This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to. Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policy makers, and performers, to hear their stories, what inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. On March eleventh, two thousand eleven, an earthquake triggered a tsunami that damaged the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan.
It was the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Today, five years after the accident, Greenpeace estimates the nearly one hundred thousand people still haven't returned home. My guest today, Gregory Yasco, was the head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time. Not a job that anyone grows up planning
to be, I think. So when I got there, my first impression was really that there's this tremendous cadre of really dedicated, idealistic safety advocates who just want nothing more than to make sure that nuclear power plants around the country are safe. Are utility react utility reactors? That's right? Which there are how many? Now? Uh, there are about a hundred, down from one oh four one oh four, that's right, And operating right now. There's about and the
four the close um which were Yankee for my Yankee. Uh. There's a plant in Florida, Crystal River, two reactors in California, Santa No Frey, Kawani which is in Wisconsin. And then a number of plants have recently announced that they're going to shut down Pilgrim in Vermont, UH and Fitzpatrick which
is in upstate New York right now. Of the ones that have closed, what's been stated in the press is that they're closing for economic reasons, that the surge of of natural gas and to some degree renewables have really made nuke are very expensive. Correct. Yeah, it's really actually a combination of two things. The plant in Florida and the plants the two reactors in California actually closed because
of safety reasons. The when you think of a nucle power plant usually you think of some big kind of concrete dome that encases all the vital components of the reactor, that the actual reactor engine and all those things. Well, in Florida, that plant they were doing some maintenance and
actually broke. It sounds a small word, but it was a billion dollar or two billion dollar fixed that they needed to do to to to fix this broken containment dome and actually couldn't operate without it because it's a it's a fundamental safe. They were doing maintenance because nucle power plants have really not operated the way they were supposed to. The parts have worn out earlier. And one of the things that has worn out on these reactors
is these large components. They're bigger than a bus, and so they had to replace some of these, and they've done in a lot of reactors throughout the country and actually get them out. They never had doors big enough to get this stuff out because they were never intended
to get them out. So they had to actually cut a hole in this giant containment, this concrete structure which has walls that are ten ft thick or many many feet thick, and when they cut this hole, they wound up creating this crack that went essentially around the entire dome. And they just were this possible thing that could happen exactly.
But the thing that you know, in a in a highly technical industry, in an industry that touts itself on on precision, on precision, something that should never have thought exactly uh now, because I don't want to, you know, beat it to death about issues of safety. I mean, certainly in the post nine eleven world, the terrorism threat has been thrown into the wheelbarrow of complaints against you know,
by anti nuclear reactor advocates. But prior to that, it was about obviously storage spent fuel, and with other groups that I worked with, it was about exposure to ambient radiation in that field, and I was wondering when you were there, what were the discussions about healthy levels of exposure to ambient radiation near reactors. You know that that's always a very controversial topic and it's it's very inconclusive.
It's hard to know really that when you're talking about the very low levels of radiation that you get from just ambient exposure to reactor, it's very hard to to say one way or another that that's causing any impacts. And we know from studies that have done to people who survived, say the nuclear weapons that were detonated in Japan, we certainly know that at very high levels radiation is clearly harmful. We know that it kind of middle levels,
we have very strong evidence that it causes harm. And then when we get into this low area, it's just very very hard to pinpoint how this impacts people. And I would have people come into my office. There was one group of families who lived in and I believe it was in Illinois, and there was a clust of children in that community. Uh. This was around Byron or Braidwood, I believe, UM it's a little bit further inland into the state. And it was a family very well meaning,
very knowledgeable, and very very concerned about their children. And I remember talking to them and we talked about this issue, and they believe that part of the reason for this cancer cluster in this community was generally in young children, was that they were exposed to some kind of radiation from the plant. And what I what I told them and what I often tell people, there's a lot of people in a lot of communities who work in nuclear power plants who live near them, and we don't see
elevated cancer us. And they made a very important point to me, and they said, but you know, those are adults. And one of the things that we're learning now more and more is that children respond to radiation in very different ways, so it's not conclusive one way or another. UM. And in the NRC when you were there or to your knowledge your predecessors, did they want to have a conclusion about that or did they try to side stuff? You know, I actually tried to get an answer to that.
The basis for most of what we know about how radiation impacts people and how it essentially causes cancer is from a study that was done in the nineties early nineties, and I actually as chairman, I initiated an update of that study. Who did that study and it was actually done by the National Cancer Institute uh And I actually called the head of the National Cancer in Student. I said, hey, would you like to do this? And he said, no way, I don't want to touch that issue. It's it's too
too difficult, it's too inconclusive. And I said, you know, we we pride ourselves as an agency and being up to date and with the best possible information, So I'd like an update of that study. And eventually we we did some work and we got the National Academy of Sciences to do a study um and so they started.
