Coal To Nuclear and Other Good Stories

Podcast Transcript

Ed Coyne: Hello and welcome to Sprott Radio. I'm your host, Ed Coyne, Senior Managing Partner at Sprott. With me today is Zion Lights. Zion is an award-winning author and environmental activist for a higher-energy, low-carbon future. Thank you for joining Sprott Radio, Zion.

Zion Lights: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Ed Coyne: Well, Zion, as a new guest at Sprott Radio, I thought it would be helpful to start with a bit of your background, some of the work you're doing and the things you're passionate about. It would be great if you could walk us through that to kick this off.

Zion Lights: Sure. I'm a science communicator. I deal with data and facts by trying to turn them into stories to help people understand the basics of science and technology and how they underpin the way society works. Many people are aware of this now because there's a lot of misinformation around, which brings me to the nuclear world. I didn't deliberately go into talking about nuclear. I fell into it as someone who had reservations about it, who'd been misled by misinformation and then started doing a bit of myth-busting and unexpectedly took off.

I've now spoken about clean energy in many countries around the world. I'm pleased the tide has massively turned in the last few years. The narrative has also shifted very much, which is promising in showing that you can combat misinformation because doing that work has made a huge difference.

Ed Coyne: Why do you think there's so much misinformation out there as it relates to energy in the environment? Why do people use a scare tactic, so to speak, when they talk about that space?

Zion Lights: We spread it, environmentalists spread it. There are many different reasons. I would say that for nuclear specifically, it goes back to the anti-weapons movement. Over here, we called it the CND campaign for nuclear disarmament, but I think there are different groups around the world. I've known these people, worked with them, blocked roads with them, and their hearts are in the right places.

I know a lot of people don't like me saying that. They say, "Well, they call us shills, and they're horrible and blah, blah, blah," but they genuinely have been misled themselves. We can only speculate where that goes back to where the inception is. I would say some people had these fears where they're legitimately, or for nefarious reasons, they had these fears, and they were excellent communicators. They were brilliant storytellers, and those stories have lasted for decades.

Most of our narrative about nuclear energy came from those people from decades ago. When I was growing up, I was afraid of nuclear energy. I watched The Simpsons, and nuclear is the bad guy. Who's the worst person in The Simpsons? Mr. Burns. I'm not saying I believe that that was true of the industry necessarily, but these pop culture references have a knock-on effect, and you see it repeated everywhere.

If you don't know anyone who works in the nuclear industry, you don't know a nuclear engineer or anything like that, then it’s never challenged. We fell flat because the scientific community wasn’t challenging it enough, and the industry wasn’t challenging it. They stayed very quiet, and good stories are powerful. As soon as I started telling better stories, I found a lot of people woke up the same way I did and said, “Oh, maybe I’ve been wrong on that. Maybe I’ve been misled.” That’s where most people were in the middle.

The people who were very anti were a minority. I think you find that in almost all cases of misinformation, whether around GMOs, vaccines, nuclear, or something else, it’s usually a very small minority, but they’re excellent storytellers. The stories they tell are more powerful than the science and technology we develop because they overtake those. They control those in a way.

That’s what happened, and now I think it’s shifting back. To be fair to them, even a lot of those people have said, “Well, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was misled.” That’s great, but I think that does show a bit of a broader failure of society to engage those individuals who, frankly, a lot of them came from Britain or the US, where they’ve been through the science education system. Something’s failing there.

If people come out of that and believe the earth is flat, that’s a societal failure. I don’t think we can put it all on the activists. They then run with a fear that they have, thinking that they’re doing something good in the world when they’ve done quite a lot of damage.

Ed Coyne: You talk a lot about misconceptions out there, and I wonder if you could tackle some of those misconceptions and how we’re overcoming them because, as you said, you mentioned you had blocked roads with some of these people in the past as well. How did you get to the other side, and what are some of those big misconceptions you’re trying to help people overcome through your storytelling and being a scientific communicator? If you could talk about that a bit, that would be helpful.

