Nuclear Power is Back? - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to John Stossel

[00:00:00]flagrant disregard for nuclear safety.

[00:00:02]>> That's just a bunch of crap. You're [clears throat] afraid of [laughter] something.

[00:00:05]>> Today we're going to be looking at nuclear is back with John Staceil. Let's see what they mean by this.

[00:00:11]>> The nuclear power plant in Citrus County is shutting down.

[00:00:15]>> Okay. One of the biggest misconceptions people have when a nuclear plant shuts down prior to its license expiration is that it's because it became unsafe.

[00:00:26]That's almost never why. Plants usually close because of economics. Sometimes natural gas gets incredibly cheap.

[00:00:34]Sometimes electricity markets don't reward carbon-f free generation.

[00:00:38]Sometimes repairs become uneconomical.

[00:00:41]And sometimes politics changes the business environment. So this site, Crystal River, the one he's talking about, is an interesting case because it was largely due to a containment building repair project that went way over budget. nuclear industry is being dismantled.

[00:01:00]>> And there's unfortunately been some truth to this. Historically, for decades, the US essentially stopped building reactors. And reactors are expensive, but the biggest contributor to this is we stopped building enough of them to get better at building them. So, it became a vicious cycle. We weren't building nuclear plants cuz a lot of people just didn't know how to build them anymore. And a lot of the engineering learnings are due to repetition. And the inverse of that is also true where if you don't build nuclear power plants or even a lot of other heavy industry, you don't use a lot of that industry that you once used, a lot of knowledge gets lost. One example, when I first started out my career in my early 20s, a lot of my co-workers were in their mid4s or older.

[00:01:53]There were very few people that were in their 30s. So, generation gaps are a problem. So, while things like combined cycle gas turbines became cheap because thousands were built, the opposite problem was true with nuclear plants.

[00:02:08]That just destroys institutional knowledge.

[00:02:11]>> Just a few years ago, nuclear power looked doomed in America.

[00:02:15]>> I would argue it was longer than that.

[00:02:17]pretty much from the late 1980s through the mid2010s.

[00:02:23]That was not an unreasonable statement.

[00:02:26]The natural gas market exploded because of hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

[00:02:31]Wind and solar expand rapidly.

[00:02:33]Electricity demand flattened and nuclear power plants have a high fixed operating cost. though low variability. That's one of their advantages. This low variability cuz they're solid base load units. But in that particular situation, it wasn't really doing them any favors.

[00:02:51]>> Sanopre nuclear plant is shutting down for good.

[00:02:55]>> Some people love that.

[00:02:56]>> Anti-uclear activists rejoiced at the news.

[00:02:59]>> And I started I started to cry.

[00:03:02]>> Politicians even bragged about closing plants.

[00:03:05]>> 14 years ahead of schedule >> and people applauded.

[00:03:11]Why would >> and this always fascinates me because a lot of these activists genuinely want lower carbon emissions. So the irony is closing a functioning nuclear plant almost always increases fossil fuel use cuz that power has got to come from somewhere. Uh biggest example was in Germany saw it on a smaller scale after Saninophre like they mentioned in California and you saw it in the northeast after the um Indian Point plant was shut down. Reactors generally are not replaced by wind and solar overnight. You can't really do that because they don't have the storage or the base load ability. They are designed to come on when electricity demand goes up throughout the day. They usually get replaced by natural gas because they already exist and they're more dispatchable. They have that energy storage. So if your primary concern is climate change, closing and operating nuclear plant is counterproductive.

[00:04:12]>> Would they applaud shut down New York's finest source of clean energy? You got to be kidding me.

[00:04:19]>> Former Yeah. As a fellow nuclear engineer, I understand that frustration.

[00:04:23]If you look at it from the grid operator's perspective, so not just the nuclear engineering perspective, but Indian Point was immensely valuable cuz New York City needs a lot of base load power. Replacing that isn't as simple as building more solar farms or wind farms hundreds of miles away. Transmission matters. Grid stability matters. Voltage support matters. Those are engineering problems that don't get a whole lot of attention. And a lot of people just don't realize that. Nuclear engineer Ray Rothrock now invests in nuclear energy because it's reliable and relatively clean. He's met with presidents to talk about that, but nothing was ever addressed >> until now. We will embrace all forms of energy.

