Simon Goes Nuclear with nuclear energy influencer Isabelle Boemeke

0:00 This episode is brought to you by True Classic. I wear their t-shirts and have long before they became a sponsor. And it's really cool to see how their company is growing. Before AI, it was cryptocurrency mining. You know, the data centers were using the same amount of electricity as a country in Europe.

0:19 So hot tip here, top tip for all you Gen Z and Gen Alphas. If you truly, truly, truly care about global warming and climate change and saving the environment, take fewer selfies. I'm sure that's going to land really well. I don't think that's going to go very well. How good at branding are you? Think you could brand another energy bar to stand out in a crowded market?

0:42 Or maybe you've got a new energy drink, supplement, or athleisure brand you want us to pay attention to. How about this one? Nuclear power. With events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, it's a heavy task for anyone wanting to change how we think about nuclear energy. Well, Isabel Bembeke is up for the challenge.

1:04 And here's the amazing thing. It's working. I was always open-minded to nuclear electricity. Not a zealot, but open. Thanks to Isabel, I now understand the history of nuclear and how it got such a bad rap. And I have to say, I'm converted. Isabel, along with her social media alter ego, Isodope, has found a very modern way to help us understand the truths of nuclear electricity, how it may be the best solution we've got to tackle climate change, and offer us a reliable source of electricity to power our AI future.

1:39 She's a Brazilian model and fashion influencer who understands branding, social media, and her generation. And with her new book, Rad Future, the untold story of nuclear electricity and how it will save the world, Isabel might just save the world. This is a bit of optimism. I am so curious how a young girl who grows up in Brazil, who, unlike other little girls who dream of being, you know, I don't know, a princess, that you became obsessed with nuclear electricity.

2:26 Where in a young girl's... Where in a young girl's, you know, upbringing, you know, do you discover nuclear plants? I remember being about six years old and just... Are you serious? No, of course not. Oh, okay, all right. My Barbie nuclear power plant? Actually, what I'm about to tell you is probably boring because I did grow up with Gisele Bundchen as the Brazilian icon.

2:55 Right. Supermodel. She was, yes. I mean, I think she was categorized as an Uber model, which goes beyond the supermodel. It's higher than supermodel? It's like a supercar and a hypercar. Yeah, totally. What makes a supermodel an Uber model? I believe the earnings. Oh. I believe at the peak of her career, Giselle was making like $42 million a year.

3:22 And the second top model was making something like $16 million. It was just the gap between her and every other supermodel was gigantic. So I grew up with Giselle. She was also from the same state as I am, which is the southernmost state in Brazil. It's very specific because it doesn't feel like Brazil.

3:44 If I tell you I'm from Brazil, you think of Rio, you think of the beach, the Amazon forest. And this place where I'm from and where Giselle's from is like Texas. Just like a bunch of farmland and cattle and just like people grow corn and just agriculture in general. Okay. A lot of German descendants, the good Germans.

4:06 I always make sure I clarify that. That's true because there were a lot of Nazis who fled to Brazil. Yes. That's true. My last name is German. but I made my dad track down the whole genealogy to make sure I'm like okay we're good it was late 1800s no problems here but what's so weird about the place where I was born and and lived for a long time is there are people there who still don't speak Portuguese they speak they full-on speak German not even German a dead German dialect no kidding yes it's really crazy so during I think it was Wednesdays, all of these German families would go into the city.

4:41 Did you speak German as a kid? No. Okay. But these people would go into the town. They would live in little farms around the town, and they would go into the town to get paid. And all of a sudden, the town would be taken over by people speaking a dead German dialect. When Brazil played Germany in the World Cup, they were cheering for Germany.

5:01 Okay. They were like full-on Brazilians. Anyway. So I did grow up looking up to Giselle, and it wasn't really a dream of mine, but I kind of knew somehow that I was going to end up becoming a model. Don't ask me how. And that did happen. One day I was leaving my high school. I was about 16 years old, and this guy runs towards me, and he's holding a microphone in his hand, and there's a guy with a camera behind him, and he goes, Are you a model?

5:28 And puts the microphone in my face. Of course I wasn't a model. I was a high school student. So I said, no. He said, well, there is a contest here happening tomorrow. You have to go. It's for the biggest modeling agency in Brazil. And I ended up going and ended up placing third in the country. Wow. and that started my my modeling journey so i moved to the united states and began working as a fashion model and there is a whole entire chapter of my life that happened there until one day i randomly came across a tweet by a planetary scientist called carolyn porco where she was talking about molten salt thorium reactors city molten salt thorium molten salt thorium reactors Yes.

6:13 Okay, don't know what that is. I didn't know what that was either, but isn't that a cool name? Good name. Great name. Good name for Star Trek. And I was just curious about it. I was like, wait, what is a molten salt thorium reactor, to your point? But also, it was interesting that this female scientist was speaking positively about nuclear.

6:33 So I did what most people would do in that place. I went on Google, and I typed molten salt thorium reactor. and everything that came up was just way beyond my understanding so i couldn't understand the technology but it was it did something to my brain where every time i talked to somebody who was working in energy or concerned about climate change i would say have you heard of molten salt thorium reactors and they would say no but let me tell you about nuclear and then they would kind of whisper behind closed doors or like, they would just be very weird about it and say, you know, nuclear is way safer than people think.

7:15 We needed to solve climate change, but people absolutely hate it. And that in itself was also so odd and interesting because why would it be the technology that's necessary, that is safe, is hated, right? yeah so again just for many many years that was yeah i mean people people are afraid of nuclear power they're afraid of when they hear the word nuclear yes like unless you're absolutely schooled in it which most of us are not when you hear it you're just like uh you know and then you remember like three mile island or fukushima and then you're like i don't know i don't know it seems dangerous right you're right it has a bad brand it just has so to the point where these scientists are like come here it's like they're they're pushing drugs they come here nuclear it's

8:02 all about nuclear right well they don't say it's all about nuclear but it was it was almost like they were terrified to even admit that it was a solution to climate change okay and i don't know if they were terrified or or if they were just hopeless at that point you know yeah we it's a great technology but it's never gonna happen because people hate it so much so that also stuck with me like why what an interesting thing i brazil turns out to be a very anti-nuclear country i didn't know that growing up i don't have any memories of hearing even people talk about nuclear so i didn't have that perception myself but again just a curiosity this was back in like 2015 2016 and then 2019 happens and i see the fires in australia and the amazon and in

8:52 California as well and I was just depressed about the state of the world like you grew up with climate change right you do you remember worrying about climate change as no I grew up learning about it in school and so on and I was worried but it also it always felt like a future problem you know oh this thing it's happening we're gonna figure it out the adults in the room has have gotten it.