We got a lot of pressure. The industry was very unhappy about it because they were worried it was going to show something and they were worried it might show something, and in their mind it would it would be a false positive, but nonetheless it would show something that they'd have to respond to and deal with. And in my mind, it was about finding out information. Unfortunately, actually, just about a year or so ago, UM, the NRC decided to
cut that effort to update that study. And why, you know, they cited the usual concerns about time resources, which is the one thing I learned working in Washington is that whenever somebody cites resources as the reason to not do something, it's usually another reason. What do you think the real
reason was? You know, I think it just comes down to the fact that it's a very very difficult study to do, and the industry continued to pressure them to the point where they convinced them that it wasn't it wasn't going to gain them any useful information. And I think that's wrong. Even no information or no results, so to speak, a result that says everything's fine would have been useful. I just wanted, as a little primmer for people to say, and you and you chime in, or
I'll stop for you to give your assessment. And this is a very kind of a children's book version of this even that nuclear power was developed as a weapons system, some people turned around and said, wow, why don't we run some pipes and boil some water here because we have the superheated capacity and there's really no business to be had and making just a couple of reactors here and there to build bomb material. Uh, we're going to have a source of energy. And you know the famous
quote too cheap to meter. They said, well, the commercial industry, as you said, all this whole enterprise started with the need to make nuclear weapons. And then essentially people realize, well, we've got to do something else with the technology where everybody across the world is going to build nuclear weapons, so we got to get them kind of focused somewhere else, shift their their mindset a little bit to this commercial
nuclear power. And that took a long time to develop because it was a risky technology and there were no companies yet who were willing to kind of bet their whole business on this risky technology. So you had to have something called the Price Anderson Act. Price Anderson helped
facilitate them exactly. It provided a sense with the government said you know what, if there's an accident, we're going to cover the liability from that act, taxpayers are going to cover the taxpayers essentially and or essentially we won't we won't reimburse anybody for their damages, but you'll be kept whole as a company. And so that once that kind of came out of the risk for that company that other than any other enterprise would have to bear.
Exactly why do you think that they gave the price as an exemption to that industry, You know, because I think there wasn't There was a desire to develop this technology and the government wanted to support it, and because they also wanted to support it internationally. They wanted people to take this technology. You know, you had to get very much a situation where you had to have and the have nots. You had that American companies wanted to
sell this technology abroad. Absolutely, we're developing a business. Exactly. We're not just sitting there saying we want to have to nuclear technology as an example for you. We want to have nuclear technology as an example of a product we can sell. Exactly, it was an American technology at that time, and you look around the world. I wanted to grow a business, exactly. They want to grow a business,
and they wanted to divert away from nuclear weapons. So they did what they needed to do, and Chrice Anderson was a big piece of it. And and then you had this, You had this Atomic Energy Commission, which had this responsibility to build nuclear weapons, to build nuclear power plants, to regulate nuclear power plants, and all of that just became too much. It was just an overload. And then in the in the late or the early seventies, they split it all off, and they split it all apart.
They took away the nuclear weapons work and they just left the NRC to do the regulation. And so it's supposed to just be the place that thanks nothing more than safety. But also at the same time, you know, I was I worked with her in a stern Glass, the father, if you will, of the Baby Tooth Study, which he credits and his allies and supporters credit as helping to leverage the nuclear test band, treating with Kennedy
in the sixties. And what stern Glass basically said was that a daughter element of a nuclear reaction from nuclear bombs and so forth in the atmosphere mimicked calcium in the developing fetus, and so you would take a children's first set of teeth when infant children lost their first
set of teeth. We could take them. And you saw during a certain periods of time when there was a lot of radiation in the air from from bombs, a spike, and when there was the Test Band treaty, it went down, and then when the nuclear reactors were being built in the country, it went up again. And stern Glass said, you know, ambient exposure is higher than the NRC or
the AC wants to admit. Then there was, of course the story that was told that Nixon wanted to have the option in his pocket to bomb Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and as a preventative measure, because he didn't want to be accused of poisoning his own citizenry, he had the a e C raised the allowable exposure to radiation months in advance of the planned bombing. I mean, the federal government has played a lot of games with the American people about exposure to radiation. Is that a
fair statement. Yeah, I mean, I think in the early stages of this industry, nobody really, nobody really understood this technology, and into a large extent, people didn't understand the harmful effects of radiation. I mean, it was really until we dropped the nuclear weapons in Japan that people really understood.
