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Hello, and thanks for joining us for sustaining us here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

As the Biden administration and many U.S. officials and other world leaders continue their quest to phase out oil and gas, right or wrong, depending upon who you talk to, you obviously, the search for the best clean energy replacement is being studied and researched and argued.

So what are some of the renewable options these days to achieve a carbon neutral zero emissions future?

There are technologies, for example, like solar, wind, even hydrogen, all of which we've talked about here on this program.

Well, what about nuclear energy as a clean energy option?

The problem is when you talk about nuclear, there are a lot of critics here in the U.S. and throughout the world.

Over 40 years ago, Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania was the site of the most serious nuclear accident in our nation's history.

That, coupled with other nuclear incidents over the years, including the shutdown of the iconic San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Southern California this past decade due to safety issues.

Well, that's cause for concern.

And yet, with all that said, many argue nuclear is still a safe and a viable, even an essential energy source.

For context, we begin our broadcast with a visit to Pennsylvania and Three Mile Island, courtesy of our public media partner, WITF, PBS, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for this report.

Then we return for a discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear energy.

Mounting concerns about climate change are driving a new push to keep nuclear reactors open.

The plants are the largest source of carbon free electricity in the U.S., far outpacing renewable sources.

Across the country, about a third of existing nuclear plants are either unprofitable or scheduled to close.

Nuclear advocates are now pitching their carbon free electricity as a solution to global warming.

But critics don't think they should be classified as clean energy.

Virtually any time the subject of nuclear comes up in a group of people who understand the problem and are looking for solutions, they end up in an argument.

And it's because there really are good arguments and many different ways.

In Pennsylvania, the debate reminds people of Three Mile Island.

40 years ago, it was the site of the most serious nuclear accident in U.S. history and sparked a backlash against the industry that halted its growth for decades.

On March 28th, 1979, the plant's unit two reactor near Harrisburg partially melted down.

Fearing for their safety, an estimated 80,000 people fled the region.

I took our marriage certificate and I took our children's birth certificates.

I was concerned that if in the confusion, things really got bad, that I could prove those were my children and that we could at least be together.

JOYCE Karate was a young mother of four, running a daycare out of her home a few miles from the plant.

My strongest memory is pulling out of this driveway and wondering if I would ever come back.

Public officials, even the governor, didn't seem to know what was going on.

We're getting conflicting.

Reports.

Too.

What we're trying to do is give.

You our best estimate.

Of what the accurate facts.

Are.

After about a week, many people, including karate, returned home.

The plant eventually reopened, minus the one damaged reactor.

That legacy left it hobbled.

It means Three Mile Island can't produce as much electricity as other facilities.

Most have two working reactors.

There is only a single unit now atomized.

So it's one of these single unit plants that's having a hard time competing in the market.

Three Mile Island's unit one reactor, which is owned by Exelon, closed this fall 15 years before its operating license was to expire.

Long time anti-nuclear activist Eric Epstein sees the renewed attention on nuclear power as just a new marketing ploy for a failed technology.

I think a lot of environmentalists are making Faustian bargain and signing up to bail out nuclear without.

Understanding that it's.

Really going to do little to nothing to combat climate change.

The time it takes to get a new nuclear power plant up and running.

Presuming you have the resources as ten, 15 years, we don't have that kind of time.

We've got to deal with climate change now.

In recent years, states including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio and Connecticut have given billions of dollars to prop up their nuclear plants, recognizing them as a source of carbon free power.

I want people to know that nuclear technology is safe.

The tremendous contribution it makes to combating climate change because it emits no carbon, the tremendous economic role that it plays in the state and in the community.

The nuclear industry has faced economic headwinds from the rapid growth of natural gas plants and renewable sources like wind and solar.

It's meant some plants have become less competitive in the market.

And that's true certainly for some nuclear power plants as well.

Certainly not all nuclear power plants, but certainly some nuclear energy advocates have been pushing Pennsylvania to look to the ways other states have recently moved to prop up their own unprofitable plants.

But legislation to reclassify nuclear plants as clean energy stalled in Pennsylvania earlier this year.

State Senator Ryan Amen.

A sponsor of one of the nuclear subsidy bills, says it was hard to talk about the issue without people remembering the past.

When you mentioned Three Mile Island, when you talk about nuclear energy, their mind immediately flashes back to the events of the spring of 1979.

