The book "Limits to Growth", looked at a scenario where there was abundant clean energy, and the situation still collapsed. Energy is important but it isn't the only vital thing we are using at unsustainable rates. And replacing ~5000 fossil fuel power plants of average 500 MW around the world with nuclear, doesn't look at all likely to happen, and it would require more than that because current electric plants don't produce enough to run transportation and industry. I understand he isn't thinking we can run everything with nuclear, but we haven't solved much to leave these out. Industry and transportation each use almost as much as is used for electrical generation, which can be seen in the Lawrence Livermore Lab flow charts of energy use. And I'm not saying that wind and solar are answers to our problems, either. Thinking of Jacobson's faith in these, which was mentioned here, I have to think he doesn't understand the issue of energy quality. Someone ought to explain it to him. Then there are serious problems with soil erosion; and maintaining fertility of what doesn't wash away, and all I see is a lot of hand waving from him, and you, on this. Nothing demonstrated to work without fossil fuel inputs, nothing about how these undemonstrated techniques would be taught to hundreds of millions of new small farmers in different and changing climatic conditions, how they would get land and housing. And yes, lots of small farms already exist, but a large and growing number of them also use fossil carbon made and run machinery and fertilizer, may irrigate with fossil carbon machinery as well. It is interesting that he knows, and of course dislikes, that we have always had around a 50% death rate of children. He might not know that this a very low rate when considering other animals, and he might remember that utopias don't exist. Civilizations have endlessly tried to create utopias and they have endlessly created hell instead, before dying and leaving only ruins. And he might know that modern medicine and food and shelter production has a growing huge problem of failing public health, with a large and growing part of the population having one or more serious chronic health problems. I understand that people desperately want a solution or solutions, just like addicts always want to keep the highs and get rid of the lows, but wanting things doesn't mean they exist. I don't see a solution to my personal problems, they will be solved by death, and that is something that has to be accepted by everyone in the end, but I want humanity to survive, and people like me, like others, also get reproduced over and over, if others younger and healthier survive, though features that don't work, don't get reproduced. And inability to accept that we are addicted to unsustainable amounts of energy and material use, inability to end this addiction, is a feature that isn't going to be common in the end.

@astrologerclimatewitness3787

15 күн бұрын

BINGO.

The guest is a master of brushing things off. He even brushes off the Great Simplification.

Important discussion: Some questions; why was the US Price-Anderson Act passed in 1954? Would if the people living on land don’t want, and are not willing to be compensated for uranium mining, on, or near them? What happens to the tailings from mining uranium? How and where on earth has a nuclear reactor been decommissioned? If the land mass for the facilities is small, where does the regular venting of the iodine 131, strontium 90 and tritium go? What will the effects of a heating planet be in relation to hotter water, drying rivers, increased flooding and rising oceans? What’s the lifecycle cost on our electric bill, from the mining - to the waste. Who will be around to monitor the reactors and the waste in 3024, 6024, 9024? Since we are now locked in ecological overshoot that was predicated “progress”, I think it’s important to answer these questions before we expand nuclear electricity.

@DavidMarcotte-xx1nw

5 күн бұрын

Great questions indeed.

Speaking from someone with a view very close to Chris', from France. One problem I also see is the uncertaintity of our world and our politics : going nuclear requires stability in decisions and highly qualified labor. In france, it seemed for a moment the nuclear sector was declining and maybe going to end, so not much training of new recruits. If we wanted to go fast on rebuilding we would be blocked by the need of experienced workers; today mostly welders (not atomic specialists). In our current industry if the welders do a good enough job then it's ok, we'll just replace the broken part if it brakes. That's less expensive. So the welding skill doesn't have to be very high. In nuclear construction you want stuff that will last very long and sometimes won't be replaceable. Most components of the reactor itself or the main cooling circuit are there for life and if something fails, then the whole reactor will have to be dismanteled. To last decades, reactors have to be maintained and it requires constant skilled labor othewise you shut it down. Our new generation reactor is way out budget and still under construction in part because of those welding problems, but also not acceptable cement quality and even some parts of the reactor itself built out of the fault tolerance ranges of the nuclear regulations. If we want to continue the nuclear way, we have to invest in training, choose quality instead of cost and avoid changes of directions just because there's a new president or a new instagram video. Maybe that's the hardest part...

@HammerinWA

20 күн бұрын

Yes and it requires water!

@strontium7641

19 күн бұрын

@@HammerinWA it requires a source of cold. They don't really use water : they can pump it and return it back, hotter. Some require water because the water is transformed into steam to get more colling power from much less water. It's a design decision and requires acceptable locations. It would drain water from small lakes and small rivers. It can be a problem for large rivers if the water is heated too much for the flora and fauna to survive. It's not a problem if taken from the sea (45% of existing power plants, 100% in UK, Sweden, Finland, Canada with the Great Lakes, Japan, China and some others). A single small nuclear power plant in cold siberia just uses air to cool itself.

What we really need to do, all of us, is to consume less and conserve more.

@isnisse3896

13 күн бұрын

that and fewer babies

Thanks for the conversation Nate. One of the things I like about your podcast is the comments. I love to scroll through them and get inspired. My 'window into reality' shows a different vista than Chris's. I don't fault his passion, thoughtfulness or arguement and I can see how nearly loosing a child at birth can be a significant turning point. Hi 'Trust me, these are some of the smartest people people on the planet' comment is a red flag for me. Some very smart people come up with some of hte stupidest solutions but I get his drift. I'm much more of a Samanther Sweetwater person than a Chris Keefer, but the discourse is critical. As a South Australian I have a very different windon on reality. WIthout high level of rooftop solar we have over 70% averaged over 12 months, frequently exceeding 100%. On many occassions solar into the grid is turneded off because of oversupply. Nevertheless the last 10% 'dunkelflaute' is a real thing. Ironically we also have huge reserves of unmined uranium. We have no nuclear industry and the timescales Chis talks about for Canada are out by a factor of 5-10 here. Nate, I appreciate your questions about the unforeseeables. Also the inference that smart people don't make mistakes. Note the emergency around the powerplant for a couple of weeks in Ukraine. If I were to list one concern it would be the assumption about technological optimism and the absence of wisdom traditions. Cheers

@lynndonharnell422

18 күн бұрын

And yet here in Queensland the plan (partially implemented) is to slash swathes of remnant vegetation along just about the entire Great Dividing Range for windmills, access roads, pumped hydro and power lines. The environmental approvals process seems to have ignored. All on taxpayer subsidies.