I mean, of course, you can go see the archival footage of people looking and watching nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada Desert, and of course those tests were originally done above ground, and then they realized, well, you know what that's that Eventually they recognize that's causing radiation exposures they I mean, there's the classic community that lives in in uh In, Utah, the so called down winders and who were exposed to radiation from the weapons test because
they would wait until the winds were not blowing towards Las Vegas, but blowing in that direction. Um. So, you know, there were a lot of things that were done. I don't I don't necessarily trying to describe motives to what people were doing and why they did them, but it certainly was a technology that was new and that people didn't fully understand. And in a lot of ways, that's
what makes we understand it pretty much well. And and that's what in a lot of ways makes it so tragic is that we we think we understand it better, but in some ways we don't. Um So, you look at what happened in Japan just five years ago. UM, here was a nuclear power land that was sitting on the coast of Japan and there was a massive earthquake and a tsunami and wiped out basically every safety system and you had an accident that was spewing radiation into
the atmosphere for six months. And do you get updates about the situation there now? I do, UM just periodically. They encouraging, not really, UM, it's it's a it's just a tragedy. It's it's gonna be a mess there for decades to come. And there's really nothing. There's nothing you can do. It's mother nature has kind of taken over. And as much as we like to think of humans we're all powerful and we can control Mother Nature. At
this point, the physics is more powerful. Is going to disperse a lot of radioactivity into the ocean for decades and that's basically what's going to have a slow seeping basis exactly. And there's there's really nothing that can be
done about that. And one of the things that people who were long term members of this debate I said was the Department of Energy very cynically cited these plants where there was as often as possible cross contamination from chemical contamination, so you couldn't figure out who to blame for any kind of cancer cluster or soft tissue anomalies that were there. Oyster Creek had a lot of high rate of cancer. They're higher for childhood cancer. It had
an autism cluster there. There was contamination there from sea bagage and a union carbide, and a woman that was a local advocate there prevailed upon a congressman to give her discretionary funds that were in his budget as a congressman to do some research there. And the moment she obtained the funds, union card bite settles and then on all the documents seal they don't want people to know
what's underground underground there. So you have a lot of cross contamination there, and you have a lot of working class people, people who really really rely on those jobs. And some of the people I work with said that the NRC and the and the Energy Department deliberately cited these plants in places like that. Does that seem true to you? You know, not really, um, I mean, I'm
just in your opinion. What would seem more to to me is that the power company may have chosen to do and and you know, I could see maybe reasons why it may have been an industrial facility because ultimately the sites were chosen by the power companies. The NRC then has to approve the site and and and and didn't work. That was the Yeah, they were chosen. They're chosen by the power companies initially, um, and then again
the NRC approves it and does those things. So would it surprise me if somebody had chosen a site that had contamination that you know, was suited better to an industrial facility, like a nuclear power plant than some something else. Certainly not. I mean that would certainly make sense. And rather than having to clean up you know, what is a what is a potentially messy era, you build an industrial facility over it and you don't have to deal
with that as much. So, UM, you know, I can see where there's maybe some truth to those those legends, in those myths. But responsible, Um, the Innescy's All plant wasn't responsible for the site. I didn't know that. I would have thought that the was controlling the sites themselves
as well. The sites were private, and that's why there was that difficult transition period because you had this technology, which was largely controlled by the government, and then they were saying to the private sector, here, take it and do something with it, make these power plants. And the private sector said, we don't know anything about that, and we don't want to bet our companies. So you know, that's where you got prisonity, you got all these things.
So there was this push to kind of get the private companies to do it and um and that was the early legacy of of the of the industry. What nuclear facility is laying on a piece of land right now the most mimics Fukushima in your mind. We're flooding on a massive scale. If some weather anomaly were to occur. Where's the Fukushima that could potentially happen in the US. It's probably in the Midwest, plants along the Mississippi along there's a handful Iowa. I actually went the summer of Fukshima.
I actually went to one of these plants in Nebraska. What's it called called Fort Calhoun, And I'll never forget this. I went in a privately owned by an energy privately owned by a Nebraska utility, and the site was almost completely inundated with water, with water and you had to walk on an aluminum plank from kind of where your bridge are a long bridge, a long bridge, very long bridge. Because there was so much flooding, and what are they
saying there about it? Well, at the time, you know, the NFC was monitoring it, and the flood levels were not likely to get like another six or seven inches higher, which is where the plant would have really been in very serious trouble. But what happens in the plant when when that happens, what happens, Well, everything the doors are sealed and keep the water, to keep the water out.
