The Power of Nuclear

Podcast Transcript

Ed Coyne: Hello and welcome to Sprott Radio. I'm your host, Ed Coyne, Senior Managing Partner at Sprott. I'm pleased to welcome Marco Visscher, an award-winning journalist, for his climate policy and clean technology work. Marco, thank you for joining me today on Sprott Radio.

Marco Visscher: Thank you for having me.

Ed Coyne: Marco, before we discuss your most recent book, The Power of Nuclear, I thought it'd be helpful for our listeners to hear a bit about yourself and your background.

Marco Visscher: I became a journalist about 25 years ago. I was working at an alternative left-wing magazine in the Netherlands. Over time, I covered globalization and got more involved regarding sustainability, and climate change became a bigger issue. I wrote a lot on environmental issues over the years, covering energy. It was funny, when I was working on my book, The Power of Nuclear, I was looking up what I had written about nuclear power during my career. I stumbled upon an article from the year 2000. Rereading that article, you could notice I didn't like nuclear at all.

Ed Coyne: I was going to call you out on that.

Marco Visscher: There was a climate change conference back in 2000, and the nuclear industry was there promoting nuclear power as a solution to climate change. I didn't buy it at all. I think I wrote something like, "Now is the time to bring down the nuclear industry before it ruins the planet," or something like that. That gives you a hint of where I'm coming from.

Ed Coyne: We're going to address that. We won't let you off that easily, but I think we all have the right to change, which is wonderful. Let's get into that a bit because in your most recent book, The Power of Nuclear, you talk about the rise of nuclear, the fall of nuclear, and the return. You refer to it as the world's mightiest energy source out there as well. What prompted you, then, to author this book?

Marco Visscher: A couple of years ago, I wrote a book in Dutch only on the energy transition, looking at where we are with our climate goals and where we are with renewables. At the end of the book, I realized that wind and solar can only take you so far, and that there's a need for a clean, zero-carbon electricity source that can power 24/7, regardless of the weather.

At the end of the book, I was merely raising the question of whether it might be time for us, in the Netherlands, to look at nuclear power again, because it was not on the table then. That changed coincidentally, around the time my book was published in 2018, I believe. When nuclear power became part of the government plans here, I thought it was time to look into nuclear power. I hadn't done that before, because I felt the future belonged to wind and solar.

I did notice that when environmentalists spoke out in favor of nuclear power, most notably Stewart Brand in his wonderful book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. There was also George Monbiot in the UK, who spoke out in favor of nuclear power. The Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank, promoted nuclear as part of the solution. I did listen, but I never realized it had to be such a part of the future plans. If you look at the data, I was quickly convinced that nuclear power isn't the villain that I held it to be, but I was mostly intrigued by the emotions that nuclear power sparks.

It's not just anger. Sometimes, when I talk in public about climate policy and energy, people get angry when the topic of nuclear power is raised and even walk away. Also, people cheer and applaud. This is rare in any public debate about something as technical and boring as climate policy. I wanted to write a book that was more interesting than just another defense of nuclear power.

I looked at the lively stories of how nuclear power came about. My first chapter is on the atomic bomb, which is probably not the most logical beginning of a book. If you want to make people enthusiastic about nuclear power, we could go to the deathbed of the engineer in Chernobyl who caused the reactor there to explode, or a family from Fukushima who fled to Tokyo to escape the cloud of radiation they expected to be there. A more lively book and less of a book aimed at convincing people of the wonders of nuclear power.

Ed Coyne: It reads like a textbook, but also like a novel. It's fact-based and data-driven. Your storytelling on it is quite remarkable. I think it allows you to walk away from the experience and feel like you know more about its history. I guess talking about the rise, maybe that's the first part we could address, is when you started the book with the bomb and people looking at it, talk about that a little bit when people originally were interested in the early days of what nuclear could do, and then lead us into the fall.

Marco Visscher: If you want to start at the beginning, you should begin around the year 1900, when there was this idea that the atom contains so much energy, and the real question is how to liberate that energy. If we could liberate it, wonders would be possible because you could power cities without burning anything and only need to split atoms. If you don't burn anything, you can have clean cities.

