The Untold History of Nuclear Energy with Packy McCormick and Julia DeWahl

So my hobby is arm wrestling. I go out to Evanston and then just have guys that actually do stuff for a living, like, rinse me for like an hour and a half. I actually started it so that I could overcome my fears of doing advocacy for nuclear. It was like very not fun to be pro-nuclear just a few years ago. And I was like, I gotta fix that. And I was like, well, the only way I'm gonna fix that is if I can learn how to lose, because competition is about learning how to lose.

Today on Upstream, we're diving into nuclear energy with an episode from Packy McCormick. And Julia DeWaal's new show, Age of Miracles. The show is an ambitious narrative series about nuclear power and energy superabundance. They talk to a ton of the top experts, policymakers, investors, and founders to learn how do we 10x or 100x clean, reliable energy. This episode charts the rise and fall of nuclear power in the 20th century, which is even weirder than you might think. The themes of global economic systems in flux, misinformation, and pseudoscience, and the complicated relationship between government and business will all feel familiar. Without further ado, here's Age of Miracles.

That was Emmett Penny, a nuclear advocate, arm wrestler, and author who goes by Nuke Barbarian on Twitter.

Being a nuclear advocate over the past few decades has only been for the contrarian thinkers brave enough to believe in something so counter to the mainstream narrative. However, we're now seeing hype for nuclear ramping up again. But in the 1950s and '60s, people were hyped about nuclear too. We'd been here before, but then things turned. Before we get too excited about what's happening now, let's examine: What happened, and how do we not make the same mistakes again?

I'm Packy McCormick.

And I'm Julia de Waal, and this is Age of Miracles.

If you're just tuning in, Age of Miracles is about exploring what needs to happen to turn innovation into impact— all the hard, nitty-gritty details that go into creating the age of miracles we think is possible in our lifetimes. This season, we're starting with nuclear energy because energy is the foundation of progress, and because nuclear is the prime example of the fact that even the most miraculous innovations don't work without the hard work of implementation. Fission is a miracle technology, and we've had it for 80 years, but we don't live in an energy-abundant world Because progress takes more than miracles.

Today, we're going deep into the history of nuclear energy and why the industry went from thriving to stagnating, and what lessons we can take away from its near demise.

As we've done our research, there's kind of these overarching narratives that, at least coming in from the outside, I had in my head. But the reality is so much more detailed and messy than that. So let's start by talking about the 2 narratives. Julia, what's the first narrative that you hear when you even hear the word nuclear in the first place?

The overarching narrative people have probably heard are that nuclear energy comes right out of nuclear weapons, they're practically the same thing, we built a bunch of reactors for a while, then we had these huge disasters— Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima— and those proved that nuclear energy was not safe. And then of course there's the impossible-to-solve issue of nuclear waste, And now, you know, finally, thank goodness the environmentalists put an end to all that nuclear stuff. We now have wind and solar, the true renewables, and those costs are coming down precipitously. So we just don't need nuclear anymore.

Yeah.

And then there's the second narrative. And I think this is the one that probably I got to as we started kind of doing the research and having conversations around doing this podcast. And this is the one that comes from nuclear supporters. If you started to look into the industry a little bit, To get nuke-pilled, as we called it in episode 1. You've probably heard this one too. In this telling, everything that you've heard about nuclear energy from the environmentalists is wrong. Nuclear is safe. It's the safest and cleanest form of energy we have. Nuclear is the greatest thing since sliced bread. We should build reactors, large reactors and small modular reactors, by the hundreds. Everything in nuclear land would be great if it weren't for those damned environmentalists and all of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regulations.

And while I definitely fall more in that second camp, and I think, Packy, you do too, I think what we've discovered here together is that there's a lot more nuance to the, it's perfect, build tons of it, no problem. We've figured out how to solve waste. We know it's carbon-free, which is great. We know it has really high capacity factors. So there's really a lot to love about nuclear, but at the same time, the regulation is there for a reason and it's tricky to navigate. The costs are hard. We've gotten worse at building large construction projects. There are a lot of complications and a lot of nuance to get through here, and I'm really excited to take this episode to take a look back at where we've been with nuclear, what kind of baggage we kind of accumulated along the way, and then we can look ahead to where we want to go from here.

Totally. I mean, nuclear power did start with the development of nuclear weapons, though maybe not quite how you might think. And renewable energy sources that aren't nuclear are growing very quickly and getting cheaper, and we're going to talk about that later in the season. But we think all of that is, is great. What I really want to get out of this episode is an understanding of where things got wrong so that we can avoid making the same mistakes again. The topic is complex, and understanding how nuclear's momentum in the '60s and '70s ground to a halt will help us prevent that from happening a second time.

Quick preview for this episode: we're going to zoom through the early history of nuclear energy and how we started actually with small-scale nuclear reactors before abandoning them for large-scale reactors and plants in the mid-'60s. We'll then go deeper into the history and what factors led to nuclear's decline and finish at looking at where nuclear is today and peek into what it might take to build more nuclear energy large-scale power plants. We'll be talking to people who have worked in the nuclear industry or have studied it closely, the people who know nuclear the best. And you might think that these would just be all rah-rah pro-nuclear people, but I found that nuclear people tend to be some of the most self-critical of the challenges that their industry faces.

So let's go back to the beginning to tell the true history of nuclear, as best as we understand it. The first thing that most people get wrong, actually, is is the fact that we didn't build the bomb first, like you might have seen in Oppenheimer. Here's Rod Adams to explain. Rod is a managing partner at Nucleation Capital, a former US Navy submarine officer trained on nuclear subs, and a historian of and advocate for the industry. And note, Rod does mean Irene Curie when he says Irene Curie. She's actually the daughter of her more famous mother, Marie.

Conventional wisdom says we went to the bomb first. But there were people in 1939 who were already thinking that nuclear was going to be a replacement for coal. Actually, to be honest, there was one, Leo Szilard, who patented a nuclear reactor power source even before fission had been proven. When he heard of what Enrico Fermi had done in 1934 with neutrons splitting isotopes of uranium, he applied for a patent. I think it was in 1935, 1936 for a power-producing system using nuclear reactions. By 1939, just after fission had been proven, the New York Times had several articles featuring Frédéric Joliot, who was Irene Curie's husband. And he and Irene had discovered artificial radioactivity. And it also, once he heard that fission was working, he started trying to figure out ways to make uranium as a coal replacement. And he talked about how $2 worth of uranium could replace over $1,000 worth of coal. It wasn't the bomb first. And even in, if you look at the Manhattan Project, way before we got the bomb, we built several reactors.

What's surprising is just how small those first nuclear power reactors were. That's an idea that we're actually back to today. If you've heard about small modular reactors or SMRs, we talked to Nick Turan, a nuclear engineer at TerraPower, and writer of the excellent website whatisnuclear.com, about the early experimentation in nuclear.

There was a time back in the '40s, '50s, '60s where, like, there were 100,000 people around the world, the smartest people in the world, were all focused on nuclear reactor technology. It was like the thing. And so there's so much interesting information and history and things that people did back then. It just blows my mind. Every time I go look, I find something new. We had lots of small reactors, dozens of small reactors, some of which pretty much check all the boxes of the things that we're excited about now.

We actually Nick takes us back to 1942. That's the year Enrico Fermi's team was at the University of Chicago, and they achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, which was part of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.

That was sort of a big reactor. I mean, well, it was the size it had to be. It wasn't a power reactor. And then we started saying, well, let's make plutonium for weapons. And so they made big reactors at Hanford that were designed just for plutonium. And then the next application was, well, how about submarines? And submarines were much, much smaller reactors. And so this thing called the pressurized water reactor was invented, which is a small, compact, simple, reliable reactor. And we built a prototype of that in Idaho. And that was really the first, like, application of the actual nuclear power that comes out of the chain reaction. And then we started saying, okay, well, we need to come up with, like, ways to make power plants. And so we built a bunch of little test reactors that were just little kind of research reactors. The cores are like this big, roughly. There was a little reactor called Clementine in the '50s. The core is this big.

The core for the Clementine reactor was contained in a metal cylinder that had an inside diameter of 15.2 centimeters with a length of 117 centimeters. So imagine that, a reactor that has a diameter less than the length of a dollar bill and the height shorter than that of a 7-year-old child. And that's the whole core.

They're just like small experimental reactors. But then things got really interesting when the Air Force wanted nuclear-powered airplanes, and there was this huge 10-year, $10 billion program to make nuclear-powered airplanes. The idea being for strategic— there were bombers effectively that could stay in the air forever. And we built little tiny reactors that were super high power that could propel aircraft. We never— we flew them. We like put one on an airplane, operated it, and flew the airplane. But we never actually had one of these things power an airplane. And that program eventually got canned when ICBMs, the long-range missiles, came out. So anyway, the Navy had their reactors, Air Force had them, and so when the Army came along, that's when we got really into the, like, micro reactors, portable reactors. And there's this thing called the Army Packaged Power Program where they built these amazing reactors, little tiny micro, 1 megawatt and less.

This rhymes with the development of so many moonshot technologies. The military needs a certain capability and the government teams up with researchers to develop solutions to address that need. In the beginning, they produce something that works, but that Isn't economical by any stretch of the imagination for regular consumers, and then they declassify it and hand it over to the private sector to let the free markets work their magic. This is a story that you see over and over again. It's one that we'll tell later in the season about the development of fusion. But for now, let's talk about space.

The space race laid the groundwork for the modern space economy and even created the initial demand for solar panels. used to power satellites, and semiconductors. Space missions required lightweight, compact electronics, and semiconductors beat vacuum tubes. They helped bring those technologies down the cost curve so the commercial sector could grab the baton. We followed almost the same process for nuclear energy in the '40s and '50s, except with a little more nuance. Here's Rod again.

Well, after the war was over, we took a 9-year break and didn't do anything with power reactors, except for one project started by the Manhattan Project, by Groves and his folks. They financed the guy who was in charge of the metallurgical laboratory at Chicago. His name was Farrington Daniels, and his project was called the Daniels Pile and had a lot of industrial cooperation from organizations that were big in the electrical power business. He brought these engineers down to Oak Ridge And they were going pretty well on the project. They had a pretty solid design. They were making good progress. But the project got canceled and defunded by the Atomic Energy Commission as one of their first acts after they were created when the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 came out.

The Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, are, by the way, the same guys featured in the last third of Oppenheimer. The commissioner, Lewis Strauss, was the villain played by Robert Downey Jr. in the film. While the movie focuses on the personalities and geopolitical struggles of nuclear weapons, the effect that the AEC had on nuclear powers' rise and fall is underreported and provides another lesson on what we can do in the future, which we'll touch more on later in the episode.

So by April of 1947, the Daniels Pile Project was canceled. And the civilian Atomic Energy Commission decided that their main mission was to focus on building up the infrastructure for manufacturing bombs. And it wasn't until '53 that President Eisenhower, he said, we really need to build some peaceful uses of this stuff. In December 1953, so almost exactly 70 years ago, President Eisenhower said that we were going to produce power to supply, quote, With President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech in 1953, the country pledged to use atomic power for good.

It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. The United States knows that the world is ready to embrace this new power. But if the fearful trend of atomic military buildup can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon for the benefit of all mankind.

That started off a rather interesting boom in nuclear power plants.

And it worked. Nuclear power shifted from just a military initiative into something more broad and commercial for the benefit of all mankind.

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Back to Nick to explain.

And so when they started to build the commercial ones, they took that and they said, well, geez, if we make that 10 times the size or more, that only takes 3 times the material and it only takes, you know, 1.5 times the personnel. And so The economy of scale really pressured these reactors to get bigger and bigger. And so when they first made the early ones, PWRs and BWRs, they were pretty small, tens of megawatts, very much in the small modular reactor size. They weren't competing with coal at the time. Coal was the major competitor for electricity. And so they had a huge pressure to get cheaper. And the way they got cheaper was by getting bigger. And they got bigger and bigger until about 1965 when they reached parity with coal. And there was announcements throughout the industry, you know, we've We've done it! Economical nuclear power is here! And orders came in like crazy, and everybody started building relatively large light water reactors.

Hang with us. We're going to explain what light water reactors are and how nuclear power plants work in episode 3. For now, just picture the big nuclear plants with the cooling towers that you're used to seeing, because you can see them. For a while there, we built a ton of light water reactors. James Crowlenstein, a physicist and nuclear advocate, explains more.

And so we really start seeing the takeoff off of the light water reactors. And we also see big companies like GE and Westinghouse start going to utilities and actually initially sort of offer to them turnkey deals, right, where you can basically buy a nuclear power plant for a guaranteed price. And this is all coincident in this time where we saw skyrocketing electric power demand coupled with a real belief that we're going to start seeing decreasing fossil fuels availability, particularly in oil. Right? But also coal prices were increasing and natural gas was not nearly as cheap as it is today. So utilities in the 1960s who were dealing with this skyrocketing electric power demand were trying to figure out, hey, how do we meet this demand while also dealing with what could be scarcer and scarcer fossil fuels? Couple that with this sort of atomic age optimism, and you've got a huge amount of ordering of these nuclear power plants. These light water reactor designs really seem commercially available and able to actually generate power to the grid somewhat economically. And that sort of generating, you know, in Westinghouse Combustion Engineering, Babcock& Wilcox, and GE, this real sort of iteration of their own product line. And most critically, we started seeing the size of the reactor plants really start increasing, where we were going from these 50 or 60 or 70-megawatt Plants up to 100, 180, then 200, then 300, then 400, 500, 600. And then we have Zion Unit Number 1, you know, come online in the late '60s or early '70s. That is literally a gigawatt per reactor, right? And so we saw this real massive increase in just a decade going from this small demo plant in the late '50s of Shippingport, right, all the way, which is less than 100 megawatts. We scale an order of magnitude in a single decade. in the power reactor fleet, and that was driven by the economics, right? We do see profound cost-capacity scaling in nuclear power plants. We sort of ended in the late '60s, early '70s, and, you know, the reactor orders are just increasing each year. And I think the peak number of reactor orders happens in 1973, where we order 100 new reactor plants in that single year. President Nixon at the time announces, in response to the OPEC oil embargo that happens in '73, Project Independence, where we're going to build 1,000 nuclear reactors in the United States to get off of foreign oil and, as its name implies, to achieve energy independence in the U.S.

Things were going so well. From a standing start in the 1950s, nuclear was booming. By 1965, nuclear plants were generating 3.85 terawatt-hours. By 1978, just 13 years later, Nuclear power generation had grown 75x, reaching 290 terawatt hours, good for a 40% CAGR, or compound annual growth rate. Had that growth rate continued for just another 8 years, nuclear would've generated more electricity by 1986, the year before I was born, or 4,180 terawatt hours, than the entire United States consumed in 2022.

From the perspective of 1973, it seemed like things were only going to get better for nuclear. It had government support, popular support, geopolitical tailwinds. Calls for energy independence then echoed the ones causing nuclear to surge today. But instead of an inflection point, the 1970s were a turning point. By the end of the decade, growth would plateau, and we would never see this rate of building again. Here's Rod again to explain.

We ordered gigawatt-scale reactors for about 5 years. Say from 1969 to 1972, '73, then reactor orders pretty much trickled off and were down to zero by 1978.

The early history of nuclear energy ended in the 1970s, so that's where we'll pause to pull out the factors that led to nuclear's decline. We think there are 5 key ones. 1, the Atomic Energy Commission itself. 2, an economic death spiral. 3, increasing regulation. 4, the environmental movement. And 5, finally, the, quote, disasters at Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl. Remember Emmett Penny, the nuclear advocate who arm wrestles? He starts with the Atomic Energy Commission.

Yes, the Atomic Energy Commission was created after the success of the Manhattan Project and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was a really tense political formation, right? So the AEC has a dual mandate, and it is both to promote nuclear power and nuclear weapons and to regulate them. So that's an immediate conflict of interest that's going to raise a lot of questions later on down the line. But in the meantime, no one really knows a lot about nuclear, and so a case has to be made to the public. It's made in a very limited way, and then actually kind of a disingenuous way. There were already like accidents and problems, you know, not as lethal as other industrial accidents. I think that that should always be put on, like combustion, when it comes to like Like, power generation is always going to be more lethal than fission. Just historically, that's the case. But that doesn't excuse these guys at the AEC who were like, there's a 1 in a billion chance that it's going to happen, when they already had on record some accidents they had, they had tried to cover up that had hurt a handful of people.

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The AEC, along with the private sector, started to overpromise on the safety of nuclear reactors. Instead of treating nuclear power plants like you would any other industrial plant or power plant, where there are mechanical failures and where accidents do happen, the AEC got overly defensive on nuclear, essentially claiming it was impervious to the standard issues of industry. It set expectations that no plant could live up to, and when the inevitable mishaps inevitably occurred, it teed up detractors to falsely paint them as disastrous meltdowns.

And yet, as time goes on, they do so much boosterism and they do so much to help get reactors built that they sort of overstep and create this big bandwagon market where everybody wants a nuclear reactor in the same way that sort of like everybody wants renewables now. Right. And the system might not be ready to onboard that because we have to think about how this is cutting-edge technology, highly complex engineering projects. There are human capital problems. There's difficulty in getting parts to build these things. So we start to get some delays there. And then over the course of that time, the Atomic Energy Commission adopts basically 2 fatal premises for radiation dosages in its final years. And the first one is called linear no threshold. And linear no threshold is just not safe at any dose. Mark Nelson, a good friend of mine who I hear you guys are interviewing, also once explained it to me like this: if somebody added up every single time you'd been cut in your life, And then looked at you and said, you just bled out. It was an oversensitive mechanism. And then they took it a step further and they said, we're going to try to make our exposure at our plants as low as reasonably achievable. But that's not an engineering metric you could ever design something to meet. So what does that mean? Well, that means fiat of the regulator. And we see both labor costs and construction costs Hit— I think labor costs were like by over 137% between the '60s and the mid-'70s, which is a lot. It's like almost the same thing for construction costs. At some point, once the NRC takes over for the AEC, because the dual mandate is obviously a problem.

Already we're seeing what a tangled web this is. Emmett's point about the NRC's regulation is a big one. It deserves its own section, and we're going to give it one. But it's all tied together because, at least initially, regulation's biggest impact was on the economics. The second domino to fall against nuclear was actually the economics. Regulation was part of that, sure, but there was also good old-fashioned supply and demand. What happened to nuclear reactor demand in the '70s looks a lot like what happened to the demand for internet fiber in the 2000s. A lot of excitement and rapid growth in demand for electricity led to utilities overordering reactors to meet overoptimistic projections. When demand for electricity slowed, so did orders. Many were even canceled.

Here's Rod again to explain how slowing demand slowed nuclear's growth.

1973, we have this really important thing called the Arab oil embargo, and the Arab oil embargo raised the price of gasoline by a factor of 4 from October of '73 to March or April of '74. Gas lines, all kinds of things were causing problems. But part of the impact of that oil embargo was for people to take a real hard look at their energy use. And for the first time in decades, the US electricity demand actually shrunk, partly because of conservation, partly because of the recession that was caused by a quadrupling of the price of gasoline and people couldn't spend money while they're sitting in the gas line. The, when the electricity demand actually dropped instead of growing at 7% a year, which it had been doing for a very long time.

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Electric utility companies were really concerned because they had a lot of plants in progress, a lot of plans for expansion, and they didn't know where they were going to be able to sell the electricity. That all these new plants could produce. And in particular, one utility, Public Service in New Jersey, had a big plan to build nuclear power plants offshore. Westinghouse had come up with this idea for the Offshore Power Systems, was the name of the company, OPS. Public Service in New Jersey had ordered, I think, 3 or 4 of the reactors and had a place they were going to build them offshore. Westinghouse had been building a factory at Blount Island, which is just north of Jacksonville. One of the largest overhead cranes in the world was there. They were coming up with doing all this stuff. It was a very nice order. They were looking at building dozens of reactors in a factory. Does that sound familiar? Of course, the factory was called a shipyard, but it was— they were all the same design. Very interesting program. But in '74, when Public Service and Utility, PS&J, had a drop in their demand. And their drop was even bigger than most because some of their biggest customers were oil refineries near I-95. They didn't have any oil to refine, so they shut down because of the Arab oil embargo. And so Public Service New Jersey told Westinghouse, we're going to cancel our order, and ended up paying Westinghouse, I don't know, $100 million or something like that for the cost of canceling the order. And that was the very first cancellations of nuclear plant orders, and it sort of started a trend. So I tell people, can you imagine the Arab oil embargo, a time when oil prices go up by a factor of 4, actually slowed the growth of nuclear energy in the U.S. and ended up helping to stop it? So by '78, we stopped ordering nuclear plants again. A lot of it was partly the demand wasn't growing as fast as expected.

Basically, after rapidly achieving economies of scale over 20, 30 years, It almost as suddenly became cost-prohibitive to build a nuclear plant. And this was before all of the disasters, environmental pushback, and regulation.