Is it water tight? It is water tight up to a certain level, and they have a level at which they're designed to be water tight, and they were about seven I think seven inches below um, the level at which they were no longer water tight. Now seven inches of water spread out over you know, the entire floodplane the I guess around Missouri River is is a lot of water. But nonetheless there was already a tremendous flooding there,
so that was really close. And it actually it just so happened that about a year before some really good folks at the NRC had identified a problem at that plant where they weren't actually watertight to the level that they thought they were, and they identified this and they made them fix it, and thankfully they had, because if not, they would have been much much closer to that kind of breaking point. Is it a densely populated area, I would have mentioned it's not. It was near I believe
it's right outside of Omaha. Um so the plants not that far from a population center. Is there a discussion, I'm assuming there's a discussion. This is while you were in charge. Was there a discussion about what steps need to be taken. I'm assuming you can't raise the building. How do you drop the water level? Yeah? You you you shut down the plant. That's the first thing you do, and I mean they had shut down. You do you dig another floodplain somewhere. You know, there's really nothing Army,
there's nothing they can do. There's nothing you do with the flood with the floodwaters keep rising, they keep rising, exactly. The flooding was larger result of Army core dams, so they control all this. It's actually fascinating. All this water comes from like Montana and Wyoming, all these from the mountains, from the mountains, and all the snow melts, and they
had a massive snowpack that year. And so all this water comes through a series of dams that are controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers, and they have limits on how much water they let go for farming, for industrial use, for agriculture, all these different things, and so they control that to a certain extent. But if there's so much water, they have to let the water go.
And so they were letting water go, and it was bringing the level of this river up, and it was, you know, there they were guaranteed to us that they weren't gonna let open up flood gates enough that it could flood the site more, but nonetheless it was it was a precarious situation. Where are you from Upstate New York, from Albany, you're from all. But what did your father do? He was an industrial engineer, specifically, what kind of worked
he worked? He actually worked. I like to say, my dad's is the history of the depleting manufacturing industry and upstate New York. He started out in textiles um and we lived up in Glen's Falls, which had a big textile industry. He worked there for a while. He worked in factories, he he designed assembly lines and figured out how to move products through factories and u um, so he I got kind of my engineering technical sense from him. Are you many siblings? Are you? How many? One sister?
As she an engineer too, she's a she's a she's a musician. So she's a musical engineer. Someone had to bring some soul. That's right, this dining room table. And then, uh, where did you go into crowd Cornell University? And where'd you go to graduate school? Madison, Wisconsin? And what did you study? Physics? Physics? I was a physicist. And what
did you do when you got out of school? I went, I did a fellowship and which put me in Washington, d c. As a really great fellowship program from something called the Association for the American Association for the Vans from the Science. So it's a big scientific member society and they take about twenty or thirty uh fresh PhDs like myself or senior scientists, and they throw him into an office in Congress and kind of introduce you to the political process. And so that's how kind of how
I got my start working in Washington. How long did you do the fellowship? It was a year and then where did you go? Then I went to work for Harry Read, Nevada Senator. How long were you with him? About four years. How did you working with Read shape your view of politics and how did you employ the perspective when you were working at the NRC. You know, the thing that I learned from him is that the most important aspect of politics, and really what makes politics
work is your word. And you have to be honest with people, and you have to um follow through on your commitments. And the thing that he is masterful at better than anyone I know, is he understands what people mean when they say yes and when they say no. And he knows when he yes means a yes, and yes and means a no, and he knows when a no means a no, no means yes. Coming up Gregory Yazco on what he thinks is the future of nuclear power, also why he resigned as chairman of the US Nuclear
Regulatory Commission before his term was up. Explore the Here's the Thing Archives where I speak with Antonio Jujas, an investigative reporter who continues to cover the effects of the two thousand ten BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. What this industry has done is taken a natural resource and turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot org. This is
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. My guest today is Gregory yasco physicist and former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. How to dispose of nuclear waste has been a problem for scientists since the technology
was first invented. I worked a lot on Yucky Mountain, which is the was the plan nuclear waste repository in Nevada, so the place where they were going to take all the leftover fuel spent fuel to take us through a quick a quick trot through the history of that, I mean spent feel hasn't always been kept on site at the reactors. As we grew more and more reactors, no
one sent it off site. No one. There's a few companies I think in South Carolina where they own a number of plants and they've taken some of their fuel and they put it, say at one plants they consolidated. But essentially, yes, always was on a plan somewhere exactly. Yeah, in pools and containment pools, in pools and in kind
of big concrete silos with water. Uh No, it doesn't always have to be filled with water to make it correct to take away the danger, that's right, it just needs Why are the ones that are kept in water for people who don't know anything about physics, why are they kept in water? It's essentially to cool them off.
