PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Going Nuclear
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of Brokernomics, I chat to an English nuclear engineer about nuclear energy, nuclear fusion and the future of nuclear power in the UK. We talk about the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear energy and nuclear fusion, nuclear power plants and nuclear energy storage.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now, as you probably heard me say in several episodes,
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I think that the fundamental duty of the British government would be to get its house in order by
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taking care of the absolute basics. Now, for me, the absolute basics are energy and agriculture.
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I think I'm going to have to add birth rate to that. I'm not sure how I'm going to tackle that.
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Maybe I'll find some sort of breeder out there or something. I have found a farmer, but apparently
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he doesn't want to talk to me until November because of some harvest business or something
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like that. But I have found somebody I can talk to about energy. Now, obviously, nuclear
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is the only sensible option. And I happened to bump into a nuclear engineer type person
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the other day. So welcome to Brokernomics, an Englishman outside of time. Hello.
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Yes, absolutely. Good to see you again, sir. So what's your sort of general background and
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what kind of industry are you working in, your sort of projects and stuff?
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My general background is I'm an engineer, mechanical design engineer specifically. I've
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worked in the nuclear industry now for around about four years, roughly, I think. Yeah.
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So basically, I saw it literally just before COVID sort of hit. So yeah, it was interesting
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to see that sort of the way the office changed so rapidly over just such a short period of
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time to go from actual office working to working remotely, which is what quite a lot of my colleagues
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do, because we're specifically, I work specifically for a consultancy firm, rather than directly
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on nuclear sites, if that makes sense. So I'm kind of more in the background in the design aspect.
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Oh, good, because I've got a nuclear design I want to share with you before too long.
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Okay, so and what type of nuclear reactors are you working on? Because I understand that these
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days, well, there's the big ones that occasionally blow up, but not too often, but occasionally.
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Then you've got these small modular reactors, which apparently is going to be the next big
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thing. And I've even heard of like these nano ones, which are quite small, but could be
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used on a factory or something. So what kind of stuff are you working on?
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Yep. Specifically, I've worked on a couple of different styles of reactors. So I've worked
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on... Let's think of how to phrase this without dropping myself in it.
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I've worked on the medium ones, and I've worked on nuclear fusion as well. So I've worked on the UK
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side of nuclear fusion, which is UK SMR. No, wait, that's smaller reactor. It's UK... It's through
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UKAA, and I can't remember the name. It's a spherical tokamak that they're doing. It's a sort of new
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design compared to the older forms of tokamak. So the older forms of tokamak are kind of shaped
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more like a donut. So the design that the UK has gone for is kind of more shaped like an orange.
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So did you say fusion? Do we actually have fusion? Because I thought everything was fission
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Everything in terms of actual power generation and production is fission at the minute. It's all
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still purely fission. Fusion is kind of... It's that... It's forever been 40 years and common
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kind of thing. And I think a lot of people, even within industry, still agree it is still
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Right. And so why is there such interest in moving up from fission to fusion? What would
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Multiple fold. One of the main ones is that for, obviously, with fission, you get a lot
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of nasty things come out at the end of it that they're not too difficult to deal with,
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to be fair. You basically just dig a hole and throw them in the hole. Kind of half forget
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about them. Okay. It could be a problem if you live next to the hole, but I see your
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Yeah, exactly. Which is why they tend to put the holes far away from anyone. I think there's
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one up in Sweden in the middle of the mountains and things like that. But yeah, the main benefit
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is it's for nuclear fission, you've got a finite amount of fuel. So for all, it's not
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going to run out within the next, like, you know, it'll be the next 200 years, it's spent
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all the nuclear fuel, basically. Or at least for the type of reactors that we use right
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now. The benefits of fusion are, you have basically an unlimited fuel source for it.
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Well, you could just use seawater or, you know, or whatever it is you want.
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It kind of. It basically, what it is, is it becomes a self-sustaining reaction that generates
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its own fuel source? Because what it uses for fusion rather than fission is it uses
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tritium. So it's literally right on the absolute opposite end where nuclear fission is banging
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heavy, really, really heavy elements together to make a fission reaction. And fusion is the
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exact opposite. It's banging really, really light elements together to make a nuclear reaction.
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Which again, it's the difference. It's the difference between sort of the atom bomb and
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the sun. So the sun works on nuclear fusion rather than fission.
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Ah, okay. Right. It's the Spider-Man plot. It's the Spider-Man plot of we want to harness
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Oh, okay. All right. I'm not up on my comics, so I could be getting that.
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It's fine. It's fine. But yeah, I can tell you the main, one of the other main...
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Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. The other main benefit is the safety side of things. Everyone
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immediately, as soon as you mentioned nuclear, the mind immediately springs to Chernobyl.
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Everything could go wrong. It could go bang and we all die. Yeah. That's what everyone
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immediately thinks when they think of nuclear. The beauty of fusion reactions and with fusion
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as a energy generation concept is if it goes that kind of structurally wrong, all that
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Right. So it's not like... Because fusion bombs are a lot more powerful than fission bombs.
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So why is it that you can have a fusion plant go wrong and it's fine, but that's less the
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Basically, basically what happens when plants explode is they have an uncontrolled chain
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reaction. So all your heavy elements continue banging against each other, creating more and
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more, and they just build up and build up and build up until they explode. With fusion, because
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everything's lighter, it's not a continually sustained chain reaction. It basically just,
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as soon as you remove the forces that you're implying onto the elements to make them smash
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together and come together, it just stops. It just fizzles out.
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Okay. It's like when you see some of the numbers, it's crazy numbers because it's like the fusion
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reactors that we'll have on Earth are running at a hundred million degrees Celsius, so like several
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times hotter than the center of the sun. Which when you see the numbers, you kind of like freak out.
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Oh, surely that could go very wrong. It's like, no, because it's contained within this space.
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And even if everything fails, it goes wrong. It literally just kills itself and just cuts out.
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And presumably generates an awful lot more power.
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Theoretically, yes. The main problem with it is, is they're having quite a lot of time actually pulling
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power from the reaction itself. Because part of it is, it's economy of scale at some degrees,
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because it takes an awful lot of energy to maintain that fusion reaction that you don't need for the
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fission reaction to the same degree. Because with it being a self-sustained reaction and a chain
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reaction, you just kind of put it in there and away it goes. Whereas with fusion, you've got to
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continually keep prodding it to keep it going. A bit more engineering involved. Yes. Okay. Okay.
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So that makes perfect sense. So I understand why we want to move towards that. But we're nowhere near it.
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Well, we're not, we're not close at the moment. We're not 100 miles away, but we're not anywhere
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near it being. Yes. It's not touching distance. Yeah. It's not touching distance. It's like,
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we've got, we actually in the UK have one of the experimental reactors that can conduct a fusion
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reaction, which is the jet Taurus down in Oxford, I believe. Right. Okay. So, but, but for now,
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I suppose what I probably want to focus, how are you on the medium sized ones, the small modular
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reactors? The small modular reactors are coming along quite nicely, as far as I'm aware. Yeah.
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The, the basically a case of the idea of the small modular reactor is you take
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what was essentially every single bit of nuclear energy that we had in the past, and you try to
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modularize it because the main problem with all of our prior nuclear plants is they were all completely
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unitly 100% bespoke. So every single design aspect of it was a case of, it has been designed for this
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plant. And then you go to another plant and you've got the exact same operation being carried out by a
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completely different part. They're totally not interchangeable in any way, shape, or form with
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any other plant. So you've got no way to sort of like scale it up, so to speak.
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And the economics of that, of course, is really bad. I mean, if, if, if I went and bought a car,
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but it was specifically made for me, it would be a hell of a lot more expensive than me buying one
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that's just rolled off a production line. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Right. So before we,
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before we get too deep into this, let's just make sure that we understand what a nuclear reactor is.
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Now I've, I've been having a think about this and I think that I can build a nuclear reactor in my
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back garden. So you tell me if you, if, if I've got this right. So basically I take a big steel plate
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and I wheeled onto that, a big steel pipe and I put a bit of water in the bottom and I drop
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a bit of uranium in it, into the water that will make the water hot. And that, and then I can stick
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a fan at the top and it will basically run the motor backwards and supply power out of it. So I,
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so, I mean, I may have skipped one or two safety steps in there and I don't want to turn this into
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a bloody health and safety channel, but, but basic principles, it's, it's boiling water with uranium.
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Yeah. And then, and then spinning something and then that goes remote. Have I got that right?
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Yeah. It's basically, that is the principle of just about every single means of energy generation
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that we've got. It's just, we're coming up with different ways to heat up a kettle, basically.
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Right. Okay. That is all that a power station is.
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So, um, and on, on, on that note, actually on the, in your backyard, um, it was actually a case of a
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American boy scout that did exactly that. You went around and got a load of, uh, I think he made a
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fast reactor. It was, but he was basically, uh, getting all of the little bits of radioactive material
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from fire alarms, fire detectors, and just, you had a boatload of that and you just stuck it into a
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reactor and managed to irradiate his shed, uh, to the, to the point where I think, uh, the government
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kind of got involved and went, Ooh, what are you doing there? Can you not do that?
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Well, that's the one thing that's holding me back from doing this in my own back garden,
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because I can imagine a man from the council turning up with his clipboard and looking very
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astute. So, so let's say I build my nuclear reactor in the garden. You come around for a barbecue
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and you have a look at it and presumably you're mildly impressed that I managed to get
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a hold of uranium or whatever it was. What, what have I missed in my design? What, how,
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how do I, without making this too health and safety conscious, what, what do I need to add to that?
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Because I mean, okay, I'm using a fan. I could probably use a steam turbine.
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Yeah. Well, yes. So, and I probably, I probably want a bit of containment and maybe control worlds
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and dual water systems. Explain, take my design from that level to something that's,
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you know, proper professional. Oh, that'd be quite a challenge. The,
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the main challenge that you would have for one in your own backyard is that basically,
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Oh, okay. How would, how would you do it when you're doing this properly? What, what,
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you bet you've got a pot of boiling water and what do you, what do you take it from there?
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It's a, it's a strange one. Cause the, one of the things that does surprise most people is
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there's not everyone that works on nuclear understands exactly how the entire power plant works.
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You have a specific area that you're responsible for that you need to know how it works.
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Yes. And then there's someone sort of at the top level that has a vague idea how all of these
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systems come together and mesh. So what are, one of the ones that's quite interesting is if you were
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to try to do in your backyard, you would need a running water source, which is what you need for
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just about every single power plant. You need a running water source to go by because you need
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So what, what they tend to do is they tend to, if you look at the locations of most of your power
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plants, they tend to be situated on either a river or by the sea and they take the cooler
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water in literally directly from either the river or the sea.
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Yes. I had been thinking of using the garden hose, but I would get into difficulties if,
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if for whatever reason, the water where there's a hose pipe ban or something.
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So I understand I've kind of skipped containment because eventually I'd end up with just a very
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irradiated metal pipe. So there should be lots of lead in there and concrete.
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Yes. You'd have, you'd have things like that in there to stop the radiation from leaking out.
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And one of the, one of the interesting things actually is that you actually have on containment
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specifically, your nuclear power plants are incredibly heavily regulated and restricted as
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to how much emissions are allowed to let out. Yes.
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So it's to the point where your average coal power plant will actually kick out more radioactive
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waste than a nuclear power plant in the atmosphere, just uncontrolled emissions. Because obviously when you
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burn things, you create re-reactive isotopes. Yes. Yes. And, and, and the regulation is very
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light on that. And, and actually another thing, another bizarre thing I found, because you know,
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you mentioned the safety aspect of nuclear. One of the things I discovered looking into this is that
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actually more people die on solar per megawatt generated than they do on nuclear. Because actually
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nuclear actually has a surprisingly low number of deaths, even with a couple of catastrophes behind it.
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It's, you can, you can throw it, you can, to some degree, I think you can throw the atomic
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bombs in and it still comes into the top three per megawatt hour generated because of how much
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energy is being produced and how safe your power plants generally are. Like I can, there's, there's
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a couple of stories I know of people dying on sites, on actual nuclear sites. One of them was just
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people just carrying out, it's not like the, you know, they walked into the reactor and they just got
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raided and died. It's not something like that. It's literally just like stuff, things that you would get
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happen in any walk of sort of, uh, industrial life. Like it's people slipping and falling from
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heights. It's things like that. Well, that, that's why the deaths on solar and wind are actually
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quite high because the solar you're on a roof and they're high and people fall off. And, and
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obviously wind turbines, they're very, very high and people have to go up them all the time for
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maintenance. And every so often somebody falls off. So actually the death, the death count for
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solar and wind is, is, I mean, it's just massively higher than it's higher than people expect.
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Yes. Okay. So, um, the other thing I wanted to clear up, so, so now we've established, um,
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how, um, nuclear works. Um, I, the other thing I wanted to get to, and I wanted to put this in scale
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is, um, uh, tell me if I've got this right. So I've, I've got the, the bands of energy generated.
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So let's, let's start with, um, with a watt, um, very low amount of energy. I might be able to run
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a small digital clock maybe. Yeah. Okay. Um, then you go up to, and then it basically goes up in
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jumps of a thousand. So a kilowatt is a thousand Watts. Now I've, I've got a solar system that can
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give me on a sunny day, four kilowatts and that's enough to run a home and charge a battery and all
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that kind of, and once I've got a killer, what I can do something useful, right? Run a microwave or,
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uh, you know, all my fridge freezers and my led lighting or the oven or something like that.
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So, so a kilowatt is kind of a useful scale at the, at the home level. Yeah. Right. Then we go
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into megawatts and that's, uh, a million Watts. So again, a jump of a thousand now megawatts,
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that's the range of sort of power stations, isn't it? Now the small modular reactors. Yeah.
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And if, if I've got this right, I mean, you correct me, but the, what we're looking at for,
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for these small modular reactors, which is, you know, the new big thing is somewhere between
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like 30 and a hundred, maybe 300, um, per unit. I believe the exact target they're in for is
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roughly 300 megawatts, but I don't know whether they'll specifically hit that. It's the, the aim of
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your small modular reactor is it's going to power a small to medium sized town. And yes, well, yeah,
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I think, I think 300 would definitely give you that. Yeah. If, if, if the sums that I've got later
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on, uh, are correct. And then you go up by another unit of a thousand and you get to the gigawatt range.
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Yeah. Right. Now this is interesting because I have a look at the, the national grid line.
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That's where you're going to country sized. Yes. So apparently at this precise moment,
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the UK is demanding 33 gigawatts, uh, and we are generating 31 of that, meaning we're getting two
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gigawatts from. Is that 30 or three point? Uh, so, so 33 is the demand and we're generating 31.
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Right. So, so we've got a gap of two gigawatts that we're currently getting in from elsewhere,
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which I don't really like because if you're dependent on elsewhere, somebody else. Yeah.
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Well, they can hold you to ransom on that. That doesn't seem good.
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They can, but to some degree, they'll be able to hold you to ransom anyway,
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because the place that's more slightly come on from will be France. And France actually owns,
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I believe it is pretty much all of the nuclear reactors in the UK in part or in full. Like,
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I believe that, uh, I think. Well, the new one, whatever that is, Hinkley Point.
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Hinkley Point see and size. Well, see, I believe that the, the PDF is in at least
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And there was a bit more complication with them because I believe that the Chinese were also involved
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in, uh, the construction and they were going to be partially owning those as well. And the Americans
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stepped in and said, no, we've put a ban on them as a company. You can't work with them because
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they've stolen nuclear secrets. Well, yes, I can, I can understand the point there. So,
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but, but at the moment, actually, let's have a look at the national grid life. How much are we
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getting from nuclear? We're getting just under five gigawatts from nuclear. So we've got, we're
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getting a decent chunk out of the 35 out of 33. Yeah. But what I read was, and let me just check my
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notes here. Apparently the UK government has said, but they want to get to something like,
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where did I put it? They want to generate an awful lot of energy from SMRs.
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Um, what do they say? My, my main question for the UK couldn't be when exactly, because you can't just
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spring. When? They want to get 24 gigawatts of nuclear energy by 2050. So 24, that's, I mean,
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that's most of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's most of it now, but it depends on which way they intend on
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the economy going as to how much they're going to need. Because if they, if they continue insisting
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on de-industrializing everything, they probably won't even need that much.
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Yes. Well, I mean, but the thing is, if you don't want to de-industrialize, what you want is cheap
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energy. Yes. Which is true. You do, you do want cheap energy, but my main concern, especially for
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looking at the future is, uh, you've got a grand total of nine reactors. There's nine nuclear reactors in
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the UK right now that are operating. Of those nine, I believe there is at least, I think it's four of
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them that are set to close by 2026. That's when their decommissioning dates are set for. And then
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the others, the other five, I believe are all due to be decommissioned by 2030 or roughly thereabouts.
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Okay. So Sizewell C and Hinkley Point C are both not due to be built until after 2030. So you're
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going to have this gap where they have the choice of, do we extend the plant life of these existing
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plants? Which I think I haven't, I haven't visited some power plants before. There's some funny things
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with regulations whereby basically there's certain safety protocols and procedures that kind of get
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stepped over kind of the exact same way that, uh, when they introduced the seatbelt, this decided,
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oh, every new car needs a seatbelt. However, if your car's built before this point, don't worry about
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it. It's fine. So it's, it's the, that was one thing that did genuinely shock me is that you can go
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to a power plant and you'll see things that you think that doesn't look very safe. And it's the,
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the response from the people working on site is we've done it this way forever. And there is a cutout
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in the law for us to be able to continue doing it this way. Yes. Okay. So they're really going
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to need to get motoring with these small modular reactors if that's the thing, especially if they
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want 24 gigabytes, which is, uh, well, it's most of our energy and then we're going to get there
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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
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to be that big. I mean, it would fit in, you know, your local park of your town. You know,
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it's, it's, it's maybe 10 acres, something like that. Um, and, and basically it's just a, you know,
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a building with a hole in it. And then a, a, a lorry turns up with the reactor, um, and a few other
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bits and basically all slots in. And so big Lego bits. Yes. It's a Lego build it yourself.
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So if you could, if you can get a main factory, you know, churning these things out, it actually
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becomes viable to have hundreds of them spread across the country. The only thing that will
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probably be a limiting factor will be government red tape. Because right now, the main thing that
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they look at when they're looking at putting a new nuclear plant in is they look at preexisting
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sites because you've got to have so much paperwork done before you can just drop a nuclear plant in
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there. But there is several sites that previously did house nuclear site plants that would be able
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to have the plants dropped into them. And this is also part of the concern with the decommission.
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And once you've started the decommissioning process, your site lease can lapse. So there's probably quite
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a few plants at this point where they would have made a good place to put a nuclear plant.
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But there's no nuclear activity going on there. So it would be a lot more paperwork.
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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.
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?
00:27:31.820
Oh, excellent. Okay, good. Because I've got 15 panels on the roof. So that's quite a lot of coal
00:27:40.460
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...
00:28:08.220
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.
00:29:00.940
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