9:24 And I remember when I saw those fires, realizing for the first time that, no, we have not made enough progress in solving this problem. And as a matter of fact, it's getting worse. I just felt completely hopeless about the state of the world. And as I started looking into solutions for climate change, I came across nuclear again.

9:45 and I was like, oh, this is interesting. Let me now dedicate the time to really understand the technology. And I think everybody who has misconceptions about nuclear or who doesn't know anything about it, when they start reading, they come out the other side feeling like they found Jesus or something.

10:08 When did Isodope show up? so i had you became sort of like a self-appointed nuclear evangelist but you did it huh influencer yes sorry influencer they used to be evangelists now they're influencers um uh nuclear influencer and basically sort of max headroom style making this sort of you created a whole persona talking about the benefits and trying to help improve the brand of nuclear, right?

10:40 Yeah, so I came out the other side thinking, oh my god, okay, everything people think they know about nuclear is completely wrong. When you talk about the accidents, people think millions of people died from nuclear accidents. That's absolutely not true. And then every single thing that people have this misconception about is completely wrong.

10:58 And so I was faced with that and I was like, okay, maybe this is the role I can play in helping solve the climate crisis, as absurd as it sounds, is I can translate all of this information that's readily available into something that people want to consume. So I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, okay, I have this like, very odd skill set, which came from modeling, which is like branding and making sure I can sell something, right?

11:25 Influencing. Influencing. Yeah. I have somewhat of a social media platform, not huge, but something. Yes. So how can I now get all of this information that's in my brain into a medium that young people can relate to and are interested in in you know engaging with right so i went on a 10-day fast it's a true story you didn't know about this like a hunger fast yes like a hunger protest not a hunger why why did you do that well this is i didn't know this this is a time when intermittent fasting was the rage you know in health so so if taking one morning off is healthy you figured taking 10 days off is really healthy well i didn't figure there's a lot of research okay there's a lot of research is this one of the is this one of these like cleanses would you like

12:20 you do a week of you know cayenne pepper and honey and hot water no because it's a full-on fast okay and also that has all sorts of connotations and i know that you are like me in that you're allergic to woo i'm pretty yeah by the way completely unrelated but i just learned this i just learned this from survival training i didn't take it but but uh i learned this that we can survive three weeks without food yeah but we can only survive three days without water i didn't know i didn't know that it was three weeks without food but i did know it was three weeks without food but only three days without water that's that is unbelievable isn't that insane by the way some people probably survive way longer without food depending on how much

13:06 how many the point is water is the thing that kills you yeah so like when people go hiking more more hikers die during the day than at night day hikers die because day hikers don't No, no, no, no. Because they don't pack enough supplies. Because night, you're like, oh, we'll have tons of supplies. So what day hikers do is they put tons of energy bars in their bag.

13:25 So they've got plenty of food, but they don't have plenty of water. They only bring a little bit of water. They're like, oh, we're just going for the day. So it's lack of water that kills people, not lack of food. Anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there, a little factoid. Interesting, right? I wasn't going to die.

13:38 So you weren't going to die because you were drinking plenty of water. You were drinking plenty of water for 10 days. Yeah. Drinking plenty of water. They give you breath. They give you, like, breath for electrolytes. and all of that, because even water alone can be dehydrating. So you had some something.

13:51 Some something. I was doing it totally just for health reasons. But if you look into the history of fasting, you know that it's been used historically for spiritual reasons. And protesting. And protesting, which wasn't the case. It wasn't the case at the time. So I come out the other side of it after the 10 days.

14:14 I'm in this cabin in the middle of nowhere, brushing my teeth, and I look into the mirror. I'm like, hmm, what if I become a nuclear energy influencer? Go on. I love this story. Which is like the type of idea that you obviously would have after 10 days without food. So you're in a complete delirium. and that's when you decide I'm going to invent this idea, invent a character and become a nuclear electricity influencer.

14:45 Exactly. So I look, but by the way, I have this idea and I'm doing what you're doing now, which is just like, that's absurd. Right. And then the next thing I did was tell my partner that and he said, that's a great idea, which he also had fasted for 10 days. So I think we're both delirious. Right. and I just started pitching it to people.

15:10 You were one of the people I pitched it to. What did I say? You said that's, you laughed, and then you said that's a really cool idea. I mean, I wouldn't have lied to you. If you had told me, if I thought it was a crappy idea, I would have been like, you should be thinking that. You're extremely honest.

15:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think you would have said that. I would have told you. You'd have told me, but I don't know. I would get on a flight, and somebody sitting next to me would be like, what do you do for a living? and I'd say, I'm a nuclear electricity influencer. And the responses were all, it was never like, oh, cool.

15:44 It was always something like, what? But what about Chernobyl? And they would have all these questions. So what is the answer to Chernobyl? Okay. What about Chernobyl? Let's now go through this. First of all, I want to go back up a little sec. Yeah. Okay? Because when you started writing your book, you came over, we worked together a little bit on it.

16:01 And I learned something from your book that blew my mind. And I find it absolutely fascinating, which is the actual reason why nuclear power has such a bad brand. It's so interesting. Right. Okay. Yeah. Why does nuclear power have such a bad brand? There are several reasons, but the number one reason, and that's the original sin, what I call, is that nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 in Germany.

16:43 Full stop. Stop, exactly. there is nowhere nowhere i mean i guess there are other moments in history but this was one of the moments in history that that discovery just was the worst possible time worst place worst place worst time worst so just i just need to i just need to underscore this so of course human beings are working on better sources of energy more reliable sources of energy since we figured out electricity and energy, right?

