Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio. Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Noria with you along with Robert Jubri and his latest work is called The Case for Nukes. Robert, let's wrap up about Chernobyl, jump over to Fukushima, then talk about the positive aspects here at home. So Chernobyl is just rendered useless for twenty thousand years. Well, no, Chernobyl reactor was destroyed. But if you want to know, once again, there's frankly no
evidence of much harm from the fallout from Chernobyl. They may have been some, but very little. In fact, the area around Chernobyl right now, because it was evacuated by people, is now one of the richest wildlife reserves in Europe because the animals love the fact that the people have moved out and they're doing just fine. It's now inhabited by giant buys, in wolves, all sorts of animals that people thought were extinct in the area have gone and
recolonized it. The radioactivity has destroyed the area. Nope, that's interesting, all right. Two thousand and eleven Fukushima, what about that situation, Well, Fukashima is very interesting. And by the way, after Fukushim, I want to talk about there's only three nuclear accidents of consequence of Fukashima, churnobil and three my line. We'll
get to that one in a minute. Okay. But Fukushima, of course, an entire city was destroyed by an earthquake and a tidal wave in twenty eight thousand people were killed by drowning or falling buildings and things of this kind not and three reactors were destroyed. Okay, but not a single person received a dangerous radiological dose. Not a single person outside the plant gate got any radiological dose
of any significance whatsoever. So if you want evidence for nuclear safety, sure Fukashima is it is if you can have a natural disaster that destroys the whole city and three nuclear power plants and no one is harmed by radiation. I mean, it doesn't get much safer than that. If that had been an oil refinery, you would have caused fires all over the place, and it would have been giants,
smoke clouds, I mean, you name it. If that had been a chemical plant, there's all sorts of things that could have been that would have caused all sorts of harm, but nuclear power plants. No. Is there something to be said about building power plants by earthquake faults? Yeah, you
shouldn't build power plants by earthquake faults. But I do want to talk about actually what, in certain ways is the most famous nuclear accident, which is the one that happened in art Country at three Mile Island in Pennsylvania nineteen seventy nine. Right right, now, here's the thing. Okay, as I mentioned, it's a scientific fact, and it cannot be contested that a pressurized water reactor cannot have a
runaway chain reaction. And the people Ralph Nater used to say they could, they're just lyne But the more educated environmentalists would acknowledge that this is so. However, they'd say, but there's a different danger, which is that the nuclear power plant accumulates radioactive waste in its fuel elements. And even though you can turn off the nuclear reaction in a millisecond by dropping in the control rods or if
the water is removed, their chain reaction shuts down. Okay, what will happen inside of a millisecond is the power level of the reactor will drop from one hundred percent, not to zero, but to seven percent, because their decay products are still producing that much heat. Now it will then go down in a few hours to one percent, but for a few hours it'll be given off substantial heat. And if the coolant isn't there, the fuel is going
to melt. You'll have a meltdown. And they said it will not only melt the fuel, the fuel will melt its way through the eight inch thick steel pressure vessel that contains the reactor, and then it will melt through the containment building eight feet thick, and then down through the earth to the center of the Earth, and then somewhat unscientifically, it would then proceed up to the other side of the Earth to China. And this was called
the China syndrome. And coincidentally, there was a movie of that title about such an accident that occurred the very same month as the three Mile Island accident. Now, what happened to three Mile Island was there's an operator error and they drained the coolant out of the reactor, and because the coolant was out of the reactor, then fission
reaction shut down. But yes, there was the k heat, so the fuel elements did melt, but they did not melt through the pressure vessel and the containment building and through the earth and all the way to China. They didn't even melt all the way through the pressure vessel. They melted their way about one inch into the eight inch thick steel and then they stumped and that was
the end of it. And there was a small amount of radioiodine what had be vented that exposed the people in the area to the same radiation dose they would have gotten if they had spent the weekend in Colorado, because the background radiation here is higher than Pennsylvania. That's how the smallest three mile island is the only mega disaster in human history in which no one was hurt. Okay, So it's purely a propaganda thing. And this whole thing is discussed in depth in the book The Case for Nukes.
Now back home, let's talk about the power of new power. Do you believe it's clean? It's clean? Okay, And well let's start at the beginning here. What's the biggest problem that we have on this planet today? I say it is poverty. You know, we have poverty here in America, but the average American income is fifty thousand dollars a year. The average income on planet Earth is ten thousand dollars a year. Okay, big difference, and get a load of this.
Half of the Earth is below average. So the average is ten thousand, and there are people making five thousand and two thousand, okay, and nothing. But then they don't stay alive very long. But this is a huge problem that affects billions of people. Billions of people suffer from malnutrition and their bodies are weak and subject to disease for their entire lives. Or their children have to go to work, and so they can't get any education and
they have no future. And you could go on and on about this, but this is what our world is actually like today. Okay, this is the problem. Well, if you there's a direct proportionality between energy use and living standard because everything that you use and everything that is made for you, and everything that is transported to you to use it all involves energy. And if we're to raise the whole world to the aren't American standard living
and once again we still have poverty here. But just to get to that level, will have to increase human energy consumption five times, five times, and that doesn't even
take into account population grows, so maybe ten times. Okay. Now, so these people say, well, we want to replace fossil fuels because of the carbon emissions, they're not even addressing the right problem because first of all, you can't replace fossil fuels with windmills, even at the current level of energy consumption, let alone replace them and increase our energy
production five times over. But you can with nuclear energy because nuclear energy represents an energy resource as vastly greater than fossil fuels, as fossil fuels are compared to horses and sailing ships. Okay, the fossil fuels revolutionize the world, and fossil fuels, by the way, they don't want to save the environment. You know who save the whales, Rockefeller? Okay,
because the whales will be hunted for their oil. But when we got petroleum oil, then they didn't have to go after the whales anymore, and the whales were saved. And there's a lesson there because we were going after a resource that plays a much smaller role in the biosphere than the whales do, or forests. Cutting down forests and they're going drilling for oil has much lower environmental
impact than cutting down forests. Okay. Well, nuclear power is even more remote from the resources that are used by the biosphere. There are no animals or plants that make use of nuclear power, unlike the fact that they make use of trees and so forth. So, in other words, if you want to preserve the natural, you've got to
create the artificial, and that's what nuclear does. And just to give me an idea of this, the amount of any block of granite like buildings are made of, or mountains are made of, okay, contains two parts per million uranium at eight parts per million thorium. And if you took the energy in that uranium and thorium in a pound of granite, it has the same energy as one hundred pounds of oil. Okay. And if we go to
fusion power, we we're using the deterium in water. A one gallon of water equals three hundred and fifty gallons of gasoline. That's how much energy we're talking about. We're talking about releasing energy that could power humanity at a thousand times its current energy level for a billion years. Robert. There was a nineteen seventy five book by John Fuller
called We Almost Lost Detroit. I was living in Detroit then at that time I talked about the Fermi one new Clower plant in Monroe, Michigan, which was a southern suburb of Detroit, that happened in nineteen sixty six, another meltdown that was a huge story. Then. Yeah, that's also discussed in the book The Case for Now. We have in fact that that reactor, which was damaged in a partial meltdown, was subsequently returned, repaired, and operated through the eighties.
Uh the v UM. So once again, this is panic literature. Okay, Now, look, what's the real problem that we face? Well, yeah, but I'm telling you that there is a real problem that we face, okay. And the thing that we can't use carbon fuels is a variant actually of the previous argument that the environmental has had, which was that we were going to run out of farm fuels. But back in the early seventies, late sixties, they we're putting out all these books saying we're going to run out of everything,
and that's why we have to stop economic growth. Okay, And then they switched it around and say, now the problem is that we're not going to run out of fossil fuels, and that's why we have to stop economic growth. Okay, But either way, what they're trying to do is stop economic growth, and stopping economic growth is aboarding the future. Stopping economic growth is sentencing billions of people for the rest of human history to have to live in poverty.
That's what it is. And so look, you know, and they talk about how there's too many people, we got to get rid of people. Well, we're not in danger because there's too many people. We're in danger from people who think there are too many people. Okay, And you know, the as I mentioned earlier, I was originally a nuclear engineer, and in the eighties I would debate people from the Sierra Club and they would talk about, we have to stop economic growth because of all the pollution, and we're
going to run out of fuel. And I said, well, nuclear power creates no pollution and we'll never run out. And they would say, we hate that. And I couldn't get that. Why do they hate nuclear power when it solves all the problems they're talking about. And then I realize that's exactly why they hate nuclear power. They hate nuclear power because it would solve a problem they need to have okay, And that's all discussed in the case
for nukes as well. It talks about where these people are getting their money, It talks about their ideological motivations and and and the problem that they create for the rest of us by really they're they're using these purported problems of resource scarcity and pollution for an agenda, which is to basically say that there isn't enough to go around, so human numbers, activities, and liberties must be severely constrained. Okay. And that's why they hate nuclear power, because it takes
away their fundamental premise. It says that reason horses are unlimited, so human numbers, activities, and liberties do not need to be constrained. And quite the contrary, it is, why do we have nuclear power. We have nuclear power because of freedom. We have nuclear It was America that invented nuclear power through its scientific creativity and inventiveness, which is a product
of freedom. Freedom creates resources. They say, in order to live without resources, we must courtrail freedom, I say, And what nuclear power says is in order to create resources, we must have freedom. If you had your way, how many power plants would we have in the country well to meet our cart if we wanted to, Well, look France, it's seventy five percent nuclear, ten percent hydroelectric, fifteen percent
fossil fuel. Okay. If we had continued building nuclear power plants at the rate we were building them in the early seventies, we would be like that today, and instead of having one hundred nuclear power plants, we'd probably have around four hundred, okay, and that would do the job. That would pretty much we would be essentially decarbonize the electric grid. And the only major country, by the way
to decarbonize their electric grid is France. Okay. Germany, which is run by environmentalists, and they say, oh, where so green? We love our forests, so we hate nuclear power. Germany produces five times the carbon emissions as France per unit electricity produced. And it's even worse than that because a lot of their carbon emissions they're getting from burning down forest. They say, it's so natural, We're getting our electricity from
natural wood. Well, that's called killing trees and killing the animals that live in the trees. You're not a friend of nature. If you get your electricity by burning down trees. You're a friend of nature. If you get your electricity by splitting atoms. It's pretty remark Coblas do it. Yeah, so you know that's what I say, is you know Savortree splitting at him. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more