And without a doubt, that's been a real hurdle to overcome in terms of of being able to educate folks on the benefits of the nuclear energy industry and frankly, a tremendous record of safety that the industry has had over its existence in the United States.

For people who lived through the accident like Joyce Karate.

Its legacy still looms large.

Nuclear power is an entity that if you run it 100% of the time, 100% perfect or okay, but nobody does anything 100% of the time, 100% perfect.

Her most vivid memory is evacuating, leaving behind her home and wondering if her life would ever be the same.

I find that really, 40 years down the road, I'm still sitting on top of a plant that has all the waste.

A plant that cannot sell its electricity.

And there's still no real answers.

To this day, she avoids driving by the plant's cooling towers.

It's kind of like living with a giant in your neighborhood.

You know, it's there.

You know, it could cause you problems.

But you live in an uneasy compromise.

Thank you.

WITF PBS in Pennsylvania for that report.

And joining me now to discuss this further is Matt Crow's out.

Matt is the executive director of strategy and Policy Development for any eye, any eye as a nuclear energy institute in Washington, D.C., prior to any eye.

Matt was with the Department of Energy during the Bush and Obama administrations, helping to develop the next generation of nuclear technologies.

Now, with any eye, Matt works to advance public policies that support the generation of nuclear power plants.

Also joining the panel is David Kogan.

David is with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.

David teaches science communication, oceans and works with scientists, researchers and faculty as they study various environmental issues.

He's also an environmental author, most recently of his book, The Green Bundle Pairing the Market With the Planet.

Thank you both for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Mel, let's begin with you.

What is any I.

Tell me all about your organization.

The NEA is the trade association for the nuclear industry.

Our members are companies that own and operate nuclear plants.

They service the plans to make sure they're running well, design the next generation technologies, and you can go to set that through universities.

We have colleges that are members as well.

And any allows the industry to speak as one voice on policy matters and public communications and with the regulator as well.

So we try to be a one stop shop for the entire nuclear industry to communicate more broadly.

David, Tell me about your UCLA Institute, the environment and sustainability.

Sure.

You know, we are a multidisciplinary Institute for Education, research and Public outreach.

We've got dozens of faculty.

We've got, you know, hundreds and hundreds of students and pretty much all geared towards finding solutions to the environmental problems that we're facing from climate change to extinctions to just about anything you can think of.

And it's all done at the public university level.

So we're able to bring in many more people who might otherwise not have access to a top 20 research education.

Thank you both for that.

Matt, let's begin.

Can you simply explain exactly what nuclear energy is and then why, in your opinion, is nuclear a good and viable option for our energy source?

We hear so much about nuclear.

You explain it for me.

Sure.

Let me begin by making sure we're clear on how we make electricity in the first place.

So for almost all forms of electricity that we rely on, what we have is a machine that spins, a turbine that connects to a generator, and that spinning action produces electricity.

You think of a windmill as pretty obvious example.

The wind blows the turbine, creates a spinning mass for the generator, and that creates electricity.

We have hydropower.

That is the same thing with water rushing through dams.

But most of the nuclear power plants we have in the United States rely on using heat to create steam or some other fluid that's going to spin the turbine.

Most of that in the U.S. right now is done by burning fossil fuels.

Traditionally coal, but also now natural gas to create that heat and drive the turbine.

Nuclear energy works similarly, except that instead of using a fossil fuel with carbon emissions and air pollutants, we use uranium.

And essentially, when you have a uranium atom, it will eventually split apart and do two things.

One is release heat that's useful.

We'll also release additional neutrons.

And if you put those uranium atoms near one another, those neutrons will go create other visions of splitting action, which in the heat does a chain reaction and that's how you can generate heat from a nuclear power plant to create the steam that's going to create electricity.

As a result, a nuclear does not have carbon emissions or any other air pollution for that matter.

It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is a carbon free energy source, has really value because we have wind and solar.

We're going to add a lot more of those when we should.

But one of the challenges that we have is making sure that we have electricity all hours of the day, all places on the grid.

And nuclear helps to balance that by operating at times of day when you might not have these variable resources as widely available.

David Matt makes a good case.

Why is nuclear energy so concerning to you?

A great number of reasons.

It's concerning to me as part of the mix to make us more carbon, you know, carbon free in our energy production.

