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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm anika and in this episode i'm joined by amina kara and laura to talk about climate change and offer our points of view on how nuclear energy can potentially help us to deal with this massive crisis that humanity is facing so to start off i want to ask cara why do you care about climate change
ah thanks nika um good question uh i think yeah we were talking about this earlier and i said a really good example but why i care about climate change is that we've seen the future that we could end up with in wall-e and that's not what any of us want um i like being able to go out for a walk amongst the trees um and be able to see some nature and i think overall um we need to protect it because it's kind of what we we owe to the planet um and i really great thing i heard recently was that
someone said planetary health equals people's health which equals economic health so really overall we need to have a healthy planet so we can have a healthy society absolutely and wall-e's and tears it is not watched um amina what about you why do you care about climate change um so i have two little girls um and i would like them to have a green future i would like them like cara to be able to go out into the woods have a walk do some fresh air and have these options and
just keep things going i mean when i'm having a stressful day just being able to go for a walk and breathe in some fresh air it really calms me down and to think that potentially the future generations couldn't have that that's a really sad thing to even imagine and i wouldn't wish that on anybody absolutely it's definitely something granted being able to go out for a walk and breathing cleaner and having that for you know children and our future is saying yeah
coverts completely highlighted that um you know when we've been in lockdown and stuff and everyone's just even to be able to go out and have a walk like it's just been amazing so you know you take things for granted laura what about you um for me it's what i grew up with uh so i was born in the northeast of england in the mid 1980s which was when like the minor strikes and things like that were going on for the coal miners um so i sort of grew up with this backdrop of jobs have been
taken from people and it was related to how we were polluting the planet as well and there's this idea that you can do it better you can have societies that live sustainably um that have jobs that don't have such a big harm on the environment and therefore iskara said is just better for everyone so it's what i'm used to it's uh it's everything i've been taught says that we should try and do something to stop climate change so now we've got some idea of why people care about climate change
what can we do one of the biggest contributors to climate change is the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation electricity is generated from a wide range of sources all with advantages and disadvantages and recently the international energy agency or the iea has been collecting data on electricity used to help us figure out what we're using and what changes we can make for example in 2018 the electricity consumption in the uk was 4.9 megawatt hours per person
now if we can compare this to another country such as pakistan which is uh only 0.6 megawatt hours per person which indicates that there's a huge disparity in how much electricity uh different countries consume so when we're talking about you know having these conversations not only do we need to look at how much electricity we're using but where our electricity comes from so in the uk our electricity typically comes from a mix of renewables nuclear biomass imports and unfortunately a lot
still comes from fossil fuels in the form of gas but there is talk of a green industrial revolution which would diversify the energy mix by expanding renewables and delivering new nuclear power yeah it's something that the international agency is talking about also mentions in their sustainable development scenario however we have to be you know mindful that there's no one solution and nationally and internationally we need a diverse energy mix to meet the net zero targets
now when you dig into the data you can see how electric electricity in the uk is generated on any given day to meet demand and we've recently used this electric insight stockholder uk website to look at the energy mix in the uk um and we chose a couple of days so we looked at the 8th of march well most of the demand was actually met by gas there was 50 percent uh was met by gas and only 13 percent of demand was met by wind if we fast forward however to the 13th of march and these numbers are
pretty much reversed we're getting 19 uh being met by gas and 46 by wind so on the days where wind wasn't blowing natural gas made up for the shortfall and so i want to ask our panelists if we didn't have natural gas to fill in the gap on days that weren't windy what kind of things would you do uh so i guess the most obvious answer if you've got nothing else is just to sit and wait um which i it's i would be really uncomfortable with i like knowing what's happening and if you don't know how long
you're gonna be without electricity for um especially if you're in the north of england like i am where it's dark an awful lot of the day in winter we only get like six or eight hours of daylight uh and i wouldn't have heating because i need a pump that um is running electricity to generate by get water going around my heating system i'd just be sitting in the dark in the cold i think which is fairly miserable to think about yeah it doesn't sound nice what about you all right
um i guess well it depends what was dying if uh they still somehow had the telephone signals going okay i guess i would just sparingly use the battery in my phone like you said i'm just sitting wait and hopefully hopefully it'll be okay so i'd maybe go to and then for example you could go to a neighboring area where they didn't have the same um problems of the power being done so yeah maybe i'd go sit outside somewhere that i was close to working phone cars so how could you take
advantage of that maybe plug my phone into a train station plug the cycle in the wall for example i love how the most important technology is your phone alright that's that no no heating no light but phone is like number one priority for this scenario where we don't have enough electricity to keep um to keep things down and the millennial i can have candle lights for light it's fine but i need my phone for everything else we need to have access to social media and candy crush
like what about you amino i think for me it would have to be coming up with some practical solutions and if i know that this is going to happen get a wood burner in the house i don't know maybe get some some more glass in the house so that you can maximize daylight i don't know you'd have to do some out of the box thinking to be able to accommodate that again i've got little girls so for me it would be a lot of planning how to all their meals and stuff all the microwave meals will have to go