17:11 And they figure out nuclear fusion. Fission. Sorry, fission. They figure out nuclear fission, which is nuclear power, in 1938 in Germany. Yes. So, of course, this incredibly powerful thing that they discovered, because it's 1938, a year before we go to war, before Germany goes to war, the immediate reaction is, hey, we can make a weapon out of this thing.

17:37 Well, the immediate reaction was, hey, this discovery is really exciting. Hitler is probably trying to make a bomb with this. So that is literally what kick-started the Manhattan Project. Einstein and a physicist wrote a letter to President Roosevelt at the time and said, hey, the Germans have figured out fission.

17:59 We better get on a path to build a bomb because they're probably trying to do it. So the reason the word nuclear has such a bad reputation, such a bad brand, is not because it's dangerous, it's because its very first iteration was the Manhattan Project nuclear bombs, and it was built in the time of war.

18:18 Had it been discovered in 1946, we wouldn't be having this conversation, and the whole world would probably be nuclear-powered. Totally. I think that's so insanely cool. And it's also fascinating because since the beginning of the 1900s, scientists were already imagining you know, atomic energy, what it would be able to provide for the world, all the technologies it would create.

18:45 And it was almost like a technology that existed in a superposition, if you might say, of incredible potential both for destruction and creation. But at the time, it was just like potential. And then the first use of the technology is weapons. So it kind of becomes firmly cemented. And we have Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the famous mushroom cloud that we see from the Manhattan Project or anybody who saw the movie Oppenheimer.

19:12 Like that is the human race's introduction to nuclear power. Yes. Or nuclear energy in this case. Nuclear. Nuclear. The word experience nuclear. This is the human introduction to nuclear. And then we spend the rest of the Cold War in a nuclear competition, fearing more nuclear war after we've seen from the nuclear bomb.

19:34 So anybody who says, hey, what if we took that exact same thing and made safe electricity out of it? The brand is done. Well, yeah. And the U.S. government in the early 50s really tried to push for nuclear electricity. Yeah. So President Eisenhower gave this famous speech at the UN Assembly General called Atoms for Peace, where he talked about how obviously we had developed these weapons, but it was time to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes only.

20:05 So that's electricity, that's agriculture, medicine, obviously like radiation therapy is also nuclear. That's another word that's got a bad brand, atomic. Right. Right. Yeah, even though it's just related to atoms, but again, it's the bomb. Atom bomb, right. Right. So the Atoms for Peace speech kind of kickstarts, you know, this whole campaign to promote the peaceful uses of nuclear.

20:26 So Eisenhower was the OG nuclear electricity influencer. Yes. I'd say a lot more influential probably, but yes. And what's so fascinating as well is even Walt Disney got involved in this pro-nuclear campaign at the time. So for those who have seen there, he made a whole movie called Our Friend the Atom.

20:47 And in it, he explains how nuclear fission works himself, talks about what we just talked about. You know, we started with the bomb, but there are all these amazing uses of this technology. And he was so obsessed with nuclear and he thought nuclear was the future. And to this day, Disney World in Florida has a license to build and operate a nuclear power plant.

21:08 No kidding. Yes, he wanted to power Disneyland with nuclear. He never was able to fulfill that, but he applied for a license and so on. And the funny thing is, so then we have, okay, so we have, nuclear power exists here and there. We've had a few significant accidents. The three that I mentioned, Three Mile Island, which is when?

21:31 When did that one happen? 79, 1979. So that one happened in 79. We had Chernobyl in 87. And then we had Fukushima in... 2011. 2011. Okay, let's go through them, right? And those are just the big famous ones. Which, by the way, just like to pause there. Yeah. Imagine any other technology that has existed for 70 years.

21:58 Yeah. And all you can point to is three accidents. Well, yes, I hear you. Yes, statistically, that's true. But I think, like many things, they're big, they're significant, and they get a lot of news coverage. Like airplane crashes. Like airplane crashes. So they sometimes feel bigger than they are. So what happened at Three Mile Island?

22:20 So Three Mile Island was the first big incident. It wasn't even an accident. It was an incident. It was the biggest nuclear incident in the United States. People say the biggest and the most catastrophic. And when you say that, you probably imagine, oh my God, people died. Lots of people got sick. But in reality, the plant's safety systems, they kicked in and were doing exactly what they were supposed to do.

22:47 There were some human errors. So people came in and turned off the cooling system that had kicked in. And it caused a partial meltdown of the reactor. they released some radioactive gases into the atmosphere just to relieve the pressure in the reactor. But the release of radiation was not significant at all.

23:12 So all of the science, all of the studies that have been done have concluded that the release of radiation was so small that it didn't cause a single, let alone a single death, a single cancer case. Wow. So nobody died. Nobody got sick from Three Mile Island. I didn't know that. But you know why it was the most catastrophic accident in American history?

23:34 For nuclear, for, go on, yeah. Because we turned away from nuclear electricity because of that accident that didn't kill anybody. So it freaked everybody out. It freaked everybody out. So we're moving in a nuclear, so the brand was getting better, we're moving in a nuclear direction, and then 3 Mile On freaked everybody out.

23:50 Well, the brand was getting better in the 50s and 60s. Thanks to folks like Walt Disney and Eisenhower. Yes, exactly. Then the environmental movement in the early 70s starts getting, you know, they start turning against nuclear, mostly because of the connection to weapons and to military, mostly because they saw nuclear as the big man.

24:11 It was kind of like nuclear is so correlated with military and the government. It actually had nothing to do with environmentalism. It had to do more with like left-wing politics, anti-military kind of thing. It was. Because again, the brand was so closely associated with military usage. Exactly. That they just lumped anything nuclear in with that.

24:29 Yeah, you got that exactly right. And for the first 15 years after the discovery of nuclear fission, only military could operate nuclear reactors. So it was really connected to military. So yes, this sentiment, to your point, wasn't as much about the environment. It was really more just left-wing, we hate the government.

24:47 It was like, this was during, obviously, anti-Vietnam War, anti-establishments. So it's anti-Vietnam, anti-military. It's just, unfortunately, nuclear, again, bad timing nuclear. You're always trying to go to the party at the wrong time, the wrong place. And so you screwed it up in 1938, Germany. And now you have your first accident in the 70s.

