Nuclear: an Old New Solution? Interview with Bret Kugelmass
This is a transcript of the podcast interview recorded for Sustainability Explored on 9 of December 2019.
This is Season 2 Episode 15.
You can listen to it here, or join on any of your favorite podcast platforms.
[00:10] Anna: Hi everyone, and welcome to Sustainability Explored, a podcast where we explore all the sides, angles, and colors of sustainability.
This is the third episode of the second season, Déjà!, and the fifteenth, I guess, overall, since I have started the Sustainability Explored. In the second season of this podcast, I would like to focus more on the energy — to know and understand where it’s coming from, are alternative so-called energies are really green and sustainable, and what influences the price of our energy, amongst others.
So two weeks ago, I attended a workshop on energy transition and climate change, organized by the German NGO called United Europe in Paris. You can listen to this fruitful discussion, that came at the end of it in the episode # 13 to understand a little bit more the general narrative of the energy transition in the European Union and even globally a little bit.
The reason I bring it up is during the two days’ workshop, we never mentioned one particular type of energy, which is nuclear.
When we say alternative energy, when we say energy transition, we in most of the cases mean solar, wind, geothermal, tidal energy and so on, but the experts and the general public tend to, you know, altogether we tend to kind of forget or pretend that we forget about this type of energy as nuclear.
Nuclear power is amongst the most abundant forms of alternative energy. It creates a number of direct benefits in terms of emissions and efficiency while also boosting their economy by creating jobs, of course, in plant creation and in operation. Thirteen countries relied on nuclear power to produce at least a quarter of their electricity as of 2015 and there are currently 450 plants in operation throughout the world.
The drawback is that when something goes wrong with the nuclear power plants, the potential for catastrophe exists, and it’s very real. The situations in Chernobyl, Ukraine 1986 and Fukushima in Japan are examples of this.
For this episode, I have invited a guest, a distinguished guest, his name is Bret Kugelmass. He’s a managing director of Energy Impact Center, the research institute analyzing solutions towards net negative carbon by 2040 and a podcast host of Titans of Nuclear.
Titans of Nuclear is a podcast featuring interviews with experts on nuclear energy. It currently reaches more than 40 000 listeners across 125 countries up to five times a week.
So, I invited this distinguished guest to help me understand and help my listeners understand the nuclear energy — the drawbacks, the potential advantages, the price and so many more. So we’ll wait for him to come in a second and we’ll start the interview. Meanwhile, a musical pause.
[04:25] Anna: So, my guest, Bret Kugelmass. How are you today, Bret?
[04:28] Bret: Doing great. Thanks for having me.
[04:30] Anna: It’s so nice to finally get to speak to you. You get to work with the very controversial topic, nuclear energy. Can you tell us, where is it going today and what are you doing as a managing director of Energy Impact Center?
[04:46] Bret: You know, it’s funny, I actually don’t think it’s that controversial. In some circles, you know, when debating, I think amongst the very rich in the world who have the luxury of choosing whatever energy source they want and paying for more expensive energy if they want, and growing up in an era, where, you know, a lot of the elite may have talked badly about nuclear.
I think, some of those people might think it’s controversial, but I think, for the majority of the world, the world just needs energy so badly that they don’t even think of nuclear is controversial. They just think of it as a potential way for them to access energy.
[05:20] Anna: That’s what I thought. You know, I was thinking it’s controversial to me personally, but maybe I’m just implying my views on other people.
The reason why I asked, I already mentioned a little bit in the intro — two weeks ago, I attended a very nice intensive seminar on energy transition and climate change, where we spoke about alternative energies and where the world is moving, the pricing for alternative energy in the world, and nuclear was not mentioned.
So my guess is that at some point the world just turned its back to the nuclear, saying: “No- no, it’s too dangerous to use, let’s just completely switch”. So especially, this year was the HBO Chernobyl TV series. It brought back again this narrative of probably cheap, probably controllable, but it’s still very much connected to severe environmental and social accidents.
So the image is still fresh in the minds of people. That’s why I was thinking, you as a promoter of nuclear energy, what do you get to hear the most? Are people pro or against?
[06:41] Bret: Well, first off to clarify, I’m a promoter of anything that can solve climate change. And after running the math, and that’s what my organization, the Energy Impact Center does.
We’re a research center based at Washington, D. C. My former life is a Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur, and I thought to take the same mathematical tools that I applied to technology and bring them to the nonprofit space. And so when we looked at which energy sources were capable of actually reversing climate change, not just slowing down new emissions, which doesn’t do anything — to reverse climate change, you need to pull carbon from the air.
