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hi guys this is a podcast called technically speaking we are a bunch of scientists and engineers and we are hoping to talk about scientific topics or topics of interest and have a discussion around them and see how you guys um pick up from that in some sort of way today's topic is is nuclear power um going to contribute to tackle climate change um we have on the line so we have uh laura we have anika and we have cara and myself um amina and we are going to see how this discussion goes
so would you guys like to perhaps maybe give an introduction about yourselves yeah uh i guess i'll go first um so i worked in the nuclear industry on and off for quite a while now about 15 or so years i know quite a lot about nuclear waste and a little bit how nuclear power technology works as well um and generally stuff about the risks associated with the benefits of it and that sort of thing uh anika do you want to go next yeah sure so i'm also a researcher in
nicaragua i work on nuclear fusion and i look at more of the materials and engineering side of things yes i'm cara i'm i am an engineer by training but i've never really worked as an engineer um i've been a bit of a jack of all trades doing interdisciplinary research um and i did my phd with the nuclear decommissioning sector so that's really about the back end of i'm how we're going to clean up things but my focus really is around um the social side of things
and social value around the communities and what nuclear energy does for people awesome right so if we take things uh right to the beginning um shall we go off by how nuclear reactors work and what sort of different technologies are available anika i think that's one for you thanks guys so i work with the most like futuristic nuclear reactors so none of the reactors at the moment that we have available uh for electricity are actually nuclear fusion reactors um so basically any nuclear reactors
producing electricity at the moment are a type of reaction called a fission reaction so they're fission reactors and that is essentially where you split atoms apart uh could be different types of atoms typically um uranium which is which is split and then thanks to good old einstein and his e equals mc squared equation you have a mass difference between the um the atoms that you're splitting uh to start with and then the products that you're left with and that mass
difference is equivalent to to energy so that's basically the energy that's that's liberated from that reaction um in the form of heat which we use to drive turbines etc and produce electricity so that's kind of a very very simple way of explaining how a nuclear reactor works i don't know if anyone wants to add anything that's a very bare bones uh description i know yeah and i came across someone who said that the most basic form of describing how a nuclear reactor works is
imagining it as a giant kettle so basically you heat it up and you produce steam and then the steam turns into the turbines and then that effectively produces energy and then the way that you get the heat and stuff again can obviously be done by fission or fusion fusion who's watching nuclear and anika was talking about so i i have a possibly really ignorant question so i know so little about fusion power but did you say that also drives a turbine right well theoretically if we ever produce a
a power plant that can actually produce electricity controversial topic i know um but yeah so essentially i guess it would work in the same way that yeah you would produce uh generate heat private turbine with steam etc and produce it the same way but i know potentially maybe people are working on more efficient technologies etc or secondary applications is a big hot topic at the moment so not necessarily using um the the energy liberated to provide electricity but maybe for other
purposes um so a big one at the moment is producing hydrogen uh the hydrogen economy is a big buzzword that's floating around at the moment people want to convert from traditional gas to hydrogen um in the in the transition to you know a cleaner cleaner society so that could be a potential secondary application we could use for vision or fusion reactors um another kind of things could be like desalination and stuff like that so using the heat for other things apart from just
electricity is something that we need to think about as well when transitioning to cleaner forms of technology and energy yeah there's talk about using the steam that's generated to sort of like it's district heating isn't there yeah yeah which i think could be a pretty cool use of it so you've got like those cooling loops you'd have like a secondary cooling loop i guess that would somehow interface with a grid of hot water running under the city i guess or town or wherever you are i haven't
heard of that before i guess that's a question sorry this is a bit off topic but uh fish and reactors tend to be in the middle of nowhere in the uk so district heating wouldn't work as well do they imagine that uh fusion reactors will be closer to people i mean i'm not sure actually so there's a bit of a what's the word uh debate maybe i think it debates the word i'm looking for so some people are pursuing this like kind of the larger the reactor the more energy you're gonna
uh liberate and the more electricity you can produce but there's also kind of uh current work looking at smaller reactors uh due to new technology that's being developed they can actually build smaller reactors that in theory could could generate the same amount of electricity as larger ones so they're it's these new high-temperature superconductors that can essentially shrink down the size of your reactor so that could be really interesting in in terms of where fusion reactors could be located
in the future i think so then in terms of just different types of nuclear energy that's also the future of a fission they're kind of sent about small modular reactors um because yeah efficient technologies over the decades have changed quite a lot and the uk has quite a unique setup for what they have um so they do think going forwards they will they do plan to continue building fish and reactors but yeah maybe some of the small modular ones that did you said