25:09 By the way, no. It's post-Vietnam, though. Yes, but. It's post-Vietnam, but I understand. The sentiment is still there. The sentiment, the vibe, right? Like that whole generational vibe. not only was it during this time the accident happened 12 days after the premiere of the china syndrome which is a thriller about a nuclear reactor meltdown oh no featuring jane fonda oh god can you believe it by the way it's like it's like having a major shark attack 10 days after the movie jaws comes yes like no one's getting in the as if that movie didn't freak everybody out enough yes got it exactly so now let's flash forward to chernobyl so then you flash forward to chernobyl so obviously by the way there it's like okay nuclear is too dangerous even though

25:54 nobody died right from this accident politics bad timing with movies hollywood yeah close association with military keep going so then we moved to chernobyl which was a completely different accident this is a completely different reactor design this is a design that didn't have what we call a containment dome, which is a big concrete and steel house that stays over the reactor.

26:18 So in case there is an accident, radiation doesn't go into the environment. It's a safety precaution. It's a safety, yes. It had a bunch of design flaws. And it was also obviously operating in the Soviet Union, which wasn't known for being transparent. Right. And the reactor... Understatement. Yeah, understatement.

26:36 And the reactor operators weren't really informed of the design flaws. I'm going to skip over like a thousand pages of complicated nuclear physics here. But basically, the reactor exploded. And with the explosion, the core also caught on fire. And so it's just releasing radioactivity into the air. Now, after the accident happened, for days, they didn't warn the population.

27:03 So people are drinking contaminated milk. They are eating contaminated food. The way they found out about Chernobyl actually was a nuclear power plant in Sweden picked up higher radioactivity levels in the air. And they're like, that's weird. So they inspected their plant and realized their plant was totally fine.

27:22 So this is how cool nuclear science is. They were able to trace the type of radioactivity that they were detecting and look at the wind patterns. And they traced it all back to the Soviet Union. Wow. So that's how they figured out that Chernobyl had happened. And then Gorbachev had no choice but to come clean.

27:39 Of course. Right. So this was really... I saw the HBO TV show, the miniseries. Chilling. Chilling. Chilling. Did you know this? Here's a quick aside. I don't know if you watched the commentary afterwards. But they said that the filmmakers said that they compressed time frames and they made composites out of some people.

28:00 But otherwise, it's very, very accurate. And they said that when they had competing accounts, they always chose the less dramatic one so as not to be accused of over-dramatizing what happened. Just think about that for a second. You saw the show. It's insane. And they picked the less dramatic if they had competing accounts.

28:18 Anyway. Yes, and? I mean, it's a... And it goes quite deeply into the human... The design flaws. And because it's communist Soviet Union, their desire to lie, hide, fake. Totally. Not tell anybody, not admit anything. Even when it's happening, they're like, no, no, everything's fine here. Nothing to see here.

28:39 Right. Yeah, yeah. And I just told you that Trumat Island was nothing. Right. Okay, this was a hiccup. This was not an accident. Right. Chernobyl was a tragedy. For sure. However, when you ask people, how many people you think died from Chernobyl? They'll tell you millions. Hundreds of thousands. The confirmed number of fatalities is less than 100.

29:04 Period. But what about cancers over the course of years? Exactly. I mean, those are significant. Probably not in the millions. However, just to give you an example. But that's not the nuclear plant per se, right? There was the design flaw because they didn't have the dome, which would have contained a lot of it.

29:20 But also, that was politics, which is they could have evacuated people. Right. They could have evacuated people quickly if they admitted to the, obviously, to the accident. So a lot of that was just mismanagement in general. But again, you know, like, I'm not going to excuse that and say people still got cancer, right?

29:36 And it's still a meltdown. It still happened. Still an explosion. It was a nuclear power plant. Totally. Still an explosion. People died from radiation poisoning, right? However, in the Chernobyl series, one of the most, like, amazing moments is when these three guys go into the basements. Do you remember this?

29:53 they go into the basement of the reactor to open a valve and let some water on a suicide mission yeah except two of them were still alive last year no kidding and one of them died in like 2005 from heart problems totally unrelated to the accident the other thing people don't know is there were four reactors at chernobyl one of them obviously exploded the two other ones ended up closing earlier but one of them kept operating and making electricity until the year 2000 and this is the one that was right next to the one that exploded wow so again yes it was an accident yes it was a tragedy it's so far removed from what people think yeah it was yeah now you asked about the cancers it's very hard obviously to trace down because how are you going to you can't yeah not everybody

30:45 who gets cancer came from not everybody who gets cancer but obviously with radiation exposure you would imagine that the people who are closer to the accident were exposed to more radiation right so you can kind of calculate several studies have looked into it the most credible ones think it would be around 4 000 right deaths from cancers related to chernobyl yeah um there were about 16 000 cases of thyroid cancer thankfully thyroid cancer has a survival rate of like 99 percent right so these people got surgery and so on again these are bad things but you're a tragedy but but then you compare to the normal operation of fossil fuels right which is what we use right now for our energy right even when everything goes right in a fossil fuel plant yeah in the world we have four

31:41 million people dying every single year from air pollution alone caused by by burning fossil fuels right and so we would basically need to have 200 chernobyl's at i'm being very conservative here we would need to have 200 chernobyl's a year for nuclear to be as dangerous as fossil fuels Because nuclear is completely clean.

32:05 The only byproduct, I believe, is steam. Yeah. So when you drive by a nuclear power plant. Aren't you impressed that I even knew that? I am very impressed that you knew that. Yes. How did you know that? I don't remember. Did you read my book? I don't remember that from your book. It's one of the useless facts I've picked up.

32:23 My mother calls me a walking encyclopedia of useless information. I can relate to some of that. But it's always fun conversations. Yeah, exactly. Good for trivial pursuit. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, when you're driving by a nuclear power plant, some of them have the big cooling towers, not all of them. It looks like a smokestack, but it's just steam.

32:39 It looks like a smokestack, but it's just steam. Yes, because that's how nuclear power plants make electricity. It's running a turbine. Right, exactly. Literally... The heat from the nuclear reactor heats water, which drives steam, which moves a turbine, which makes electricity. There you go. Yes, good.