So the water acts as a kind of a heat bath, and it takes away the heat from the fuel because it's very physical, it's physically hot temperature from a temperature perspective, Once the nuclear reaction is over, they're still really really hot, so it's like it's like you don't cool off for
like a long time. Exactly. Yeah, it's like your electric stove and they're radioactive and honestly, and so we need to So So when did the conversation begin as to spend fuel having to be stored at an external quote
unquote facility? When did that begin? The first discussions were very academic discussions, probably in the fifties and sixties, but they weren't anything that was a practical solution for anybody knew this stuff had to had to go somewhe they they didn't know where it had to go, but scientists decided that the best place to put it was somewhere in the ground, to bury it in a mountain somewhere
or something like that. It took the industry probably until the mid eighties and the government in the mid eighties to really come up with a solution. So you're talking about kind of the peak of the nuclear power boom, and it's only then that Congress is passing a law that says, okay, we we've got to figure out what to do with this stuff. So a lot of plants were built without any path for that fuel to to
go anywhere. Most plants really were built that way. Most lay people who understand this only when it's written brightest in the headlines yuck a mountainous the as the name that that comes to mind as a facility that was designated in Nevada, uh to store spent fuel. And describe for me the history of that enterprise. Well, that was a very very political process because nobody wants this stuff. And back in the in the seventies, people tried to find a place in in the Midwest and they couldn't.
So Congress stepped in and said, well, we're gonna solve it. We're gonna come up with an objective, fair set of criteria. And was it objective and fair? It started out that way, but as most political things are, they wind up not being how so, because the danger to Nevada residents who've obviously had their exposure from other uh Nevada residents are down winders themselves, correct from for decades of bomb testing
in New Mexico and so forth. And then there were bomb test in Nevadas from Las Vegas, right outside Las Vegas. So so, um, what was the danger to them? How far has Yuck a mountain from Las Vegas. It's about ninety miles from Las Vegas. Not that far, not that far. And what's most important is that the highways that get you, they're all take you through Las Vegas. So all the fuel would have to be essentially transported without a big issue.
There was a fatation exactly, yeah, the transportation and kind of a sense on the nevad AND's part that they had done their part for the country. Mean, there's a lot of radioactive material buried in the Nevada desert from all the nuclear weapons tests that we're done. So so people who so elected officials whether it be Read or others and residents there who are advocates. They basically said, we've done enough. That was that was the viewpoint. Yeah,
and Reed was opposed to. It was opposed to. And we even in spite of reeds opposition, How much money was spent developing yuck A Mountain before they abandoned the project. It was billions of dollars. How how did that happen? Well, essentially, Congress passed the law that said we don't care with Nevada things, and we're going to do it, and they overrode any of Reed's protests or the indigenous protests, and then they started to build this thing. And what essentially
is it. They dug a number of tunnels, they did tests, and then it's now closed. So there's pad locks and gates barring the entriens of dollars with tunnels. Yeah, exactly one tunnel, yeah, one or two tunnels. Yeah. They would have stored the facilita the material in several different you know, kind of containment. Uh said, they would have get out like a cave and opened up the mountain and then
brought the nuclear waste in. Over decades or actually over centuries and then kind of eventually just closed the gate and walked away, shut the door, and not at all. Maybe, but much of the spent fuel produced in the entire United States would be in one facility ninety miles from Were there any other plans you heard? Were there any other proposals you heard for what to do with spent fuel that you were excited by the youth thought were
worth investigating. In a lot of ways, the best alternative is probably to leave it where it is, you know it really, I mean there are some places where you don't want to keep it, you know, the probably Indian Point, which is close to New York City. Um, so some of the fuel you want to move, You want to get it into maybe another location. Um, but you know they're really it's you know, it's like it's it's there there. You're not saying that just as a practical political concern.
I mean, let everybody share in the risk. You think, for for from an engineering standpoint, from a physics standpoint, it's better to leave it there. Yeah, I think it is right now. I mean, we certainly in supporting it is dangerous. Transporting it adds risk, and we just we don't have any place to put it so right now it can end up in containers and putting at the bottom of the ocean doesn't work. You know, I'm not
in favor. You could do it, You could do it would center, Yeah, it would eventually leak, and eventually will I mean all containers you put stuff in the exception, there's there's nothing you can make that's gonna that's essentially forever last for millennia, which is what you need, is what you need. Yeah, that's interesting. So you are working with Read for four years and you're working on yuck A Mountain for four years most of the four years
or the most of the four years. When you leave Read, where do you go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do what I started out as a commissioner. So there's five people that make the decisions for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Um I was one of those five. It was a long, hard fight by Senator Reid to get me on that on that hard because I was viewed. Um I had worked for Senator Read and before that, when I was the fellow I worked for now Senator Ed Markey. Um well,
there you go. That kind of not going to make friends in any industry, certainly too cozy with Ed Markey. I learned a lot from him, and then I went to work for Senator Reid, who is almost the exact opposite personality, but they're both equally effective, just in completely
different ways. And so I kind of went to the NRC with what I kind of called the scarlet and for nuclear because I worked for two of probably the biggest antagonists to the nuclear industry in a way, uh, Senor Read because of his opposition to yuck him outain and now Senator Markey because of his strong advocacy for
nuclear safety. Uh. And so there was a lot of resistance to me joining the nuclear reactor viewed as someone who was not pro industry, and industry obviously exerts a lot of pressure not just on the regulations that are passed by the NRC, but the enforcement of those regulations. And then of course they influence who's on that commission exactly or they try to exert some influence on that.
So what they do they really do so uh, they're very influential in working with senators to giving money to campaigns and and just these are positions that are they are nominated by the President and then confirmed by the Senate, so you have to get the okay of of enough of really a majority parts group of people. Yeah, exactly. And so you were a commissioner at the NARC for
how long? For about four years? And during that time, what was something that struck you as particularly troublesome or dramatic or noteworthy while you're on, Well, we were really dealing then with a lot of still a lot of the legacies of the nine eleven attack and nuclear security now, right, so now the security issue comes popping to the four if you will you and it was two thousand five, so it was still about four years after, so it's royally now by the time you get in there, exactly.
But what struck me is how long it was taking. And you know, a lot of ways I would have thought that, Okay, you know, problems were identified right after eleven, and those problems should have been fixed within a couple of years. But one of the things you see in this industry is that everything takes longer and longer and longer.
And some of that is is just because the industry understands that if you delay things, the public outcry goes down, the interest among members of Congress goes down because they have a shorter attention span than a lot of institutions, and so you know, as time goes on, the impetus and the will to make reforms relaxes. So the longer you can take to do things usually the better off
it will be for for the industry. And so I was surprised by how long this was still going on and how many things were still needing to be done. It was really my first exposure to this idea that you know, the industry is is going to have access and they're going to make argument, and you know they're not unreasonable arguments, but they're not always necessarily, in my view, consistent with where is the industry? Where are they right?
Where we're anti nuclear advocates think they're wrong, Where do you think they're right? I think they are. I'm not sure that they're right, and I'm not sure that they're wrong, but they have a fair point about the cost of what they're doing. And the way I always looked at my jobs, what in terms of the realities of um, you know, if they're gonna if we're gonna require them to modify the plant, it's going to cost a certain
amount of money. That money is going to be charged to the people who buy their electricity, and it's going to raise electricity rates. So that's a legitimate, in my mind, concern on their part because there are companies of a public service Commission issue, though exactly it's never the issue for the NRC, and that was always where I drew the line. While they may make those arguments, that's not really the argument that the NRC is responsible for them
passing on the coast rate pairs and not your issue. Exactly, it's not urg But you know, when you go and testify in front of Congress and a senator complains about how their electricity rates are going to go up and they're hearing from the utility, it's because of the NRC. There's that subtle pressure for the industry is passing on the buck to the NRC and saying that they're because
you're demanding that they do exact safety things. Yea, the average reactor was licensed for what period of forty years initially, and some of them, forgive me an example of someone who's extending that least far beyond forty years. Almost every plant in the country they want what they want another twenty and now they're starting to ask for another twenty beyond that, So to go up to eight, I think
that's too long. Um, I really do. I think you're starting to push the boundaries of equipment and material degradation and just the performance is going to suffer. And we're seeing that. I mean, we know that that that's happening, and that's why you're seeing plants shut down. You know, they say it's because electricity rates are so low because of natural gas and um, but it's really a combination of that, combined with the fact that they have to
make modifications to the plant because they're getting old. So I never think this issue of economics, it's it's never separated from safety. It's always very very closely related to safety, because the reason nuclear power is expensive is because of all the safety systems you need to make it safer. Are there models on the drawing board that are smaller and safer? There there are models that are smaller. I'm not sure that anybody has actually produced a detailed design
that's safer. But when you build them smaller, you start to really run out of a use for them, and it's almost like building. You know, somebody's saying, well, you know, long haul semis um they get much better gas mileage if they were a lot smaller. And they would say the size of a pickup truck, but you can't haul as much cargo with a small pickup truck as you can with a big semi. So four years as a commissioner from two thousand nine, and then what happens? Then
I became chairman. Okay, now did that happen? Uh? So Senator reid Um advocated and lobby the president and Obama is president. That's right, President, that's the only way you're getting in right, Yeah, that's right. Um. Yeah. And then I became a chairman. And and then what did you want to do when you became chairman? Your agenda? Uh? Improved safety? Uh specifically how restores flooding things like in Nebraska?
Addressing those issues? You know. I actually the first thing I did as chairman as I sat down and I took a bunch of staff together in the agency, and I said, tell me what we need to do. What are all the issues that we need to work on and we need to folk they knew, and I came up with actually this really long plan. Who was your predecessor? It was a man named Dale Klein. He was appointed by President Bush pro industry, pro industry, Okay, absolutely, yeah,
And so I was here. I was this um you know, really, if anything, you could characterize me as agnostic about nuclear technology and put in this position now to lead it. Was the youngest chairman in the history the agency. And my first job was to ask everybody what we should do for safety? And I tell you it caused a lot of waves. Um. Why because people didn't want to know the answer. Uh. My colleagues on the commission who
were um Bush appointees, which uh the Republicans? Um, there were essentially two at the time when I started as chairman. Two Republicans typically are five, yeah, but because of the problems, it sometimes gets down to fewer than five. And so when you when you were on the board, yeah, you were one of three. Yes, I was one of four, and then very quickly another left. And so then when I became chairman, Um, the other two were Republicans, the other Bush appointees, and they were not happy with you
being elevated to chairman. I was naive about that, UM, and I knew there was a lot of opposition to me, UM, But I just chalked it up to the It's just the process. It's a game. It's a game. Yeah, there's the back and forth in the tussle and the tug of war and then you know, and if you play rugby, then you shake hands. Yeah, because these guys really didn't want to shake hands with They did so far want to rip your arm off. They haven't yet wanted to
shake my hands. So and they and when I was there, and the first thing then was I had the audacity to kind of come up with a list of things that we needed to focus on. And do you actually wanted to be the chairman of the of the nuclear regulatory I wanted to be. So you had the audacity to try to regulate the nuclear and you had a list of things. And what was the most problematic for them? What was the one that they just couldn't believe? What took your hand that you were a communist? I think
it was tone more than anything. But it was just talking about we knew the list of things they were present. I'll give I'll give you an example of a story. Um. So, one of the first things that happened when I when I started as chairman um the agency had been reviewing the design for a new reactor for a very long time a reactor by Westinghouse. So it tended to be a new design that would be built and in fact
is being built right now. But the staff was having some problems, usual the agency employees, the kind of the nuts and bolts, the workers in the in at the NRC, and they were worried because there was a safety problem they thought with this, with this plant, and they wanted it fixed. So they came and they sat down to my office and they said, you know what, we're we're exasperated. We can't get Westinghouse to listen to us. They won't
make changes. We're at our wits end. We're going to send them a letter that essentially says, if you don't change things, we're don We're not going to review this anymore. We don't think it's safe. I said, great, I'll support you, I'll back you up. Let's do a press release. So we did this. We issued the press release, and then, um, I think it was a week or so or a couple of days later, I was going to a big industry conference, and uh, it was I thought a very
important conference. I gave a speech, talked about a number of safety issues. But I walked in. There's always a reception before that, and I walked into the reception. It was almost like I was Moses and the sea had parted. All the industry people just looked at me and kind of moved away, exactly and um, and then slowly, you know, I would mingle and people would come up to me and talk to me, and because at the end, they're
all just people. But basically what I heard was, you know, we didn't have any problem with if you having the staff send this letter to Westinghouse. We actually thought it was a good idea because you know, some of the folks in the industry, we're thinking Westinghouse wasn't main attention. But what they said was, but why do you have to do a press release? Why do you have to
make it public that there was a problem. And to me, that was just a reflection of the kind of the relationship that had developed where problems were not talked about. It's not an as need to know basically exactly, Yeah, you're one of us. We need to keep this quiet. We're working up between, you know, behind closed doors ourselves. Yeah, exactly, to know that's what people in your position do exactly. And that was what I what I was told I
was flabber gas. Transparency was something that was important to you, very important public having in some knowledge and also a knowledge that you were doing your job exactly. Yeah, And that's what I told him. I said, you know, I have a responsibility to this agency. Why is it okay when we do when we issue you a license to build a plan, do you want a big public ceremony, But when we you know, have a concern of the responsibility. Now, this was how early on in your tenure. This was
very early, within the first couple of months. And then be things unraveled. Is it's safe to say. I think what really started to create the problems was when the
Fukushima nuclear accident happens. But this is yeah, and this is in two thousand eleven, UH and UM there's a major nuclear accident in Japan, and uh I got thrust into responding to this as part of the US government's team, and the NRC became really a big player in in dealing with this accident, and we made a number of decisions about what people should do Americans in particular in Japan and UM, they were a little bit more conservative
decisions than what the Japanese government was saying for their people, and that that created some blowback. The first thing that I said was that Americans need to stay fifty miles away from that reactor. And um, in the United States, we don't tell people to stay fifty miles away from reactors. We tell them in an emergency essentially have to plan to stay about ten miles away. And that's a big problem because you take a plant like Indian Point, which
is about thirty five miles from where we are here. UM, that's well within fifty miles. So that started to create this I can imagine. What was happening was that all my colleagues on the Commission were getting calls from the industry saying, what's he doing? Why is he doing this? And this was not a decision that I that I made with my colleagues on the Commission, was done in
my role and responsibility as chairman. I started getting questions from senators, very pro industry senators, why was I not telling my colleagues on the Commission what I was doing, which I was telling them, And so just spiraled into this this chaos of of confusion and innuendo and their hearings, and there are hearings, there's a congressional hearing. Who who's
the chair of those hearings? Darryl Issa actually chair to hearing UM about my management style at the NBC so which, you know, if you think about all the useful ways that Congress can spend its time trying to understand how the nfrc's managed, doesn't seem to be one of to have a trial and to be person created by Daryl.