[00:05:07]>> I like hearing a nuclear engineer get into investment cuz there's different risk matrix associated with like investment risk versus nuclear risk like the whole nuclear safety analysis. So yes, if you look at it from that lens, the financial lens, that's nuclear power's biggest risk. It's the investment risk, especially if you're looking at building new sites because huge capital costs upfront and depending on what the political situation is or what the market situation is. It's actually, as much as people harp on the politics, it's usually column B, the market situation and how much that can change over several years of construction. And that's why you've seen examples like up in the Northwest in Washington State where you have halfbuilt nuclear plants because when they started being built, forecasts in the early 1970s were saying, "Okay, we need a lot more power." But then the late 1970s happened, the stagflation happened. Um the demand went down and they were like, "Oh, well, it doesn't make sense to build this anymore, so we're just going to leave it as is. sell off what we can and you see these husks of what could have been up there. So yeah, I like seeing the um intersection of finance and engineering is very important because you need to understand both of those risks >> including nuclear. President Trump has ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to speed up licensing of new plants, >> essentially turning the NRC into a rubber stamp rather than a trusted safety regulator.

[00:06:53]>> Democratic. All right, so here's where you need to slow down. This is a false dichotomy. It's not do you support safety versus do you support faster licensing. Those are not mutually exclusive. The goal should not be approve everything quickly, nor should it be study everything forever. The goal should be rigorous reviews that are proportional to actual risk. And I mentioned the whole knowledge gap that doesn't just affect constructors and operators that affects the regulators too. And people are less confident in how to regulate um new mass construction of nuclear plants. So there's a big knowledge risk associated with the regulatory aspect just like you see in the um other facets of the industry. And no, I don't want the NRC being a rubber stamp. They have earned an international reputation for competence, but there's a huge difference between high safety standards and procedural efficiency.

[00:07:50]Those are not the same thing. Um, look at airport security for instance.

[00:07:55]Checking passengers is good. Making every passenger wait 12 hours is not good. Safety and efficiency can coexist.

[00:08:03]>> Exenators are upset. That's not a conducive situation to nuclear safety.

[00:08:08]>> Flagrant disregard for nuclear safety.

[00:08:10]>> That's just a bunch of crap. You're afraid of something. [laughter] >> I definitely understand the frustration >> that they don't need to be afraid of. We don't need to be afraid of nuclear power.

[00:08:21]>> No, you don't. [laughter] >> First step in a nuclear nightmare.

[00:08:26]>> I was a young reporter when >> Okay, this is Three Mile Island cuz it's showing 1979. Yep. The media got hysterical about the United States worst commercial nuclear power accident.

[00:08:38]>> And that's where the big failure was with the media.

[00:08:42]>> Was happening was in the news every night. Time magazine was running articles, cover stories, all this, you know, the thought the whole nuclear industry was coming apart.

[00:08:51]>> The China Syndrome movie coincidentally released days before the accident.

[00:08:56]>> What's interesting is that movie wasn't really anti-uclear by itself. I think it was just anti- big business and corruption. But yeah, people thinking that's prophetic >> increased fears. It suggests that a nuclear accident could burn a hole all the way to China >> while ignoring the part that China is not the antipode of any location within the United States. But sure, they already don't understand how physics works. So they can certainly not understand how geology or even geography works.

[00:09:28]>> The China syndrome.

[00:09:30]Only a handful of people.

[00:09:32]>> Young Michael Douglas and Wilfford Grimley cracked me up.

[00:09:35]>> What [clears throat] it really means >> and they're scared. [laughter] >> That movie was >> You're laughing. But to people, they thought it meant that the thing would burn all the way through the earth to China.

[00:09:50]>> Yeah. Um, what's crazy is how people get hooked on something like that. And um, you look at other movies and you have a mobile space station that can destroy a planet in a fraction of a second and people don't think those things are real. But people think the nuclear accident is depicted in that movie was real. But that was that that's ridiculous. A core melting is not an infinitely hot drill. I guess they don't understand first principle of gravity, right? Can only go halfway cuz that's where it stops. Three mile island did melt and go.

[00:10:26]>> Yeah, they don't understand gravity.

[00:10:28]They also don't understand heat transfer. It's not an infinite heat source. It's going to cool rapidly when it melts through anything. There is a huge amount of heat. the um latent heat of fusion. That is to say, it takes a lot of energy just to do it takes a lot of energy just to do a phase change without the uh fuel warming up a degree.

[00:10:50]>> Did it melt to China? I don't think it did. And nobody was hurt. Imagine that.

[00:10:55]>> The public didn't understand.

[00:10:57]>> No, they didn't.

[00:10:58]>> And that's exactly right. Three Mile Island was serious. The core melted, but multiple containment barriers worked. It breached the first one. from the cladding and caused fuel damage. It damaged the reactor coolant system, but the containment building was pretty much unscathed. That's why you have multiple fision product barriers. The containment building did exactly what it was designed to do. So, the great irony here with 3M Island is it's one of the greatest engineering success stories because it showed that containment worked under an accident scenario.

[00:11:30]People often associate meltdowns with mass casualties. Not necessarily. The reactor has the fuel pellets, the cladding, and the containment as the three primary fishing product barriers.

[00:11:41]And there's other radiological barriers.

[00:11:44]There's a bio shield within the reactor containment building as well. So, there's all kinds of shielding that has been demonstrated. As far as nobody was hurt, nobody was hurt directly. The accident caused tremendous psychological stress and economic consequences which led to the completion of non-nuclear fuel sources that provided more environmental damage. That still matters, but radiation doses to the public were immensely low. After 3M island, >> a blast at the Dei nuclear power plant in Fukushima.

[00:12:19]>> Yeah, there was that nuclear.

[00:12:21]>> Interesting. Soon they skipped Chernobyl >> accident in Japan.

[00:12:25]>> The lives upended by radioactive fallout.

[00:12:28]>> Radiation did escape.

[00:12:30]>> The Fukushima meltdowns contaminated hundreds of square miles of northeastern Japan.

[00:12:35]>> But again, the radiation didn't harm people. The media distorted the risk.

[00:12:39]>> So you have to be careful here again when you evaluate harm. I mean, that statement is broadly correct because radiation health effects have been misunderstood. However, it was still an enormous disaster. It was a consequence of an enormous disaster. That being the earthquake and tsunami, not because radiation killed thousands. It was the earthquake and tsunami did. But losing cooling after an unprecedented tsunami destroyed multiple reactor cores. The engineering failures and emergency planning lessons are incredibly important.

[00:13:12]>> People did die from the tsunami and more died during the governmentordered evacuation. the J >> if you take evacuation stress in account more than Fukushima. But but no, the natural disaster was the worst part.

[00:13:26]Almost 20,000 almost 20,000 fatalities.

[00:13:30]But he does bring up a good point when you look at evacuations. When emergency when you do emergency response, ordering a mass evacuation is not always the most conservative decision. Risk trade-offs matter. The evacuation itself caused many premature fatalities, especially among elderly hospital patients. Doesn't mean the evacuation was wrong, per se.

[00:13:52]It means emergency planning needs to account for evacuation risks alongside radiation risks. That's very nuanced and there's a whole um risk management science behind that. Engineering is about balancing risks rather than eliminating one specific risk at any cost because it can cost you more than the other side of that risk.

[00:14:17]>> Japanese government ordered an evacuation of everyone within 2 miles [music] of Fukushima Daichi.

[00:14:23]>> But [clears throat] no one died or even got sick from nuclear radiation. The UN concluded that the extra radiation would have no discernable health effects. Most people don't realize that radiation is everywhere. Just flying gives you radiation.

[00:14:39]>> Absolutely. One cross-country flight gives you more radiation than a lot of people realize. Not a dangerous level of radiation and but enough that airline crews receive monitored radiation exposure per year. It's enough that it's worth monitoring. But yeah, depending on what your job is at a nuclear plant, you could get uh more dose from just flying on business trips than actually working at the site. Again, that depends heavily on what your job is.

[00:15:04]>> Living in Denver, >> yes, exposes you to radio.

[00:15:07]>> Yeah. Living on the beach in Brazil, >> bizarrely, this beach has natural radiation levels that are worse than our government safety standards.

[00:15:16]>> Yeah. Um there are certain zones within the world that give you high background radiation. That's why the background radiation number has such an extreme amount of variability. But yeah, nature doesn't care about regulatory limits.

[00:15:30]Some locations naturally exceed those conservative guidelines. Yet studies have not shown immediate obvious health crises there that were triggered by that. That tells us that biology is a little bit more complicated than every little teeny tiny dose causes obvious harm. like the infamous linear or no threshold model. The one that makes more sense is the linear threshold model. And the threshold being 100 millverts or twice the dose limit of a radiation worker has been shown has been correlated with an increased risk of long-term cancer. Doesn't mean you're going to get cancer if you exceed it one year. Just it's correlated with increased risk. And that dose limit is far above what you would see in the public even in elevated locations like this place in Brazil.

[00:16:21]>> 30 times the safety standard >> and yet they don't get more cancer.

[00:16:26]>> You don't.

[00:16:27]>> Why take it?

[00:16:27]>> That's cuz the safety limits are 100 times less for a member of the public than that threshold.

[00:16:34]>> Any risks? Why don't we just use solar and wind?

[00:16:37]>> Wind stops blowing sometimes.

[00:16:39]>> So here's the thing. I'm not saying we shouldn't use solar and wind. This isn't an either or discussion. You need reliable systems and you need a diverse portfolio. Saying just use solar and wind is a bit like saying let's invest in one or two stocks and see how that works out for you. Solar and wind, while I would argue they're more situational than nuclear, there are situations where they're the optimal choice when you're not relying on base but and you want a scalable modular approach. They're pretty modular. They're more modular than small modular reactors even. And solar and wind are good sources. They're just not they don't solve all the problems. Nuclear doesn't solve all the problems, especially not large scale nuclear cuz there are small remote areas where it would be impractical and it would be way more than that community would ever need in terms of power.

[00:17:30]Solar's good, wind's good, hydro's good, geothermal's good, and nuclear's good.

[00:17:35]They solve different problems. The grid benefits from diversity.

[00:17:39]>> Solar only works when there's sun. On top of that, >> you need a lot of land for solar, a lot of land for wind. Start throwing in all those cost and it's pretty darn expensive.

[00:17:49]>> Transmission is going to be expensive, too, cuz a lot of them are placed in remote areas where you need that much land. So, you're going to you're going to see it on the transmission side.

[00:17:57]>> So, why don't more countries do what France does, get most of their power? In come the stereotypical French music >> from nuclear plants.

[00:18:08]>> Thousands of anti-uclear protesters marched through Tokyo >> because the ant.

[00:18:11]>> So France is probably the strongest real world example that large-scale nuclear deployment and dramatically reduce electricity sector emissions. They have among the lowest carbon intensity in their grid than anywhere else on earth.

[00:18:27]Not perfect but impressive.

[00:18:28]>> Anti-uclear protest movement has been so strong. I SAY NO. YOU SAY NUKES. NO.

[00:18:35]>> NUKES.

[00:18:36]>> NO.

[00:18:36]>> And now they're assuming nuclear power plants make nuclear bombs. No.

[00:18:43]>> That led to >> Oh, well, this is Greenpeace. They don't understand how physics works. So, there you go.

[00:18:48]>> Excessive regulation in America.

[00:18:50]>> We're wasting too much time on permitting.

[00:18:53]>> Regulators spend millions analyzing whether a community is a good place for a nuclear plant.

[00:19:00]>> All right. So excessive regulation the nuclear industry absolutely should be heavily regulated but the question is what kind of regulation and it should be performancebased that is to say did you reach this safety goal for instance and there are ways of measuring safety goal like using a probabilistic risk assessment and to give you a sense of how very um conservative these goals can be a one ina million chance per year of core damage age is considered unacceptable.

[00:19:32]High risk was 1 in 10 million. Low risk is 1 in a billion chance of core damage per year. And I'm and core damage is any detectable core damage that results in damage to the fuel. So a small amount of melting. The entire core doesn't need to turn into molten goo in order for you to hit core damage. And the odds of a large early release, a puff release, which is the most which is probably the largest um postulated hazard for um the public in the surrounded area. That is far less in a lot of plants. It's anywhere from 10 to 100 times less than even just the core damage. So, a regulation as in did you meet these risk goals, these safety goals, if you will, that's and that's just one example, but did you meet your core damage frequency goal of less than one in a billion or whatever it is? Then that's should be what the uh regulation is centered around, not prescriptive regulation which is the did you follow these exact instructors set by the government and not the engineers that operate the facility. Generally performance-based is better because that encourages innovation rather than being forced in one specific way. So the type of regulation matters as much as the intensity of the regulation, if that makes sense.

[00:21:02]>> Even when >> we've been running nuclear in that community for four decades, why are we even asking that question?

[00:21:08]>> The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's cumbersome rules pretty much stopped American nuclear power innovation.

[00:21:14]>> Thou shalt do it this way. Thou shalt have this. Thou shalt have this. The regulator said, "Well, if it takes a 3 foot 6 inch wall to protect from the radiation on this side of the wall from the people on that side of the wall, >> why don't you make it four? Better still, why don't you make it 10?"

[00:21:33]>> That is nuclear engineering math is what that is. Basic math, 2+ 2 equals 4. A lot of engineering math, you say 2+ 2 equals maybe five because you want to add a bit of safety margin. nuclear math 2 plus two equals 100 because you want to be absolutely sure you're not exceeding anything. So safety margins are important but margins on margins eventually just become diminishing returns. Some of these it's like imagine designing a car to survive a crash when it's going 500 mph.