Zion Lights: Sure. My mind did not change overnight. It took many years, and it wasn’t through facts and people telling me that I was wrong and that I should read this book or that book. Although I did go away and read different books, I started questioning what I believed. A friend of mine, John, an engineer, would have these conversations with me. Reflecting on that now, he must have been so frustrated and annoyed when I said things like, “Well, the waste is harmful for millions of years,” and all this nonsense, but he was very patient with me and challenged me.

He said, “Well, this is what’s true.” People underestimate the importance of communicating trust, which strongly influences people. The trust I had for him suddenly started to weigh more than the trust that I had for the environmentalists that I’d listened to for many years. I started thinking, “John’s a good guy. John wouldn’t lie to me. John doesn’t work for the industry. He has no dog in this race. Maybe he’s right, and so a slow shift started to happen.

What helped was that I would take the things he’d said back to that community, and I’d say, “Well, John said—" Their very volatile, angry reactions made me say, “Well, he’s not talking like that. He’s speaking in a measured way. Why are these people having such kneejerk reactions.” I think that’s always a good sign to look out for. If someone’s spreading misinformation, they almost always react in a panic. That’s not a good ’lace to make decisions.

I came around to the logic, largely thanks to his help, to be honest, but it shows how many years I was in that movement before anyone bothered to engage me. I’m not saying that I couldn’t have done my research, but I was reading Greenpeace reports, which are outright misinformation. Those reports still exist today. They are telling you that all these people died at Fukushima, for example, which isn’t true. That fish are dying in huge numbers isn’t true.

If you’re a kid, why would you say, “Well, that must be false.” You will believe those reports. They seem like a good, well-meaning organization. As I mentioned, the main myths I have dealt with have been around waste. That is something that used to worry me. Again, some were from pop culture references, but a lot were from official reports from so-called green groups saying awful things about waste and how it’s not managed. If only they’d put that effort into tackling fossil fuels instead, where there is a waste problem, where it's not managed, where it's stored in the earth's atmosphere.

That was one of the main things. I feel like that’s quite an easy one to dispel because, in the first place, what people think of as waste is just the complete opposite of what it is. I believe this is a green, acidic, goopy liquid. It’s solid and very minimal. Yes, it’s radioactive, but then we can have discussions about how every living thing is radioactive and some non-living things besides, and then we can have discussions about why people are radio-phobic. Why do people protest 5G or X-rays? Some people will refuse to have X-rays or cancer treatment because they’re so radio-phobic.

There’s a lot to say about having these discussions. Many of those people have been let down by society because their fears and anxieties have run rampant and never been challenged effectively, which is why I think science communication is important. It’s not just about throwing facts at people or what a lot of people think of as science communication. It’s about having those conversations, meeting people where they’re at, and being reasonable in hearing their concerns.

I would say the primary concerns have always been waste and radiation. Whereas waste has been completely overblown, radiation is a fair fear. You are extremely unlikely to be exposed to high levels of radiation, but the idea of it is scary, and that’s why there are so many stories in literature and films. They’re compelling, and they stoke a fear in you. Even though you are far more likely to have an accident when you get in a car, nobody fears that. Everybody does it every day.

We fear these huge, unlikely scenarios instead. Yes, there have been cases where that’s happened, but that’s been related to weapons and not energy. That’s another useful point that you can tell people because it’s factually correct. They can look it up, and it can just help unpick some of those stories they’ve been told for a long time.

Ed Coyne: To your point, between The Simpsons and Marvel Comics, half the superheroes have been exposed to radioactivity, and that’s why they have their superpowers. You’re right. There are a lot of stories out there along the way that fuse people’s view of it. It’s interesting because as we go down this path of renewable, sustainable energy, nuclear has been around for a long time, yet, in the last decade or so, wind, solar and hydro have gotten most of the front page news. More recently, nuclear power has started to catch up.

Can you talk about some of those other alternative energies out there? Maybe the pros and cons and how nuclear could support them. That's part A. Then, in part B, I want to talk about coal because you've done some cool stuff with it: some articles, etc. I want to shelve that for now, but can you talk about wind, solar, and hydro for a minute and how that relates to nuclear?