When I watched this documentary which shows this hearing, and it actually shows a view from where the congress people looked down to the witnesses, and I was one of the witnesses, and that was the first time I ever saw what I looked like during these hearings, because of course I'm not watching my face, and I'd never gone back to look at a TV broadcast or anything. And I when I saw the documentary for the first time, I was shocked. I realized I didn't have a good
poker face at all. And I was just I was angry, I was confused, I was outraged, offended um the accusations that were being made about me, and and and really the triviality of the whole thing that at the end of it, there were conflicts over policy, and in a way, those were difficult conflicts, but they were conflicts in a way we were supposed to have because these were serious issues and a serious accident and happened. Then they accused
me of um. Probably the worst accusation was that I was abusive to women, which was just so ridiculous that I couldn't even fathom that somebody would say this about me. I mean, to me, it was just farcical. It was hard. I had I had a group of sixteen personal staff that kind of worked directly in my office, and none of them corroborated them, of course, and and half of them were women. But that was the low point. Yeah, that was definitely the low point. Yeah, yeah, But you resigned.
I resigned then that following summer, So this happened around Christmas or in December two thousand eleven, and then I resigned in June of two twelve. Was that hard for you to do? It was very hard for me to do. But did you feel it wasn't the best interests of the organization? Is that why you did it? Yeah? I did it. It It was it was incentive Read's best interests, because he still had an interest, I think, in trying to help make sure that the NRC was doing its job.
And he came to me and suggested that then might be a good time to really step down. And I realized at that point I had done a lot. I had gotten in a set of reforms after the accident, and this is also what generated a lot of the opposition. I was very aggressive in pushing for reforms. We got a group of people at the NRC to do a study of what we needed to fix, and it was in my mind a very very reasonable answer that they came up with, UM, and I pushed to get that
full report implemented. And of course, you know, the industry chopped at a commissioner's chopped at, and everybody kind of tore it apart. UM. But I pushed and we got a lot of that done. And so once once I had done that, you know, there, I felt you would accomplish something. I had felt I had accomplished something. Yeah,
and it was it was time. Now you have a unique vantage point from your job and from your career at the overall picture of energy in this country, and where do you see this country twenty and thirty and fifty years from now in a doable way, not some pie in the skyway. Where do you see us ending up energy? Was what's going to happen to our energy picture. It's going to be more localized, and it's going to
be more renewables. We build really big power plants, and then we build really big transmission lines, and we ship all that power where we need it to homes to businesses. I think what's going to happen over time is that more and more electricity is going to be generated at your home, in your local community. It's it's going to be cheaper, it's more resilient from a security standpoint, it's more resilient against natural hazards. Battery storage will be a
big piece of it. I mean, one of the activity will get better. But one of the things that's really unique, if we don't think about yet, is that, let say everybody starts driving their cars with electric cars. So one of the things you can do, you drive your car
all day, it charges up the battery. You get home, you plug that car, and now you're not necessarily charging the battery from your home, but using the battery as kind of a buffer to back up your electricity at home when maybe you're the sun is not shine anymore, the wind is not blowing anymore, and so you've got this potential, this massive fleet of batteries that's going to be out there. Uh, and you can use that. So I think the systems aren't really there yet, but we're
getting close. And I think with the rapid pace of technological change, we can't even envision yet how we're going to have electricity in the future. I really think that. But I think we're not going to have it the
way we have it now. And the the analogy I always think about as I think about hot water, right, you you could easily have designed our entire water system so that you have big power plants that make hot water and ship that hot water in pipes to your house and you turn on the hot water and the hot water comes out. But that's not the way we did it. The way we did it is we built hot water heaters in the home, so when you turn on the water to get your hot water, it's being
produced locally and uh. And again the key being, we don't have to achieve saturation where every sphere in the country is covered by what they can, they can produce. All you have to do is knockdown consumption. All we have to do is knock down oil consumption, and then what a triumph that would be. We don't have to replace it. We're never gonna be replacing were never. Do
you agree? Yeah? Yeah, I mean if you think about carbon dioxide limits and greenhouse gas limits, we're not talking about getting to zero carbon dioxide emissions, we're talking about reducing by So you don't have to completely replace some of these older technologies. You just have to replace a portion of them. Gregory Yasco is finishing a book on nuclear power and working to create a company to develop offshore wind facilities. This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to here's the thing