I think first and foremost is the risk right now.

The risk that it poses.

We've seen, you know, most dramatically and recently in the Ukraine where we had, you know, nuclear reactors at risk due to conflict, which we expect to rise with climate change, which is already sort of happening.

So that's that's one example of something very recent where we were concerned.

Right.

And certainly the local populations and people throughout Europe were concerned.

We also had the, you know, the Fukushima event in 2011.

And, you know, if any country has reason to be concerned about nuclear fallout, it would be Japan.

And, you know, despite all their efforts, despite their technology, they still weren't able to account for Mother Nature.

And that wasn't even a climate driven incident.

In that case, we are expecting things like dramatic floods.

We're expecting more heat, bigger storms.

We're expecting a lot of changes due to climate change that are going to put places that were normally safe that we've planned for to be pretty safe in great risk.

Now, to answer some of David's criticism, obviously he's not the first to have about criticism.

There are many others.

But I want to you to defend your career because we just want to understand more about it, obviously.

Oh, I understand that entirely.

So the thing to understand with the modern nuclear plants is that they are hardened and designed to handle a range of the threats.

So, for example, even things like having a 747 crash to your power plant in the United States, you have to be able to demonstrate that you can withstand that kind of a massive impact.

We had an eagle in the Ukraine.

What we saw was, yes, there were challenges around the plants, but the plants kept operating.

And I think that speaks to just how important it is to have reinforced secure machines that we have in operation today.

In most of the Western world.

You know, the challenges of climate change are real and the storms that we see are important.

But we look at the places like the Gulf Coast where we have seen significant storms.

I have family from south Louisiana and in southeast Texas.

We have nuclear power plants there that are the first power plants available to respond after a storm because they, again, are hardened for these kinds of disasters.

Think Japan is a very important case, too, because they have indeed had a real challenge of how they're going to manage their electricity system in the aftermath of the Fukushima.

What they're seeing right now is a renewed interest in turning towards nuclear, both restarting some of the machines they have, but also deploying new.

And part of the real challenge there is that with energy, there are trade offs to be had across technologies.

A lot of the Japanese system was built on being able to import large quantities of natural gas.

That sounds like a really appealing option five years ago, but why don't we seen with the disruption in the energy markets and especially cutting off natural gas from Russia, that's now not nearly as defensible as a long term strategy?

And so the point that I want to make is, as we think about this transition, I don't think there's a single technology that is the answer for everybody.

But we have a challenge on our hands, the scale of transition that we're looking at, the need to be completely carbon free by mid-century is going to entail us to bring all of our options forward as fast as we can, and nuclear is part of that option, said David.

I correct me if I'm wrong, and we're going to get back to what Matt was saying in a moment.

I just want to jump to a bit of a different issue here and then get back to what Matt was saying.

I had read somewhere you are concerned about nuclear or not being cost effective and then I'll explain.

Matt, I believe during a phone conversation I had with Matt had said nuclear is an economic boon.

You know, there's a lot of job creation empowering of local communities.

I want to hear from Matt in just a moment.

But why are you concerned with the financials of it, Dave, and then we'll get to Matt.

Sure.

I mean, you know, to to to varying extents, every energy industry is going to generate some jobs.

Right?

You know, and and that's no different with nuclear power plant versus, you know, a gas power plant or versus wind farm or solar farms.

However, nuclear energy itself is more costly than all the other renewables by far, as well as the fossil fuel examples.

And that's not even including sort of the other costs that are very rarely calculated into nuclear, which is the cost of disaster.

Fukushima cost over $500 billion right.

For that for the Japanese government.

You know, these are the other external costs, the cost of storage, storing fuel, which we really haven't fully figured out yet.

They're still storing it at the actual power plants.

So nobody wants that in their backyard.

Nobody wants these power plants in their backyard.

And I grew up with one in my backyard.

So, you know, I feel very, very strongly about that.

And yet, Matt, you did tell me it is a somewhat of an economic boom.

Talk more about that.

So we get your take on the costs of all of this.

Sure.

And Dave is right that all our projects have jobs associated with them.

What makes nuclear stand out is that the costs are really in the people and salaries.

So whereas fossil fuel plants, for example, the vast majority of cost to operate them is to pay for the fuel itself.

A natural gas plant might only have a two dozen people who work there.