and going back to the point that um you guys were saying about um being sort of remote the smrs are still sorry the small modular reactors which are known as smrs and they're still hoping to be quite remote they're still going to be sort of right now the sort of preliminary plumbing that they're doing and the um areas that they're looking at to sort of corner off for smr uh production and they're all still really remote they're they're not sort of coming inwards or anything
yeah i think people are still a bit more scared of fishing than fusions and maybe uh i could i can't imagine distributing working that well for a fishing reactor people are scared of the radioactivity politically speaking we have a rueda as well on the line who i think has a question yes i have a very basic question since uh everybody is so knowledgeable on nuclear energy there's this rumor that nuclear energy is endless so it will keep on if you have a reactor
it will keep on generating electricity forever is that true who would like to take that i can start people can jump in if they yeah um again i might butcher this completely but unfortunately there's no such thing as unlimited energy even though we often use that that phrase especially in fusion we're very guilty of that thing we have limitless energy because the the fuels infusion that we would use are deuterium and tritium which are kind of ice types of hydrogen
which you can kind of determine you can get from from sea water and uh the tritium you can get from from lithium um which is basically what's in your laptop batteries so we often throw that phrase about um but in reality nothing is limitless so even though the fuel for fusion might be in a great supply but the other kind of materials you need to build the reactor how long they last um coping with those extreme conditions in the reactor those all contribute to the lifetime
of the reactor and then in the fission industry again although you liberate huge amounts of fuel uh from a huge amount of energy from very small amounts of fuel especially if you compare to like um coal or other fossil fuels for example the actual amount of fuel you need is very limited so you know it's a much higher payoff on the fuel side um again you know buildings they get wear and tear they break down over time sometimes from the you know damage from the neutrons
heat loads and just generally getting old like any old uh building um but i know laura ankara that we've evolved you know on the other side the end of life of nuclear reactors but i think also equally with that people are trying to extend lives as well of nuclear reactors and keep them going for longer um to make them more worthwhile to laura and cora don't know if you wanna yeah i'm trying to think how how long a lot of the reactors have been around for i'm i
i want to say some of them 60 years yeah 60 years they're trying to go for 60 years now so now everything that's coming out they're typically saying about 60 years yeah which is pretty long time for a piece of technology that's being like irradiating itself quite heavily and i guess the other thing about um fission reactors i'm gonna keep stumbling over that works i keep mixing up fishing and fusion because i don't tend to deal with the power side of it i work well with waste from uh
old technology and that's a lot doesn't really have those phrases involved but i think after about sort of a couple of percent burn up from the fuel so a very small amount of uranium is converted to something else falling apart um those fission products start to um affect the efficiency of the reactors the amount of energy can be liberated false the fuel then has to be taken out and then it can be recycled so you extract those fission fragments that aren't useful and
you can take the other sort of 94 of uranium or whatever it is and put that into fresh fuel rod so you can keep recycling it quite often i think yeah you can so you can uh change the configuration of the reactor quite frequently according to how they're being irradiated and stuff and and so that way you extend its life effectively um and you obviously but you do obviously have power outages and stuff as as as with any sort of um uh power supply where they need to do maintenance and
stuff but the power outages don't seem to be too long because they kind of know what they're doing and they're kind of maintaining things along the way alongside the way that they're going so it it's quite efficient really i'd say um so the big question here is if nuclear is great in in so many ways then what's the main problem why do environmentalists not like nuclear power why do we not have a big sort of backing of yes this is the future let's go go go um i think that's a really good question
um and i think one thing that we should reference uh in the podcast today is the international energy i want to say authority iea is it i authority i think it's our agency yeah iaea not iaea it's the other one i always get them too confused so iaea is international atomic energy agency but there's also the iea which is the national one is the international energy authority um but let me just google this as we speak but they've had a flagship um report uh last end of last year in which they've
kind of modeled his agency it's international energy agency um but yeah so they've got this world energy outlook and they've they've got these um kind of goals and their sustainable development um scenarios um and within that going forward of course renewables will play a part but they've actually said within that that nuclear has to play um a part in that and i think last week also bill gates said something about this that nuclear really has a key role to pay play
if we are to meet those kind of climate change goals um because although the renewable technology is there and it's great uh it still has its issues you know if it's not windy on certain days if it's not sunny on certain days you don't have a stable baseload supply of energy and our world needs energy um whether we like it or not so nuclear really does have a key world to play in that but i think obviously it does have this issue with public perception and maybe that goes to the
social value side as well kara um i don't know if you want to add anything on the social side uh i could wax lyrical about this for a long time um i think there's yeah there's a lot to say about um the perception of nuclear a lot of it is to do with risk perception i think if you go back and look at the history of it a little bit um when nuclear energy was kind of first being like shown around the world started started off really in england um of how great it was and they kind of