out of the window and as any parent would know that is a huge lifesaver um so yeah a lot of planning would be required layers and yeah all eventualities you'd have to think of and it's um inconvenient let's say today i can imagine eating a lot of cold baked beans yeah living like an undergraduate again i hope you didn't need cold big beans if you're living in an apartment you don't even have gas cookers right so you've got electricity so if you're thinking i mean from a
house point of view at least i've got gas cooker and stuff but like i i know that there will be plenty of people out there who don't have like and stuff so they'll have electricity so for them you're literally taking everything away from them aren't you um all sorts of food aspects and stuff you're taking in a moral way and in an apartment you don't necessarily have that much daylight coming through anyways and uh yeah that's a fair point actually but i guess
i live in an apartment that don't have gas in it but what i do have is it's actually a modern build which is built really really well so it's almost like pacifier standards so i don't i don't use central heating because i don't need to um so actually that's a good consideration that in winter if we were then relying on having no heating sources is there something around like going forward making sure our horses are built slightly better so some aspects of it don't rely so much on energy sources
there's one type of technology that people are considering is like having kind of more centralized heating or cities for example to have like instead of everyone having their own boilers having a kind of centralized heating system across the city and and also this kind of thing about small solutions which you've all been discussing that that kind of stuff does already is occurring around the world in places with kind of shortages of electricity um for example i've seen
like in afghanistan they have like these solar powered um cookers almost so it's not a solar panel so it doesn't have all the high-tech technology related with the solar panel but it's literally like a huge mirror made of loads of tiny mirrors that's curved and concentrates the light from the sun um which you can then yeah basically concentrates the heat and you can use that to cook and heat water and things like that so i think these kinds of small solutions that people are talking about
are really important um but obviously we do need to talk about the bigger scale and about national solutions as well um so we've talked about what we do individually in our own homes if we didn't have access to enough electricity but what do you think we could do on a national level to kind of reduce the amount of fossil fuels we're using and look at other solutions that are cleaner um i guess well the first thing i'll say is i'm just in reference are you talking about
different solutions in different countries there's some really great resources online people are interested in that kind of thing and it's kind of where i first cut my teeth on the kind of more um out of the box thinking with engineering um and so one would be engineers with borders who have always championed massively what they do and another one is practical action um and they both are charities who do lots of work in different countries around the world and who
partner with organizations in different countries attempt to really kind of highlight what great technology there is on a small scale um but then trying to bring that back to a bigger scale i guess one solution is um that maybe is not so great for climate change is the uk is currently um in the process of possibly opening up the first deep coal mine for the first time in about 50 years or something ridiculous like that which might bring us back energy security but there's questions around
whether that's really good for the future of climate change um obviously they'll hang in there shall i i think that mine's a really interesting thing to consider because i think what gets missed a lot in the media it's very separate conversation this but it's actually for um creating steel um which would be useful for making wind turbines um it's not going to be used solely for the purpose of creating electricity um but for some reason the media keeps missing that point and
like jumping on the sort of the climate change agenda and relating coal to electricity generation um but you're right in that we need to find some sort of alternate um mass power source to plug that gap um i guess well partly is plugging that gap that already exists it's also reducing our demand right so we can make things more efficient so it's sort of balancing the supply with demand um question so i actually i didn't realize that that was actually mostly for steel i thought it was for energy
production and i wondered how to get under my radar up until suddenly it was it was there and i was like how is this there and that would be because i'm not aware of the steel industry in any way and so obviously i wasn't hearing these conversations so that reassures me slightly that i didn't just miss something um but also yeah i think definitely back to the passive housing which i just said it's about reducing our demand arguably you know a lot of energy
materials go into building passive house in the first place but you know what to start thinking about the whole life cycle cost um of different things so that's one of the and another solution i could maybe just throw in there is batteries we need better batteries we need to be able to store power so we can rely on things which are intermittent like wind and solar um so that's one part of the solution i know there's some really great things happening in the uk different research around batteries
and you could delve into some of the conspiracies around the policy stopping that and why they don't get so much funding if you really wanted to um but i don't know that much detail to really say it today but there is some interesting technology for sure coming from that yeah it sounds like there are a lot of developments coming out of quite different sectors i mean one of the big things is um smart meters for figuring out what the peaks and troughs are in demand
which could help with generating like smart grids that can adapt like balance the load somehow depending on what demand actually is which i think sounds really ambitious yeah so i i have um smart meters i've always been not known so much about if it's interesting you bring that up because there's always this thing i work a little bit i look with some data scientists and it's always like we've been collecting so much data for years and years and doing nothing with it so