A nuclear plant is going to have 4 to 600.

And these are full time jobs that we've seen now from recent analysis.

Nuclear jobs are the highest paid jobs in the energy sector for electricity production by a lot because these are specialists who have real knowledge that come with their skill set.

As we've been trying to carry the nuclear message forward, one of our strongest allies has been organized labor, because these are often union jobs and not just ones that are gigs where you're installing a solar panel, for example, but careers that it's not uncommon to have multiple generations of families working at nuclear plants because they have a long lifetime in the community.

For viewers just joining us, we're talking with Matt Crow's out of the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, DC, and David Cogan with the UCLA Institute of Environmental and Sustainability.

David, I've also read some of your writings and you talk about energy justice issues.

So to speak.

First, what do you what is an energy justice issue?

And then I read where you are concerned about nuclear as an energy justice issue.

In your opinion, Talk about that.

Sure.

And this is sort of folded in with the issue of the risk of of nuclear power being transferred into nuclear weaponry.

Right.

Which is something we've been concerned about for a very long time.

And are still concerned about now, as we've seen nuclear breakthrough brinksmanship in the past six months.

And and I think the fact the reality is, is that we don't want countries to have this pathway to developing nuclear weapons.

So they're going to be a lot of people left out, a lot of countries left out.

Most of the world will be left out if we rely on this as a major solution to global climate change.

Right.

Like this is this is not that because we're not going to you know, we're not going to as a matter of sort of geostrategic concern and security concerns, allow a lot of new countries into this fold.

And the countries that will get left out are the ones that are already exploited, the ones that already produce the least emissions.

They're the ones that already bear the most damages from climate change, and it's in its outcomes.

So what we end up is, is exacerbating even further a really nasty global inequality that's going to have winners and losers.

And we're talking about winners and losers in the sense of life and death in many cases.

Dave, I am going to get back to climate change in a moment.

I have a tough question, a challenging question for you.

But Matt, I did read, I believe, somewhere where you were talking about I guess I want to say it's just a low carbon future technology, so to speak.

In other words, how nuclear plays into all of this with other technologies.

Can you be detailed and explain what I was reading, if I have that correct?

So I suspect what you're saying is a lot of the modeling that we're seeing from the energy systems, academics and experts on how you get to a low carbon energy future, and in particular, what they're trying to understand is as I create this transition where I rely less on coal, less on natural gas and more on low carbon sources like nuclear, like wind, like solar.

How do I ensure that I maintain a reliable electricity system?

In particular, there's a challenge in ensuring that when the hottest days of the summer when electricity is being used the most are in the northeast from the depths of winter.

How do I have enough carbon free electricity to meet those elements?

And what these analysis has been consistently showing is that having a what they call a firm carbon free source like nuclear energy is really important to ensure that you can have that reliable system as we make more of our economy reliant upon electricity for our cars, for our industry, this reliability becomes even more important as we have more electricity to supply.

We've also seen this too, in the companies themselves who are on the hook to actually make this transition.

The utilities that are making carbon free commitments at mid-century are looking again at, well, how are they going to actually do this in a way that allows them to maintain a reliable system?

And that's where we've seen nuclear have a renewed appreciation in the challenges that future not the only technology, but is a promising one and one that we're seeing a lot of interest from the utilities and how to bring that in as part of their long term planning.

Thank you for that, David.

Now, I will just get back to climate change.

You and your fellow scientists say how long as they say you claim climate change is such a massive existence?

Dual threat.

I make no judgment on this one way or the other.

I just ask the tough questions.

If that is the case.

In defense of Matt, what the heck is wrong with nuclear being part of the mix?

If climate change is this existential threat, as you say?

Sure.

I mean, well, for starters, it's not really a viable solution because the scale at which we'd have to build nuclear from more nuclear power plants and the time at which it would take to do that is just not sufficient to address how immediate this problem is.

Right.

We need we need to decarbonize rapidly if we're going to do anything to prevent some of the very, very worst outcomes of climate change under, you know, warming scenarios that could be three, four or five degrees.

So so it takes about 10 to 14 years to build a nuclear power plant.

And if you're talking about new technologies, there's always going to be cost overruns, there's going to be time overruns, and we don't have time to do that, for starters.

And just disregarding for a moment all the other arguments why we shouldn't do nuclear, the safety arguments and the the justice arguments.