So the second factor in nuclear's downfall is simple: it's the economy, stupid. That's one of the things that surprised me most in the research and our conversations, and why I said earlier that the narrative in which the nuclear industry would have been totally fine if it weren't for environmentalists and the NRC falls apart a little bit. Economic considerations were a real concern, and they weren't caused by anything other than typical market forces.

But regulation was certainly a bottleneck, if not the only one. Regulation has been a hot-button topic as it relates to the nuclear industry for a long time. A framework called Linear No Threshold, or LNT, has been around since the AEC was getting started. It says that there is no safe dose of radiation.

To understand why radiation became such a focus, Rod Adams argues that you need to go all the way back to the 1950s, the year before the first nuclear power station opened at Shippingport, and to the people who stood to lose the most from cheap, abundant nuclear energy: the oil industry. You almost have to be impressed by their foresight. According to Rod, the Rockefeller Foundation, whose fortune gushed from Standard Oil's wells, was behind the bogus research that led to LNT.

In '56, some very influential parts of the oil and gas industry helped to finance a study by the National Academy of Sciences, very, the most credible body of scientists available in the US. They paid the whole cost of the studies. They even supplied the chairman of one of the committees of that. Then they had 6 different committees and almost everyone in the group had been financed, had grants or educational things or whatever paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. And They produced a report that said that every dose of radiation down to a single gamma ray, a single ionizing event, raised the risk of cancer and there was no safe dose. And that was published on June 13th, 1956. The Rockefeller Foundation continued to support what was called the BEAR, the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation BEAR work through about 1963 or so. built a lot of foundation, produced educational materials. I mean, that was one of the things the Rockefeller Foundation was investing in was education. They were, they had a lot of people in the medical field. They had money to spread all over. And by the early '60s, it was pretty solidly embedded in the scientific community, everything else, that every dose of radiation caused the risk of cancer. So that was kind of a background thing. And, you know, like anybody else who wants to influence the public. They kind of pulled their hands away. They wanted to make sure that they didn't have— nobody really made the association. It was all about protecting the oil business. You know, they did— they didn't hide the fact that they'd done it. They claimed that they were doing great things by helping the public understand about radiation.

Listener, they were not doing great things. A number of studies since have disproven the National Academy of Sciences' findings Including a 2018 study in Genes and Environment that said of the 1956 LNT findings, this spurious hypothesis was not based on solid data, and actually found that low-dose radiation from atom bombs actually elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to unirradiated individuals. Low doses of radiation cause radiation-adaptive responses that actually strengthen the body. The paper's author concludes, for many reasons, L&T must be revised or abolished, with changes based not on policy but on science. According to Rod, what won out was narrative, not science. He calls out that Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, was a member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees and was present at the 1954 meeting. That fact probably contributed to the successful publicity effort of the NISBARE committee reports. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, they say. The truth is, though, we all live amid background radiation day to day. It's part of life. Radiation isn't necessarily unsafe. It's just unsafe in high doses. There's a threshold below which radiation is safe, and they argue that we should use that as our goalpost when designing safety regulation. But that thinking has not prevailed. The LNT framework became codified into ALARA, As Low As Reasonably Achievable, in 1977, after the NRC was established. Now regulation required that a plant must do anything it could reasonably do to reduce the possibility of radiation exposure, even if those radiation exposure levels were far below what a person experienced in day-to-day life. This regulatory ratchet led to ballooning costs towards, quote, radiation safety, with incredibly dubious benefits.

That is an insanely asymptotic standard to build towards. As low as you go, you can always go lower. Typically, LNT and ALARA are discussed as onerous standards imposed from outside the industry. But Brett Kugelmass, the founder of Last Energy, has a different take. He thinks we're looking at a classic case of regulatory capture.

What I realized was that around the mid-1970s, the industry turned against itself, and the companies that we thought of as selling nuclear power plants were in fact selling something very different. They were selling fear of nuclear power plants. They were selling safety systems. They were selling radiation protection. And so the industry turned on itself and through rent-seeking behavior, you know, that's a term economists use to say, okay, let's just extract as much value out of what we already built instead of innovating and bringing new things to the So through this rent-seeking behavior and using a very, very effective tool of regulatory capture, Congress created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with unprecedented powers. They're actually— it's a branch of government that's independent of the executive, right? Like, the president can't tell them what to do. I mean, that is an extremely powerful agency. So if you're going to capture an agency, boy, do you want it to be that one. And so the incumbents captured the regulator to insist on ever more protection in order to sell their new product, which was 10 times as lucrative as the old product, to sell fear of nuclear power. And so after being very, very successful and having done that for 50 years, this is how we can be— find ourselves in a circumstance where the facts say nobody gets hurt even when all safety systems fail. 3-gigawatt-scale meltdowns simultaneously. And yet emotionally, emotionally, we all feel very different.

Alex Epstein wrote an excellent book, Fossil Future, in which he makes the case for fossil fuels. But more than anything, he's an energy realist. He's also very pro-nuclear, and he agrees that L&T and Elara are insane.

Then on top of that, nuclear also faces— and this is another anti-freedom thing— Just a totally irrational danger policy. And this relates to things like linear no threshold and as low as reasonably allowable. And this essentially, you can think of it as our law says that our goal with nuclear energy should be to minimize its risk as much as imaginable. As much as imaginable. And the way they do this is with pseudoscience like linear no threshold. Treating any amount of radiation as deadly, which is just false. But the other thing is it's, it's patently illogical to say our energy policy is to minimize the risk of nuclear infinitely, because if nuclear is the safest thing, and if you minimize infinitely the risk of the safest thing, and you don't minimize the risk of the other things, then you just use more dangerous things. And that's the story of nuclear. So we have this anti-impact policy regime, and then we have this— I mean, you can think of it as anti-radiation policy regime, but this uniquely irrational policy toward radiation-related danger that doesn't apply to, say, the danger of explosion or the danger of a dam bursting or these other things. And so that combination is you can't do anything.

We often lump regulation into one big bucket, but there are really 2 main categories that slowed nuclear down and made it more expensive to build. The first one is specific to nuclear safety regulation related to radiation, as Brett and Alex called out. That's LNT and Alara. Then there's a second one, environmental regulation, or NEPA. This one applies to so many big projects, from solar installations to SpaceX launches. The Institute for Progress has a great piece on how NEPA environmental reviews actually harm the environment by slowing down things like Renewable energy and nuclear projects. We'll include it in the resources guide. Certainly, NEPA, passed in 1969, contributed to making nuclear buildouts slower and more expensive.

Here's James again to explain how the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, began to slow nuclear down back in the 1970s.

But what occurs starting in '73, '74, '75 is a dramatic increase in environmental regulation caused by a D.C. District court case called Calvert Cliffs Coordinating Committee versus the Atomic Energy Commission, which basically says that the AEC, the predecessor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, needs to take the National Environmental Policy Act much more seriously when it comes to nuclear power plants and do much more serious environmental impact statements, use cooling towers generally if you're using a river or a lake to cool with, and so on. That starts increasing the price. But also we see inflation occurring in 1973, 1974, '75, major supply shortages and labor shortages, which means that all of a sudden a nuclear power plant, which can have 5,000 or 6,000, you know, workforce of that large, of that many workers on the job site, became very, very expensive to do that. And the productivity just starts really decreasing. So what we see is we see the cost skyrocket of new nuclear power plants during this time. And then Three Mile Island occurs in 1979, which really causes a major increase in the regulatory burden for safety systems. And that decreases the economic competitiveness of nuclear power plants and skyrockets the price and makes them, you know, take years and years and years to finish.

I didn't realize the chronology here, but it seems like before we even get to the anti-nuclear movement or disasters, We have a witch's brew of economic and regulatory concerns that made building nuclear harder, slower, more expensive, and riskier. Emmett's not one of min's words, so let's ask him to divide up the blame.

Ooh, yeah. So first of all, I'm going to put, I think, the lion's share of the percent, because you have to, in the changing economic conditions and the regulatory environment. Those actually historically happen So that's really important. Like, NEPA gets put in place around a nuclear power plant, but it wasn't necessarily anti-nuclear. It was just a typical environmental concern. Are these animals going to be hurt by our industrial thing, right? So it doesn't really become anti-nuclear for a little bit, not explicitly. So I'm going to put the lion's share there. I'm going to say that's like 60%, right? And then I'm going to say the other 40% is going to be the cultural element. to it. No politician is going to risk their ass to do something interesting, you know, and neither is the utility industry because it's going to screw up their book and they don't want the headaches.

Typically you hear about Three Mile Island as the turning point, but by 1979, a potent anti-nuclear mix was already at play. The AEC had overpromised on safety. Utilities had ordered too many reactors expecting energy demand to continue to rise. And then, economic conditions changed, and environmental regulation made it much slower to build.

And then, on top of all of that, there was the cultural element that Emmett described. That's the 4th factor: the environmentalist anti-nuclear movement. They got started long before any major reactor issues, and actually, their work helped color the public reaction when the first one did occur. In fact, the movie The China Syndrome, starring vocal anti-nuclear activist and actress Jane Fonda, Yep, that Jane Fonda, came out 12 days before Three Mile Island and worked to spark fear in a generation. First, the anti-nuclear movement, then Three Mile Island. We'll play you a clip to put you in the state of mind that people were in when the disaster at Three Mile Island happened in 1979. The China Syndrome.

It will start with a tremor in a nuclear power plant.

Where it will end will depend on 3 people.

I would say you're probably lucky to be alive. Same for the rest of Southern California. Jane Fonda.

Let's face it, you didn't get this job because of your investigative abilities.

Kimberly, don't fight it.

Jane Fonda wasn't working alone. Who was behind the anti-nuclear push, and why? One of the biggest players was the same group celebrating Illinois' August decision not to overturn its moratorium on new nuclear, the Sierra Club, an environmental group that was initially very excited about nuclear energy because of its tiny land footprint. Mark Nelson, founder and managing director of Radiant Energy Group, explains how things turned.

You can say that Sierra Club got politicized in the direction of the anti-nuclear bombs and nuclear bombs testing movement, and because that clustered along with, say, anti-population work, or, you know, anti, like, human population growth. And, um, it also got clustered in with left-wing anti-war, anti-industry work then. And, and happening before carbon was a particular concern, really, it was a vibes problem. In the end, it just all seems to come back to the bomb. The bomb. The bomb. Why? Because the nuclear plants were seen as part of an industry, a supply chain, an industrial ecosystem that included nuclear weapons. Um, very early evidence that we have for Sierra Club members describing— the anti-nuclear ones describing why and how they wanted to fight And eventually they actually had to split off from the Sierra Club in part to fight nuclear, which eventually let the Sierra Club come back around and become anti-nuclear. But sort of the older guard of Sierra Club, the ones who had fought in World War II, Ansel Adams, for example, Will Searle, these were, these were pro-nuclear people for exceptionally pragmatic reasons. Well, the anti-nuclear folks said, look, We've got to convince people nuclear plants are dangerous because it's part of the same effort as nuclear weapons. And nuclear weapons are a sign that humans have gotten dangerous toys. They've gotten beyond their moral capability to act. They've gotten too much power. And that too much power argument very cleanly steps into too much energy. Too much power, too much energy. It's all the same thing. Too much growth. And you can see how imperceptibly to be against nuclear weapons and to be against nuclear weapons testing was to be ready to make an argument against nuclear energy.

Emmett was even more blunt in his assessment of the anti-nuclear camp's motivations. In his telling, and the telling of others including Robert Zubrin, this camp viewed nuclear energy as a bad thing Not because it was inherently unsafe, not because of the bombs, but because nuclear power represented the greatest opportunity for humanity's practically limitless growth. Nuclear's opponents were OG decels, folks like Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who argued for population control under the guise of environmentalism. This is where it gets even weirder, and I'm going to turn it over to Emmett to untangle the web for us.

I mentioned before that there's that whole connection between, like, technological development, population growth, and, uh, running out of resources or whatever. That was even explicitly in the calculations that the Club of Rome used in its famous Limits to Growth report, right? Uh, so Hunter Lovins, who worked on that, was the wife of Amory Lovins, who heads the Rocky Mountain Institute. They were pulling on ideas that go back to the progressive Eugenics movement. But I mean, this theme has been an enduring one since the 1600s, 1700s, right? It is about what is the relationship between industry and nature, and can we continue to keep feeding, clothing, heating, sheltering ourselves over it, right? So they were trading on that, and they had— there's some really dark roots to the progressive stuff, like, right? Like the guys that founded the Sierra Club, and this isn't the current Sierra Club, so fault. In fact, they've done good work trying to distance themselves from their founder's ideology, were deeply racist ideas about people who didn't have Teutonic blood couldn't steward the forest because they were dirty garbage people or whatever. So it's that level of thinking. I mean, you just see that all over history, right? That's not unique to them. What is unique is that it donned the veneer of something closer to science when ecologists like Paul Ehrlich got involved, who started to premise his ideas Paul Ehrlich's whole thing is like, I'm going to do population growth scares but make it less racist.

The environmental movement at this time promoted degrowth over growth and popularized mantras like small is beautiful. Renowned environmentalist Amory Lovins said in 1977, if you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. Or even more bluntly, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb book, giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. The environmentalists turned against nuclear energy because it was too good. It could make energy abundant and cheap, and they were scared of that. And so they did everything they could to damage nuclear's reputation, conflating nuclear bombs with nuclear energy, and leading a popular anti-nuke movement with many figures, from politicians to musicians to celebrities, all vocalizing their support. They primed the public for incredible overreaction to the nuclear accidents that would follow.

The biggest misconception people have of this time is somehow the meltdowns came first, and then because there were meltdowns, people got an anti-nuclear movement. That's entirely backwards. We wouldn't even know about the meltdowns Maybe only Chernobyl. And even that, just a footnote for the people who didn't live through it. Not that it was fun to live through, but it's just like most people on the street don't understand Bhopal and the Union Carbide plant that, that had a massive leak that killed and maimed thousands of people, right? But it would be that sort of thing, a local curiosity, local tragedy, individual tragedy for those caught in it instead of a world-defining global narrative. which Chernobyl is, the existence of the anti-nuclear movement changed the meaning of the few meltdowns that we've had that have come to public attention.

So to recap, at this point, the nuclear industry is already collapsing on itself from the overpromising of safety from the AEC, the economics of the time, increasing regulation like LNT and Alara, and the whole environmental movement. The final nail in the coffin were the disasters which we myth-busted in episode 1, but wanted to touch on further here. Mark explains how Chernobyl, even the worst disaster, had some unexpected elements.

So when I talk to people who are against nuclear and they say Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi prove we can't do it, well, I think my experience can, can be best related in the most extreme story I have about this. San Francisco is close to these big, beautiful redwood forests, and we'd go up in the morning with various runners from around the Bay and run up Mount Tam in the morning. Well, I had this long, brutal uphill debate with this British lad, nuclear physicist, either already had his PhD or was getting it at Oxford and was visiting the Bay Area. And we get all the way up and he's adamant that nuclear is not good enough. It's not acceptable. Fusion's the future. Nuclear fission is too dangerous. And then somewhere around on the way down, I was just fed up. And I said, look, How can you possibly say that nuclear meltdowns are so dangerous? They didn't even stop running Chernobyl nuclear plant. And he pauses and he says, yes, they did. I said, no, they kept running it for 14 years. It's like, that's impossible. How can you say that? What's your evidence? And I'm like, these are open records. There's no one who's hiding it. IAEA has the production data. What do you want me to recite it to you when we get to the car? And he's just silent. For about 10 seconds. He says, so nuclear's not that dangerous? It just— he hadn't realized that the worst nuclear blowup ever didn't realize to even the next reactor a few feet away stopping production.

