When it comes to Up Wing thinking, there's no better litmus test than nuclear power. Setting aside the regulatory barriers we've imposed on ourselves, the United States can tap a source of clean, reliable energy that overcomes the carbon emissions and geopolitical challenges of fossil fuels. Here to make the case for nuclear in this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, is Robert Zubrin.
Robert is a nuclear engineer and the author of the new book, The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future.
In This Episode
Is the case for nukes contingent on climate change? (1:14)
How the Atomic Age ended (6:39)
A 75-percent nuclear America (15:03)
Is a nuclear renaissance coming? (23:00)
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation
Is the case for nukes contingent on climate change?
James Pethokoukis: Were it not for climate concerns, would there still be a case for nukes, or would you be writing The Case for Carbon instead?
Robert Zubrin: No, there still would be a case for nukes. The primary case for nukes is to expand humanity’s energy resources. Regardless of climate change, we have an imperative to make energy more cheap and available. The primary problem in the world today is poverty. We have poverty in America, but in America, the average per capita income is $50,000 a year. Globally, the average is $10,000 a year. And half of the world is below average. So the existence of poverty in the world is quite prevalent. And that stifles people's lives. It kills people — people die of diseases that could easily be cured. They don't get educations. They suffer from malnutrition. They suffer from lack of opportunity. This is the thing that needs to be answered. We need to increase the availability of energy to put the whole world on an American standard of living. Once again, we still even have poverty here. We'd have to increase world energy five times. And fossil fuels cannot support that. So regardless of the issue of climate change or carbon enrichment of the atmosphere, we need more energy.
And secondly, we need the energy to come from freedom, not from possession. It needs to come from the power of creation. A major problem with fossil fuels is it puts a lot of global power in the hands of people who just simply have it by force of possession, not through creativity. It gives wealth to those who take it rather than those who make it. For example the OPEC oil cartel could, as it did in 2008, constrict the world's energy supply below what it needs and send the price of oil up to $150 a barrel and cause a massive worldwide economic dislocation as a result. That's even a potential threat right now. Whereas nuclear power fundamentally comes from mind. That is, it’s the result of technological creativity: turning something that is not a resource into a resource — an incredibly abundant resource. So it moves power where it needs to be, into the hands of the creative, which is to say in the hands of the free.
Let me continue on the theme from that first question: Why isn't it The Case for Solar? I know that solar prices seem to have come way down in recent years. Why not that as the thrust of your book?
The problem is this, that solar energy, and in this I would also add wind as well, are intermittent energy sources. They are not reliable sources of power with which to power an industrial civilization. They are useful boutique energy sources. Wind power has had a major role in the development of human civilization by powering ships. Worldwide commerce was enabled by putting wind to work as a classic example of off-grid power. Solar energy is predominant in space, once again, way off-grid. But if we're talking about the production of energy at scale in a reliable way to power industrial society, they simply do not cut it.
Does solar still not cut it, even if we figure out new ways and better ways of storing that energy? That sounds like it's doable. We just need better batteries or ways of storing that solar energy for when it's cloudy out.
There are a couple of problems there. First of all, the amount of solar energy to power Manhattan would cover most of Long Island — and try buying Long Island to put the solar energy capacity there. And then you have the problem with storage. First of all, the problem with storage on a planned basis, that is just storing for a night, is bad enough. And it basically increases the cost of a solar installation by like a factor of five just to do that. But what if it's cloudy for three days going? What if there's this thing called winter that happens? Which it does. Solar energy can be inadequate for months on end. Having the capacity to deal with that is simply not possible. So, in fact, solar energy power systems have to be 100 percent backed up by reliable sources of power, which to say either fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydroelectric.
How the Atomic Age ended
Why did the Atomic Age end? Do we understand the culprits? Do we understand who the murderer was?