There's a practicality aspect to this, and it's just it's just not a practical solution for addressing climate change.

And the other is, you know, we're neglecting the the sort of reality that energy storage is an area of intense technological growth and development right now.

And we're getting better and better at this all the time.

And and and I don't think that the sort of idea that the sun goes down and we no longer have that as an electrical source is an extremely compelling argument to switch to a whole bunch of nuclear plants there then going to be there forever.

Their fuel is going to be there forever.

And the impacts of of digging up all this nuclear or all this uranium, which is increasingly hard to get, and it causes severe impacts in countries that are never going to benefit from nuclear energy.

It just it just does not make sense as an answer to climate change and decarbonization.

Final question.

The nuclear narrative.

I admit it has changed greatly since Three Mile Island.

The report that we had at the beginning of our broadcast talking about some of the dangers.

With that said, are you concerned about the dangers or are you more concerned about some of these newer technologies being developed with nuclear that are advancing the narrative and possibly making it less dangerous?

Your take on that, Matt?

Well, I think that the new technologies that are being developed are being developed in light of everything we've learned over the time we've been using nuclear energy.

So, for example, you're going to see designs that are smaller, that are faster to build, that rely more on factory fabrication, less on complex backup systems, but also have fuel cycles that have more possibilities for how we use the uranium and how we can even think about approaching how we use the used fuel.

All of them have safety.

That's you've been informed by 50 years of export experience with this technology and also the regulation that we've built around it.

So what we're seeing is a new generation that's coming to marketplace that is built to respond to the challenges going forward.

And David mentioned energy storage.

I think that it's a an excellent example.

One of the new designs actually has thermal energy storage built in as part of the way it delivers electricity in the first place.

So it is inherently designed to work alongside wind and solar to provide just that kind of balancing the long way of making the point that the challenges that we saw in the 1970s and 1980s and how we transition and learn from that has brought us to a different point in time, which is great because we have a real problem that we're trying to address.

And that's why I think nuclear has an opportunity to be an important part of that solution.

My big concern is that for us, daunting is the challenge of transition that David lays out actually is I'm more concerned that we're going to fall short, not because there were we chose one path or another, but because we didn't go fast enough on all these path at the same time.

David, in our remaining seconds, you get the final word.

Okay.

I mean, I think it's just tough in general for people to take the nuclear industry at its word when there's not a lot of transparency there for security reasons, for a million reasons.

And, you know, just looking at both the field report that you showed and our conversation now, the pro-nuclear advocates are all paid advocates of the nuclear industry or receiving money from nuclear industry, including the elected officials that were in the field report.

And I think it's just really tough to buy into the arguments that are being made.

And I do hope it has a chance to sort of respond to this.

But but these are people advocating specifically for an industry that profits off of more nuclear plants.

So it's very difficult for me to take such arguments seriously when the amount of money that goes into the pockets of the nuclear industry as a result of these discussions could be huge.

I retract my statement.

Matt, I do give you the final word.

I want you to be able to answer.

David.

I appreciate that.

Yes, I do work for it at this organization.

I don't buy that at all.

One of things that really has happened, though, is that the conversation that we're having around nuclear isn't just being led by those who are in the nuclear industry.

We have we've seen a range of NGOs that have taken on nuclear, not because that's where their paycheck comes from, but because that's where they see the challenge of nuclear technology being able to address the bigger issue of climate change.

A lot of the enthusiasm that we're seeing coming into the industry now comes straight from the college ranks.

Those who see this as a technology that can help solve the crisis that they see coming forward.

So I my request is if that's the concern, I would encourage people to go reach out to people who don't have a industry backing for them.

And talk to them to.

I think those voices exist and they might not have been there 40 years ago, but they certainly are now because for so much of the environmental community, the climate change challenge is much bigger than than what had been the motivating principle of anti-nuclear interests in the 1970s.

And that's really changed how the conversations taking place and the voices we're listening to also.

I apologize.

We have to leave things there.

Thanks.

Matt Crowe's out and David Kogan, it was really a great discussion.

Thank you both so much.

Thank you both.

Thank you.

Really, really appreciate talking to you, man.

Good to be.

With you, David.

Now for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact us to send us your questions and comments or story ideas so we can hear from you or contact me @DavidNazarNews on Twitter.

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Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm Devin Nazar.