The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Going Nuclear

00:00:00.560 Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now, as you probably heard me say in several episodes,

00:00:06.500 I think that the fundamental duty of the British government would be to get its house in order by

00:00:10.840 taking care of the absolute basics. Now, for me, the absolute basics are energy and agriculture.

00:00:15.860 I think I'm going to have to add birth rate to that. I'm not sure how I'm going to tackle that.

00:00:21.060 Maybe I'll find some sort of breeder out there or something. I have found a farmer, but apparently

00:00:25.360 he doesn't want to talk to me until November because of some harvest business or something

00:00:29.360 like that. But I have found somebody I can talk to about energy. Now, obviously, nuclear

00:00:34.180 is the only sensible option. And I happened to bump into a nuclear engineer type person

00:00:38.100 the other day. So welcome to Brokernomics, an Englishman outside of time. Hello. 0.94

00:00:44.280 Hello, sir. Nice to talk to you.

00:00:47.240 Yes, absolutely. Good to see you again, sir. So what's your sort of general background and

00:00:53.700 what kind of industry are you working in, your sort of projects and stuff?

00:00:56.740 My general background is I'm an engineer, mechanical design engineer specifically. I've

00:01:02.260 worked in the nuclear industry now for around about four years, roughly, I think. Yeah.

00:01:07.400 So basically, I saw it literally just before COVID sort of hit. So yeah, it was interesting

00:01:13.520 to see that sort of the way the office changed so rapidly over just such a short period of

00:01:19.480 time to go from actual office working to working remotely, which is what quite a lot of my colleagues

00:01:24.260 do, because we're specifically, I work specifically for a consultancy firm, rather than directly

00:01:29.220 on nuclear sites, if that makes sense. So I'm kind of more in the background in the design aspect.

00:01:35.180 Oh, good, because I've got a nuclear design I want to share with you before too long.

00:01:40.120 Okay, so and what type of nuclear reactors are you working on? Because I understand that these

00:01:45.720 days, well, there's the big ones that occasionally blow up, but not too often, but occasionally.

00:01:51.980 Then you've got these small modular reactors, which apparently is going to be the next big

00:01:56.100 thing. And I've even heard of like these nano ones, which are quite small, but could be

00:02:02.000 used on a factory or something. So what kind of stuff are you working on?

00:02:05.220 Yep. Specifically, I've worked on a couple of different styles of reactors. So I've worked

00:02:10.180 on... Let's think of how to phrase this without dropping myself in it.

00:02:18.640 Big ones, medium ones, or the nano ones?

00:02:22.380 I've worked on the medium ones, and I've worked on nuclear fusion as well. So I've worked on the UK

00:02:29.700 side of nuclear fusion, which is UK SMR. No, wait, that's smaller reactor. It's UK... It's through

00:02:37.860 UKAA, and I can't remember the name. It's a spherical tokamak that they're doing. It's a sort of new

00:02:43.300 design compared to the older forms of tokamak. So the older forms of tokamak are kind of shaped

00:02:49.180 more like a donut. So the design that the UK has gone for is kind of more shaped like an orange.

00:02:55.340 Right.

00:02:55.740 That's the easiest way to put it.

00:02:56.740 So did you say fusion? Do we actually have fusion? Because I thought everything was fission

00:03:02.000 at the moment.

00:03:03.100 Everything in terms of actual power generation and production is fission at the minute. It's all

00:03:09.380 still purely fission. Fusion is kind of... It's that... It's forever been 40 years and common

00:03:15.960 kind of thing. And I think a lot of people, even within industry, still agree it is still

00:03:20.380 40 years away, so to speak.

00:03:21.940 Right. And so why is there such interest in moving up from fission to fusion? What would

00:03:30.200 be the benefit there?

00:03:31.740 Multiple fold. One of the main ones is that for, obviously, with fission, you get a lot

00:03:39.240 of nasty things come out at the end of it that they're not too difficult to deal with,

00:03:44.200 to be fair. You basically just dig a hole and throw them in the hole. Kind of half forget

00:03:48.560 about them. Okay. It could be a problem if you live next to the hole, but I see your

00:03:52.760 point.