[00:22:05]Eventually you make cars so expensive that nobody affords them. You need to do a costbenefit analysis. That's really what it comes down to. just to get approval for a new plant >> got to be five, six, seven years and then people stopped completely. No new >> just give up. Just don't even do it.

[00:22:19]>> Don't even do it. So for 30 years, literally 30 years, the NRC hasn't had has not seen a new reactor proposal. The reg >> regulatory uncertainty is bad. Investors hate uncertainty. If licensing takes 15 years, capital just goes elsewhere.

[00:22:34]>> Regulators rarely adjust rules for new technology. They require this big dome, a safety feature for water cooled reactors. But some new reactors are not even cooled by water. Yeah, this one uh this example showing here is helium cooled and it's small. This is a teeny look look like look how big these people are relative to the uh reactor size.

[00:22:57]Containment domes exist because of an accident from a highly pressurized and high temperature environment. It's designed to absorb an explosion essentially from the inside. There's not enough energy in the these little guys to require something like that. So if a reactor design physically cannot generate the same conditions, requiring identical containment makes zero engineering sense. That's why technology neutral regulation is important.

[00:23:30]>> They're not pressurized, so there's no need for a dome, but the rules say you have to build a dome.

[00:23:38]>> Only now has that rule been changed.

[00:23:40]>> And there's finally a limit on how long bureaucrats can spend reviewing reactor designs, 18 months.

[00:23:47]>> So, that's good. And not because reviews should be rushed, but you need to have a timeline. Predictable timelines reduce financial risk. Just like when you have an outage at a nuclear power plant, it's not about finishing early. It's about having a predictable schedule. But government is always slow. More than a year's passed since Trump issued his orders. But things now are finally turning around. For the first time in 10 years, a new reactor has been approved.

[00:24:14]>> It's expected to power up to 400,000 homes.

[00:24:16]>> A Michigan plant that had been closed will be started up again, making history as the first nuclear plant to reopen in the US. start again.

[00:24:24]>> That is that is rare. Restarting a previously closed commercial reactor is extraordinarily unusual. That shows that attitudes are changing.

[00:24:33]>> Activists complain.

[00:24:34]>> This nuclear nightmare is back. You can have a full-blown reactor core meltdown.

[00:24:39]>> But this time they're losing and 18 other reactors have had their operating licenses extended. In addition, >> a new generation, >> a license extension, so an initial license is usually about 40 years and an extension is another 20 >> of advanced reactors is in development that some say could signal the dawn of a new nuclear age.

[00:24:59]>> On top of that, private entrepreneurs are >> So, yep, when you're talking small modular reactors, molten salt, high temperature gas, fast neutron reactors, micro reactors, each of those solve different engineering problems. That's why you need to look at a lot of different ones and know not every one of those technologies is going to be successful. That's okay. Innovation requires experimentation. Making safer and better fuels.

[00:25:24]>> The radium in each one of these balls produces about as much power as about 4 tons of coal >> and reactors that are installed.

[00:25:32]>> Valor will mass manufacture reactors and deploy hundreds of them at each location. So yeah, those trees fuels um essentially mini containment buildings uh micro reactors.

[00:25:44]>> One company's building a prototype that Google will use to power a data center.

[00:25:48]>> The goal >> and that's one sign of just economics shifting. The demand is going way up because of mass production of these sites. So reliable 24/7 power is becoming more valuable because that's what those facilities require. That changes the economics. is a standardized design that can be built over and over with shorter timelines and lower costs.

[00:26:10]>> If you're so France standardized, South Korea standardized, the US largely customized and customization increases cost. Standardization enables learning curves.

[00:26:23]>> Bureaucrats get out of the way. Well, >> I'd soften that slightly. How about if regulations became riskinformed, technology neutral, and efficient? then nuclear has tremendous potential. I don't want no regulation. We just need smarter regulation.

[00:26:39]>> So have cheap, clean energy that'll make the world a better place.

[00:26:44]>> Overall, I felt like um Staceil got the broad picture right. And the real engineering challenge, just like any engineering challenge, is finding the balance. Regulations should focus relentlessly on actual risk, not requiring every future reactor to resemble a lightwater reactor from the 1970s. They need to be safe, efficient, economical, and practical. Nuclear shouldn't get a free pass, but it also shouldn't be held to impossible standards that no other energy source faces. Thanks so much for the recommendation, and thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.