that smart meters themselves aren't going to change anything we have to take the data and do something with it and once we start doing those clever things that's when we can make the change but back to my flat again my flat is only i think this week one year old construction i have a smart meter that is the first generation then it's all the first generation smart meter that my energy provider can't connect to and they've told me i've got bad reception in my area so even if they
wanted to upgrade to the new one i can't so i now have a smart meter which has been installed and it looks great because they can put it on the perspectives of the flats it doesn't work i have to myself i did i spent a few weeks there going in once a day checking my own meter readings just to see how much energy i was using even though my smart meter was sitting there flashing red next to it because it wasn't connected to anything so there's a barrier's technology
we've got the same issue we've got a brand new spark meter everything's all there but no guess what when we need a reading we have to get into kite nook and crannies to be able to get a reading and to be able to give it to them yeah so it's an interesting point that for years people have been collecting data and not doing much with it because the uk government or decades ago was like we will invest in new nuclear builds we will have these new power stations and not a lot seems to have happened
i mean obviously like hinckley point c seems to get in the news a lot for various reasons it's important to um realize that although these things are really great and stuff like nuclear energy is like a solid sustainable source of energy and but the current sort of mechanism that we've got to um build the nuclear sites they have a lot of red tape that they need to get through and there's a lot of um stuff which is built into it which makes it a very lengthy lengthy process um and whether
that's actually practical or not is another discussion i think for for the uk but then sms can come into it um so small modular reactors and and this is basically we they are making nuclear reactors but on a smaller scale and the concept is to make more smaller smrs throughout the country and which will produce less electricity but they will require less upfront cost because for a regular nuclear build you uh for a regular nuclear plant you will need a really big investment whereas
these in comparison need a smaller investment produce less energy but they if you have more of them frequently then you could still adapt that state so that would be a really good sustainable source of energy for the uk mix it's not the solution but for the mix it would be quite good like you highlighted that on different days we use different amounts um so wind and gas we use different amounts of energy from both of them and this could just be part of the mix
it could be a solid baseline kind of energy source into the mix yes i think the data on that electric insights website i think it has nucleus sort of like a constant about 14-ish percent contribution to meeting demand it doesn't seem to vary that it does vary it's sort of like when there's um shutdown periods and those kind of things but yeah generally you're right it's sort of stable yeah so it sounds like that's the sort of thing that was like a national program it could be coordinated so it
would continue to supply that sort of that base demand and it'd be topped up with other less reliable sources is that the right phrase but i think yet the small modular route is it kind of addresses the issues with with larger reactors of any kind which they just take so long to build like if we're having this issue today where we need to you know address this we needed to address this about 10 years ago or even further back to ghana so we should have done it even previously so
having technology which is quicker to set up which obviously when things are smaller it's a lot faster to set up the technology and get things um available and up and running and i guess if it's smaller it can also be used and like remote communities as well it doesn't have to be close to um you know large groups of people you can even use it in in you know remote rural areas places like where they were planning to build that um the new coal mine for example which i think is not
too far from you laura no it's it would be just a few miles up the road from my house actually i'd go past it on my sunday run [Music] i think yeah a lot of interesting interesting different concepts and um yeah to kind of tie everything together there's a lot of different solutions that we need to pursue to fill the gap um that we face when when trying to get rid of um fossil fuels um i think the key thing from that is there's no one silver bullet there's no one perfect solution that will
meet all of the requirements of the uk or internationally of the of the world for example we need to have a wide variety of mixes um do people want to comment on why we need to have a variety or kind of reiterate some points that they've made um i guess i'll say the variety is really important because i think what we've discussed here is the technology isn't always the barrier it's the implementation of how people do that um and so to get the policy working in
to get the finance behind it it's going to take lots of different initiatives together and inevitably that's going to mean different approaches to technology not everyone's going to agree to invest in the same thing and to do community-led projects for example all looking at nuclear you know they'll maybe want to do solar instead um so yeah it'll be a variety of people being involved which means a variety of technologies absolutely yeah i think any financial
accountant would say if you're going to invest in something you need to diversify don't just invest in one thing i like that good comparison oh if you're doing some energy accountancy maybe you'd say there are there are advantages to every sort of solution you can't sort of say well you know wind is the the way to go and you know that's the only way you should be everyone should be open to different possibilities and there are good things and bad things with each one um and it's important to
to get the best from each one and to be able to do that you will need a mix yeah that makes sense yeah totally agree absolutely yeah now i think that's been a really interesting conversation and hopefully we've showcased a variety of technologies that we feel could be used uh to address climate change and kind of the important role that nuclear could play especially through small modular reactors i think that was one of the things that that we came up with um yeah
so i hope that's been useful for everyone and i just want to say thank you to amina kara and laura for their insights today that's been really really fantastic the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to
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