00:03:53.200 Yeah, exactly. Which is why they tend to put the holes far away from anyone. I think there's

00:03:57.100 one up in Sweden in the middle of the mountains and things like that. But yeah, the main benefit

00:04:02.780 is it's for nuclear fission, you've got a finite amount of fuel. So for all, it's not

00:04:11.340 going to run out within the next, like, you know, it'll be the next 200 years, it's spent

00:04:15.300 all the nuclear fuel, basically. Or at least for the type of reactors that we use right

00:04:19.500 now. The benefits of fusion are, you have basically an unlimited fuel source for it.

00:04:26.080 Well, you could just use seawater or, you know, or whatever it is you want.

00:04:31.200 It kind of. It basically, what it is, is it becomes a self-sustaining reaction that generates

00:04:35.400 its own fuel source? Because what it uses for fusion rather than fission is it uses

00:04:40.940 tritium. So it's literally right on the absolute opposite end where nuclear fission is banging

00:04:45.860 heavy, really, really heavy elements together to make a fission reaction. And fusion is the

00:04:51.860 exact opposite. It's banging really, really light elements together to make a nuclear reaction.

00:04:56.440 Which again, it's the difference. It's the difference between sort of the atom bomb and

00:05:00.940 the sun. So the sun works on nuclear fusion rather than fission.

00:05:07.000 Ah, okay. Right. It's the Spider-Man plot. It's the Spider-Man plot of we want to harness

00:05:12.760 the power of the sun.

00:05:15.580 That was Superman, wasn't it?

00:05:18.240 Doctor Octavius, I think. Spider-Man 2.

00:05:21.160 Oh, okay. All right. I'm not up on my comics, so I could be getting that.

00:05:25.220 It's fine. It's fine. But yeah, I can tell you the main, one of the other main...

00:05:29.520 Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. The other main benefit is the safety side of things. Everyone

00:05:34.100 immediately, as soon as you mentioned nuclear, the mind immediately springs to Chernobyl.

00:05:37.760 Everything could go wrong. It could go bang and we all die. Yeah. That's what everyone

00:05:41.880 immediately thinks when they think of nuclear. The beauty of fusion reactions and with fusion

00:05:47.280 as a energy generation concept is if it goes that kind of structurally wrong, all that

00:05:53.380 happens is it just fizzles out.

00:05:54.420 Right. So it's not like... Because fusion bombs are a lot more powerful than fission bombs.

00:06:02.500 Yes, they are. Yeah.

00:06:04.100 So why is it that you can have a fusion plant go wrong and it's fine, but that's less the

00:06:12.640 case historically with fission?

00:06:13.940 Basically, basically what happens when plants explode is they have an uncontrolled chain

00:06:21.160 reaction. So all your heavy elements continue banging against each other, creating more and

00:06:25.420 more, and they just build up and build up and build up until they explode. With fusion, because

00:06:30.600 everything's lighter, it's not a continually sustained chain reaction. It basically just,

00:06:36.860 as soon as you remove the forces that you're implying onto the elements to make them smash

00:06:43.180 together and come together, it just stops. It just fizzles out.

00:06:46.940 Okay. It's like when you see some of the numbers, it's crazy numbers because it's like the fusion

00:06:51.420 reactors that we'll have on Earth are running at a hundred million degrees Celsius, so like several

00:06:57.900 times hotter than the center of the sun. Which when you see the numbers, you kind of like freak out.

00:07:01.980 Oh, surely that could go very wrong. It's like, no, because it's contained within this space.

00:07:07.820 And even if everything fails, it goes wrong. It literally just kills itself and just cuts out.

00:07:13.260 And presumably generates an awful lot more power.

00:07:16.380 Theoretically, yes. The main problem with it is, is they're having quite a lot of time actually pulling

00:07:23.660 power from the reaction itself. Because part of it is, it's economy of scale at some degrees,

00:07:29.660 because it takes an awful lot of energy to maintain that fusion reaction that you don't need for the

00:07:34.540 fission reaction to the same degree. Because with it being a self-sustained reaction and a chain

00:07:38.220 reaction, you just kind of put it in there and away it goes. Whereas with fusion, you've got to

00:07:43.500 continually keep prodding it to keep it going. A bit more engineering involved. Yes. Okay. Okay.

00:07:48.700 So that makes perfect sense. So I understand why we want to move towards that. But we're nowhere near it.

00:07:54.060 Well, we're not, we're not close at the moment. We're not 100 miles away, but we're not anywhere

00:08:02.460 near it being. Yes. It's not touching distance. Yeah. It's not touching distance. It's like,

00:08:07.180 we've got, we actually in the UK have one of the experimental reactors that can conduct a fusion

00:08:12.300 reaction, which is the jet Taurus down in Oxford, I believe. Right. Okay. So, but, but for now,

00:08:19.580 I suppose what I probably want to focus, how are you on the medium sized ones, the small modular

00:08:24.780 reactors? The small modular reactors are coming along quite nicely, as far as I'm aware. Yeah.

00:08:30.060 The, the basically a case of the idea of the small modular reactor is you take

00:08:35.260 what was essentially every single bit of nuclear energy that we had in the past, and you try to

00:08:40.940 modularize it because the main problem with all of our prior nuclear plants is they were all completely

00:08:46.300 unitly 100% bespoke. So every single design aspect of it was a case of, it has been designed for this

00:08:54.780 plant. And then you go to another plant and you've got the exact same operation being carried out by a

00:09:00.380 completely different part. They're totally not interchangeable in any way, shape, or form with

00:09:05.340 any other plant. So you've got no way to sort of like scale it up, so to speak.

00:09:10.940 And the economics of that, of course, is really bad. I mean, if, if, if I went and bought a car,

00:09:15.820 but it was specifically made for me, it would be a hell of a lot more expensive than me buying one

00:09:20.140 that's just rolled off a production line. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Right. So before we,

00:09:25.500 before we get too deep into this, let's just make sure that we understand what a nuclear reactor is.

00:09:30.700 Now I've, I've been having a think about this and I think that I can build a nuclear reactor in my

00:09:35.660 back garden. So you tell me if you, if, if I've got this right. So basically I take a big steel plate

00:09:42.860 and I wheeled onto that, a big steel pipe and I put a bit of water in the bottom and I drop

00:09:48.220 a bit of uranium in it, into the water that will make the water hot. And that, and then I can stick

00:09:53.900 a fan at the top and it will basically run the motor backwards and supply power out of it. So I,

00:09:58.860 so, I mean, I may have skipped one or two safety steps in there and I don't want to turn this into

00:10:05.580 a bloody health and safety channel, but, but basic principles, it's, it's boiling water with uranium.

00:10:11.420 Yeah. And then, and then spinning something and then that goes remote. Have I got that right?

00:10:15.980 Yeah. It's basically, that is the principle of just about every single means of energy generation

00:10:20.940 that we've got. It's just, we're coming up with different ways to heat up a kettle, basically.

00:10:25.180 Right. Okay. That is all that a power station is.

00:10:28.700 So, um, and on, on, on that note, actually on the, in your backyard, um, it was actually a case of a

00:10:37.100 American boy scout that did exactly that. You went around and got a load of, uh, I think he made a

00:10:43.100 fast reactor. It was, but he was basically, uh, getting all of the little bits of radioactive material

00:10:48.780 from fire alarms, fire detectors, and just, you had a boatload of that and you just stuck it into a

00:10:54.700 reactor and managed to irradiate his shed, uh, to the, to the point where I think, uh, the government

00:10:59.660 kind of got involved and went, Ooh, what are you doing there? Can you not do that?

00:11:02.860 Well, that's the one thing that's holding me back from doing this in my own back garden,

00:11:06.540 because I can imagine a man from the council turning up with his clipboard and looking very

00:11:10.220 astute. So, so let's say I build my nuclear reactor in the garden. You come around for a barbecue

00:11:14.860 and you have a look at it and presumably you're mildly impressed that I managed to get

00:11:17.500 a hold of uranium or whatever it was. What, what have I missed in my design? What, how,

00:11:22.220 how do I, without making this too health and safety conscious, what, what do I need to add to that?

00:11:27.420 Because I mean, okay, I'm using a fan. I could probably use a steam turbine.

00:11:33.340 Yeah. Well, yes. So, and I probably, I probably want a bit of containment and maybe control worlds

00:11:39.180 and dual water systems. Explain, take my design from that level to something that's,

00:11:44.060 you know, proper professional. Oh, that'd be quite a challenge. The,

00:11:48.700 the main challenge that you would have for one in your own backyard is that basically,

00:11:52.060 Oh, okay. How would, how would you do it when you're doing this properly? What, what,

00:11:55.900 you bet you've got a pot of boiling water and what do you, what do you take it from there?

00:11:59.980 It's a, it's a strange one. Cause the, one of the things that does surprise most people is

00:12:04.220 there's not everyone that works on nuclear understands exactly how the entire power plant works.

00:12:09.020 You have a specific area that you're responsible for that you need to know how it works.

00:12:12.940 Yes. And then there's someone sort of at the top level that has a vague idea how all of these

00:12:17.900 systems come together and mesh. So what are, one of the ones that's quite interesting is if you were

00:12:23.420 to try to do in your backyard, you would need a running water source, which is what you need for

00:12:27.340 just about every single power plant. You need a running water source to go by because you need

00:12:31.260 something to produce the steam for you. Yes.

00:12:34.940 So what, what they tend to do is they tend to, if you look at the locations of most of your power

00:12:38.620 plants, they tend to be situated on either a river or by the sea and they take the cooler

00:12:44.860 water in literally directly from either the river or the sea.

00:12:49.340 Yes. I had been thinking of using the garden hose, but I would get into difficulties if,

00:12:55.180 if for whatever reason, the water where there's a hose pipe ban or something.

00:12:58.700 Yes.

00:12:58.860 So I understand I've kind of skipped containment because eventually I'd end up with just a very

00:13:05.980 irradiated metal pipe. So there should be lots of lead in there and concrete.

00:13:12.140 Yes. You'd have, you'd have things like that in there to stop the radiation from leaking out.

00:13:16.060 And one of the, one of the interesting things actually is that you actually have on containment

00:13:21.260 specifically, your nuclear power plants are incredibly heavily regulated and restricted as

00:13:27.820 to how much emissions are allowed to let out. Yes.

00:13:30.460 So it's to the point where your average coal power plant will actually kick out more radioactive

00:13:36.940 waste than a nuclear power plant in the atmosphere, just uncontrolled emissions. Because obviously when you

00:13:43.260 burn things, you create re-reactive isotopes. Yes. Yes. And, and, and the regulation is very

00:13:50.780 light on that. And, and actually another thing, another bizarre thing I found, because you know,

00:13:54.300 you mentioned the safety aspect of nuclear. One of the things I discovered looking into this is that

00:13:58.620 actually more people die on solar per megawatt generated than they do on nuclear. Because actually

00:14:05.980 nuclear actually has a surprisingly low number of deaths, even with a couple of catastrophes behind it.

00:14:12.380 It's, you can, you can throw it, you can, to some degree, I think you can throw the atomic

00:14:15.900 bombs in and it still comes into the top three per megawatt hour generated because of how much

00:14:20.300 energy is being produced and how safe your power plants generally are. Like I can, there's, there's

00:14:25.900 a couple of stories I know of people dying on sites, on actual nuclear sites. One of them was just

00:14:31.100 people just carrying out, it's not like the, you know, they walked into the reactor and they just got

00:14:35.260 raided and died. It's not something like that. It's literally just like stuff, things that you would get

00:14:39.020 happen in any walk of sort of, uh, industrial life. Like it's people slipping and falling from

00:14:44.060 heights. It's things like that. Well, that, that's why the deaths on solar and wind are actually

00:14:50.620 quite high because the solar you're on a roof and they're high and people fall off. And, and

00:14:56.300 obviously wind turbines, they're very, very high and people have to go up them all the time for

00:15:00.060 maintenance. And every so often somebody falls off. So actually the death, the death count for

00:15:04.300 solar and wind is, is, I mean, it's just massively higher than it's higher than people expect.

00:15:09.420 Yes. Okay. So, um, the other thing I wanted to clear up, so, so now we've established, um,

00:15:14.540 how, um, nuclear works. Um, I, the other thing I wanted to get to, and I wanted to put this in scale

00:15:21.820 is, um, uh, tell me if I've got this right. So I've, I've got the, the bands of energy generated.

00:15:27.820 So let's, let's start with, um, with a watt, um, very low amount of energy. I might be able to run

00:15:34.220 a small digital clock maybe. Yeah. Okay. Um, then you go up to, and then it basically goes up in

00:15:41.580 jumps of a thousand. So a kilowatt is a thousand Watts. Now I've, I've got a solar system that can

00:15:47.500 give me on a sunny day, four kilowatts and that's enough to run a home and charge a battery and all

00:15:52.220 that kind of, and once I've got a killer, what I can do something useful, right? Run a microwave or,

00:15:57.100 uh, you know, all my fridge freezers and my led lighting or the oven or something like that.

00:16:00.860 So, so a kilowatt is kind of a useful scale at the, at the home level. Yeah. Right. Then we go

00:16:05.420 into megawatts and that's, uh, a million Watts. So again, a jump of a thousand now megawatts,

00:16:12.220 that's the range of sort of power stations, isn't it? Now the small modular reactors. Yeah.

00:16:17.420 And if, if I've got this right, I mean, you correct me, but the, what we're looking at for,

00:16:21.500 for these small modular reactors, which is, you know, the new big thing is somewhere between

00:16:26.140 like 30 and a hundred, maybe 300, um, per unit. I believe the exact target they're in for is

00:16:34.700 roughly 300 megawatts, but I don't know whether they'll specifically hit that. It's the, the aim of

00:16:41.340 your small modular reactor is it's going to power a small to medium sized town. And yes, well, yeah,

00:16:48.380 I think, I think 300 would definitely give you that. Yeah. If, if, if the sums that I've got later

00:16:52.860 on, uh, are correct. And then you go up by another unit of a thousand and you get to the gigawatt range.

00:16:58.620 Yeah. Right. Now this is interesting because I have a look at the, the national grid line.

00:17:03.020 That's where you're going to country sized. Yes. So apparently at this precise moment,

00:17:08.220 the UK is demanding 33 gigawatts, uh, and we are generating 31 of that, meaning we're getting two

00:17:16.620 gigawatts from. Is that 30 or three point? Uh, so, so 33 is the demand and we're generating 31.

00:17:24.860 Right. So, so we've got a gap of two gigawatts that we're currently getting in from elsewhere,

00:17:28.860 which I don't really like because if you're dependent on elsewhere, somebody else. Yeah.

00:17:34.060 Well, they can hold you to ransom on that. That doesn't seem good.

00:17:37.020 They can, but to some degree, they'll be able to hold you to ransom anyway,

00:17:39.740 because the place that's more slightly come on from will be France. And France actually owns,

00:17:45.900 I believe it is pretty much all of the nuclear reactors in the UK in part or in full. Like,

00:17:54.860 I believe that, uh, I think. Well, the new one, whatever that is, Hinkley Point.

00:18:00.140 Hinkley Point see and size. Well, see, I believe that the, the PDF is in at least

00:18:08.220 owns a chunk of both of them. Yes.

00:18:11.900 And there was a bit more complication with them because I believe that the Chinese were also involved

00:18:15.980 in, uh, the construction and they were going to be partially owning those as well. And the Americans

00:18:21.340 stepped in and said, no, we've put a ban on them as a company. You can't work with them because

00:18:25.420 they've stolen nuclear secrets. Well, yes, I can, I can understand the point there. So,

00:18:31.420 but, but at the moment, actually, let's have a look at the national grid life. How much are we

00:18:34.540 getting from nuclear? We're getting just under five gigawatts from nuclear. So we've got, we're

00:18:40.300 getting a decent chunk out of the 35 out of 33. Yeah. But what I read was, and let me just check my

00:18:47.500 notes here. Apparently the UK government has said, but they want to get to something like,

00:18:54.700 where did I put it? They want to generate an awful lot of energy from SMRs.

00:19:01.180 Um, what do they say? My, my main question for the UK couldn't be when exactly, because you can't just

00:19:12.380 spring. When? They want to get 24 gigawatts of nuclear energy by 2050. So 24, that's, I mean,

00:19:22.780 that's most of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's most of it now, but it depends on which way they intend on

00:19:28.700 the economy going as to how much they're going to need. Because if they, if they continue insisting

00:19:35.900 on de-industrializing everything, they probably won't even need that much.

00:19:40.140 Yes. Well, I mean, but the thing is, if you don't want to de-industrialize, what you want is cheap

00:19:43.980 energy. Yes. Which is true. You do, you do want cheap energy, but my main concern, especially for

00:19:49.260 looking at the future is, uh, you've got a grand total of nine reactors. There's nine nuclear reactors in

00:19:55.020 the UK right now that are operating. Of those nine, I believe there is at least, I think it's four of

00:20:03.100 them that are set to close by 2026. That's when their decommissioning dates are set for. And then

00:20:10.140 the others, the other five, I believe are all due to be decommissioned by 2030 or roughly thereabouts.