I think I do. First of all, nuclear power in the ‘60s was so much cheaper than fossil fuel power that in the early ‘70s, we were getting orders in the United States for two new nuclear power plants per month. That's how fast it was coming online. And in fact, it caused alarm in the oil interests, who very early on tried to stop [Admiral Hyman] Rickover from introducing the nuclear submarine. Exxon and Atlantic Richfield both gave very large grants to the Sierra Club to go after nuclear power. And in fact, part of their fear was justified because after the oil price went up in ‘73, ’74, nuclear power actually cleaned the lunch of oil-fired electricity in the United States. In 1972, 3 percent of American electricity was nuclear, 20 percent was oil. Now it's 3 percent oil, 20 percent nuclear. Oil, of course, maintained its premier position as transportation fuel. There, it couldn't be dislodged. It has unique advantages in that realm.
But what happened was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was an ideological offensive launched by Malthusians. You may remember two very important books from that period. One was called The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. And another was called The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome. That's ‘68 to ‘72. And then there were many less popular works. But they all said, “Look, we're running out of everything. We have to stop economic growth and population growth.” This was a very powerful ideological offensive, except for you may remember Julian Simon, who was an economist who said the Club of Rome was absolute nonsense. We weren't going to run out of everything, or anything, by the year 2000. But he was regarded by mainstream media as some Neanderthal from the Chamber Commerce. And if you look at the Sierra Club's statement, when they finally came out definitively against nuclear power, which was in 1974, what they said was, “We need to oppose nuclear power because it could encourage unnecessary economic growth.”
And then they went on to say, “We can do this. We can stop them by stopping the establishment of any way for them to dispose of the waste.” And so they targeted nuclear waste disposal as a key weakness of nuclear power. And at that time, there were proposals in the works to just dispose of it by subsea disposal, which is easy to do. And when they got that block, and Jimmy Carter blocked that, they then opted instead for a much more elaborate program of storing the waste under a mountain in Nevada. They then campaigned against that. It baffles the mind how someone who claims to care about health and the environment can say it's better to store nuclear waste in nuclear power plants in the suburbs of major cities than under a mountain in Nevada. And yet they did. When they say there's no solution to nuclear waste disposal, there certainly is a technical solution. And the Nuclear Navy stores nuclear waste in salt domes in New Mexico. They just don't have to put up with any of this stuff. But they managed to stop the commercial nuclear waste from safely disposing of its waste and then say, “Hey, there's no way to dispose of the waste.” And they have collaborators in the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If the FAA was run like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we would have no airplanes. If you have a totally hostile regulatory structure, you can destroy any industry.
Can you think of particular regulations, perhaps, that you think played a key role? Or is it just broader than that?
If I was asked to name one thing that is the big problem and which needs to be corrected if we're going to have a nuclear renaissance, it's the regulatory structure, what was put in place by the Carter administration — which by the way, was in infested massively with members of the US Committee for the Club of Rome. They established this regulatory structure. In the book, The Case for Nukes, I show the flow chart of what you have to do to get a nuclear power plant license in the United States. And it looks like a map of the New York subway system with a million stops and intersections this way and that way. And guess what? Each of those subway stops themselves involves another subway map inside of it. And some of these are really ridiculous. One of the subway stops, just one, is the Environmental Protection Agency, which among many other things demands to know, and have proof to its satisfaction, that the utility should build a nuclear power plant as opposed to a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired plant, or no plant at all. Imagine if you had some land and you wanted to build a log cabin on it. And so you go to the municipal authorities and say, “I want to build a log cabin on this.” And they ask you not just for your plans to show that it's going to be a safe building, but to prove that it shouldn't be a chalet, or a cape cod, or a brick house, or a gas station, or a pet cemetery, or a zoo, or anything else.
And then imagine that you actually do show that to the satisfaction of the authorities involved. But then there's now an opportunity for people who hate you to intervene in court to contest that approval. And now you have to go to court and prove to a judge and a jury that this in fact was the correct decision by the mayor. And if that court approves you, they can then appeal. That's what this is like. [Recently], we had a nuclear power plant go online in Georgia. It took 14 years to build it. Our first nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, took three years to build. That is, the amount of time it takes to build a nuclear power plant has increased by a factor of five. And this is not because they've become more complicated. It's because the legal process become vastly more complicated.