33:00 Very old-fashioned. That's what I was going to say. Basically, all energy production is kind of like that. It's pretty old-fashioned, yeah. So that's the funny thing about energy production, right? It's whatever is making the thing that makes the turbine go, or that heats the water to make the turbine go.

33:12 That's what we're debating. How to heat the water. So with hydropower dams, you have the water just from... The water just moves. ...moves the turbines. And then with wind, obviously, it's the wind moving the turbines. Solar is the only one that's very different. But then with coal, with natural gas, with methane gas and nuclear, it's that you heat up water you create steam that spins a turbine and creates electricity but with coal and methane gas you're literally burning it right you're lighting it on fire and that's the heat that's hitting the water and with nuclear you're tapping into the energy inside the nucleus of atoms and how cool is that it's very it's very science fiction it's very okay so we're going on our little tour of nuclear accidents uh fuji uh uh

34:01 Fukushima. Right. So Fukushima. So Chernobyl, just to like, you know, conclude on Chernobyl. Yes, it was bad. Not as bad as people think. Right. What's also really crazy about Chernobyl is now, obviously, it's like a huge evacuation zone. And because people left, a lot of wildlife came back. So it became this really weird accidental exercise on rewilding.

34:25 It's the only place in the world with three-headed deer. Kidding. Joke. Joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. but really you just have all the species that have just gone back to their you know what was their original right habitat okay so chernobyl happens this is it right this is like nuclear is done it's too dangerous did freak out the world it did freak out the world with reason i was a kid when that happened yeah germany for example i mean yeah germany used to be big into nuclear now they're not they were never huge in terms of the population but after chernobyl they were they were very much done and then obviously fukushima happens right so fukushima was in japan it was a huge earthquake it was like a 9.0 earthquake um and the earthquake itself is not

35:15 what caused the accident some people think oh you you can't put a reactor in an earthquake prone region and that's not true because they're designed to withstand earthquakes just like the buildings in japan are designed to withstand earthquakes some of them yeah but but yes exactly what happened was then the earthquake caused a massive tsunami and it would also not have been a problem if the seawall of the Fukushima plant was a little bit higher but it wasn't and so the tsunami came in and inundated the diesel generators in the basement and so the reactor shut down as it was supposed to but then it was cut off from electricity from the city and then the diesel generators that were supposed to be cooling the reactor down were not working because they got

36:00 flooded and so you had meltdowns and again you know another nuclear accident that just confirmed people's beliefs however the japanese government was much quicker they immediately obviously admitted that it was happening evacuated a bunch of people evacuated 3 000 people if i'm not no way more than that evacuated thousands of people and so there were 2,100 fatalities but it was all caused due to evacuation so it's like people who needed medicine or again this was in an an area that had suffered a major earthquake and tsunami and you're evacuating all of these people but from a safe from a radiation safety perspective again nobody died and nobody got sick from radiation.

36:51 Okay. So here's, you know this better than I do, which is the problem with branding or in this case, misbranding, bad brand, right? Is it's emotional. Yes. And even though, so the associated with, with the nuclear bomb was the introduction to the word nuclear atom or atomic. That's how we're introduced to it, which is bombs and wars and mushroom clouds.

37:16 Then for whatever reasons, you know, well, we know what the reasons, cold war reasons the military holds close hold on that technology we have a couple of accidents which two of them were human error and there was bad politics in both of them or it was associated with politics right uh cold war uh closed communism and the other one was just you know sort of left-wing anti-government sentiment which fuels this negative brand and so we we fear and fears and emotion, nuclear.

37:51 And that word scares the heck out of people, right? Nuclear power scares the heck out of people, that word. And I applaud that you're calling it nuclear electricity. So facts and figures, and we're saying what actually happened, how many people died, and what the safety precautions are, and the technology works, and all of these things.

38:11 And all we can point to are these three accidents since the 70s. It's all irrelevant. There was no mass hysteria about sharks before the movie Jaws. But good luck getting people to go into the ocean who are afraid of sharks by giving them statistics about the fact that, and here's a real statistics, more people die from dog attacks every single year than have ever been killed by sharks since we started measuring shark attacks.

38:35 Right? So, again, facts and figures don't help someone go back into the ocean. So, how do... And by the way, I'll even go so far as to say that even though I know you are concerned about climate change, for people who aren't, get off of it. Because it's a cleaner, more efficient, better form of cheaper energy.

39:04 Right? Is that true? That's the thing. I came to it from a climate concern, as you mentioned. right lots of people don't believe in climate change there's an there's an economic argument to be made here as well not in the united states at the moment okay yes so here's the thing okay so what happens nuclear was economic at one point in the 60s and 70s yeah and then you have changing regulations um you have people turning away you have utilities who once planned on building just to give you an example when through my island happened in 79 yeah before it happened there were 120 reactors ordered after it happened all of the orders were canceled no kidding not only because of it you know nuclear was getting expensive at the time already but that was kind

39:57 of the nail on the coffin the price is high like flat screen tvs were expensive in the first game out kind of thing is that what is that the argument well it's a new technology it's expensive for the short term it was kind of the financing mechanisms for nuclear because it's a big upfront investment at the time it was basically impossible to finance this big project what i'm learning right yeah which is the demands for power in our world right now are so exponentially high not just because we don't turn our lights off which apparently saves very little power i'm learning um but the demands on AI.

40:36 AI and crypto and all these things, but AI in particular, are so power intensive. And we have, plus we have these massive data centers that need cooling and all of this. So the demands, and so what I'm learning is that their private sector, not the energy company, is building their own nuclear reactors to power their own AI technology because it's the only thing they can find that's efficient enough to provide the electricity, to provide the power, to power AI and computing for the future.

41:11 So those people aren't necessarily concerned about the environment at all, but they see nuclear. These are hardcore capitalists who see nuclear as the best solution to power AI. Yeah, so as you pointed out, there was a period of time where we were debating whether we would even grow our energy demand.

41:31 Yeah. Okay. Sounds crazy in hindsight. But there was a period of time where like, have we reached peak energy demand? Yeah. Obviously, as soon as AI came out, we started understanding the amount of electricity that these data centers need. So just to give you an idea, if you ask Google... Go into the cloud, have to be saved somewhere.