Degrowther here. If one assumes degrowth will not be adopted voluntarily because... reasons (among which is the addiction to wealth and privilege) AND if one claims that the current system (namely capitalism) is not sustainable, what logical conclusion can we draw? Is it not that the system will implode involuntarily, which we can call a degrowth by disaster (or great simplification which is the same thing), or we can call degrowth by implosion, but a form of degrowth nevertheless? Whether we like the word "degrowth" or not, capitalism will degrow whether we like it or not, sooner or later, because it's physics. We cannot decrease entropy exponentially in the name or progress without increasing entropy elsewhere in the closed system called Earth. We should get used to this inevitability of degrowth and try harder to take the degrowth by design path, and postpone fatalism and clinging to wealth and privilege.

@mikkert-zh2cf

15 күн бұрын

Officially degrowth means "reducing the throughput of energy and materials to get within the planetary boundaries and reach a steady state economy while doing this in a socially just way". What you call involuntarily degrowth is called collapse in the scientific literature. I wish to degrow where I can in my personal life and job which can help with making my locality more robust while I expect a collapse of growth dependent capitalism.

@VladBunea

14 күн бұрын

@@mikkert-zh2cf [I replied to this but comment got deleted]

responding to the comments on podcasts - I"m getting the impression, more and more, that people listen to podcasts, among many other reasons, for the social/communal aspect of it. It feels good to be part of a community interested in a certain thing.

@UnhingedBecauseLucid

21 күн бұрын

... furthermore, among other considerations, if you're stuck at a bullshit job or simply in one of just pure drudgery, keeping a couple of neurons active while listening to a worthwhile podcast takes a bit of the edge off... There's also the fact that it's not like any other affordable media is in the business of offering any kind of depth into specific subjects, let alone "subversive" ones.

@andywilliams7989

20 күн бұрын

​@@UnhingedBecauseLucidlike growing vegetables or plastering walls. We the manual workers have the upper hand on being informed because our brains are open and bored. I have to have silence to do carpentry though.

Thanks for all the conversations, Nate. Hi Chris. My point of reference re: civilian nukes is Dr. Rosalie Bertell, who wrote "No Immediate Danger?" (1985) while she lived and worked in Toronto, Ontario. Her epidemiological work for the Marshall Islands people taught her that no level of radiation is safe for living things. Her thesis (shortened and paraphrased here) is that the dangers of nuclear power generation aren't the catastrophic possibilities (some big badaboom) we have been raised to fear, and that engineers have grown to love as problems to solve. For her, the main danger is the business as usual of releasing toxic materials into the biosphere, causing silent mutations across generations, hurting the viability of DNA-dependent phenomena in a silent and inexorable way. It's not the dramatic deaths that matter here; it's the damaged DNA that gets to reproduce in a more and more toxic world. To her, the precautionary principle trumps the engineering wow that mesmerizes us. - The uranium mine tailings in northern Saskatchewan are still hurting the health of the local Natives decades later. - The routine releases of Tritium from the Candu reactors, by their very design, spreading isotopes in Lake Ontario, say. - The possibility of radioactive or chemicals oopsies during transport and processing (e.g. very corrosive fluoride is involved - a whole nother flustercuck). - The still unresolved "disposal" problem; storage that needs monitoring in perpetuity, resilient to system failures, is an impossible solution. Rarely does the nuke/no-nuke convo include concerns for the slow pollution of the industry and its forever impact on public health. The military concerns for this tech have historically trumped public health values and have edited these verified flaws off the sales brochure. Meanwhile, really, even if this overly complex way to boil water were "safe enough" (for whom???), the tech is too complex for a world that needs to simplify. How can you say "decoupled" when that industry's supply chain has no room for error, with the corrupt industrial/military complex in the driver seat? Even if the beast were tamable, it won't happen in time to make a difference to the apocalypse, err Great Simplification. So why the continued interest in that? I'd call it engineering onanism, except that babies are actually dying. It's a massive distraction from relearning to thrive with less, more connected with nature.

@guapochino140

13 күн бұрын

Thank you. The time scale of nuclear - from building, to lifecycle, to disposal, make it a philosophical question about our relationship to the future. It's not just a purely technical issue.

@shawnnoyes4620

3 күн бұрын

"no level of radiation is safe for living things" ... This is such an incredible level of ignorance. Lookup cell repair from radiation ... Humans have evolved in a sea of radiation ...

The guest is a true representative of speciesism.

@mikkert-zh2cf

15 күн бұрын

This Keefer guy can take a hike as he has such disregard for other life that is not human. Respect for people who have different opinions, however I do not respect astroturfers that lack empathy.

@shawnnoyes4620

3 күн бұрын

@@mikkert-zh2cf Dr. Keefer not have empathy? You do not know him. He is amazing. Take the time to get to know him ... Decouple Podcast.

Born and raised in Ontario here. I have a degree in physics. I have living memory of 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. For him dismiss my concern by repeatedly saying it is because I don't know the difference between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear energy plant is both insulting and dismissive. I found that rather than actually addressing real issues (like human failings, profit motivations, waste disposal, and others you raised) he instead says "smart people designed it", "trust me" and implies opponents are stupid. This is a style of argument designed to win permission rather than educate. Also, his website is fluffy and does not identify a BOD or source of funding. As we wander the meta-crisis, my smell test has a higher bar than what could easily pass for a thinly veiled industry propaganda group. I would love nuclear to be safe. But convince me. Don't just say I am conflating bombs and energy, because I'm not.

@thunderstorm6630

3 күн бұрын

und uranium would only last for 29 years

@shawnnoyes4620

3 күн бұрын

Why convince you of anything? Do you not know how to use Google to do a literature review? Perhaps you should get your money back from the institution that granted you a physics degree - LOL. CANDU uses natural uranium. It does not use enriched Uranium. Therefore, NO Bomb. Also, CANDU reactor-grade plutonium is not suitable for use in bombs because it contains too much plutonium-240 (Pu-240). Reactor-grade plutonium is defined as containing 19% or more Pu-240, while weapon-grade plutonium contains less than 7% Pu-240. Pu-240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission, which emits neutrons and makes reactor-grade plutonium unsuitable for bombs.

How do you make nuclear safe during war, collapse and pandemic extra, I didn't feel assured by his brisk assurance. Chris seemed so secure about his knowledge base (as you would want an ED doctor to be), I kept wanting to hear some humbleness about what we don't yet know, I heard none, just speedy arguments and un-reflective facts.

@j85grim4

20 күн бұрын

How do you do nuclear period without oil is what I want someone like him to answer.

@davidbarry6900

20 күн бұрын

As we've seen in Ukraine, hydro-electric dams are even more vulnerable (and cause larger scale disasters) in times of war than Nuclear power stations. Modern nuclear power stations are HEAVILY shielded and have incredible levels of failsafes in case they need to shut down. The risk of leaking radioactivity is incredibly low; it's much safer to live near a nuclear power plant (even in a war) than a coal power plant. Amazingly, the main risk is the same as for solar and wind, in that we'd simply lose access to the power normally provided by those systems. (Solar and wind power are vulnerable mostly in that they need much more transmission lines overall.) Loss of power is not a negligible issue - lack of electricity also kills, as it means no water, sanitation, elevators, lights, cooking, etc.

@aliendroneservices6621

19 күн бұрын

@@j85grim4 It takes less oil than any other fuel. Stop with the *_purity tests._*

@roo3515

18 күн бұрын

@aliendroneservices6621 I assume his comment is less about how much oil it takes to build a nuke power station and more questioning how do we keep performing smoothly with all the support processes required which are currently provided by an oil abundant world. a Full electric economy is so materially and energetically challenging it takes a good dose of hopium to imagine we can switch everything to that without collapsing other systems.

@j85grim4

18 күн бұрын

@aliendroneservices6621 It's not a purity test and that depends on how long construction takes, what the laws are, the budget etc and then about 20 years later you may get a plant....Wake up. It's not happening, and if it did, as Nate stated, all it would do is exactly what all this new tech does, and that's add to the total energy pile we use. None of these technologies have reduced fossil fuel use globally at all. We just set a new record last year and will break it again this year unless there's a recession or another pandemic. The sad truth is that virus did more to help climate change and all other environmental issues than any new tech and ever will.

Thank you Nate and Chris! Nice to hear from a medical professional who seems to be self aware of his own cognitive biases and accepting real world tradeoffs involved in time bound critical decision making, many of which can only be known with hindsight. I would guess he understands first-hand the moral distress of making difficult triage decisions in a real immediate life threatening emergency. I also appreciate his level of somewhat detached calm. I'm reminded of the quintessential mindset of the stereotypical ER doc, "Air goes in and out; blood goes round and round; everything else is obfuscation." I would have really like to hear more about why the US healthcare system is so broken and what we might do to fix it. Perhaps a roundtable on the topic with Chris, Robert Lustig, Ashley Hodson, and Kate Raworth?

@angellamount6929

12 күн бұрын

All Western healthcare is broken. Theres too many chronically ill now. We have stone aged bodies that were made to move to obtain Real food. The majority of people don't move enough and eat highly processed stuff.

This journey from the left into being able to listen to the right is very productive. My lefty friends that haven't been able to do it now live in a self contradictory cell. "We need to come together to build a collective response...but not with them". Sad, funny and true

I think that may have been a harder interview for Chris (and possibly Nate - only he knows) than it may have first appeared. Chris is clearly a bright, thoughtful guy, and I would bet money, being a retired doc. an excellent doc as well. My third take was: there may be an aspect of Chris's way of being in the world that is not immediately apparent - otherwise I cannot explain that when he first started watching Nate's podcast, this energetic, positive, very bright, authentic guy - had a strong doomer response, a point that he reiterated in some of his closing remarks. I do believe that to be a really good doc, you have to know the science, and how to use it clinically, and you have to love people, and love helping them. Docs learn how to be with people in all manner of suffering and pain, and sometimes the only medicine they have to offer is hope. I suspect he did not immediately use his doc survival skills when confronted with a personal and societal uncertainty that will include possibly a horrific amount of suffering - he may not have had a map for negotiating the uncertainty that caring about the future of life triggers when he first encountered TGS (The Great Simplification). I found his positivity towards diverse points of view refreshing and remarkably insightful, and likely a wise kind of humility, which all bright people need a good dose of. TO BE CLEAR: I am speculating vis a vis his initial doomer response, and other hypotheses are projecting my own experience of being a doc. I learned a lot about nuclear power that I did not know, as well as fascinating and important stuff about the Cuban healthcare system. Nate's point about ecology was spot on - and the response, I thought, had echoes of the uncoupling notion ( I think illusion). Regardless, I agreed with his reminder that simplification is not like going camping. Scores of mostly older people died today because of the heat hitting Northern Ghana and Burkina-Fasso, and who knows where else in Africa and South Asia, but their names or numbers will never appear on any accounting of the incessantly rising casualty count of global warming. This is not a drill. I think Chris knows that well, and is doing way more than most, (and using his skills and talents well) of the hard work of trying to minimize the casualties, as does his elder, lol, Nate.

@garyhoover9750

18 күн бұрын

What a wonderful and insightful response - thank you! I was thinking that we need ER doctors/midwives/hospice duals for our species right now. Wise humility and loving kindness as we try to make a way for life as best as we can I keep thinking that we need to love deeply, live gently, and let go gracefully. I’m grateful for Nate and Chris holding this conversation. I would love to hear more from both about navigating the near future as people who are a part of a culture centered on plunder in a time of shrinking habitat for life - especially human life - on planet earth. It seems to me that we are not having conversations about transforming from fear, exclusion, domination, and plunder as our core cultural pardigm to love, inclusion, inter-being, and cooperation as our core cultural paradigm. Nate and Chris did touch on the reality that the fundamental crisis we face is not one of technology, but rather one of relationship. I would like to see that topic centered in future conversations.

@roo3515

18 күн бұрын

I agree. Nice comments. Clearly his experience with his child has influenced his thinking. He doesn't want to imagine a world where his child would not have been saved. Loosing modern complex medicine is definitely a big challenge to the doomer-optimist embrace of the Great Simplification. I'll throw out a view here: We should try and keep complex medicine up to what cost? What if in trying to perform ER on the modern global industrial economy, via Nuclear Surgery, (surgery on a terminal patient) we leave the world littered with nuclear reactor time bombs & waste unable to be dealt with by our future decedent's? It's a real double bind. I suggest anyone curious on this line of thinking watch the film Into Eternity

@michaelstevens6762

18 күн бұрын

@@garyhoover9750 I agree with you about the fundamental crisis - I also believe technology will remain an important component - two reasons come to mind: 1. Technology is tools, and machines, that we have made so powerful, thanks to the carbon pulse, that, like any powerful thing, they can accomplish enormously beneficial things, and enormous harmful things, and usually some of both. We use those tools with/at/on one another - usually to shape the nature of our relationships, and societally, and personally, whether they are dominance oriented, or cooperative and loving. 2. Joseph Henrich. an evolutionary biologist wrote a book about the rise of the "West", called "The Wierdest People in the World", the book being a remarkable, scientifically sound, history of, and hypothesis about, how The West evolved from communal bands where ones identity was communal, to, especially in Europe, the individuated, educated, industrialized, driven West. It is simultaneously about about the changing nature of relationships. I suspect that the rise of digital communication affects us more than we know. The essence of TGS is that we do have powerful tools, but we have been using them as weapons, and examining the tough-minded work of learning (in part relearning) how to use our tools to cooperate, to rediscover our cooperative and loving possibilities, as part of the biosphere of life. You are right, it is about relationships.

Thanks Nate & Chris.

"Fukushima is pretty close to a worst case scenario". It's clear Chris hasn't considered what can and will happen with hundreds of reactors globally in a collapse, grid-down, and converging climate disasters scenario, let alone what will happen to the waste. We can barely manage what we have now, and it's increasingly obvious our ability to do so is diminishing, not increasing. I'm getting very sick of the nukabros who rush through all the downsides of this tech or don't even consider them at all. I've watched Chris's channel too and it seems his MO is to engage in climate reductionism and pretend multiple collapse modes aren't already upon us as a result.

@aliendroneservices6621

20 күн бұрын

"...what can and will happen with hundreds of reactors globally in a collapse..." ...Would be the least of anyone's worries, *_in a collapse._*

@user-ln3yi1xw9g

15 күн бұрын

@@aliendroneservices6621 Agreed - IF you're only considering humans.

Speaking as a Canadian, I was first introduced to Chris's work via an interview on Steve Saretsky's channel series called "The Loonie Hour". Nate, I've been following your channel for years as well. Thanks for this discussion ... it's a small world ...

This is a great first episode for anyone new to the podcast. It highlights some of the most important concepts in a clear, concise manner, while covering very important current events topics. Great one!

Most of the "smartest people on the planet" have created this untenable, unsustainable techno-mythology that the human species has created. Human hubris has no constraints. Wisdom is our most endangered "resource". There is more genuine deep-functioning "wisdom" in a mountain lake or a desert ecosystem than there is in Washington DC, Silicon Valley or the Hague. Humanity's hubris is its own "Achilles heel". In the face of the Cosmos we have WAY too high of an opinion of ourselves.

@DpriaN303

20 күн бұрын

@treefrog3349 Thank you for your well said comment on human centred arrogance. Total disconnection from Nature shows itself in these people as the culture circles the drain. Your comments are always a breath of fresh air in a stale worn out commentary on humanity’s illusion of progress

@salliewaters4465

19 күн бұрын

When he said humans have never lived in harmony with nature, I thought he must not be familiar with indigenous cultures. He needs to read Braiding Sweetgrass. I think we can live in harmony with nature, but there's way too many of us now. If colonists hadn't been so arrogant and greedy, they could have learned to respect all life and the world would have been a much better place today, at least for me

@treefrog3349

18 күн бұрын

@@salliewaters4465 Great book!

@DpriaN303

15 күн бұрын

The arrogance of this culture will be its demise. The disconnection is everywhere

World wind and solar are stated to have actually produced 2894 TWh in 2021 which equates to an average power of 0.330 TW (330 GW). So we can see that the real sledgehammer is scale. Wind and solar proponents are fond of bringing up the inefficiencies of energy generation from thermal sources and state the value as 33%. Which is true for electricity generation on average but including direct heat consumption which is considerably higher, and ICE engines which is lower, a weighted average thermal efficiency would be somewhere around 44%. Which is in agreement with other reports as to the reduced energy requirements that would result from the full electrification of everything and replacement of all fossil Carbon and nuclear. Which would get us down to 8.33 TeraWatts average which is a required 25X increase over the current total wind and solar that would be needed. Storage is another big point of contention in the debate. Optimistic advocates now calculate that seasonal storage requirements could be nearly eliminated and reduced down to the realm of 90 hours with an over building of intermittent generation by 3-4X and intercontinental transmission grids. Which puts the rebuildable energy generation build out requirement back up to 25 TW. 75 times the current level. And then repair and or replace it all over again every 30 years. And most of the energy and liquid fuel for mining, refining, manufacturing, transporting, and installing all of this rebuildable energy hardware, is supplied by fossil Carbon. Which, is a nonrenewable resource that is near peak, we have used the easiest, first, and will soon be in terminal decline. At an average power consumption of 8TW, 90 hours of storage would be 720 TWh. The current total of energy storage for electricity is 8.5 TWh. This would need to increase almost 90X as well. 90% of this is currently pumped hydro. It is estimated that if every suitable geography for pumped hydro were developed (using Carbon intensive liquid fuel and natural gas for heavy machines and concrete) it could increase another 8X. Scale. There are 440 Nuclear fission plants in the world which produced 2600 TWh last year averaging 0.300 TW. If we wanted Nuclear to produce half of the newly required 8TW average power after the electrification of everything, we would need to build out 13x more to 5,900 total number of plants. Michaux calculated that we have enough Uranium for 3-400 year of the current fleet. Which becomes 30 years worth if we increase Nuclear 13X.

He talks about renewable energy needing backup or storage. But we developed pumped hydro to load match nuclear power plants because they can not ramp to match demand.

@aliendroneservices6621

21 күн бұрын

"He talks about [wind and solar] needing backup or storage." In order to become reliable baseload power. Uranium-fired power *_already_* is reliable baseload power, *_without_* backup or storage needed for that.

@DanA-nl5uo

21 күн бұрын

​@@aliendroneservices6621but it still requires storage or peaker power to max demand which he claims is a wind and solar problem only.

@noizydan

21 күн бұрын

I agree. A flat baseload doesn't match demand, which peaks and troughs. Something is needed to balance things out. Stepping nuclear up and down too much can damage the system. They like a steady state.

@strontium7641

21 күн бұрын

Nuclear is not perfect :) You have to predict the demand a few hours before. Take a full a hour to turn it on or off nicely, avoid turning it on and off too frequently to avoid degradation, and it's full load or nothing (not exaclty true but you won't make it run at just 10%). So dams are used to handle those moments usually less than hours. With renewable, you can't control production. You can have bad conditions for days. So you have to build many times more dams : let's say actual dams are used at full power today so 12 hours charging and 12 hours outputing, one day of bad conditions it's a 24 hour dam output so 2 times more dams, how many consecutive days of bad conditions are you preparing for? 5? So 10 times more dams. Then no more power at all if there's a 6th bad day? Do you put more dams, accept a big blackout until the whether changes or use fossil as a backup (which means you still have to maintain a fossil production capacity equal to full demand)?

@ninefox344

19 күн бұрын

It's not true that nuclear cannot load follow. See France for an example. It is simply less financially efficient to run such an expensive asset at less than full power. It's really just an accounting artifact. So you develop a comparatively cheaper storage bank that you offload the "following" role to. Even though you spent extra money on the storage, the power from the reactor is now cheaper from an accounting perspective because the denominator (kWh) has grown.

Thanks for clarity.

I think one important point in a steelman argument against nuclear is time. We have such a short time to drop our carbon output, and introducing nuclear would take too long. Not just because of the complexity and cost of building power plants, but because of the political resistance to introducing them. Another steel man argument against nuclear is that they would be a target for terrorists. Your power plants may be well run and secure, but what about your poorer neighbour, whose prevailing wind passes over the border? I don't think either argument precludes the introduction of more nuclear, but they are point that we should consider.

Nate, new discussion great discussion however, you brought up the Achilles heel with nuclear in the course of it. We can’t deal with the waste cheat. If we don’t have any ethos change, social consciousness, elevation, everything else is moved, so prolonging that inevitability through introducing a narrative of hope that there might be some new form of energy to replace fossil fuels is simply delaying the inevitable transition. I think this guy is really well meaning and well intention, but we can’t focus our energies on nuclear or any other source of power we need to focus our energieson simplifying first, and beating the rush as you have so aptly stated in the past

Keefer is a damned smart dude! Thanks for having him on!

I'm sorry that you find the truth to be doom and gloom Chris, but there are no free lunches in nature, including nuclear. Nate did a pretty good job in pushing back on some of the things he said but not enough on others. This guy is definitely a humanist, not an environmentalist like I hope Nate is and I know myself and Bill Rees are. So at least he was honest about that and didn't try to hide it like a lot of guests on here have recently.

@shawnnoyes4620

3 күн бұрын

He is a human environmentalist. You and others sound Malthusian or Neo Malthusian. Makes you an awful human being BTW ...

Great stuff - loved it - thanks. This sort of discussion is a great antidote to the polarised and hostile debates which have become all too common.

It’s great Nate that you’ve finally had Dr Chris Keefer on your podcast, not that long ago Dr Keefer on his ‘Decouple’ podcast talked of a nuclear renaissance, it was nuclear renaissance this and nuclear renaissance that, then some months ago he said ‘it isn’t so much a nuclear renaissance as renewed interest’. So even Dr Keefer realises how difficult nuclear is to turn talk of nuclear power into something physical. And so I include this by John Michael Greer from his book “Dark Age America”: “No nation on earth has ever been able to launch or maintain a nuclear program without huge and continuing subsidies [tax breaks]. Nuclear power, in other words, never pays for itself; absent a stream of government handouts, it doesn’t make enough economic sense to attract enough private investment [where are the institutional investors falling over themselves to get a slice of the action] to cover its costs, much less meet the huge and so far unmet expenses of nuclear waste storage, and in the great majority of cases, the motive behind the program, and the subsidies, is pretty clearly the desire [USA] of local government to arm itself with nuclear weapons at any cost”🤔

nice talk. also, Whitehorse! visited a friend who lives there and it's amazing. incredible place and amazing people.

Regarding statins my GP explained that if you ALREADY HAVE heart disease the benefits are far greater i.e. the number needed to treat is a lot less than 300/400 quoted.

With respect to Fukushima the power company hired migrant workers to do the cleanup work. When those workers left Japan their health impacts where not followed up on. So it isn't accurate to say there were no cancers cases from the cleanup. I believe it is Vietnam where the cancer cases have spiked in the migrant workers there was reporting on it about a year ago i am willing to guess some google searching could find the reporting on the problem.

I appreciate the conversation, but as someone who practices ‘dropping out’ as a positive way to cope and save energy and resources, I find it odd to labeled as less than helpful to the solution. We may need more people ‘dropping out’ from an unsustainable life style for the up 10% of USA income takers. To erase ‘dropping out’ may be as blind as definitely saying ‘No Nuclear Energy’. Our solutions may need novelty. ☘

I think we need to consider some realism than romanticizing this technology VS that technology. Wondering how is nuclear power related to human health and infant mortality ... The bigger problem at hand is human industrial overshoot and it looks really funny when addressing with a very narrow perspective of infant mortality / human health care etc.

2:06:00 topic suggestions that should be covered next time: Where does nuclear power/energy actually fit into scenarios of future energy production? If oil runs out, is nuclear enough? How does it compare with solar/wind if we truly try to move away from fossil fuels, including the manufacturing steps? Realistically, how much nuclear can be implemented and how quickly? Is this better or worse than a solar/wind +battery scenario? Is there a set of ideal mixes of solar/wind and nuclear power, possibly depending on local geography/lattitude/wind patterns etc? What is the likely scenario for scaling up energy production in the big poor countries, like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, and Nigeria?

Chris is brother by another mother! Born 1952 in Pittsburgh. Family worked for Westinghouse owned companies. Carnegie library adjacent to my Catholic grade school. Loaded with nuclear etc books. Read them all. 8th grade toured first commercial reactor in world at Shippingsport with reactor based on Navy submarine reactor which was Westinghouse. 1st and worst decision on nukes was military insisted they should be able to produce ,aterials for bombs. Reactors were extremely high pressure which creates many problems. No forethought on disposal. Ironically Pittsburgh was coal country as entire region had coal below ground. Dovetailed right into steel, aluminum, chemicals industry. As a kid Pittsburgh was filthy! Air more like black soup. Grandparents would sweep soot off their porches several times per day. Rivers open sewers. Corporations spewing the poisons arrogant irresponsible in control of government. Just north of Pittsburgh was first commercial oil well in 1855. Drakes welll still open as a park. Huge high quality oil fields created boomtowns. By 1980s oil was depleted. Today fracking is repeating the story. Coal mines abandoned with billions of gallons of toxic water polluting countless waterways. Mine subsidence rampant. Coal company in those days would allow you to "buy' pillars of coal to prevent subsidence. Countless abandoned wells and thousands of miles of pipeline through beautiful forestswith no records now spewing methane. Lookup Centralia Pa for another coal horror story.

I think you understate the economic value of solar. I built my solar/battery power station on our off-grid rural place for a tiny fraction of the cost of connecting to the grid. My suburban house makes more power than it uses, and I will likely go off grid for more reliable and cheaper power than the Sydney (AUS) grid provides. I am not going to make a cheap local nuclear power plant. ( Too complex and exotic)

@aliendroneservices6621

20 күн бұрын

So, all of the data-centers which you use are also off-grid?

@graemetunbridge1738

18 күн бұрын

@@aliendroneservices6621 why not

"People often romanticize the past but it was dirty and it was dangerous" From 𝓓𝓪𝓾𝓰𝓱𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓑𝓵𝓸𝓸𝓭 by Anne Bishop.

Did I miss it, or was there discussion in here about the finite supply of uranium?

@driftlesshermit9731

20 күн бұрын

I'm not sure. I couldn't finish listening. I would think intelligent people would promote using no energy except human energy at this point in the game.

@dbadagna

20 күн бұрын

Or the fact that civilization is itself a heat engine?

@aliendroneservices6621

20 күн бұрын

"... the *_finite_* supply of uranium." You are correct that there remain only 75 trillion tonnes of uranium in the Earth's crust, which is a mere 10 billion years' worth (if all 20 TW of current fuel-use were replaced with just uranium).

@curedent6086

16 күн бұрын

There was indeed a short evocation. He said that we could certainly find more than the known reserves by scouring the oceans, and went on to talk about fast neutron plant generation, which would be a real breakthrough, but is still at the prototype stage.