And if you look at the data, as the time it has taken to build a nuclear power plant has increased, the cost has increased as the time squared. And once again, I show this in the book. It actually follows this curve. It's not even just linear, where you have to pay people for longer periods of time, you're paying all these workers to hang around doing nothing, instead of putting things together. You're paying more expensive kinds of people. Lawyers cost a lot more than plumbers, and you're paying for more and more lawyers as this thing drags on and becomes a bigger and bigger and more complex deal. So this is what has stopped nuclear power in the United States. The time to construct nuclear plants should have gone down with experience, not been quintupled.
Currently, and this is a number that's sort of holding steady, we get about 20 percent of our power generation from nuclear. What is the counterfactual? What is the right number? If the ideological war had not happened, and all those nuclear plants, those two nuclear plants a year, that kept happening. What does our energy mix look like today, do you think?
In France today, it is 75 percent nuclear and 10 percent hydroelectric. So it’s only 15 percent fossil fuels. Here you have France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. He put together kind of a labor-industry alliance for growth that included both de Gaulle-ists and even the communists, who had a trade union. This is jobs, this is what we want. And they did it. And it's 75 percent nuclear. Meantime, here's Germany, with this massive green party, as well as green ideology infecting the social democrats and even the Christian democrats and the rest, shutting down their nuclear power plants. Germany's carbon emissions per unit power is five times that of France. Five times. There is the green Germany. And it's even worse than that, because a lot of Germany's power comes from biomass. And you have this romanticism of “We're getting our power from the forest.” Yeah, you're getting your power by killing trees and the animals that live in the trees. So how's that being a friend of nature? The way to be a friend of nature is to get your power from things that aren't involved with the natural biosphere. The person who saved the whales was Rockefeller, by switching us from whale oil to petroleum, because petroleum has much less involvement with the biosphere than the whales do. And you'll have even less involvement with the biosphere if you switch from fossil fuels to nuclear.
A 75-percent nuclear America
How do we get that 20 percent up to 75 percent?
There needs to be, fundamentally, a societal decision. Now, one thing that very oddly works in our favor here, is that the Malthusians have oversold the case on global warming. Global warming is real. World temperatures have gone up one degree centigrade since 1870. And that's true; I don't dispute that for a minute. I dispute the fact that that is a great cause for alarm. But it's true. They have nevertheless managed to alarm people greatly, because they're trying to use global warming as a rationale for rigging up energy prices. Which is basically an extremely regressive tax. (Carbon taxes are just about the most aggressive sales tax you can have, because they don't even tax on the basis of price. They tax on the basis of mass, and a cheap cut of meat involves the same amount of carbon emissions as an expensive one. And a cheap dress involves the same amount of carbon as an expensive dress, even though one might be priced 10 times above the other.) They've oversold this. They actually got a lot of people [saying], “Oh my God, this is an existential problem. We have to stop carbon emissions.” If their primary concern actually is carbon emissions, a lot of them are saying, “Well, then why not nuclear?”
So you actually have, at this point, a significant faction in the Democratic Party, and they have an organization called the Third Way, Cory Booker is a member of this faction, who say we should have nuclear power because there's an existential problem of climate change. They actually believe this. So this is the solution. The hardcore, they hate nuclear power because it would solve a problem they need to have. But these other people actually want to solve the problem. So there's some leverage there. The Biden administration, though, has responded to this faction in only limited ways. They have allocated some money to develop more advanced types of nuclear reactors. That's good.
The nuclear reactors we have now are essentially the same thing that Rickover invented in the 1950s to power the Nautilus and the Shippingport plant. I don't think that that's a fundamental design flaw. Pressurized-water reactors, which is the Rickover reactor, is like 90 percent of all reactors, if you include the mild variations of it that are out there. It's a very good design. It is inherently safe. It cannot have a runaway nuclear reaction because the water that is the coolant is also necessary to sustain the nuclear reactor. And in the book, I explain the physics of that. So it's impossible. And there's been over a thousand pressurized-water reactors on land or sea over the past 60 years, and not a single person has ever been hurt from a radiological release from one of them. But that said, it's possible to have more advanced designs that would be cheaper, that would be more efficient.