The only energy source that’s capable of doing that is nuclear energy. So that’s why we focus almost exclusively on nuclear energy. And through our exploration, we’ve spent the last two years meeting with experts throughout the nuclear space, and we found virtually everything that we thought to be backward of what we started thinking — about the safety concerns, about the weapons concerns, about the waste concerns. Literally, I grew up probably with the same understanding that you did, and what we learned in these last two years is the exact opposite.
[07:47] Anna: Can you expand a little bit more? What is the exact opposite? And I personally still don’t get what is pulling carbon from the air.
[07:54] Bret: Well, I’ll start with the carbon from the air because that’s probably the most important part. The carbon that we have in the air, 400 parts per million, right? This is what captures the extra heat. Well, anything above 300 parts per million, you’re going to be adding heat to the system, year over year over year.
So even if we went to zero emissions tomorrow, that’s in every single sector — industry, transportation, electricity, heat, everything. Everything’s zero, right? That’s the goal, zero.
That wouldn’t do anything at all. We would still have the 400 parts per million in the air, which means we have a 3 Watts per square meter radiative forcing, that’s the extra heat that we absorbed and the Earth still gets hotter and hotter, year over year. There’d be nothing solved, if we went zero new emissions. So, the goal is to actually go negative emissions. We need to pull the thousand gigatons of CO2 that we put in the air over the last 20 years.
We need to pull that out. And the tricky part is that’s going to require a lot of energy. And every energy source, including solar panels, wind turbines, everything, nuclear, everything has a carbon footprint. So your carbon footprint has to be so low, that the energy you produce is capable of not only pulling out your carbon from the air but all the other carbon from the air as well.
And that’s where nuclear is the only one that fits that mathematical requirement.
[09:14] Anna: And we’re still talking… How does the technology look like? Are we still talking about the energy blocks, like the most probably familiar picture would be the one from the HBO TV series of Chernobyl, or is it something else, something smaller, something more controlled? What are the conditions?
[09:35] Bret: Well, nuclear, it doesn’t really matter what the nuclear looks like. The nuclear is just what would power the system to remove the carbon from the air. The system to remove the carbon from the air would probably be a bunch of giant fans and some chemical solvents in order to remove CO2, but you still need energy to do that. And so energy, any type of nuclear energy source could be possible to do this. And there are many different types. The types, that you saw at Chernobyl, were essentially giant graphite blocks. The reason you don’t want to use those is because, in the case of an accident, they can go supercritical, right?
And they can also catch on fire, which would spread radioactive material. That’s the RBMK graphite reactor that the Soviet Union built. Most reactors in the world, out of the 450 reactors in the world, 400 of them are based on water. It’s just a giant tub of water with some hot metal rods in them. And so, in the case of an accident, you would not have the same conditions that you had at Chernobyl.
You’d just have a bunch of hot metal rods. They`ll boil off some water and they`ll turn into a puddle on the ground, and that would be it. So it’s very different than what we’ve seen portrayed on TV.
[10:44] Anna: And how about the waste? What can be the residuals of such a system? Because it’s still a big concern in the narrative of the discussions around nuclear.
[10:55] Bret: Yes. So this is one of the things that we learned early on that was just totally backward. Like, we couldn’t believe that we were so wrong about nuclear waste.
Now, turns out that out of all the radioisotopes, that nuclear energy produces an efficient process and it produces hundreds of different isotopes, which are radioactive for different periods of time and are different elements. In order for it to be dangerous to humans, they need to be able to first move through the environment, right?
Because if something is dangerous, but it can’t get to you, that`s not dangerous to you. And it needs to be able to be absorbed by the human body.
There are many toxins that we bring into our body every single day. For instance, there’s chlorine in our drinking water. But a glass of chlorine would kill you. But the chlorine that we purposefully add to our drinking water, doesn’t. Why is that?
You need to have a certain level of concentration dosage.
So out of all of those radioisotopes in the waste, there’s only one that can both accumulate to a toxic dosage and travel through the environment, and that one radioisotope is Iodine-131.
Now, here’s the thing about Iodine-131. It only has a half-life of eight days, which means that within a month it’s 94% gone, within another month that’s entirely gone, okay? So, the only part of nuclear waste, that was dangerous, is gone within a few months. So nuclear waste isn’t really a hazard to human health.
We still characterize it that way. The government still controls it that way, but it is not a medical hazard.
[12:26] Anna: I can’t help but notice that you speak like a real scientist. The half-life of iodine, these many days, the number of iodine… And that just reminded me, when my parents were teenagers when Chernobyl exploded, and they told me a story, how in their schools the teachers were putting iodine, how it’s called, these little bottles of iodine open at the windows, at the entries of their classrooms. But it was not that type of iodine. They thought that would help to reduce the radiation level in the room.
Speaking of this, what is your background? How come you are so knowledgeable about this topic, specifically ‘radioactive’ topic?
[13:18] Bret: Thank you. You flatter me. But my background is a mechanical engineer, so nothing chemistry-related, but I used to run a technology company, so I have a little bit of business sense too.
But as I started at the Energy Impact Center, I just started interviewing experts in chemistry and nuclear, quantum physics, everything you could imagine trying to really get to the heart of why this incredible technology source is so underutilized. And I think I’ve just picked it up along the way.
I’m not really a chemist, but maybe, can play one on TV :)
[13:55] Anna: Well, so that’s exactly was my reason to start Sustainability Explored. Because I had realized I didn’t learn that much in my corporate job. I was like “Let me go deep into the subjects that interest me and explore them myself” and I started also to invite the guests to have these interviews, like the one with you, this is already the 15th episode, and that has been an amazing ride.
[14:22] Bret: It’s incredible because you learn so much after 15 episodes. I mean, just imagine how much more, and it is a perfect way to learn. I love that you just characterize it that way.
[14:31] Anna: Yeah. Otherwise, you just get stuck in your work, doing every day the same.
But when you get to talk to people and having a podcast is a perfect excuse to get to talk to people. Tell me more about Titans of Nuclear. How did you start? What was the idea behind it? It overlaps a little bit with your time in the Energy Impact Center?
[14:56] Bret: Yeah, Titans of Nuclear podcast is produced by the Energy Impact Center, and this is our tool for learning, just like you. We go around and do interview hundreds and hundreds, I mean, we’ve interviewed 1500 people so far and made 250 podcasts, all just to go as deep as we can in every possible topic, related to nuclear energy. And even sometimes we even get into nuclear medicine, just because it’s somewhat related.
[15:22] That’s impressive. I saw the numbers — more than 4 000 listeners across 125 countries. You do it five times a week, correct?
[15:31] Bret: Yes. I think we’re up to like 50,000 unique listeners who have listened to more than one episode at this point…
[15:39] Anna: That`s crazy!
[15:39] Bret: …over 130 countries. Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.
[15:42] Anna: I will subscribe too. Speaking, going back…
[15:45] Bret: Yeah, give us a five-star rating, too!
[15:48] Anna: Okay! Speaking of the energy again, you mentioned in the beginning that it’s more prerogative of an elite country to choose, which energy source to use and to pay, maybe more, for certain types of energy.
I heard of the same concept from professionals, energy professionals from Estonia, where the regular people, households can buy a so-called Green Certificate, voting for only certain types of energy come into their household. How does it work in the US? Is there any sort of the same kind of certificate or how do people actually get to choose their energy?
[16:35] Bret: US is very complicated. Imagine the US as complicated as all of Europe is in terms of electrical grids and imagine that across all of the US, although we’ve got three distinct regions for electric infrastructure, there’s so many different utilities and so many different retail electricity providers and so many different instruments, different infrastructure.
It’s just crazy. And then each state has their own rules and they’ve got their own environmental rules and different rules for the utility and how they might sell and govern, whether you can put on solar panels or not, or who has to pay.
It’s crazy. It’s crazy in the US. So every system, that you can imagine, is here and yes, just like in Estonia, there are some states, where you can pay more to have “green electrons”, even though we all know that’s not really the case. You’re just paying more, maybe, for a penance of sorts to punish yourself for polluting the environment.
[17:32] Anna: “Green electrons”?
[17:35] Bret: Yeah. That’s what they call it here. I mean, it’s not true, right? There’s no way to control where your electrons go, once you’re connected to the grid. But people think that, and it’s a clever marketing ploy by the utilities in the States, makes the voters feel better. So that’s the case.
[17:50] Anna: You mentioned different states having different regulation, and I just realized that we in Europe are thinking of the US as of one country, and I completely slided out of my sight that’s different states can actually get, probably, correct me if I’m wrong, get the energy mix from different sources and it should probably be different state to state, right?
[18:16] Bret: It is different state to state. Some of the states are closer together, like in the Northeast part of our country, and therefore they share a lot more electric infrastructure.
In the West part of our country, the states are more spread out and so they’re a little bit distinct, but they still might share on this, still have power lines that cross each other. But the US is totally different everywhere you go in the country, it’s crazy.
[18:38] Anna: And speaking of the energy mix, do you…, because I used to live in France and at the end of the month, every time I received my utility bill, I could see exactly the percentage of my energy, coming from each and every source. And in France, I remember back in 2015–2016 it was like 76% of nuclear. How is it in the case of the US?
[19:03] Bret: That is not standard in the US, and I’m sure that there are some utilities that might provide that, whether on paper or maybe online, but that is not a standard practice here.
[19:13] Anna: And where you are, in Washington D.C., do you have any visibility of where your energy is coming from?
[19:21] Bret: That’s a great question. I guess my retail provider who sells the electricity is called Pepco here. And I get a bill every month and it autopays itself, so I don’t actually look at the bill, and maybe I should. After the conversation, I’m going to go online and log in and find the answer for that.
[19:37] Anna: See, there is some good in having this podcast! But overall, it’s hard to say, right? I am trying to understand how your work impacts the general narrative, at least in your own country, how hard it is to convince or not, or maybe the government is already in the buy-in stage for nuclear?
[20:00] Bret: Yes. So, the way it works in the US and probably most places is, economics is king, right?
If you can make something cost-effective, you’ll be able to find a market for it. Even with the advent of renewable technologies, when they weren’t naturally cost-effective, voters were able to vote for subsidies essentially, and create an artificial market where thereby was cost-effective for the utilities.
But economics rules everything.
So, in the US you can build nuclear if you want. There’s no real political opposition to it, except in maybe a few States or a few regions. It’s just too expensive. Now we’ve developed a thesis on why it’s too expensive, but at the end of the day, even as recently as 2008 they were about to build 30 new gigawatts scaled reactors in the US, they had the sites ready to go, the permits, the communities loved it and welcomed it, but then the financial collapse happened. And that destroyed the economics.
So, economics controls everything. Right now, nuclear is too expensive. There isn’t a growing market for electricity in the US, so it’s very unlikely that we’ll see more nuclear being built here other than what’s already in the process, like in Georgia. The Vogtle site is being built.
Other than that, it’s very unlikely that we’ll see new nuclear here. But our organization isn’t focused on the US, we’re focused on the globe, the whole world. And so we’re trying to create an ecosystem where people can build cheap nuclear anywhere in the world if they want.
And that ecosystem relies on a few things — education, which we do through the Titans of Nuclear podcast series. And it requires a permissible regulatory environment.
So, new many locations, if putting these regulations that, say, you can’t even use a digital computer because digital computers are too complicated. Now is, you know, essentially putting 30- 40 years ago.
Well, obviously we have digital computers and everything now. And it’d be crazy to just build things analog, even though that’s what the nuclear industry does. So we are trying to overturn those laws to say: “Come on, let a digital computer in your power plant, and it’ll make the whole thing cheaper because you don’t need people swapping out vacuum tubes”. That’s literally the case that we’re in right now.
[22:16] Anna: Speaking of when you say, it should be cost-effective and right now it’s expensive. I didn’t get that part, to be completely honest, because the narrative that I grew up in was: “It’s the cheapest type of energy and yet it’s the most dangerous. That is why we’re turning everything off.”
And that was the case, I guess, in Germany, after Fukushima in Japan exploded, they said: “No more nuclear. Let’s develop alternative”. By the way, a question here: is nuclear an alternative type of energy?
[22:48] Bret: Well, I’ll address the economics question because I feel confident on that. What you mean by alternative, I don’t actually know. Oh, let’s talk about economics.
So when nuclear was first built in any country, let’s say, it pretty much was the cheapest power source. So in the US, when they first built it in the 1960s, it was the cheapest power source you could imagine. Those plants that were built in 1960s are still producing nuclear cheaper than you could imagine, cheaper than renewables, cheaper than gas…
It’s just so cheap, it’s ridiculous. That’s because of the inherent advantages of nuclear energy. It takes 3 million times less fuel to create the same amount of energy. It’s just absolutely incredible. That’s why it can be cheap. Over the years we’ve over-regulated it. We have these requirements that say 800 people have to work at each facility to filling out paperwork, not even doing anything.
They’re not moving fuel rods, they’re not even twisting knobs. They’re not doing anything. 800 people have to be there to fill out paperwork. They have to walk room by room with thermometers.
I’m not kidding you. Actual real thermometers, like you putting in your mouth if you are sick.
And record the data onto a piece of paper and then they’ve got to fax that paper into, this is literally how the industry works and this is why it’s uncompetitive, even if it’s already built, in many places against, modern facilities, that might have a more expensive fuel form, like gas or oil or coal, but they don’t have these requirements to walk around each room with the thermometer.
So that’s why nuclear`s both cheap and expensive, and it depends on how you look at it. New nuclear, to build a new nuclear plant, it’s almost always too expensive. In modern-day 2019, it’s too expensive because the requirements like that thermometer requirement also apply to construction.
They go around to each piece of rebar, the metal that’s inside your concrete, and they measure it with to the down to the millimeter, each piece, and say it has to be exactly this many millimeters across from each other, even though that has no effect on the structural integrity of the building because that’s the way that the rules are set up.
So that’s why building old nuclear was cheap. Building new nuclear is expensive.
Operating nuclear today is expensive in some places with high regulatory oversight and not as expensive in other places. It’s complicated.
[25:05] Anna: Operating it …wouldn’t, maybe I’m wrong, wouldn’t it be automated completely in the nearest future?
[25:11] Bret: The part that produces electricity is totally automatic and almost always has been. Another special thing about nuclear, since it’s fuel is so magically dense. You don’t need to do refuelings, but once every two years. Whereas like a coal plant, you need a hundred train cars of coal that are loaded onto the system every day.
That’s a lot of stuff going on around your facility. A lot of machines moving. That’s why it requires a lot of people to operate, let’s say a coal plant. A nuclear plant, in theory, requires absolutely no one. It is, essentially automated and has been for decades, but the legal requirements still say that you need those people with paper and thermometers and other equipment just like that walking around every room, taking handwritten measurements five times an hour.
[26:02] Anna: I still don’t get where the requirement for 800 people with thermometers and papers is coming from, what is a practical side of all of this.
[26:14] Bret: It’s not practical. It’s in the name of “safety”. So the same thing that you were talking about before, you were told it’s dangerous. We’re all told it’s dangerous. It’s not true. Right? A nuclear meltdown of a light water reactor, the 450 on the planet right now, would cause zero harm to anyone. That’s a meltdown would cause zero harm.
As we saw at Fukushima, three meltdowns, gigawatt-scale reactors, not a single person was hurt from the radiation. How are people hurt? People are hurt from the overreaction, and so the evacuation that occurred, displaced 100,000 people that didn’t need to move, but the government did it anyway. 1,000 of them died in the moving process.
The overreaction kills, literally kills lives.
And the overreaction with this thermometer stuff is driving up costs, making nuclear more expensive than coal in some cases, and then people have to breathe in coal pollution and they die too. Expensive nuclear and overreaction to nuclear — that’s what kills people.
Nuclear doesn’t kill people.
[27:21] Anna: To me, it just sounds like it puts those 800 people, the required 800 people, in more danger than they should have been outside of the plant.
[27:33] Bret: Correct. In 2001 as a response to September 11th, they put security guards everywhere with giant rifles. I wouldn’t want to walk into a place with people with giant rifles around, even if it’s for my protection.
To me, that sounds like a hazard. Like what if something goes wrong? What if one of those security guards goes crazy? That’s happened before. We’ve made a nuclear less safe by requiring more protection.
[27:58] Anna: In the work that you’re doing at the Energy Impact Center and with those brilliant people, brilliant minds that you get to meet on a daily basis, five times per week podcast is not a joke. What are the challenges that they share with you in their work and even in your work? What are the challenges of nuclear?
[28:19] Bret: Well, I would categorize in two buckets of challenges. The real challenge is economics. Everything else is a fake challenge that doesn’t need to be worked on, but most people work on fake challenges.
So for waste, for instance, you know, a lot of the researchers in the industry work on waste. They work on keeping it separate from humans for a million years, and our government spends billions of dollars on this research. Well, we don’t, like we talked about before, we only need to keep it separate for a couple of months, not millions of years.
So you have a whole industry full of people, unfortunately, working on challenges that don’t need to be solved and very, very few people working on the economics. So that’s the problem the nuclear industry finds itself in today. And our job at the Energy Impact Center is to tell everyone that and try to change it.
[29:06] Anna: Okay, I see. I see. I guess all of my questions are covered for now. Thank you very much for taking this ride, this journey, this ‘nuclear’ journey with me today, and I wish you all the best of luck for your future endeavors in the Energy Impact Center and the Titans of Nuclear. Thank you.
[29:28] Bret: Thank you so much, Anna.
[29:30] Anna: Thank you. Goodbye.
[29:36] If you like the podcast, please leave a review, rate, comment on the platform you’re listening on as it helps other people to discover it. Thank you again for listening and until then, take care, stay sustainable!
Podcast host Anna Chashchyna
Episode guest Bret Kugelmass
Transcript editor Anna Kharybina