Zion Lights: Sure. You're right. Wind and solar have an excellent public image. I know this will sound silly, but I think it comes down to something basic. I say this because wind and solar energy have been seen as natural elements in the environmental movement for a long time. That's a fuzzy, ridiculous idea, but it is true. I still know people who will argue, "Well, they're natural because they last forever and come from the elements." Completely ignoring that these huge infrastructure projects require a lot of mining and minerals, far more than nuclear requires.

They're not doing that deliberately; they have this beautiful image of wind and sun in their heads. Wind and sun are replenishable and natural, whereas nuclear power seems unnatural. Nuclear power seems manmade. I say manmade, not human-made, specifically because environmentalists have said this for a long time. It's a very male thing that men created it. It's true.

Helen Caldicott was a brilliant communicator and extremely powerful in the anti-nuclear movement for many years. She's still a very prominent activist. She has given multiple speeches where she speaks to women predominantly, saying, "This is a male energy. We don't need this. We want the natural elements." Of course, if you think about it, atoms make up everything, right? What's more natural than atoms?

Let's not get into that because it's silly. Let's also be honest: people respond to good marketing. That single slogan about a product that makes you go and buy it is powerful, and that's happened with wind and solar. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't build wind and solar. They are clean. We are comparing these energies, after all, to fossil fuels. We want to replace fossil fuels, especially coal, because gas is a little bit better than coal, but especially coal.

If we can phase them out as much as possible and have clean energy sources, that will be better for all of us. Even if you don't care about climate change, I do, and a lot of people will argue with me on that; air pollution alone kills millions of people from fossil fuels. We've known this for a long time. People fear radiation when they're far more likely to be harmed by air pollution, and we could tackle that right now.

We want to talk about invisible killers; air pollution should be up there. Another thing I think the environmental movement got wrong is that we should've been arguing that message. It's happening more now, but nobody cared when I started doing this. No one was talking about it, and then they would say, "We need wind and solar." Well, that won't solve it.

We need robust, reliable energy systems. You can have some wind and solar, but the base load or reliable form of energy will always be, until we develop fusion or something else, something better, it will be nuclear or hydropower. If you look at all the industrialized nations in the world, that's what they have. They have a clean, reliable base load, nuclear or hydro, then top it with wind and solar. Then, when it's not windy or sunny enough, they import fossil fuels.

That's the argument for adding wind and solar to the grid, along with the storage, but it will only last so long. It only lasts a few hours, so you still need to have something clean and reliable to not end up importing coal, which is what we do in Britain when our wind drops. When it's windy, great, yes, everything's powered by wind. That's what the headlines say, anyway. As soon as that stops, then we import coal.

It would be great if we could have hydro, but it's geographically restricted. Only some places in the world could have it. Where they do, they use it abundantly, such as in Sweden and Norway. I don't want to speak against clean energies; we need to use all the hydropower available to us. Again, people have this image of, "Well, it's natural because it's water." Well, hydropower has killed way more people than wind, solar, and nuclear combined because things like the Banqiao Dam disaster killed hundreds of thousands of people. Nuclear is nowhere near that number. It's not even in the hundreds.

It's funny that it has such a positive image when it's potentially more dangerous and has displaced many people. People will then say, "You're saying that about nuclear, but look at all the people it's displaced." Hydropower has displaced far more people. I would say that nothing is zero risk, and we should stop pretending that things should be zero risk.

We should minimize as much as possible, but nothing is completely safe, and that's also true of wind and solar. We have to look at these things in context, compare them with fossil fuels, and go, "Well, those are unsafe. That's so polluting; why haven't we phased that out already?" Why are we squabbling and arguing about the minute details of these clean energy sources when the future of humankind depends on them?

Whether or not you're worried about climate change and global heating, people are dying right now, today, because we aren't phasing out the fossil fuels from air pollution. That's been happening for a long time, and we've known that. We've not done enough, is what I would say.

Ed Coyne: We talk a lot about health and safety, but let's boil down to reliability and affordability. We have 8 billion people in the world today, and clean energy is probably important to maybe 1 billion of the 8. The other seven just want power. They want to turn the light switch on and have a light. The bigger question is why are we putting one so much against another and why are we  not recognizing that we need them all? We need wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear, and we still need fossil fuels. We're still powering with coal and so forth. These are long projects.

Is it fair to say that many of the people out there or many of the narratives out there are putting one against the other instead of saying we need a more holistic solution to this space? I guess part two of that would be, then, is nuclear sort of the base for that to support all these other energy sources out there?

Zion Lights: Nuclear has to be the base. Until we create something better, it just has to be. It's proven to be able to do this already. It may be that we have more small modular reactors (SMRs) moving forward. The advanced tech is moving very quickly. Even then, I would not say that that's proven for decarbonizing a grid. If we're talking about reducing emissions right now, we know it's big old fission. We know it's worked. It's worked in France since the '80s. They completely decarbonized in around 15 years. We see the model that we need to follow.

I think it's worrisome when the developed nations, for want of a better phrase, point at the underdeveloped nations and say, "We want you to stop burning fossil fuels," which is what happens right every year at COP. Then you get countries like India turning around and saying, "How dare you," frankly because they still have billions of people to lift out of poverty.

They are not going to do that with intermittent energy sources. That's wishful thinking. It's not been shown to work in developed nations. Germany tried to do it. People say it's about underinvestment or political will, but Germany's a good case study of a country that put trillions into wind and solar.

On the one hand, it did bring down the costs globally, but did they reduce their emissions the way France did in a decade? No, they didn't. They tried. You might say, well, the Nord Stream pipeline thing happened, and there were elements that they didn't plan for. We all have that image, don't we? Of the village being cleared for coal and all the protestors protesting it.

Germany has a lot of coal, and they're now using it, and it's very dirty. It's the dirtiest kind. It's lignite. It's easy for countries like that where they can fall back on that. What happens in India or Africa if you give them intermittent sources, and then they have blackouts and energy scarcity? They can't just say, "Well, I'll just mine here," or "I'll just import this here." They don't have the financial means to do that.

I think one of the problems with the conversation is we don't treat the conversations differently enough. It's different in the developed nations, where we have the capacity, capability, finances and workforce to decarbonize within a matter of years. Then, like you say, quite a lot of the world that is not there yet still has not had its industrial revolutions or green revolutions, even in agriculture. They're where we were once, and we should help them. We should help them push forward out of that because we should absolutely alleviate poverty.

That will not happen if a few solar farms are sent to Indian villagers, which some NGOs are doing. That's not going to happen. That's not what we had to develop. That development is key actually, if you care about environmental standards. The one thing that we found, again, to lower emissions and bring up environmental standards is development. China is building a lot of clean energy. They're building more nuclear reactors anywhere else in the world and more solar and wind.

These countries, like us, build and burn lots of coal and realize, "Great, we've reached a certain level of development, but wow, people are sick. The air is dirty; let's now transition to clean technologies." That's the way that it happens. There's no leapfrogging. I know a lot of people wish for that, but again, it's just not been the case throughout history, and it's not for lack of trying.

It puts these countries in a very precarious position to try to get them to do that, and frankly, I think it just makes them care less about things like climate change. If you struggle to put food on the table, the last thing you care about is climate change or even the air you breathe. I think everyone should have access to good air. You don't think kids should be suffering living next to coal fire stations in other countries so that we can import that electricity when we feel like it. We never allow it at home, but we'll import it from poor nations. Yes, it's more complicated.

There was a recent study I saw about discussing nuance, which just isn't very popular. If you think on social media and the sound bites that go viral that people appreciate, they're bold. They might not be true, but they are bold and black and white. The reality of anything is rarely black and white, and the energy system is complicated. What you talk about in Britain is different from what you can talk about in America, Australia, or anywhere in Asia, where many different countries have different needs and populations.

I hope to bring some of that discussion to the table because I think it gets neglected even by world leaders who might be quite well-meaning, but they'll say things like, "Well, we just have to reach net zero." Quite a lot of countries have set net zero goals. How many countries are going to meet those?

Ed Coyne: You mentioned coal a few times. Whether it's the UK, using coal plants when the wind slows down, or what we've seen in Germany. Coal is getting a new chapter in its life related to infrastructure and potentially creating jobs or moving people from one skill set to another within the coal plant. I think it's C2N, the acronym for Coal to Nuclear. Talk about that because I think that's a cool narrative that includes what we currently have and what we could have related to Coal to Nuclear.

Zion Lights: The research on this is U.S.-specific, but it is relevant to any country that has had a successful coal program because many of these coal-fired power stations have been mothballed and phased out. The infrastructure is sitting there. The Department of Energy report that came out of the U.S. recently found that 80% of the sites across the U.S. could be easily converted to nuclear sites. If you think about the basic infrastructure you need to put in place, I'm talking about the building, the concrete forming the control room; those can very easily be transitioned.

That's important if you think about the cost and the speed of building nuclear power stations because a lot of that existing infrastructure is there. It also tackles two other things. One, that kind of NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) element, people don't want new infrastructure to be built. People wish for the idea of solar farms, wind turbines, or nuclear power stations but don't want to live next to them.

If you use existing sites, you'll find people who live next to nuclear power stations already have the highest acceptance of them. That's true globally. There's research on that because they're used to it; they know there’s nothing to fear, and the communities benefit from the jobs. That's the other crucial aspect of the C2N: By transitioning those old coal-fired power stations to nuclear stations, they found that they could retain quite a lot of that local workforce.

A lot of those people who have lost jobs in the coal industry, who are bitter and may be angry about action on climate change, are engineers or builders; they're things that can be transitioned. They're vocations that can be transitioned to the nuclear world with a bit of training. They already have a lot of expertise there, making it more accessible. For example, here, we want to build more nuclear power. The workforce isn't here. We don't have the workforce and training for that workforce.

Training that workforce, I think people underestimate how much time and energy it would take to train that workforce. We just had an election, but the previous government was looking at bringing retired workers back to get nuclear built, offering these packages, and, yes, plenty of people were taking them up.

Ed Coyne: That's not sustainable.

Zion Lights: No. I always think the measure of any society can be gauged by its number of engineers.

Ed Coyne: We need more “Johns.” As you said earlier.

Zion Lights: Yes. You and I can sit here and talk all day. Still, the people getting their hands dirty who are building the infrastructure are the ones that we need to get the economy going to set those high environmental standards so that we can have homegrown energy at home instead of importing it from countries with lower environmental standards. They haven't reached that level of development that we have. It's not just about clean energy. It's also about railways or housing. A lot is going on there, but I think it's promising for the U.S.

If you had a world-war-style effort of building, training, and maybe relaxing some of your nuclear over-regulation, you could meet a 2050 target. Why not? France did it in 15 years, in the '80s, and you have these sites that France didn't have with existing infrastructure, with communities that already support a transition, and who want the jobs.

Depending on what happens in the next few years, I think the U.S. is promising more than many other countries. In comparison, in Britain, we have two pro-nuclear parties in theory. The wording is great: "Let's build, let's get it done." First, there is a lack of skilled workforce; we rely highly on immigration for that, but even then, as we say, we're looking at bringing back retirees.

The other issues around the cost of living and housing are expensive; there are not many incentives for young people to go in and study for years to become engineers when they're not necessarily guaranteed well-paid jobs at the end. Then, the regulation means that even if you've got a good reactor, something like the South Korean APR1000, which they built in just a few years over there and exported to the UAE and showed that you can build it in a few years over there. If we tried to build one here, it would take years even to get through the planning system and then a few more years to get through the environmental regulations. This is also a European-approved reactor, so you're skipping that bit. We won't meet our targets. There's absolutely no way. We won't meet them. I think the U.S. looks far more promising. If it were a race, I'd say you're ahead.

Ed Coyne: Will small mod reactors change some of that? Can you manufacture something in one part of the world, ship it to another, and plug it into an existing coal site and now have a nuclear power plant? Am I simplifying that?

Zion Lights: No, that’s the idea. It's not that different from South Korea exporting the APR1000. They're also looking at bringing it to Africa. They're having talks with other countries about doing similar things there, but it is big nuclear. It's huge. It's a big infrastructure project. There is an issue with huge infrastructure projects, not just for nuclear, but any large infrastructure project often takes a long time to build and has cost overruns. People are worrying about this now. It's a big public turnoff, so governments don't want to invest in it.

Governments tend to think short term because they have a short term in office. They make a decision. When he came up with a MESMA plan of building, the Prime Minister of France wanted to build 80 reactors. They ended up building 50-something odd. He was thinking way beyond his term in office. Maybe even he could've been thinking way beyond his lifetime. It didn't take that long, but there's no guarantee. We've all seen that with the COVID pandemic and how that hit every industry everywhere. There are no guarantees ever.

The difference with SMRs is that you are looking at a much quicker timeline and a much smaller cost. If they get them down to being scalable, that's the challenge. The technology exists. There are nuclear submarines powered by SMRs, but what we are looking at is, can we get them built in a factory like Lego models, one after the other: it's made, shipped, and plugged into their existing system?

In theory, it is a great idea, and that's why so many people are racing to do it. You've got Bill Gates, with his own company, trying to do it, his reactor. Every country has a program, and they are always looking to invest in a program in another country. We have several in the UK, and the government funds them.

I think it's always essential to fund that advanced tech. If it comes into play, brilliant. My only concern is that while it tackles the idea that we don't want the big projects and big investments, it is as much a gamble, I think, as trying to go for a purely wind and solar grid. It's an experiment.

If you need a lot more of them to meet the same demand of a large nuclear power plant, which you are because they're small reactors, they produce a fraction of the electricity, then you're going to need more sites for them, and I think in the end, more public approval. At the moment, they have a really good public perception. The people who know what they are, are quite positive about them, and I think they've had good messaging, too. There's good branding. They don't seem to have the legacy of nuclear, but that might change when someone wants to put one in your neighborhood.

Let's be honest; it will be more in your neighborhood than a large reactor is a little bit further away because that's the idea. It's a small modular reactor. Stick it on a ship, stick it in your neighborhood. This infrastructure has to go somewhere. I think the established route of what we've been doing is fine. Those communities are already supportive. We should engage them and keep building it. For example, in the UK, we have about 12 sites of decommissioned reactors just because they got old and are old tech.

Brilliant. Build them there because the communities already support them. The communities are upset that they've lost their jobs and that their children have moved away because there are no jobs. I've visited some of these sites and written extensively about them. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have been discussing powering AI data centers, so we know artificial intelligence uses a lot of electricity.

That's a nice idea that you're going to have that site. It's your site, and it's your infrastructure. You've already built it, and then you are powering it the same way you could power it with your own wind turbine or solar panels, but they're being realistic that they know that that's not enough. In recent years, they've suddenly come out and said, "Well, we do like those things, and we have funded them, but they're not enough. Can we have these SMRs?"

Ed Coyne: Like so many things, tech tends to, in the last couple of decades, lead the way in public perception. I applaud them for looking at nuclear power to get to a 24/7 base load. It also, I think, to your point earlier, shows people that you can't have a data center; you can't have dependable AI if it's intermittent. It has to be 24/7. They're turning to nuclear for that.

For our listeners today, who want to learn more about the work you're doing? How could one find you? How could one look you up and see some of the work you're doing, some of the things you're reading, and what would you recommend out there?

Zion Lights: I have a website, zionlights.co.uk, where I have a section with all the articles I write in quite a lot of the interviews I do. That's a good place to go if you want to see what else I'm saying. I also write on Substack, where I can dive deeper into some topics. Substack is just my name, Zion Lights. It's also under the name Everything is Light, which is a Tesla quote. For other sites, I always recommend things like Our World in Data, which has a good, simple overview of a lot of these areas we've talked about, even from how something is determined to be clean.

What are the details around it, and how do we put the data together? Again, that's a useful website. I'm everywhere. I'm all over social media, and I've just recently started making TikTok videos, which is new for me. You can find me on there as well, @zilovesscience.

Ed Coyne: Wonderful. Well, Zion, again, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Sprott Radio. Our listeners certainly appreciate the information you shared, so thank you for joining us today.

Zion Lights: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.