I hear a lot about these small modular reactors.
Yeah, that's a good one. The small modular reactors are pressurized-water reactors, but it's a different kind of design where they design them to be built small so they can be built in modules in factories and literally just assembled on site. So it's not really a construction problem, it's more like a “bring a bunch of things to a place and hook them together” kind of project. That offers the chance to make them cheaper, faster to build and also to address markets not just of big cities, but maybe of towns of 100,000, 200,000, this kind of thing all over the world. That's one. There's also greener reactors, which have the capability of getting, you know, 90 percent of the energy out of nuclear fuel instead of 1 percent, which is all a pressurized-water reactor does. Thorium reactors, which [have] cheaper fuel, other things like this. I'm all for these things.
But we can't have that conversation if fundamentally there's this huge division about whether we should do it at all.
Correct. And in fact, if this regulatory structure remains in place, we won't have them because it's going to be even harder to get a new kind of reactor licensed than to get another reactor of a kind that people are very familiar with. There needs to be a fundamental overhaul of the entire regulatory structure. Whether you conduct your business should, number one, be between you and the authorities. Interveners from hostile interests should not be allowed to take part in that process at all. And the regulatory structure itself has to be greatly streamlined and made to operate within the law. By law, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to approve plants within two years of the application. They regularly take five years, and then there's a whole bunch of agencies that take more time. Once again, this argument that nuclear power is too expensive is a fiction. Any industry can be made too expensive if there are regulators making it too expensive.
Is a nuclear renaissance coming?
There seem to be some things coming together which would make one optimistic about the future of nuclear. Are you an optimist or not so much?
I'm fundamentally an optimist. Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” We're getting there. We're exhausting the alternatives. We fell for this bunk about, you don't really need energy, or you can get it from windmills. And that this somehow would be a much better way to do it, or anything of this sort. So this is clearly the best answer. Let me give you an idea of how much energy we're actually talking about here. The nuclear reactors, we get the fuel from uranium ore, which is several percent uranium. But if you aren't interested in just getting it from ore and you're just looking around for the uranium, granite — ordinary granite that you see, buildings are built out of it, mountains are built out of — is two parts per million uranium and eight parts per million thorium. And if you converted that to energy, a block of granite would have a hundred times the energy of an equal mass of oil. So you go through New Hampshire somewhere and you see these huge granite mountains, you're looking at mountains of energy. You're talking about more energy in one of those mountains than all the oil of Saudi Arabia. That's how much energy.
And then if we talk about going the next step, which is to fusion, then one gallon of water has as much energy in fusion as 350 gallons of gasoline. We're talking about completely un-limiting the human future and the waste from it. In other words, the ironic thing about making an issue of nuclear waste is that it's the only energy source in which you actually can dispose of the waste. In other words, the waste from coal-fired power plants would be impossible to sequester it because it's literally millions of times greater in volume for a given amount of energy than nuclear power. We could easily sequester the waste. And of course, with more efficient reactors, we could actually use a lot of that waste. So there's that. It's simply the right answer, and it's being blocked by people who want there to be a limit to resources.
It's a preference of sorts. It's an ideological preference.
It's a problem for people who want to assert that human activities, numbers, and liberties must be fundamentally constrained because there isn't enough to go around.
Let me build off that by asking you a final question, which is you dedicate the book to “the Prometheans.” Who are the Prometheans?
The Prometheans are the problem solvers. There's a lot of history in this book. I talk about how we got to nuclear power, and there's a human story here that goes from Einstein and Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Rickover, and what they had to overcome to make this happen. Now, by the way, we do have a new generation of entrepreneurial people. There's a whole bunch of entrepreneurial startups in both the fission and fusion area right now who are attempting to continue this revolution by introducing even superior types of nuclear reactors. And these people have guts. I mean, it takes a lot of guts to go into the nuclear business right now. You're going to have a fight on your hands. But I think it's the right answer and I think reason carries a stick. And so I think, ultimately, the rational will prevail.
🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #25