This Is The Case For Investing In Nuclear Power

that either. Yeah, the worst of all worlds, I would say, years of under investment in energy capacity, moving away from nuclear um after Fukushima, increased reliance on Russian gas, which clearly is problematic now, and not actually reducing any of their carbon emissions all at the same time. Yeah, kind of an extraordinarily bad combination. But you mentioned nuclear, and of course Germany has been moving away from it for

some time. But it does feel that even prior to the recent energy price spike, or even prior to this sort of heightened awareness on the German energy situation specifically, there does seem to be a sort of i don't know, rethinking or some sort of turn in people sort of reconsidering how much nuclear has been shut down over the last several years, how little new nuclear has been built, and whether that's been wise. Yeah, it's definitely been an

ongoing debate. But I have to admit this is something I mean, I was aware that nuclear had fallen out of favor, but I cannot remember when that moment actually happened and what exactly the process was. So obviously Fukushima happened in Japan, and there's a lot of concerns around that, but I'm very, very interested in how nuclear sort of lost the public debate. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, me too. And I think obviously, look, you have a handful of

well known either disasters or near near disasters. But it is interesting that at a time when there's so much interest in reducing carbon emissions, you know, so much has been focused on wind, solar, maybe hydropower, very little about how nuclear could be part of the solution, right, And at the same time, we have in recent years really seen some of the weaknesses or the downsides in certain renewables.

So you know, days when there isn't enough wind, we just don't have energy in some parts of the world, Days when there isn't enough sun. We've seen that in places like the UK and also in Texas. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so obviously wind and solar could at times produce incredibly cheap electricity, but it's intermittent and we don't have the battery technology to store it when it's really sunny. As you mentioned, I think it was in

November December. They're all these days in Europe and it was like the wind just was and blowing, and so the energy prices sore because what can you do. And so, whether it's in the US where we've had a number of energy grid blackouts, we saw that in Texas last year, whether it's Europe, or the price of electricity is soaring, a rethink of nuclear. So I'm very excited about our guests. We're going to get the case for nuclear investment today.

I'm super excited about our guests. We're gonna be speaking with Meredith Anglin. She is the author of the book Shorting the Grid, The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid. Absolutely fascinating book basically talking about grid policy. Uh and somehow it's incredibly readable. It's actually a page turner, even though the topic is very dense in our cane. Meredith has a gift for taking what is highly technical and

making it extremely compelling. And she is also a pro nuclear activist in some way and thinks it is the solution to many of our energy questions. Prior to writing the book, she has been for several years a researcher worker in the utility industry on our power problem. So, Meredith, thank you so much for coming out on odd lots, thank you so much for inviting me, and I'm so happy to be talking to you. Into Tracy Meredith, I loved your book. And like I said, and other people

on Twitter said the same thing. That's like, how is a book that is on such a technical topic regulatory policies? Are the grades so readable? And I mean it is a page turner somehow. But why don't you just give us a little bit of your background prior to writing the book. What is your experience within the utility and energy industry. Well, I was always very interested in chemistry.

I became a chemist and it was also interested in geology, and uh, I was working towards my PhD at University Chicago. I do not complete that. I have a master's and I was you know, and so forth. But it was in a in mineral chemistry, and when I began thinking about what you do with mineral chemistry. When I got out of school, I was also interested in geo thermal energy, and so I began researching how could I work in geothermal I learned enough to be actually getting some little

contracts in geo thermal and UH. Then I got a job at a company that wanted to get into geo thermal but was working on nitrogen oxide pollution, which is a really big problem. And so I was working on nitrogen oxide pollution, including UH some patents. UH. Nitrogen oxides are one of the prime ingredients in smog, and so I was working on that. And then I moved over to the Electric Power Research Institute, where I was in

geothermal energy. So I felt I had finally achieved what I had wanted to achieve by being in UH geo thermal energy. But then when I was in the search group that was in renewables, I began to see sort of, I don't know, the dark side of renewables, not so much.

The dark side is the fact that they really weren't up to the the level of a lift that people were claiming they would have, and that when you wanted to put in a renewable people objected, And that astonished me that the people were trying to stop renewable development. How could they do this? But at any rate, um I began working with on some similar corrosion issues with a group that was working in nuclear, and I began to get to know them. Now I didn't have anything.

I wasn't against nuclear, but I wasn't. I wasn't like drawn to it particularly, But then I began working with them, I began to realize its advantages, and I switched over to the nuclear group. Later on, I ran a consulting company about basically about a corrosion control and water chemistry and nuclear plants. And then when I sort of them,

I retired. I began supporting our local nuclear plan, ver monty Yankee, which led me into trying to understand how Vermont Yankee interacted with the people who ruled the grid, and that eventually led to the book shorting the Grid to note it's funny. I actually used to live in Brattleboro, Vermont, a couple of miles away from the Vermont Yankee nuclear Plan, which I remember tons of debate about it at the time, and lots of local activists wanting to shut it down,

and now it did get shut down. But it's fun, you know, I remember this debate very well. Well, can we talk a little bit more about that? So you know, I mentioned this in the intro, the idea of nuclear sort of losing public opinion. How did that happen exactly? And how do the alleged downside stack up against the opportunities or the upsides of nuclear power as you as you learned about them. Well, that is a really difficult question that there are many books about, Like there's a

book called the Rise of Nuclear fear Um. One of the things is that people had it mixed in their minds with nuclear weapons. What I'm trying to say is that there are plenty of states like uh, North Korea with nuclear weapons but no nuclear power plants. And there are plenty of states like United Arab Emirates with nuclear power plants and no nuclear weapons. I mean, they don't go together, as like, if you've got one, then you've

got the other. And the whole idea that someone would steal stuff from a nuclear power plant to make a weapon is so absurd it just I mean, the things that are in nuclear power plants are very big, very radioactive, and the plants are well guarded, so I mean you would have to drive some kind of a special vehicle. I mean, it's just it's not it's not like an easy thing to imagine. So I don't like to even go into that very much because it's it's it's all

so theoretical. It's just not reasonable. But my mother was very active in in in banned the bomb groups and and but you a sent against nuclear but one power. But when the bomb actually got banned, I think some of those groups just my morphs gone over like, oh well, well, let's go after the nuclear plants. Now. It wasn't reason. It was just sort of like, let's do the next step. We were worried about fallout, and now we have these plants,

so we'll go after them. And and and the fact that they're not releasing anything into the environment, we're not gonna worry about that part. They could there's this whole word could. They could. They could if you have a laborate enough scenario, they could. What do you talk about that a little bit further? And actually, of course you know we're talking about Europe the other night, I think it was. I think it was last Thursday, were recording

this March tent, so I think a week ago. One of the scarier headlines that has come out of the Russia invasion of Ukraine. All the headlines are are awful, but there was the concern about this particular nuclear plant. There was a report about a fire, and then everyone was debating how terrible could this be? Could this be a Fukushima or Chernobyl or something like that, And then the people who actually knew what they were talking about said, no,

that's a completely unrealistic scenario. There's not like that at all. But can you give us like the basic reasons, like Okay, why isn't a nuclear power plant as sort of major security risk if it could catch fire or something like that? Like why did the people who seem to understand nuclear the most they did not seem particularly worried about that risk in that situation. Well, it's a standard kind of uh plant. It's a light water reactor. It's not like

the Chernobyl plants. The Chernobyl plants, every every nuclear plant has to have a way to slow down the neutrons, and that's called the moderator, and in American plants that's that's water, and in the Russian plant it was graphied. So when the Russian plant began overheating, the graphite began burning. Uh it was just an incredible mess. That's your noble one.

But the ones that are operating now in Russia, they're practically like the American plants there, they're like pressurized water reactors. There's uh three levels of water safety between them and uh any released to the environment. What I'm trying to say is you have the pressurized water that surrounds the reactor core. Then that water goes into loops within a steam generator. That steam generator makes steam which turns the turbine. But it and then it doesn't it is it isn't

the same water that went through the reactor core. It's, as a matter of fact, incredibly pure water. Very no expense is spare to make that water incredibly pure, and the reason is that you don't want it to pass sitting things on these high speed turbans. And then as it comes out of the turbans, it's cooled by a tertiary loop, which actually is a water that goes through a cooling tower or something which is out in the environment, but at that point it's like three three steps away

from from the reactor. So uh, people kept imagining all these scenarios which which are unreasonable of the reactor uh having some huge problem that causes this vast release, which actually did happen at Chernobyl, but that was because it was a completely different plant. Another thing I have to say is Chernobyl did not have a containment structure around it,

so anything that was released was immediately released. These plants have containment structures around the reactor steam generator, uh area that can be hit by like missiles. I mean really they run. Uh they they're so strong that can be hit by trains, uh, missiles. I don't know how big a missile I suppose if it was, but but you know that they're they're testing in the Midwestern ones are tested with U utility poles flung against them as if

there was a tornado. I mean, so the whole idea that these things are just on the verge or something horrible happening is really not reasonable. And it is. But as I say, I think that the people were like, oh, we banned the bomb, let's ban the other nuclear stuff. It's all horrible aside from safety, Were there any other constraints or are there any other constraints on building out nuclear capacity, because I mean, if there's one thing I learned from some city, it's that nuclear power plants are

extremely expensive compared to all other forms of power. But obviously that's that might be out of date. But you know, are there financial constraints or policy constraints that impact investment in nuclear power? Well, there are finding at this point nuclear plants are more expensive and slower to build than other types of plants, and they're usually compared with um combined psycho plants of natural gas plants because very few people are building coal plants anymore, except, of course, in

many places in the world, but not in America. Uh, people are building coal plants in China and in India, but they're not building them in America. So we compare our nuclear plants to natural gas plants, and they're much more expensive. However, nuclear fuel tends to be a lot less expensive and a lot more reliable than the fuel for the natural gas plants. And people do a comparison

with a wind turbine. Whatever wind turbines aren't even supposed to last more than twenty five years, and nuclear plants can last sixty years, uh, eighty years, whatever, how often do you have to build? It becomes a question with with with many of the types of plants. So can you actually do the math a little bit more for us, like what are the you know a region is thinking about investing a like how much how long did would it take to build a nuclear plant versus a uh

something that's powered more by natural gas? And another important thing you talk about in your book is that a nuclear plant holds the fuel on site, whereas natural gas is real time. It doesn't store the gas on site, It needs it just in time, and so if there's any sort of pipeline disruption, the natural gas plant is useless. But talk about the upfront costs of the two, and then like how it plays is out over time in

your views such that the nuclear is the better investment. Well, you know this isn't my major area of expertise about investing in nuclear I'm sorry to say that. I will say that nuclear plants have had a tendency to be um estimated at five billion and come in at ten billion. But and meanwhile, natural gas plants are estimated at five hundred thousand and come in and a million and a half or something. No, not a million and a half. Excuse me, five d a billion and a half. Really

I would so. Um. But the thing is that with the natural gas plant, you have to have a fuel supplied all the time. It just keeps coming in over the pipeline and sometimes, uh, that's okay, and sometimes it's not okay. Like right in the winter in the Northeast, we actually are dependent on l G deliveries just like we were Singapore or something to get enough natural gas into all pipelines for winter use, and nuclear stores about

eighteen months of fuel on site. So uh, some disruption in the price of fuel or anything like that, you've got a lot of time to try and figure out what to do about it. Well, with natural gas, they say it's now X price. You're paying it. That's it. You're either paying it and refusing to accept it, whichever

is that. The main difference that you see between nuclear power and renewables, it's the I guess, the reliability of power generation and the idea that you can build up you know, eighteen months of capacity as you put it, and not really have to worry about it, versus if you have something like wind or solar, it's much more unpredictable.

Oh yeah, that's very important. Now. One of the things is, uh, grid reliability is dismissed by people who are in favor of you know, like, oh, we'll get to a hundred percent renewables, we'll figure out how to make them reliable. It won't take that much. Uh. But when you get right down to it, what most people wanted and grid is reliability. They want the lights to go on when they turn on the lights. They want the water treatment

plan to keep operating. They want, uh, you know, all the things that the grid gives us uh to keep happening. And if they're interrupted a lot, this is very very bad. And and so what happens is that nuclear plants, um let me give you an example. The thing is, it's very hard to talk about natural gas in terms of size because it's a gas. Nobody thinks of it in terms of size. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pair Vermont Yankee nuclear plant with Merrimac Station,

which is not far away. It's down in New Hampshire. Meyri Max stations, a coal plant is four hundred megawatts, and Vermont Yankee was a nuclear plant at six hundred megawats. So Vermont Yankee would have a semi pull up every eighteen months with a new load of fuel. Okay, one semi, maybe they took two sometimes I don't know, with a

new load of fuel. I've often thought that since there were several hundred people working at the plant, they probably had more deliveries of paper products of various kinds, from from from than than fuel. Meanwhile, over at Merrimac station, you have four hundred megawatts. I did the calculation several times over to try and figure it out. Uh. They told me at the station that it was forty one ton ray Hopper cars of cold per day. I went through a whole calculation on the probable heat rate and

came up with thirty nine Hopper cars per day. So you see, the thing is they they are taking delivery of a lot of coal every day to run that station. And of course, when you're delivering a lot of things that it's uh, it's can be interrupted. Now, the thing that I wanted to say is that if you look at a four hundred megawatt UH natural gas plant, it is burning not forty cars of coal, because the H two and the natural gas also burns. Say it's burning

twenty cars of coal a day. It isn't coal, it's carbon, you see. But at least you can have a visual. Then you can have a visual that the natural gas plant is getting twenty cold cars full of carbon delivered to it every day. You see. We can't have that division. Somebody will say, oh, it's got MMC so many million cubic feet. I don't. I can't imagine a million cubic feet of a gas and what happens, and that's beyond me. It's it's much easier to just think if it were coal,

then how much would this be? How much would you see showing up at the plant? And let's look at the carbon for a moment. You get these forty coal plants going to Merrimack station and then they combine with oxygen in the air to make carbon dioxide, which is because it's combined, it's heavier than than the coal was. So if you had to carry the carbon dioxide away in coal cars, you would be using um more than twice as many coal cars to carry it away. So

that's something to think about. I keep trying to figure out how to express because otherwise it's so theoretical. People like, oh, yeah, uh, it comes, We've got a million cubic feet. Nobody goes like, how much does that way? How much space would it take up? It's a gas, right, So I try to put it in terms of if it were coal, if it were visible, if it had to be delivered and taken away in railroad cars, this is what would be like.

That's a really interesting way to think about it. Let's go back to conventional renewables, and the two renewables uh that people have in their mind when they hear renewables are obviously wind and solar, and they inspire a lot of very good feelings. They do not emit carbon when the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing. Electricity is extremely cheap, and I get perhaps the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free. What is uh? And you talk about the but what is like the

basic flaw? Like, what is the argument against just let's keep ramping up wind, Let's keep you know, there's gonna be this big new wind firm off of New York, there's gonna be some win. Why not just continue to place uh turbines and panels on every roof and every UH on every mountain ridge we can find. Okay, let me let me talk about why that isn't a reasonable way of looking at the First thing is it's just

a very simple example. Um. People go to a fancy restaurant, say, and the restaurant says, we run a hundred percent on renewable electricity here. And the people say, oh, this is great. We're not only having a great meal at ten at night, but we are also on renewable electricity. Well, actually, they what the restaurant has done is just hadn't put up a bunch of It may have some some solar panels, but it's not running off the solar panels at ten at night. What it is doing is this fine renewable

energy certificates or it is net metering. That is, it produces more solar two and it sells it to the grid and then it bused fossil from the grid at ten at night. And so people get they get misled there at this restaurant and it's a hundred renewables and they're thinking, well, everybody can do this. If they can do it, we should be able to do it. Okay, So that's the simple misleading thing. The more formal statement would have to be that renewables add to the overall

system costs of the grid. For one thing, Uh, you have to back have something to back them up, now you know. I, I really I don't think batteries are ever going to do it. But that's a whole another talk. Uh, and and and so forth. But whether you decide it's batteries or its or it's gas fire plants, or it's a pump storage device, okay, something has to be available when the um when the renewables are not available, and so that means that you have to have redundancy on

the grid. And that redundancy doesn't go into the cost of when the wind turbine is actually making wind, it goes into the sort of the overhead cost of the whole grid. So what happens is that people don't understand that.

They say, well, the wind turbines are really cheap, rights, and as long as you've got an equal amount of installed capacity that you can actually call on, okay, whether it's fossil, whether it's whether it's nuclear, whether it's whether it's a pump storage whether it's a battery, you don't have a reliable grid and and so people don't realize that.

For example, if if the grid was all what I would call traditional plants nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, then a grid will usually try to have reserve capacity of I don't know twenty So for example, if the highest amount of uh killer Watta killer Watson being used at a time is something, then the grid will have installed capacity

of that amount plus. So our grid, for example in New England, it runs about on a nice day, not a fierce day, not a very cold day, very hot day, it's running around fourteen giggle watson peak okay or fifteen well then, but on a very cold day it will

run twenty gig wats. So we have to have twenty three giga watson installed capacity, so that if it's a very cold day or a very hot day and it's running twenty gigawatson, some of the planets go offline, then we still have that three gigga wats to make up for it, you know, So we're all set. But if if those twenty gigawats were wind and solar, we'd have to have another twenty gigawatts of something that we can call on when the wind and solar aren't available, and

so that's an immense cost, the redundancy cost. I have, I guess a hypothetical question, um, but it's related to policy and the decision about who chooses the actual mix of energy in our world. So you know, let's say tomorrow everyone woke up and looked at their Bloomberg terminal and saw that, you know, the oil price was at two hundred dollars per barrel or three dollars per barrel, and gas prices were still spiking, and everyone decided, okay, we wanna change up our energy mix. We want to

do more nuclear for instance. How does that How would that public sentiment actually feed through into additional investment into nuclear power? Because it feels like, you know, I just moved back to New York and I've signed up with Contetisent, Like it certainly feels like I don't have much of a choice in what type of energy is delivered to me, um and who provides it. So I'm just curious, like what actually changes if the world starts accepting nuclear power.

Who actually makes the decision saying okay, we're going to build a power plant here or we're going to add

capacity to existing power plants. Okay, Now, if you are in an area that is not run by auctions, if you're in a traditional vertically integrated area, the state, with permission from for for whatever issues might be coming up, the state decides on its resource mix, and it writes a something called an integrated Resource Plan, which it presents towards Public Utilities Commission, and then UH, if the public utility says, yes, this is the right thing to do,

then things are put in place to do the sighting, to do the permits UH to to raise the money and so forth and so on. Now, the thing is that in the auction areas, which I call r t O areas, which is Regional Transmission Organization UH. And New York is very interesting because it's a state and r t O. So, but let's look at New England instead, because New England is um a mixture of many states run by an r t O UH and and and

so forth. So every state supposedly, if you ask the head of our r T oh, what about the resource mix? He would say, the states decide on the resource mix. We don't have any particular ability to decide on the resource mix. But what it boils down to is in the r t O, it's only the plants that have um low prices uh for the next killer water, our low marginal costs and and and and can't not very high capital costs that actually can get built in an

r t O system. So even if the state puts together an integrated resource plan that says we will we are going to build a nuclear plant here, the nuclear plant builders will say, are you kidding me? Were the way the auctions are set up, will never make a living at this and and and so one of the problems is that and and and this is why I

named my book Sharing the Grid. It was in homage to the Big Short because in the Big Short uh, the mortgages which were not particularly good mortgages, liars mortgages, right, it didn't matter. They still made money. So the value

of the mortgage really didn't didn't affect things. And sure enough, pretty soon because you had all these complicated uh dead obligations and collateralized this and collateral But what I'm trying to say is when you got through all that complexity, then you know the value of the mortgage, it didn't matter. And so in the rt O areas, the value of the power to the grid doesn't matter as much as long as it meets certain criteria for the options. So

it's very, very similar to the situation. As a matter of fact, a power plant, a renewable plant, is the is most likely to actually make money on the grid because it gets uh texts, it gets subsidies and tax credits, and it doesn't have to rely on the auctions. As a matter of fact, some of those plants bid in

saying we'll pay you to take our power. This was where that was a really striking aspect of your book, that there are times in which the wind is you know, the wind is blowing so much of the Sunday is shining that actually, uh, you know, the the renewable generators can actually bid to get their electricity used that negative prices because of the subsidies or the sale of credits. And in fact, your book in general talks about just how insanely complicated electricity auctions are and it's sort of

mind boggling. But you're like, walk through it all, but can you just give the sort of simple reason why in a sort of auction based electricity system, the opposite of vertically vertically integrated UM nuclear, despite its advantages and reliability, is not economical for someone to invest in build it well. One of the things is that the nuclear plant is going to have to compete with plants on the auctions that will be UM bidding in it, like negative one,