42:04 That somewhere is a data center. Right. And that's just, by the way, that was already accounted for, right? But enter AI. And you have these huge data centers that are training on huge sets of data and processing all that data. And then obviously being used by all the people, including myself. And I think anywhere that you go now, you ask everyone who here uses AI.

42:29 Everybody will raise their hand. So we have already adopted this technology. We're not going back. Let's just say that. But if I were to make a Google search without AI and have the same search on an AI app, it would use 10 times more electricity. Wow. Yeah. So it's for now. That ship has sailed. Yeah.

42:52 That ship has sailed. We are increasing our electricity demand. Wow. Now there's an argument that obviously it's going to become more efficient. and da-da-da-da, but we know that we just keep developing technologies that use more electricity. So maybe it'll be eight times or six times, but it's still...

43:05 Six times. That's more efficient, but it's still more. And also, we don't even know. I mean, before AI, it was cryptocurrency mining. Yeah, yeah. You know, we were using... The data centers were using the same amount of electricity as a country in Europe. So hot tip here, top tip, for all you Gen Z and Gen Alphas, if you truly, truly, truly care about global warming and climate change and saving the environment, take fewer selfies.

43:34 I'm sure that's going to land really well. I don't think that's going to go very well. But the funny thing is, it's true. Yes. It is. Yes. It's like people telling us to turn off the faucet when we're washing our hands, you know, like turn it on, turn it off when you're washing your hands. So if you take one selfie, two, instead of 87, per...

43:58 But you gotta make sure you look good. That's the thing. If I give my phone to somebody else and be like, can you take my picture please? It drives me nuts that they hold the shutter button down and I have to go through 56 pictures they all look exactly the same. Why is this a thing? Anyway, but I digress.

44:18 I have a solution for climate change. Hear me out. Yeah, exactly. I've got it all figured out. I invited Ryan Bartlett, the founder of our sponsor, True Classic, to sit down for a conversation. We call this an ad with authenticity. The reason the product works so well is because it's what people can't see is that you have a culture that does the exact same thing without the T-shirt.

44:45 Yeah. The culture is a hard one, as you know. Like to build and ramp up over time and to get just A players that are just crushing it and have the right DNA and buy into the system. And it takes a long time to get it great. It's taken us five years. I mean, early on it was just a bunch of ragtag entrepreneurs throwing stuff together, making things work, and being scrappy.

45:07 But now, when I interview somebody, I'm usually like the last interview. They've already made it by the time they get to me, by the way, because I'm not really part of it anymore. I'm like the last guy. They're like, what a team. This is incredibly impressive. And I'm like, listen, it's not me. Like, they're just great in their own right.

45:24 I'm lucky to have them. They really are fantastic. I mean, I sit in these rooms with these executives, and I'm just like, who am I? I'm just this broke musician from the Midwest, like, sitting amongst these Ivy League killers. Like, how did I end up here? You know, I have a lot of those moments where I'm just, I feel very, like, I don't even deserve to be in this room, honestly.

45:45 These people are so much smarter than me. I'll pay you another compliment. So based on the story of the hiring, right? I know of another company and another famous business owner. I'll leave the name out because people know who this person is. There was a true story. It was either an intern or entry level.

46:01 Somebody very, very junior was applying for a job. And they think they had something like seven or 11 interviews, like a preposterous number of interviews, right? And the final interview was with the CEO, right? and everybody said yes, yes, yes, yes, this kid was amazing, everybody loved this kid. The CEO meets them, the answer is no, kid doesn't get a job.

46:23 What's the point of having all those interviews when one person undermines the authority of everybody in the value chain? It's worth noting that this company was plagued with office politics. Despite what the CEO may say publicly about how great business was and what kind of leader they were or thought they were, I know for a fact that this company was plagued with office politics and office politics are people attempting to assert control Wherever they can because they don't feel like they have any control that's what office politics are and the fact that you have somebody interfering for a job at your company and They get all the way up to you and you view yourself as simply a rubber stamp That you're just trust your team that if your team likes this person

47:06 then you're just happy to meet them and it's proof of how you're leading your company in the culture you've built it's proof okay but here's a point i like to make that a lot of people say that you know we can't rely on technological solutions for climate change that the only true way to solve this problem is to use way less energy and i got mad at that argument because it's always people who grew up in an energy rich society and they don't understand the huge privilege that it is to grow up with air conditioning a laundry machine a dishwasher heating and just in general in a society that has access to large amounts of energy you have better hospitals better roads better infrastructure in general right

47:57 and one of the arguments that i also hate you know one of the reasons why i also hate this argument is that who gets to decide what what's a good use for energy right so some people love like their life is traveling and going to a different country and visiting different cultures so who is going to decide how much energy everybody can use for what?

48:25 Austerity is not the best. But by the way, I know this sounds crazy. This is a serious proposal that a lot of people have as a solution to climate change. And a lot of young people have fallen into that. So I think... Sir, your argument is not necessarily use less, although we could all stand to be a little more efficient.

48:43 But your argument is not to significantly use less to solve the problem, which that ship seems to have sailed anyway. We've known about this forever and we're all idiots and don't do it. right it's like when we're bad at saving money too we're just bad long-term planners and once we adopt the technology it's very hard to have nothing like like if you live in in the developing world and you have less you have to use less because otherwise you'll like you just don't have it but to your point which is you know the wealthy nations uh are the are the guiltiest of wasting the most right um uh but to your point which is instead of austerity have more available that's cheaper, that's efficient, that doesn't do damage to the environment.

49:24 Yes. And so you can actually have your cake and eat it too. You can have all the electricity you want without doing any harm to the environment. Well, that's the thing that I came out with nuclear, is that it's the true definition of progress. When you think about progress in a technological sense, it's you're enabling people's lives, you're making people's lives better, while also reducing the impact on humans and the environment.

49:52 And that is literally what nuclear does. Because it gives you all the electricity without the emissions and uses the least amount of materials out of all energy sources. Of course, because you don't have to mine. Well, you have to mine way less. What do you have to mine? You have to mine the fuel, the uranium fuel.

