matter of truth, were the same.

The enrichment plants were the same.

The mining was procured by the Atomic Energy Commission at a fixed price of $8 a pound, and some of that went into weapons, and some of that went into power.

- And then you've also pointed out that the tailings from the mining process is a lot more than the actual uranium, but now, all mining has tailings if we're mining for whatever we're mining for.

- Metals that go into generators, in nuclear power plants, coal-fired power plants, steel, copper, it's all mining.

- If we don't grow it, we mine it, and so this is a big challenge.

I think your point was dense energy has a lot less of that.

- Yes, and so the empirical research supports the basic physical nature of this, so the higher the energy density, the less resource use.

What we've seen over the last 75 years is that uranium mining has become remarkably clean.

What we discovered is that, in fact, the biggest driver of making uranium mining cleaner has been the nuclear industry.

It's just gotten better at it.

It's an incredibly safe industry, so now we don't even have open mines.

We're just shooting hot water into the ground, and pulling the uranium out.

It's incredibly safe.

- Is that rich world stuff, or is that globally?

I mean, is it safe all over the world?

- It's becoming that way, and of course, we'd love to see it that way everywhere, but we're responsible for what we do here.

The other interesting thing is that when you do life cycle analysis comparing the mining impacts of renewables to the mining impacts of uranium, there is more radiation exposure in the mining for renewables.

- Solar and wind?

- Yes, and why is that?

It's because they require much more rare earths, highly toxic elements that are required for solar, wind, and electric cars than are required for nuclear.

- You're mixing up different things here.

Uranium is the fuel for nuclear power plants.

Coal is the fuel for coal-fired power plants.

There's no fuel for solar and wind, so once you've built the plant, you're done.

The first materials impacts of building the power plants themselves can be very reasonably assessed.

They're all materials intensive.

When you look at the capital investment of a materials intensive industry, wind, solar, nuclear, coal, the initial capital investment is the same order of magnitude, less for gas, because-- - To capture the same amount of actual generation?

- The best simple way to understand the materials impact of a unit of output in all materials industries is to look at how many dollars you need per megawatt equivalent of nuclear.

You need about three megawatts of wind for one megawatt of nuclear equivalent output, and four or five of solar.

When you add that all up, you find that their materials impacts are roughly the same order of magnitude.

So you need more rare earths for wind turbines, for the magnets and so on.

You need more copper for the kind of generators that you have in a nuclear or coal-fired power plant.

- The amount of metals in wind turbines and solar panels is tremendous, because it takes so much to collect the same amount of energy.

I mean, this is just physics, right?

- Viewers can Google this on their own, but the International Energy Agency just did a major study of the materials impacts of different energy sources, and in fact, solar and wind require an order of magnitude 10 times or more, 15 times more steel and concrete than natural gas or nuclear plants, and again, you don't need to take anybody's word on it.

This is all easy to find.

It was a major report that was done.

Solar panels last between 10 and 20 years.

Nuclear plants can operate for 80 years or longer.

All of the big parts are replaceable, whereas the solar panel itself is replaceable with a whole new solar panel.

So that's where these differences are coming.

I think there's a picture that sometimes I hear people presenting, and I used to have this picture in my mind, which is that once you build a solar farm, then that's it, you're done, and that's gonna be there for hundreds of years or something.

No, you have to go and replace those panels.

That means all of those big materials requirements are coming back in.

You have to replace those panels every 10 or 20 years, and that's simply not what you have to do with a nuclear or natural gas plant.

- Look, we've had-- - Let me say solar panels don't last for 10 or 20 years.

This is just not the fact.

Solar panel lifetime is in the 30 to 40 year range.

France actually recycles its solar panels.

So we're throwing them away.

That is a problem.

- We can do that.

- We should not be throwing them.

We're, we're throwing away lead.

We're throwing away lots of things that we should not be throwing away.

- So there's some experimental projects to recycle solar panels, but the country of France simply does not recycle all of its solar panels.

Nobody does, and the reason is because it's too expensive.

It's much cheaper to buy the raw materials than to recycle them and it will always be that way.

- The same that goes-- - Solar is a new industry.

Almost all solar installations have been built in the last 10 years, almost all.

There's not a lot of solar panels to recycle, so of course, if you're recycling solar panels, that's gonna be on a small scale because there are not a lot of panels to recycle.

- One final fact, Harvard Business Review just published a major study that found that when you factor in the cost of disposing of solar panel waste, it will increase the cost of the electricity from solar four times from what it is today.

Don't take my word for it.

Google Harvard Business Review solar panel waste.

This is not complicated physics.

This is just low energy densities require much more significant material throughput, much more waste, and then all of the costs associated with power.

- It's the challenge with recycling in general.

We recycle five to 10% of our lithium ion batteries today.

It's cheaper to make new ones.

We're terrible at the circular economy.

It is absolutely aspirational, and we need to go this way, but it's not without its costs.

It is expensive to-- - Nuclear is absolutely not a circular economy, because essentially, all the material other than the very tiny, tiny fraction that became energy is waste.

- Yeah.

- You've got the uranium waste, the mining waste, the milling waste, the spent fuel, the depleted uranium, and what we are doing is really the most problematic in an extractive economy.

We're using the electricity, and we have now created waste with plutonium in it that will last for tens of thousands of years.

That's not recycling, let me tell you.

- I'm gonna have to call a stop.

We've had a lively conversation about nuclear power and its safety.

We've looked at accident potential.

We've talked about weapons and proliferation, and we've talked about waste, what do we do with it?

What are some of the options?

And we're gonna take a little break, and we'll be back with the "Energy Switch."

I didn't expect this to become a battle between nuclear and solar and wind, but they're some of our leading options for carbon-free electricity.

Nuclear energy and nuclear weapons are indeed different technologies, but fear that one might lead to the other may block nuclear power development in some countries.

Nuclear waste is indeed minute compared to the energy it produces, but there are large scale mining concerns.

I found the studies Michael mentioned showing nuclear, solar, and wind have the fewest numbers of deaths per megawatt hour, and similarly low amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

I also found the study showing solar and wind require about 10 times the materials of nuclear per megawatt generated.

Clearly, there's more to discuss, which we'll do in part two of "Is it Time for More Nuclear Power?"

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Announcer] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by Microsoft and The University of Texas at Austin.