Sentich and so forth. So the overall price on the auction will be lowered by those plants, sometimes even all the way to negative And now one of the reasons that the the nuclear plant is also in trouble in this auction system is that in the auction system tends to favor renewables, and that means that if the sun is shining, they may want the nuclear plant to like go offline and make room for the solar. And nuclear

plants are are wonderful. They are not equally flexible. Now you might say, oh see, there's a disadvantage to them, but I'm telling you. Let's say you're taking a car trip and you see a semi. The semi is carrying a lot of goods and it is carrying it. You know, it is efficient. There's one or two drivers and it's carrying all these goods. Is it flexible? Can it pass? You? Can it go up a hill quickly? Can it stop on a dime? No, It's basically designed to be very

efficient at carrying a load forward and so forth. That's what the nuclear plants are designed for. And so UM, if they're being forced off the grid because the wind is blowing or because the the it's very very hard upon them, and they they will tend to have shorter life expectancies because of the changes that they're forced to do. I have another basic question, given that I haven't read the book, but why why you were and I planned to after this conversation, But why was everything set up

in this way? Like why was the system created in which renewable seemed to benefit from the way auctions are actually conducted, UM versus something that would incentivize nuclear. Well, let's look back to why the whole argo system happened. But the thing was that in the vertically integrated systems. Uh. The idea was that if a company invested in a power plant, it would get a rate of return on that investment from the people to whom it's sold the power.

And so that company was a widow as an orphan stock, it wasn't going to have a huge problem. Uh. It was going to get as rate of return now. Um. When when people looked at this, it was clear to some people and this was just an incentive to gold plate the grid. The more the company could invest, the more it got paid, and didn't have a particular interest

in in saving money. So people said, what we have to do is get some kind of market force in here to get that company to understand that saving money is important. And uh so the R T O system, the auctions were supposed to do that, but they didn't. And why didn't they is a very elaborate uh story having to do with the uh you know, the shell gas revolution, Uh, huge overruns on nuclear plants, the romance, if you pardon me saying so the romance if we

can get everything we need from the sun and the wind. Uh, it's kind of bucolic, you know, ideal and uh and and some of the people were I think it was Armory Armor Levins who the quote was that if there was a clean source of power that was readily available, they would destroy things with it. You know. The idea is that lots of energy isn't good. The fact that there's limited energy from renewables that will keep humankind on

the straight and narrow. So this is important to talk about some of the challenges of the vertically integrated price model, where if your return is cost plus x, then that gives you an incentive to just increase the costs, and so there are obvious impulses to find some sort of market mechanism to avoid that. You know, one of the things that I remember, and from about a decade ago, is the pickings plan and uh Tibu and pick ups of course, a well known oil and gas man who

also was very into wind power. And something that you explain a lot is uh the idea of the renewable industries wants more natural gas, and they complement each other very well, and or in theory they do. Can you explain that a little bit further, how renewables and natural gas sort of dovetail with each other from an industrial

business perspective? Oh? Yes, absolutely. One of the things is that renewables go on and off when they want to, and they need something that can that can ramp up and down quickly to to to even out the reliability of the grid. Now there are two things that can ramp up quickly to even out the reliability of the grid. Those two things are natural gas and hydro um coal

plants and nuclear plants can actually load follow. I mean that is, they can go up in the middle of the day and come down at the end of the day. What they can't do is take care of the spikiness of the wind is up, the windows down of the the sun is shining. Whoop. So the front went by, a clouds came by, and in five minutes, five minutes has gone from less of solar to like, why is it so gloomy out there? Uh and and so natural gas is the partner for this. It's the partner that

can that can fill in those gaps. Now, hydro could fill in those gaps too. But let's face it, people are taking out more damns than they're putting in, At least in my area. I can't imagine anywhere in the country someone would say we're going to build another damn the size of a Grand Cooley on this river. Uh and and and not meet an absolute storm of opposition. And in all honest state, back in the day, that

was actually a the Ara clubse slogan Adams not dams. Huh. So, with everything that's going on in the world, what's your gut instinct on whether or not we are going to see a ramping up of investment in nuclear power and of rethink on the desirability of nuclear versus something like solar or wind. I think the chances are very good for that, but I'm not sure that they're good enough