50:10 Yes. But it's because the energy density of nuclear is so high, it's a million times more dense than fossil fuels. Got it, got it. So a lot less mining. So a lot less mining. A lot less mining. When you build a nuclear power plant, it lasts 80 years. And so you don't have to replace one every so often.

50:30 There's some people that say they could last even longer than that. How long does a coal plant last? Like 60. Okay. Could last, but coal uses a lot more fuel for the fuel. Right. Because one uranium pellet, which is the fuel used in nuclear reactors, roughly the size of a gummy bear, has as much energy as 2,000 pounds of coal.

50:53 Wow. Yes. It's crazy. It doesn't compare. So gummy bear versus a ton. Yes. One gummy bear has enough. This is like science fiction stuff. Yes. One gummy bear. Has as much energy. Has as much energy. One gummy bear of uranium has the same amount of energy as a ton of coal. A ton of coal. Wow. A ton in the literal sense of a ton.

51:15 Right, literally, like the actual ton. Here's another thing that I think people don't realize. It's a military example, unfortunately, but it is what it is, which is the United States' fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines are all powered by nuclear reactors. They do not have guys shoveling coals into a furnace in the bowels of an aircraft carrier, but they do have nuclear reactors that can power these aircraft carriers and submarines.

51:43 And the amazing thing is indefinitely. The only thing that restricts how long a nuclear-powered submarine can stay under the ocean is how much food they can carry. Because you have unlimited electricity, unlimited power, unlimited oxygen, because they make their own oxygen from the water, and unlimited drinking water because they desalinate.

52:03 Right. The point is it's limitless electricity. You don't have to fill up the fuel if it's a diesel-powered submarine. I think people don't realize that the military has been using nuclear-powered engines and propulsion for decades. Decades, without incidents. And has never, ever, ever, ever had an accident.

52:28 Never had an accident. And not only that, to your point, the new submarine designs, they don't need to be refueled for their entire life. They don't need to go anywhere and put more fuel in. To your point. And they don't have to come to the surface to let off exhaust because there is no exhaust. Yes.

52:48 So I just want people to realize that the military has already adopted this for the efficiency, for the extendability, for the, you know, over the course of time, it's way cheaper. And the fact that it's emission free. it's amazing it's it is really incredible so yeah it's already been done right when people say this is not science fiction this is not this is i'm not trying to promote something that oh it's something that's going to come along in five years we already do that in the military france already mostly decarbonized meaning mostly got off fossil fuels for their electricity in the 70s because they went all in on nuclear is france the most nuclear powered nation in the world well Well, not in terms of percentage, just because the United States is much bigger.

53:31 Right. Sorry. In terms of percentage, yes. Per capita. Yeah. So France's electricity is around 70% nuclear. That's amazing. The United States is around 18%. Right. But we do have a lot more reactors, but we also have more energy demand. So we make more physical electricity than... We make more physical electricity, but France is...

53:49 But they're 70% clean. 70% clean. Wow. The electricity. Not all energy, but electricity. And this all happened in the 70s. during the first oil crisis that the french were like we cannot depend on these countries so why aren't we like i applaud you for having isa dope which is your your do you still do her it's a it's a softer version it's a i had way more time during covet that was yeah i used to love your videos they were fun yeah you went all in on production all in i know yes it was very it was just me with a green screen i mean it was a thing yeah but no but you must have had fun on amazon with the costumes that you ordered i don't think i ever saw you wear the same costume twice no yeah i did i had like some props you know like i was good with the with the like the makeup and

54:34 everything i mean it was covid was a lockdown was a thing i didn't get into making sourdough so let's right you didn't go exactly instead of making sourdough you became an influencer the the Is there hope? Definitely. Do you think we'll ever have nuclear reactors at home? Mini nuclear reactors to power our homes?

54:57 Because I've got solar panels on my house. How do they work for you? You know, they get less efficient when they get dirty, which is all the time. So, like, I have to spray them clean every now and then. But I live in California, so we get a lot of sun, which is great. But my electricity bill every three months is, like, $30.

55:15 I pay connection fees. Oh, that's great. So I pay zero. I'm ostensibly zero. I'm basically, I have an electric car that I charge during the day. So I don't even pay for fuel for my car. That's amazing. So yeah, I'm pretty much running on solar. That's awesome. Well, California makes a lot of sense. Mainly because I just wanted to stick it to the man.

55:34 No, I'm serious. You would have been anti-nuclear in the 70s. Because when I bought it, yeah, I got some tax rebates. But the amount of money that I'm saving on electricity bills and the amount of money I have to pay to install it, it's going to take a long time to get that money back. But I love sticking it to the monopoly.

55:51 I just can't help it. When there's a monopoly and I'm just sticking it to the man. But why would you not want that, right? If you can get electricity from the sun that's hitting your roof every day. People go to the gas station and pay for fuel and I charge my car during the day and it costs me zero to run my car.

56:12 Do you have batteries as well? I do. How many? Three. But you're still not fully. Could you be off grid or not? I could be off grid if I allowed my batteries to run all the way down at night. But I don't let them go below, I think, 70%. For longevity? No, no. For emergencies. For emergencies. Because we do have blackouts in California.

56:31 In Southern California. And so if we lose power, I can run my house normally all night until the batteries recharge the next day with the sun. That's really incredible. But if I were allow, if I turn that function off and allow the batteries to drain every night, I could be off the grid. I think that's a perfect example of locally grown energy is what I like to talk about.

56:57 And one of the really stupid things that happened with the whole anti-nuclear movement is that suddenly this idea of 100% renewables came about. And it was like, we have to power the entire world with 100% renewables. And that means solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and batteries, I think. Those are the main ones.

57:16 They don't even like hydro that much. And so in a place like California, it makes a lot of sense to go all out on solar. Because we have sun. Because we have a ton of sun. In a place like Germany, it makes no sense. There's also no hydro potential. Basically, the only thing you could build in Germany is wind and nuclear, but they went anti-nuclear.