said this is going to be energy that's so cheap we'll have so much we wouldn't even know what to do with it it was going to completely revolutionize society um but then of course along with that came a lot of the atomic weapon um issues and then there was example like things happening like in the bombs going off in different countries around the world and that basically was completely completed whatever perception of it was um so i i'm my accent is very irish i'm from ireland
um where we don't have nuclear partitions um but what we had in the papers a lot whenever i was growing up was that um cellophil sits in the west coast of england which is across the sea from ireland and people in ireland constantly talked about how there was um higher illness rates on the beaches along the east coast of ireland because they said the energy was coming over and it was this very much like fear thing so i've been on that side of the fear of it um maybe that was perpetuated
further by weird relations between ireland and england because there was always something another agenda coming along so it is very much these stories that get told around what people think about nuclear um but i think a lot of it to do with perception and i think i used to be kind of willfully ignorant to what nuclear energy potential had but i think i've come around to the idea that yeah it kind of needs to play a role in the future going forwards and some stats that go along with that i
think is that nuclear's an incredibly regulated industry and so people are very aware of what the dangers are and what um the risk of the waste is but actually if you compare it to coal if you compared to other fossil fuels like actually the radiation of waste is considerably less it's in far more controlled um it's technically cleaner it was if you compared to petrochemical industries again it's kind of like you know there's a lot worse things going on in the world so
not saying that that makes nuclear okay but i'm just saying you know we have to kind of reframe what the discussion is and i think a really good example of that is one of the founders of greenpeace who are notorious for being very anti-nuclear he knows no longer with greenpeace and he is not an advocate for nuclear energy because he realized that you look at the science in a different way it kind of can be seen very differently and so i think a lot of it is to do with around the messaging
of what radioactivity really is a lot of fear um so again another story from my childhood is i'm a huge fan of the simpsons um where nuclear energy plays a big role and that would probably be like my biggest uh education as a kid of what nuclear energy was um and you see the three-eyed fish all the time right that's kind of what the pop culture references make and our spider-man like people are kind of told that radioactivity is really dangerous and that's kind of constantly
what you're told how many people have those stories around coal probably not many so that's kind of a way of just kind of talking about how it's a strange strange industry but there's lots of myths around i i think your point of view was is is really good like um so i'm from a safety background and i have to say that i was so surprised when i when i joined the safety design i'm originally a materials person so i wasn't really sort of aware of all of these things but when i came into safety
the amount of precautions they're having to take on every little thing is sometimes you would stop in your tracks and you would say my god this is just too pessimistic this is just not you know this would never happen that if you look into the history of nuclear accidents and stuff the amount of fatalities that we've had in the nuclear industry are far less than what the fatalities have been in the coal or even in the oil and gas industry like it's just the fatalities comparison is just
it's ridiculous how much negativity that we have around the nuclear industry can compare a comparison to the other ones um if you look at all the major accidents that we've had in the nuclear industry like sort of fukushima fukushima everyone sort of says that it was a big thing but actually it was just an hydrogen explosion um if you sort of go into it and look into the details of it um so the the the safety around nuclear industries it's just inherently built into it so much that actually to
have sort of like a nuclear accident is is quite slim i i think actually people who work in nuclear people here now realizing that the messaging needs to change slightly is that they've realized that this constant like oh but let's see if it's safe let's see if we can we can prove to it see if has it made people maybe people think like is it safe really you know like why are you trying to reassure us so much um yeah and there is definitely something around that they need to kind of
rethink how they're doing that's too much yeah yes yeah yeah i think that like yeah kind of you know i agree with that i think you've both put that really well and yeah the thing is like yeah there's no such thing as like a clean resource or anything that's guilt-free or without any issues at some point during the supply chain like even solar panels for example they're kind of heavy metals and toxic chemicals associated with that or disposing of that i think is is pretty horrendous um
actually but no one really seems to go on about that i'm not saying we shouldn't have solar panels but it's just that as you say it's a perception things that there's no such thing as uh you know completely clean or completely perfect uh utopian energy source they're just there just isn't we just have to make the best um of what we have basically yeah i think the the correct information needs to be out there for people to make an informed decision right and i think it's very
difficult to take some information in when like feelings and social consciousness and stuff like that gets in the way because i think as kara pointed out there are all these ideas about the nuclear industry that persist in the media and in society that kind of skewed the conversation quite a lot i was anti-nuclear as a as a kid um yeah so i think it's yeah i mean i think it's pretty common um because i was one of these like greenpeace hippie kids and i was like yeah yeah no no nuclear but
somehow ended up going internally eventually somewhere along the line something something changed and clicked i definitely think it's all about perception like uh the amount of stem events i've done and i've had people or even kids as well as parents come up and be like what is it with this industry why do you work in this industry it's just it's not safe and you have like a 10-minute conversation with them and they walk around saying actually that's really good so it's just it is
just about a matter of just getting out there speaking to people addressing their concerns and hopefully podcasts like this will help that um so can i also please ask one sort of big question so nuclear power also produces a lot of waste we can't deny that um it's great it's um really sort of like we've spoken about fatalities and inherent safety being built into it and those kind of things it's it's great in some aspects but then it also does produce nuclear waste so um
what are your thoughts on that how how is the risk of the nuclear power sort of versus the nuclear waste that it produces and how we manage with it and um what it means for the generations to come well the amount of waste that's produced from the industry is actually quite small in terms of volume compared to just like the waste that's generated in the uk in the year like household waste volumes are far bigger than nuclear waste volumes um annually um admittedly there are possibly more
risks associated with waste and nuclear industry but it depends on exactly what that waste is not all waste is radioactive from nuclear and there are different levels of radioactivity as well um i think someone did some maths on this and the amount of the high level waste so the stuff that the class is really dangerous that we've produced um for the lifetime of our person um is like a disc that would fit into my hand uh i wouldn't necessarily pick it up because it'd be really radioactive but
that gives you an idea of um the sort of waste volumes that are generated um and in terms of managing it i mean the nuclear industry in the uk has been around for decades since like the 50s if not earlier and so we've got all this experience of how to manage the waste and how to do it safely and the big question is how to dispose of it i think and that's something that radioactive waste management limited is currently looking at the idea is that a host community will come forward to volunteer to
host a repository so the way it'll be buried underground it'll be far away from people where it can't be um interacted with by us um and it'll be sealed off from the environment and then we can not have to think about it so much i don't know if anika kara i've got anything to add to that um well i think you kind of covered both things really talking about it um about back end of the weirdest i think um so a couple of points to make i guess one is really around most countries do do it quite
well they have got things saved quite well and deep in the u.s they have things a big concrete tanker sitting in car parks but they are generally kind of you know keeping an eye on it but there are stories definitely where some countries where there's illegal waste management that happens and i think things have been turned up on the beaches of this is sudan like these big kind of like big canisters full of nuclear waste where so there is definitely challenges around
this it's not being managed well but it's in comparison to the coal industry which pumps out like who knows how much like volumes of coal waste into there all the time but i think in terms of the whole supply chain of waste i think so sometimes there is arguments around if you look at the whole life cycle cost modeling of like building a plant like they want to cement or concrete that goes into it is a lot but a really forgotten part of the supply chain is actually uranium mining
and i think that's definitely where there's actually some challenges around waste management that people maybe don't consider enough from what the limited amount that i know of it i think a lot of it comes from countries um where maybe our communities where they aren't protected enough i know a lot of it comes from native american land in the u.s or kazakhstan and is it somewhere in nigeria possibly and australia so australia baby mama's spanish australia and canada so yeah in these places
depending on how well those communities are supported and regulated there maybe isn't so many challenges but there is definitely some communities who've been left with a long-standing problem where their minds have been left essentially but they are being exposed to natural radiation so kind of maybe not as immediately dangerous um but it is definitely an issue that i think is not discussed enough in the uk all right so the talk at the minute is that um we won't
necessarily reprocess our waste at the minute to extract the useful uranium um because uranium mining is so um cheap but cheaper to buy it from somewhere else than it is to recycle it i think that might change if the mining practices change yeah but um kind of anika you hit it before talking about solar panels if you look at the electronics industry generally i think where a lot of valuable materials come from they don't have to care about their social practices around their minds so
i'm not sure how quickly uranium will become more expensive unfortunately even if it is in canada and australia where the industries might be a bit more regulated they aren't really when it comes to mining things um so i i don't know actually but i'm a bit cynical about that possibly maybe if that came under regular sort of nuclear um regulations and stuff perhaps it would sort of get picked up because as far as everything else is concerned for nuclear it's so heavily regulated
that um sometimes it seems a bit excessive so maybe the the angle should be to include the mining all the way down to um decommissioning rather than just sort of looking at the lifeline of them producing the energy all the way up into decommissioning because that's what we essentially we look at right now it's we don't really sort of include the mining and stuff into it yeah i agree actually i'm not sure why i i thought because i worked in decommissioning i didn't really meet
people who worked in that side of it but maybe they do maybe maybe it's not included generally yeah right um so i think that's been a very useful discussion um and uh if we hope to post this online and have a discussion around this maybe we can have some questions and we can address some questions some more um and i hope that you enjoyed this discussion and we shall see you soon you