00:20:17.420 Okay. So Sizewell C and Hinkley Point C are both not due to be built until after 2030. So you're

00:20:25.580 going to have this gap where they have the choice of, do we extend the plant life of these existing

00:20:30.300 plants? Which I think I haven't, I haven't visited some power plants before. There's some funny things

00:20:38.380 with regulations whereby basically there's certain safety protocols and procedures that kind of get

00:20:44.060 stepped over kind of the exact same way that, uh, when they introduced the seatbelt, this decided,

00:20:49.740 oh, every new car needs a seatbelt. However, if your car's built before this point, don't worry about

00:20:54.300 it. It's fine. So it's, it's the, that was one thing that did genuinely shock me is that you can go

00:21:01.260 to a power plant and you'll see things that you think that doesn't look very safe. And it's the,

00:21:06.380 the response from the people working on site is we've done it this way forever. And there is a cutout

00:21:11.100 in the law for us to be able to continue doing it this way. Yes. Okay. So they're really going

00:21:16.700 to need to get motoring with these small modular reactors if that's the thing, especially if they

00:21:20.140 want 24 gigabytes, which is, uh, well, it's most of our energy and then we're going to get there

00:21:25.020 at 2050. Now, if, if I understand how these things should work, um, basically a lot of it is basically

00:21:33.580 just made in a factory somewhere. So you need to prepare your site. The site doesn't actually need

00:21:37.900 to be that big. I mean, it would fit in, you know, your local park of your town. You know,

00:21:42.300 it's, it's, it's maybe 10 acres, something like that. Um, and, and basically it's just a, you know,

00:21:47.420 a building with a hole in it. And then a, a, a lorry turns up with the reactor, um, and a few other

00:21:53.580 bits and basically all slots in. And so big Lego bits. Yes. It's a Lego build it yourself.

00:21:59.500 So if you could, if you can get a main factory, you know, churning these things out, it actually

00:22:05.660 becomes viable to have hundreds of them spread across the country. The only thing that will

00:22:11.500 probably be a limiting factor will be government red tape. Because right now, the main thing that

00:22:17.660 they look at when they're looking at putting a new nuclear plant in is they look at preexisting

00:22:24.220 sites because you've got to have so much paperwork done before you can just drop a nuclear plant in

00:22:29.900 there. But there is several sites that previously did house nuclear site plants that would be able

00:22:37.580 to have the plants dropped into them. And this is also part of the concern with the decommission.

00:22:42.620 And once you've started the decommissioning process, your site lease can lapse. So there's probably quite

00:22:48.780 a few plants at this point where they would have made a good place to put a nuclear plant.

00:22:54.380 But there's no nuclear activity going on there. So it would be a lot more paperwork.

00:22:57.420 So it makes more sense to try to build it and continue sort of rolling forward, which is what

00:23:02.060 why you've got both Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C are both. There's two preexisting

00:23:09.980 nuclear plants on both those sites. And they've been there since, I think, since roughly the 50s,

00:23:14.460 I think. Either 50s or 60s. Yes. Yeah. They just keep building plants in the same place.

00:23:19.580 So that was the biggest hurdle I found when looking into this. It is all with the red tape.

00:23:24.060 However, not that I want to make government sound like a smaller problem than it is, because it is

00:23:31.820 the existential threat to our species at this point. But it is ultimately a decision.

00:23:37.900 So we could I kind of want to focus more on the on the what's actually possible with good governance.

00:23:43.980 If you want to go down the route of governance being a problem, there is a company called

00:23:51.660 Nucleo, which I believe they wanted to do as they had the they've got their own form of SMR,

00:23:57.980 which they want to move forward with. I believe that it's based on a lead form. It's lead and plutonium,

00:24:05.340 I think is what it uses. And we as a nation have a shed load of plutonium just sitting around in storage.

00:24:14.380 And this company Nucleo approached the British government and said, well, this material that you

00:24:20.140 have sat there is actually a liability for you, because if Nerdwells were to get a hold of it,

00:24:28.380 there wouldn't need very much of it to create an awful lot of problems. Yes. Well, and also,

00:24:34.300 if we insist on, you know, provoking places like Russia, if they were to drop a missile on top of

00:24:39.820 it, I presume that would be bad. Yes, it wouldn't be good. Yeah. And basically, so this company Nucleo

00:24:44.860 had approached the UK government said, well, you have this material that is a liability for you,

00:24:51.020 but we have a use for it and we can take it and use it in our nuclear plants that we want built.

00:24:55.980 And the government basically turned around and said, not interested, go away. And so Nucleo has

00:25:01.900 moved their company headquarters from London to Paris because the French have said, oh, yes,

00:25:07.500 we'll quite happily have that. Please do come. Right. Yes. Okay. Yes. But on the red tape issue,

00:25:15.260 I mean, they managed to clear away all sorts of planning and regulatory challenges to get up vast

00:25:24.540 amounts of wind and solar. So when they want to make a change and when they want to expedite something,

00:25:30.860 actually they can. And I'm thinking of another example would be Germany. I mean, they shut down

00:25:36.860 their nuclear reactors, of course. Madness. And then having decided to do that, they then went all in on

00:25:42.460 Russian gas. They then decided to lose a pipeline, stop using Russian gas. And so they found themselves

00:25:49.980 in the situation where they just simply couldn't generate the energy and they needed to get their

00:25:54.940 coal power stations back online. And they basically just, you know, at the wing of the hand, got rid of

00:26:01.980 all of the regulations so that they could expeditedly get things back. And they had power plants back

00:26:06.460 within a few months. Yeah. To be fair, I'm quite happy that they went down the route of using coal

00:26:11.020 directly rather than important in the form of solar panels, for instance. Because one of the things

00:26:17.020 most people don't realize is solar panels are actually manufactured using coal. Quite a bit of it.

00:26:22.540 Each solar panel, I believe, if you go out and try to find out the exact figures, it's quite woolly to

00:26:27.900 find out the exact figures. Yes. But the rough figures that you can find will tell you it's around about

00:26:32.940 four to eight tons of coal, roughly. And that's the sort of finger in the air. This is what we think

00:26:41.980 it roughly is. Because the thing with it is, is most of your manufacturing solar panels, I think 80% of it

00:26:49.260 is done in China. Yeah. And China really doesn't care about all of the green energy stuff that we have. 0.58

00:26:55.260 So they literally just burn a load of coal, one, for energy, and two, the actual manufacturing process

00:27:01.820 of solar panels requires metallurgic silicon. And the way you get that is you stick it in an arc furnace

00:27:10.300 with a lump of coal and burn them together. And so one of the main ways that they manufacture

00:27:18.300 one of the main materials for your solar panels is by burning coal.

00:27:24.860 So, okay. And so was that four to eight tons for how many?

00:27:29.260 One panel.

00:27:30.140 For one panel? Yeah.

00:27:31.820 Oh, excellent. Okay, good. Because I've got 15 panels on the roof. So that's quite a lot of coal

00:27:36.380 that I'm responsible for. Yeah.

00:27:37.660 Which cheers me up immensely.

00:27:40.460 Exactly. This is my one, that's been one of my main confusions with the whole green thing.

00:27:46.060 Part of me thinks that the government doesn't seem to care about having continuous certain power.

00:27:52.220 They don't care if the grid drops out occasionally. I think that they are going down the lines of,

00:27:56.620 we just need intermittent power so that we can continue talking to people when we need to.

00:28:02.300 Yes. I mean, I didn't buy it because I'm trying to save the planet. I mean, obviously, but...

00:28:06.940 No, it's independence.

00:28:08.220 Yeah, it's independence. I mean, that's what it is. And what pushed me over the edge was,

00:28:12.140 you know, COVID era. It was, I think it was Gavin Newsom in California. And at one point,

00:28:18.940 he was threatening to cut off the electricity supply to anyone who wasn't vaxxed. And I thought,

00:28:23.500 right, okay, I'm getting, I'm getting solar panels, I'm getting a battery. Because I mean,

00:28:27.740 it helped me in, in two scenarios. One, if the government ever decides to mess with me by

00:28:32.540 threatening me that we'll cut off the electricity. Yeah.

00:28:34.540 And two, you know, zombie apocalypse, which is, you know, it's the sort of thing I think about,

00:28:39.020 what am I going to do in the zombie apocalypse? So, so it gives you that level of independence.

00:28:43.020 It's especially helpful if you're, if you're sort of away, but I appreciate it's not cost effective.

00:28:49.900 Yeah, it doesn't need to be cost effective. It's, it's, and the way to look at things like

00:28:54.700 solar panels is to look at them purely as a form of independence. It's energy independence from the grid.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 08, 2024

PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Going Nuclear

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