57:39 so you asked earlier is there going to be a day where i'm gonna have a tiny reactor in my home depends where it depends where exactly it depends where there might be a day yeah for the united states in general small reactors don't make a lot of sense because we have a big grid that requires a lot of electricity and you can have things like solar and batteries everywhere so i see the united states going more towards the big reactors that can that can feed the grid why are you laughing i'm just i just i just love you nerding out on the stuff oh i am such a we can go 10 layers deeper here i know um but you know right now the whole conversation is about small reactors yeah yeah tiny reactors small reactors here's one thing that a lot of people don't know

58:28 we tried all of those in the 50s in the heyday of nuclear after like around manhattan project these people were experimenting with everything right like molten salt reactors that we started talking you know we started this whole conversation with breeder reactors which is another exotic type of reactor the army had micro reactors powering remote bases that could be carried in a like the back of a truck wow what happened they were all way technically complicated so ended up being too expensive so they couldn't compete with a diesel generator basically so now when i hear people saying oh we're gonna build all of these tiny reactors they've done it they've tried it all well i'm excited and you know hey there could be some major technological advances that

59:19 nobody foresaw however i'm afraid to put all my hopes in that basket because we have tried yeah and we have gotten to a technology that works that works incredibly well so why don't we is it just bad branding or is it the electricity is it the power is it the power companies is it the coal and and is it the coal uh mining lobbies that just don't want to why can't they just reinvest in nuclear well so there was there was a lot of that all of that yeah and all of that caused nuclear projects to go way over budget including over regulation and so it got really expensive and so now the anti-nuclear people say well you know i'm not anti-nuclear but it's It's too expensive.

1:00:03 When they made it expensive in the first place. Do you want to know another thing where government, where private sector lobbying was a stupid decision? I don't remember the exact numbers, but the IRS or the Treasury, sorry. The Treasury had determined that if we, the average lifespan of a dollar bill is one year.

1:00:22 And the average lifespan of a coin is 30 years. And so they determined that if we abandoned dollar bills and went to a dollar coin instead, we would save billions of dollars a year in printing and paper and ink costs, right? Billions, just by going to a dollar coin. But the paper and ink lobby would hear none of it.

1:00:45 And so we still have dollar bills. are you kidding me i'm being deadly serious so when you talk about business getting in the way of progress and saving money we talk about you know all this desire for efficiency and saving money nope it's the paper and ink lobby is the reason we have dollar bills and not dollar coins because the government recommends dollar coins that's baffling yeah it makes me so angry but it but it's the same argument because the american people paying for this people paying for their literally literally so yeah and it's pure waste just by going to and look you look at the rest of the world low denomination like in the uk there's no pound note it's a pound coin they've even started using alternatives they've started using plastic for um for some of their

1:01:29 money because it lasts decades as opposed to a year that is but think about it mind-blowing well think about it if you're running a paper and ink business right and you do printing money you would love to reprint that amount of dollar bills every single year of course it's purely it's so that so you go back it's the same argument that the that lobbying doesn't have the interest of economics right it doesn't forget about the environment it doesn't even have economic interest it has self-interest totally and so i think so so the question i go back to then is i mean i know you're hopeful but you know do you think the brand is better are we less afraid of nuclear electricity now absolutely um it's kind of crazy because when i started posting my videos online five years ago

1:02:18 i had no idea i was like it's all because of isotope it's literally because of ice no but but you know i was like is this gonna do anything i didn't know if it was going to do anything i had no hope i was playing an infinite game yeah you know i was like thank you nice plug nice plug But, you know, I was like, I have to do this.

1:02:37 I have to do this. Otherwise, I'm going to be so depressed with my life. This is what I have to spend my time on. No hopes. Now, five years later, everything has changed. So just to give you a data point, back then, only 49% of Americans were positive towards nuclear or wanted more nuclear. Now it's 61% in five years.

1:03:04 And it's cross-political, right? Yeah. Well, usually conservatives tend to lean more favorably towards nuclear because of the connection to the military. Oh, interesting. And liberals still are anti-nuclear. Because of the connection to the military? Well, yes. The entire history, but also the connection to the military.

1:03:23 I mean, I want to go back to that. To me, it blew my mind. And you, by the way, your work completely converted me. I mean, I was open-minded to nuclear, but now I'm all in because of your work. Oh, deadly serious. because I didn't understand the brand and I'm gonna we started at the beginning of this episode we talked about it and I think to double click it on at the end it blows my mind that we discovered fission nuclear fission the ability to split the atomic an atom to create electricity to create power it was discovered in 1938 Germany and then as you said Einstein sent a letter to the president to Roosevelt and said the Germans have figured this out if you don't figure this out can get on this they're going to make a nuclear bomb before you and thus is born the pursuit of

1:04:09 nuclear power totally it's just and that's why the brand is the brand that's why it's it's the beginning of why right and then planes crash but even by human error and there's there's there's explosions at at coal plants whether it's bad design or or or or human error and people die when there's explosions there heck i live in california the freaking power company is constantly accidentally lighting fires that destroy thousands of homes.

1:04:36 You know, the number of things that are tied back to the power companies because of negligence. And yet we're like, oh, yeah, power company, you know. And the point is, of course, accidents are going to happen, you know, of course. But fundamentally, I'm just blown away how the whole resistance to nuclear has nothing to do with science.

1:04:55 It has everything to do with branding. Totally. And to your point, it started with the bombs and the mushroom clouds and so on. And then you have the first accident, the second accident, and it's just confirming. Confirming the fear. Confirming the fear. They were 10 years apart from each other. Yes, totally.

1:05:14 And then we got to where we are. But the hope that I have is young people do not have that emotional reaction to words. because they didn't grow up with the Cold War, with the drills. People during the Cold War were doing drills. We were afraid of nuclear war. It's called nuclear war. Yes. Nuclear bombs.

1:05:33 The only time, like, as you said, it's bad branding. It's just bad branding. These people would hide under their desks. It's so amazing to me. Isabel, thanks so much for stopping by. Thank you. So much fun. Thanks for having me. That was fun. A Bit of Optimism is brought to you by The Optimism Company and is lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius and Devin Johnson.

1:05:58 If I was able to give you any kind of insight or some inspiration or made you smile, please subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts for more. And if you're trying to get answers to a problem at work or want to advance a dream, maybe I can help. Simply go to simonsenic.com. Until then, take care of yourself.

1:06:18 Take care of each other.