@dbadagna

15 күн бұрын

@@curedent6086 Delusion

If wind solar and storage continue their exponential growth will new nuclear be an expensive white elephant in 10 years time? I totally agree it's much safer than burning coal but not convinced it's going to be needed in 10 or 20 years

I think some differentiation between different reactortypes would be needed in the next episode

Breeder reactors are very fickle to operate, less secure than PWR as far as I know. France and Germany cooperated on developing and operating them, but due to operational instability and aversion in German public operation stopped quickly, I think there were 1 or 2 operational and there was one German unit that was stopped in commissioning. Then the Belgians (my crowd) and French also developed kind of fuel rods for standard PWR, called MOX fuel. It's mostly a modification of the spent fuel rod recycling. Safe in operation but due to Plutonium dangerous in the recycling plant. But fuel recycling is always dangerous. On the podcasting part, I'm very much with him against romantizing the big simplification. I had cancer death in my family (natural radiation possibly being part of that), so I don't follow his light analysis on nuclear danger. But then again, during cold war there was a "Chernobyl children exchange" program in Germany for the eastern Germany children being sick of air pollution due to the dirty coal industry in Eastern German industrial areas. To say that Nuclear is dangerous, but carbon energy sources are as well. Thanks a lot for the podcast, always good to listen to Dr. Keefer.

Awkward time in the woods is a place to clear the brain...never overcome that. Provides the thinking brain with a connection to reality for later mental function.

First reactor was similar to Chernobyl but tiny. Was built under stadium in Chicago.

Having been involved for 30 some years in nuclear power (rare) accident, aftermath of Chernobyl and low level radiation, effects specifically upon children...I can say that his comments are credible. Three continuing concerns as yet unsolved, two of them technical: a) the plant designs are still far too costly and time consuming to build, and b) waste solutions still not solve unless long term storage on site for each plant. But the biggest concern is the tendency for human arrogance and screw-up as a result, nuclear power is amazing and also risky if not managed well, and hence the human management of it, A.I. also is not the answer, though if carefully tested, could be helpful, maybe. Regardless, I appreciate what he has to say, he's actually researched and thought a lot of it through...So maybe someday, maybe even near future, small and scalable and relatively much less expensive, we need a better nuclear power alternative.

@alan2102X

21 күн бұрын

Yes, "still far too costly and time consuming to build". No possible way that nuclear can catch up with renewables now, no matter what. Train has left the station.

1:23:20 Canada vs USA - they are similar in that SOME provinces like (left-wing) British Columbia still have a ban on nuclear power, while others (e.g. Ontario) have embraced it.

Where do you find these fountains of wisdom? Thanks again

17:01 *Chris Keefer:* “I do really, really genuinely appreciate good arguments that I disagree with.” Nate asks Keefer to “steel man” the extremes 19:17 and Keefer goes off on a three-minute disquisition on the apocalyptic fears of nuclear annihilation and fear of radiation displaced onto nuclear energy. Those might be the irrational fears-and, perhaps, even the primary underlying motivators-of the anti-nuclear “extreme side” but are _those_ the steelman arguments that Nate asked for? Is Keefer saying implicitly that those are the best arguments he can come up with-I find that hard to believe-or is he just not answering the question and going for some boilerplate explanation? And this from a guy who, just about two minutes before, said he “really, really genuinely appreciate[s] good arguments” that he disagrees with. It’s an inauspicious start to an over-two-hour-long conversation.

37:00 I would ask your friend: How much of California’s 106% renewable production was used to drive a tractor?

@life42theuniverse

21 күн бұрын

I think the primary reason why, thorium reactor/breeder being abandoned, was the difficulty of weaponization.

@life42theuniverse

21 күн бұрын

I believe hospitals are closing because the public no longer have disposable income to pay for their services.😢Equity is moving as everyone begin to tighten their belts.

1:47:00 the side discussion of much more proactive medical system in Cuba is interesting as an example of how we COULD achieve a decent quality of life (at least in the medical sphere) with much lower material inputs (starting with energy). However, Chris's discussion failed to mention just how poorly Cuban doctors are paid - apocryphally less than cab drivers. It really has to be a labor of love, because they are NOT doing it for the money. In the bigger picture, switching to that sort of medical system/society requires a HUGE cultural shift, and/or perhaps a hard externally-imposed limit if we run out of oil. For MOST current societies, the 90/10 rule is much more likely if/when oil (i.e. cheap energy) runs out; i.e. the top 10% will reserve/use 90% of the economic resources for themselves (and/or migrate to countries with stronger economies if they can), while the bottom 90% of people in each country will have to make do with 10% of the service.

Chris is great. Having discussions about options and the future with proponents is important.

22:00 22:04 22:08 22:10 Strontium *_90_* (not "99").

If I was a young person wantimng to invest in green power I would prefer future retirement money became part of the patient capital directed to nuclear construction.

Keefer makes the case for Ho' oponopono.

Great conversation, as always! My view is that if there's any way to keep a certain share of the few products of progress that arose thanks to the carbon pulse that one would consider worth keeping after the Great Simplification and the fall of fossil fuels, then nuclear energy has to be a part of it. For example, things like some knowledge and communications technologies, the internet, servers and data centers, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning, sterilization and higiene, some sort of land transportation, a minimum of global coordination and cooperation infrastructure... Although I agree that the nuclear complexity problem is a tough one to crack, and I can say this from first hand experience. It was once possible, from the 50s to the 90s, when the world where the technology was being deployed was considerably less complex to begin with, but it seems to be really hard to manage nowadays... with a bit of luck, the first shocks of the simplification will help create the conditions in which nuclear technology can be taken seriously again and re-deployed with a bit of a longer term, more right hemisphere values embedded into it. That's my hope, at least. I'm a nuclear engineer, by the way. I happen to think about these things more often than not.

@dbadagna

20 күн бұрын

No, it won't.

Oh, and I thought you were light on permies.

Sorry to intervene just to criticize, but his remark about the gorilla and the child is really silly: 1) We'd also shoot a human attacking your child. 2) The current situation has nothing to do with a child accidentally coming into contact with a dangerous animal: we exterminate animals without having to. The analogy would be a bullfighter finishing off a bull. And there, no, I'm no longer on the human side, sorry.

Thank you for the wonderful discussion. There’s sure potential for more! It seems to me that almost all of our conversations are centered on developing technologies to continue doing what we are doing, rather than on transforming our fundamental relationship with ourselves or the biosphere so that we achieve as much homestasis as we possibly can do. I heard a variant of this question asked recently: “What if we treated the earth as the body of God?” It seems to me to get at the real problem that we avoid with almost all of our conversations. If we see ourselves as sacred and beloved beings knit together within a sacred, loving being, then we would live with empathy as our core cultural paradigm, and we would develop technology that would be veey different. As it is, rape is our core cultural paradigm - or one might say that plunder is our core cultural paradigm. We covet, steal, and kill to take and hold what we want. We have no real interest in self-limitation or in empathetic inter-being. Our model for leadership is the malignant narcissist who mis a criminal sociopath. Our unholy cultural Trinity seems to be Rape, Pillage, and Plunder. The fundamental criss is one of relationship, not one of technology. I would love to hear Chris and Nate (and others?) focus on this, especially in light of the intensification of “resort to violence” as our primary human response to the global polycrisis….? Technology is important, but conversation about technology is moot and meaningless if we do not first create global beloved community.

How to make pharmaceuticals without oil?

@stephenboyington630

21 күн бұрын

I believe converting oil to plastics and other usable products results in less carbon emissions...the carbon stays in the plastics somewhat and gets buried with the water. It is different than burning oil or gas for heat.

@stephenboyington630

21 күн бұрын

Buried with the waste.

@DanA-nl5uo

21 күн бұрын

Less than 0.1% of the 105 million barrels of oil we burn a day

@alan2102X

21 күн бұрын

Why would you want or need to? Amount of oil used for chemical production is very small relative to transport use. There will always be oil enough for chems.

@antonyjh1234

20 күн бұрын

@@stephenboyington630 I don't understand your comment. Gas or oil comes from the same barrel as plastic.

Nuclear power is the most expensive solution today. It is oligarchy trying to keep energy as a commodity. Off grid solar is rapidly becoming the cheapest solution for energy as battery costs continue to drop sodium batteries will be a game changer in cost of storage. Off grid solar removes the profiteering off energy. This scares the oligarchy that is designed around the petro dollar energy to economy link.

@aliendroneservices6621

21 күн бұрын

"Off grid solar is rapidly becoming *_the cheapest solution..."_* There are 1 million factories on Earth. Name one running on *_"the cheapest solution"._*

@alan2102X

21 күн бұрын

SOLAR is for sure becoming cheapest, but off grid ("rooftop") solar is by its retail nature not AS cheap as utility-scale. On the other hand, it has big advantages not had with utility-scale.

@alan2102X

21 күн бұрын

@@aliendroneservices6621 You can get an answer to your question in 10 seconds. Search "factories rooftop solar". There are lots and lots of factories with rooftop solar.

@DanA-nl5uo

21 күн бұрын

​@@aliendroneservices6621there are 8 billion people in the world name one who lives in a factor.

@DanA-nl5uo

21 күн бұрын

​@@alan2102Xthe cost of off gird solar needs to be compared to the cost of retail power not the cost of generation. If the entire system costs less than the monthly power bill over the 25 year lifespan of the system it is the lowest cost solution. I know someone who just bought an off grid solar system because it cost less then the 2 power poles he needed to add to get the power from the road to his house site. In his case the install cost alone was cheaper than the power grid connection before you consider his monthly bill. Grid scale is cheaper in raw numbers but not paying the connection costs to the grid and the power company profits is real dollars that can be considered savings on the off grid system because it is the real cost the end customer pays.

I've been listening to every episode of Nate's and Chris's podcast for the last two years, and I want to say thank you to you both. Personally I kind of agree with Chris on the dangers of romanticizing nature and the past... I'm a human and on team human. And on the other hand, I find myself agreeing more with Nate on the 'pessimistic' or realistic scenarios he paints of the future. I do agree that being on team human ultimately also implies being on team biosphere, at least to some extend.

@j85grim4

20 күн бұрын

This podcast was supposed to be an ecology based podcast, which means team life. Mother earth. That's the team I'm on.

@thisistoofunny3454

20 күн бұрын

@@j85grim4 I don't think it is suppose to be anything in particular but an exploration of our current predicament. Mother earth is an abstraction for the amalgamation of living beings on this particular planet. It's not an agent and doesn't have a perspective itself. The living beings making up 'Mother nature' do, and those evolved in a competitive and sometimes cooperative dance with eachother and the planets geology and other systems. All those living beings view things from their particular perspective. Ants, birds, dino's, and yes also humans... all view and act from their particular perspective. Even in that regard we are not special. Every living being acting from its perspective, that is how the individual living beings and also earths ecology as a whole got where it got. No thing ever took the perspective of the whole. To expect any living being to take this perspective of the whole is un-natural, and a degeneration of instinct. This I strongly believe, if we want to succeed in implementing any kind of change for the better, we need to find something that is at least acceptable from the perspective of Team human.

He talks about nuclear power as using less resources but that discounts the centries of waste management for decades of power generation at the plant level.

@cemotazca8628

21 күн бұрын

Its a question of reactor type, its not so easy. Lies to children version : no higher actinides means short halflives

@foresthappel1543

21 күн бұрын

Yes and also the uranium mines out west are poorly supervised. I believe that the nuclear trailings from the mines have been widely blowing around all over the western states for years. I don't believe that the capitalistic mining industry really has any plans to greatly reduce these hazards...it's part of their business model

@dbadagna

20 күн бұрын

Not centuries, tens of thousands of years!

@cemotazca8628

20 күн бұрын

Yeah if you allow for enough neutron capture time for higher actinides to be formed. Which again depends on fuel form and reactor type and much more. Its note Reactor = long halflife waste, its not so easy. Also Halflife is directly inversly proportional to activity.

I think you need a response to the pro-nuclear guests you have, Chris Keefer for example. I live in Georgia where we just built the first two reactors in30 years. Chris does not. I know the ratepayer impacts from Vogtle. Chris does not. I know what Georgia Power said and did to get Vogtle approved and the gamesmanship they played. Please have me on your podcast so that the full story can be told.

Chris needed to add that only Ontario gets 50% of its electricity from nuclear and about 25% from hydro. Only New Brunswick also has nuclear about 37% that comes from Nuclear. No other provinces use nuclear and hydro is the predominant source in Canada. When you decommission Natural gas and coal and hydro plants you are not left with 200000 years of lethal pollution. The other flaw is nuclear electricity production is incredibly inefficient because it uses steam turbines,. Additionally the amount of energy you get from uranium is a tiny fraction of its theoretical energy, single digit. Oh BTW I am also an ER Doctor and NOT in favor of nuclear power.!!

Don't we have to use coal power to build nuclear bc we can't yet smelt metal with solar energy? Asking out of ignorance for sure. Energy just seems to be the most fragile of resources. AI and all things computers are draining our Kw quicker than other human uses?

@dbadagna

20 күн бұрын

I don't believe a response will be forthcoming.

Good discussion. Keefer believes civilization will be very unpleasant without abundant energy/technology and nuclear is the only option that might keep things going. Hagens believes nuclear is too dangerous and unaffordable given our imminent great simplification. I believe they are both right which is why the only good path is population reduction which neither of them mentioned.

It's always hard to take seriously a guy who puts forward the concentration of nuclear energy as an advantage, then minutes later plans to go fishing for uranium in the oceans 😞

@aliendroneservices6621

14 күн бұрын

Which is easily possible because of its energy-density.

@curedent6086

14 күн бұрын

@@aliendroneservices6621 Uranium's energy density doesn't help you fish it out of the ocean.

No one can virtuously rationally ACTUALLY call themselves a Leninist MUCH LESS a hard lefty... Let's MAYBE definitely rethink THAT. Otherwise, efforts dedicated to dispelling that with mention of U both will commence, unremittingly that is. Cheers Luck Peace Gaia ✨ ya, that guy.

@dermotmeuchner2416

20 күн бұрын

Trotskyite maybe?

This could have been much more informative with a few figures, but Chris Keefer is far too focused on what he thinks "listeners think" and not enough on hard facts. For example, nuclear power currently accounts for around 2% of the world's final energy consumption, and is expected by the IAEA to more than double by 2050.

@astrologerclimatewitness3787

15 күн бұрын

I hope not... and ... too bad that my comment was deleted... I think... because, I don't see it here... second time that has happened. Maybe because I use the ellipse too much.. Bad habit I formed. It was a long comment... because I had a lot of facts in there. Wish I knew why it was deleted.

@curedent6086

15 күн бұрын

@@astrologerclimatewitness3787 Answers frequently disappear on KZread, and this poses the problem of dependence on this platform. Too bad, I would have liked to read your facts. You can try it piece by piece. It sometimes stays that way...

@aliendroneservices6621

14 күн бұрын

10% of electricity, and 5% of total (20 TW) power.

@curedent6086

14 күн бұрын

@@aliendroneservices6621 Yes, and this power should double only to maintain this 10% of electricity in 2050. We are talking about a very small piece of the solution.

Rooftop Solar on the Rise finds that America could generate up to 45% of its electricity from solar rooftops. Which means we could get close to half our energy with zero land usage because it is over our living space. That doesn't count parking lots. Hard to say that is more land dependant that the nuclear power industry and transmission grid that you don't need between your roof and your basement battery storage.

@aliendroneservices6621

21 күн бұрын

Rooftop solar won't power data-centers. The only reason people "invest" in solar homeowner is to be able to steal power-service from the grid.

Bret Weinstein should invite this guy onto his podcast. I think he'd give him a tougher time. Especially with his recent EMP danger refresher!

...all I see is a wiggling moustache... and it's glorious ;)

Andrew Huberman on alcohol...stopped my social habit.

The American left is really something! The guy counts as a positive that the nuclear industry creates few jobs 😂

How can he not address the elephant in the room: URANIUM, which is a limited resource (close to reaching its peak) that is also basically stolen from countries in the Global South that are exploited by western countries like France or the US? His optimism seems a bit disingenuous, although good that he seems to be open to debate. This and that bitcoin guy have to be the two most unrewarding conversations you've had on your podcast. I guess they can't all be as insightful and interesting as they usually are...

@curedent6086

15 күн бұрын

He talked about it: he's betting on unknown resources or those in the ocean, and on fast neutron technology.

@aliendroneservices6621

14 күн бұрын

The earth's crust contains 10 billion years' worth of uranium.

@santiaguado

13 күн бұрын

@@aliendroneservices6621 you are forgetting entropy, resources are not measured by their quantity but by their level of concentration, which determines the ability to be extracted successfully with a positive EROI. The red book of uranium, which is alwyas optimistic, gives it 150 years, with the CURRENT level of extraction, that only powers 10% of the world’s energy.

Beware the Kanukian with a nose sponge. Someone from Texas told me that. Think they use bandanas like civilized people do in Texas.

no thanks doing ok with solar . no need big brother nukes more about$$$$$$$$ than anything else as i see. how about cleaning up mess & storage before new build like Hanford? there is a good book out there about Hanford get that author on.

This Guest, Chris Keeler, was hard to listen to. I was very disappointed with this week's episode. Many of his claims, comments and statements were a direct contradiction to those of the typical very informed guests of this podcast series. I would have to say that this guest was the least useful of all interviews in this series. I live in the forest and have studies several sciences for 45 years. Chris demonstrated much lack of understanding of much knowledge and topics. His views make me think he has been in a city/urban silo all his life. He is in a world where he does not see those poly externalities of our extraction economy. Any they are overwhelming, such as the crisis of air pollution killing millions every year, micro plastics found in new born everywhere now in the western world. I don't think he is even aware of the 15,000 uranium mining sites in Western USA that are yet to be cleaned up. They are causing a range of serious health and ecological problems. Theoretically nuclear power could be part of the solution we need. But government and the corporate focus on profit make nuclear extremely dangerous. In many cases his rambling rapid talk was a way to skip over a topic and sidestep the weakness of the opinion. He would have a hard time defending many opinions such as his stereotyping of hunter gatherer cultures. They were as varied are many cultures are today. One common fact of the hunter gather bones is the fact that they showed good health and almost universally near perfect skull, and teeth. I could go on; he was wrong on many points. I never heard of him before and I will never go to his podcast, gauranteed. Nate, it is better to not produce a podcast rather that have a bad one like this fiasco.. The reputation of your show has dropped a notch in my mind. Please get Vandana Shiva on again or someone of very high quality. Please stick to guest who can defend what they say. You really need to recover after this appalling episode this week.

@johngray1439

18 күн бұрын

Amen.

You only need 1% of the people to "get it". 13% of the people will co-operate, 20% will be naysayers, the remaining 66% can become loyal followers (of either). Just saying, from the data.

Another 2hr+ talk

@thegreatsimplification

21 күн бұрын

Several more in the queue- and they’re all fantastic!

Does anyone understand why people who know nothing of thermodynamics, and therefore don't even understand the question, have the loudest, and most obviously wrong, opinions on global heating.

Nuclear is a life line for coal. Delay tactic. This guy is not creditable

@aliendroneservices6621

21 күн бұрын

Fossil-fuel use will never decrease, no matter what anyone does to try to decrease it. What is happening now is an energy *_addition._* Hydroelectric power is being expanded. Fossil-fired power is being expanded. Uranium-fired power is being expanded.

@DanA-nl5uo

21 күн бұрын

​@@aliendroneservices6621 Ember Claims Renewable Energy Is Taking Market Share Away From Thermal Generation From cleantechnica KZread won't allow a link but look it up 2% drop in ff in 2024

@cemotazca8628

21 күн бұрын

Yeah smart people, whats a brayton cycle and what does a barn measure?

@EricMeyer9

21 күн бұрын

Hard disagree. Nuclear is the future.

@pawpawthebeagle9442

20 күн бұрын

I have to run, but wanted to ask if cold fusion is discussed…where progress is at with it.

Most of the world wants food, hospitals and electricity, and Nate is probably thinking: what about Gaia in 250 years.

He talks about renewable energy needing backup or storage. But we developed pumped hydro to load match nuclear power plants because they can not ramp to match demand.

@alan2102X

21 күн бұрын

Backup and storage will not be a problem after 2030 or so. Numerous options exist and are being built out. For that matter, it is not a serious problem now, since renewables are still supplying only a modest portion of total power. (That will change radically however inside of 10 years!)

@antonyjh1234

20 күн бұрын

Nuclear replaces coal base load.