in this country. What I mean by that is in other countries, uh, they will look at the fact that um France doesn't have a single Uh, I don't it might have one, I don't know, a natural gas fire plant. It's a nuclear you know. And uh and and so France isn't particularly concerned with what is happening in the Ukraine, except as a European nature nation that doesn't want to see that amount of suffering. But in terms of like, well they turn off our power, they're not. They're not

worried about that. So other people are going to begin to take energy security eighteen months on site. You can't be turned off by by somebody at the drop of a hat just because he's decided to start a war. I think that people are going to take it more seriously. And now people are already taking it seriously. In other parts of the world, nuclear plant builds have been going on in the Middle East and have been going on in in in China, but in America we we haven't

done that. We just we have just a minute or two left before we have to wrap. But let's say, you know, public opinion were to change on nuclear Let's say just in the US, where what would the policy change have to be to make it happen. Would it be something at the federal government, would be at the state level, like obviously, as you explain, the current R T O auction model does not augur well for nuclear

what would have to change? And then, real quickly, storage is the other big thing, and we haven't touched on it, but people talk about, well, no, no one wants the storage in their backyard, you know, you uh in Vermont probably people don't want the nuclear stored, you know, in in the you know, the Rolling Green Hills or under

the Ganic apple farm. So just real quickly, can you touch on a where the policy impulse would have to change and how to deal with the fact that it's still extremely costly and by and large not desirable to

live near nuclear storage. Okay, basically, um, in terms of policy changes, I think that we have to begin looking at systems costs, because if you look at it inexpensive wind turbine, and you don't look at the fact that a natural gas plant work to pay whatever is an offer for the natural gas has to be available to back it up, then you think that wind turban is

pretty cheap. But if you look at the system cost you will realize that no, it isn't um And then in terms of a storage, oh, I don't know, I I get, I get very uh concerned with people who are so concerned with storage. I mean, the material is being stored is a ceramic, It's not a google like in in the Simpsons' curam And you know it's a

dangerous substance. Okay, well fine, you know as somebody says, well, you know there's enough whatever I've had nuclear plan to kill everybody in the state, and I'm saying, yeah, you know, there's enough stuff under my kitchen sink to kill everybody in the family. The question is, and what I mean is you know, like uh, household household cleaners. But the thing is not is there enough? But isn't well contained? Isn't something likely to leak? And frankly, ceramics is the

least likely to leak. Well, this is a huge, sprawling, fascinating topic. It's already given me like ideas for three or four new episodes that we have to follow on. I definitely suggest people check out your book, Shorting the Grid. Thank you so much for coming out odd lots. Thank you, Tracy. I found that extremely interesting. I do think like it this core thing. Meredith used the word bucolic when describing the allure of solar and wind, and I thought that

was very apt. You could see the appeal. But when you think about the redundancy that has to be built the law, you know, the difficulty of batteries and so forth, Uh, you can see why it's not It's certainly not a silver bullet. Yeah, you mentioned you calic. I was thinking about, like all the responsibility that maybe pop culture has to pare,

you know. Meredith mentioned the Simpsons, and I was also thinking about Back to the Future and like the doctor stealing a bunch of platonium and everyone getting it in their heads in the nineteen eighties, that you know, this is something that can be stolen and terrorists use it and stuff like that. Um, but it is interesting. I mean a I need to read that other book. That Meredith mentioned as well about how nuclear lost the public

policy to date. But it's just and be fascinating to see whether or not the turnaround actually happens given current events, and then be if there is a turnaround in public sentiment, how feasible that actually is given the current structure to implement. Yeah, there's a lot we have to do. So we have to have an episode with someone who is very pro wind and solar and believes it really is the solution.

We absolutely have to do a batteries episode because of both cars, and then also grid level storage is going to be like a huge question to like the further ramping up of renewables. There's a lot more to do. I think this is going to be like our huge theme I think for two and there's like so many different energy questions, uh coming through. But I thought it was very helpful and uh, people really should check out the book. Yeah, alright, well more to come on this subject,

but in the meantime, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there? All right? This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway, and I'm Joe wisntal. You can follow me on two her at The Stalwart. Definitely check out our guest Meredith England. She is at Meredith England. Big thanks to our producers Magnus Hendrickson and

Colin Tipton. Followed the Bloomberg head of podcast Francesca Lead at Francesco Today and check out all of our podcasts in Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.