It's fascinating that even with what I would argue is the only actual disaster in nuclear, Chernobyl, the power plant itself, minus the reactor that blew up, continued to operate for years afterwards. People needed the power.

Brett, the founder of Last Energy, who we heard from earlier in the episode, came to nuclear in a similar way, but his white pill was Fukushima.

So one of the early facts that I learned about nuclear was that Fukushima, despite having 3 gigawatt-scale meltdowns and every single safety system failing, couldn't manage to hurt a fly. Okay. So like, that's a fact, but like, that doesn't resonate well with us. And so like, why it doesn't resonate well with us is like part of the puzzle as like, how did we get up here? How can we all be so emotionally resistant to that fact that nuclear was never a hazard to begin with?

Right?

Remember, zero safety systems worked. 3 full meltdowns, not a single injury. So if there is no hazard, and yet we all say that a meltdown is a catastrophe, it's the epitome of catastrophes, that's a little bit of a clue to how we got to this point.

The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima stand out in our collective memory because the idea of a nuclear explosion is so terrifying, and because Americans were primed to be terrified. But because of that, their role in nuclear's history is often overblown. They were more effect than cause. And if anything, they've been catalysts that have helped nuclear to become so safe. That's why we wanted to look at the history of nuclear, to talk to as many people as we could to understand what actually happened, to pull out the lessons. So let's recap those historical lessons, because I think they're going to be really important for the rest of the season, and particularly in the next episode when we talk about, in the year of our Lord 2023, what are the things that we can actually do to build more nuclear power?

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, quick history recap. We had the atomic bomb, which was the first basically awakening of this concept of nuclear fission on anyone's kind of the public's horizon, right? Their understanding. You have this little hiatus where people are Kind of focused on the weapon stuff. The Cold War is starting. And then finally Eisenhower says, okay, we have this great technology. Let's use this for the public good. And then he kicks off the Atomic Age with his famous speech that we're gonna have atoms for peace and build a whole bunch of nuclear energy. And we actually do start doing that. So late '50s, we built the first one into the '60s. We're building, building, building, building. Then as we get into the '70s, Looks like there's going to be a lot more electricity needed, so we're still building. But then there are a few things that happen that kind of slow us down.

So first, there's the Atomic Energy Commission itself. As Emmett pointed out, by overpromising on the safety of nuclear power, by saying that there was a 1 in a billion chance that anything bad would happen, while at the same time covering up incidents that disproved that fact directly, they set the bar too high. lost public trust, and made nuclear an easier target for both environmentalists and regulators alike.

Next, we have the environmental movement that does kick off in 1970 with Earth Day and kind of goes from there. You see the Population Bomb book come out and people start to rally around small is beautiful. They don't want to see nuclear energy built. The Sierra Club is changing their stance on nuclear energy. And so there is this building momentum around the cultural aspect of being anti-nuclear.

Then third, there's the economic reality of building nuclear power plants. This is one that I think hits close to home because it feels so non-obvious. Like today, that is the big challenge with nuclear. It's expensive, and we'll get into why that is and how to fix it. But my perception of the past was always this stuff made sense and it was just shut down. Large reactors are multi-billion-dollar, decade-long projects that can pose an existential risk to the utility companies who order them. Often, these utilities exist in deregulated markets where they can't just pass on the cost to consumers. Nuclear has to compete on price with other electricity sources from day one. And if it doesn't win, the utility could go out of business. And it's happened before. Nuclear has been called a utility killer for a reason.

And I would say the last thing here is we do start to see regulation layered in, right? You have NEPA, you have various kind of ratchets as the now NRC is coming in with its mission just to regulate, right? And they're just adding layers upon layers of regulation, and that drives up cost.

That web of costs and regulation and financing costs and construction, like, All of that we're going to unpack. Then I guess like last and just way less important than I had thought, although if you do look at kind of the history of nuclear installations, there are sometimes these inflection points. But I think for the overall narrative, the disasters at Three Mile Island, at Fukushima, and at Chernobyl, there's certainly an element and they certainly color people's minds. And I think there's just a lot of residue left over from these things that Maybe got overhyped and bent because of all these other factors that we talked about. There's certainly a factor, but we put these last because I think without the other 4 factors, all but maybe Chernobyl would be non-stories. They'd be footnotes in history. And even Chernobyl, I mean, there have been gas plant explosions and deaths from oil and like all sorts of things all around the globe for hundreds of years. And I can't name another one of those. And so I think, you know, even Chernobyl, the worst of the nuclear disasters, would probably also be a footnote in history. If there hadn't been this big movement against nuclear happening at the time and all these other factors that led to its demise.

This list isn't exhaustive, but it gives us a good hit list of issues we need to tackle if we want to make sure that the recent wave of enthusiasm for nuclear doesn't turn into another 1970s. If the nuclear industry is going to learn how to win, we need answers to all of these issues and more. Issues like how to finance these projects, how to build up our construction expertise, so we can get down the cost curve, and how to balance free market capitalism with the government muscle often required to get big things built. We're going to spend the next episode going deep into the weeds with the people on the ground to understand how we move forward here.

Thank you for listening and watching to this episode of Age of Miracles. If you like what you hear, please rate, subscribe, And share. And if you're feeling really generous, tell us what you think in the comments. Plus, we have a ton of resources and references in our resource hub if you want to go deeper, and we've linked them all in the show notes below. See you next week.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine. The podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people By tech people, we have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors, like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co.