There was also, very quickly, the realization that there was so much power inside the atom that you could blow up a city as well. You could lighten it up or blow it up. What's it going to be? Back then, these were just theoretical discussions, philosophical, if you will. Only in the 1930s did we realize how it should be possible. During the Second World War, the Americans blissfully figured out how to do it. They created the atomic bomb, which ended the Second World War.

Then, most focus was on producing more nuclear weapons, because that gives so much might to the U.S. Then, Russia produced nuclear weapons as well. Both were testing these atomic weapons. President Eisenhower was in power when he noticed that there was so much fear about the future. It was almost paralyzing society in his mind. He figured that this should be different, and that there should be another way to use this atomic energy, as it was called back then.

During his famous Atoms for Peace Speech in 1953, addressing the United Nations, he argued that the U.S. should be a pioneer in building nuclear power plants and offering the technology to other countries. That's what happened. The nuclear industry rose from that time on. By then, the Russians had already started building their nuclear power plants. They were the real pioneers, if you will.

I think most people saw it as a technological marvel. It was abracadabra to most people, and it still is to some extent, even though we know pretty much everything we should know about nuclear power. A nuclear power plant became a tourist attraction. People would go there, and exhibitions showed how all this worked. In the 1950s, we saw such a spike in living standards.

People realized they needed energy. They also realized that there was a shortage of fossil fuels that were powering their societies. Nuclear power, in the 1950s, was generally seen as a blessing. It was clean and abundant because uranium appeared everywhere on every continent. I guess, to some extent, the fall already began in the 1950s, because there was such a powerful link in the public imagination between nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants that the bomb tainted nuclear power from the beginning.

The link between nuclear bombs and nuclear plants is obvious, because the physics is the same, even though uranium has to be enriched much more, of course, for a bomb than for a power plant. Still, the same physicists, people, and regulators were involved. People were scared of these nuclear weapons. With the testing, they were scared of the fallout and the damage it would do to their health.

Also, there was another interesting power in place that didn't like nuclear power, because who wouldn't want cheap, abundant nuclear power? It's the power companies selling fossil fuels. They got alarmed. The Rockefeller Foundation, most notably, back then, promoted a lot of research in all kinds of fields. They also initiated research into the effects of what would happen if a nuclear power industry took off.

They wrote this study and published it in 1956. The conclusion was that the radiation around the nuclear power plant was dangerous. Every level of radiation is poisonous, basically. It would damage your health, your children's health, and your grandchildren's health. Waste could burst out of their canisters and poison the environment without us noticing, because we wouldn't notice if radiation escaped.

This was the language in the 1956 report sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, warning of a quick rollout of a nuclear industry. I guess that was the first part of the fall of nuclear power, just before it was even rising. Still, a nuclear power industry came about fairly quickly. Never before was an energy source able to take up so much of the share of the energy supply as nuclear power did in the 1960s.

More people were standing up against nuclear power. There was the environmental movement, of course. They wanted technology to be simpler. They longed for a simpler life. They were against big governments, against big corporations, and somehow, this nuclear energy was the embodiment of the progress they questioned. Rather than seeing, "Oh wow, energy is making life so much better, for so many people," they considered, "No, no, no, we should slow down here. Economic growth is not everything. We should be more frugal, live more in harmony with nature," if you will.

In a way, the early environmentalists were doing the job of the fossil fuel industry by protesting against the development of nuclear power.

Ed Coyne: When researching this book and talking about it, what have you seen that's really driven the return of people starting to embrace nuclear power? What's driving that return right now?

Marco Visscher: I would say two things mainly. One is climate change. There is an obvious need to tackle climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Much focus has been on expanding wind and solar energy, and I'm not protesting against wind and solar energy at all, but this will only bring us so far. I think there is more of a realization that you need a power source that can power a modern society, without batteries or some mysterious solution to the intermittent production from wind and solar. We will need nuclear power. I think that realization is kicking in more and more.

Another is, and this is especially the case in Europe, I think, the realization that we've become so dependent on fossil fuels coming from Russia. Of course, this has changed over the past years, but the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix has hardly slowed. It's around 80% or something like that, and it was 80% 25 years ago before we were talking frantically about climate change.

In reality, fossil fuels have expanded because the energy demand has also expanded in those 25 years. I think these are the two main topics. I guess there's another one that we are realizing. We have access to information much better than in the 1980s, especially the 1970s and '60s. For instance, you could just go to Wikipedia to establish Fukushima's death toll. I think this access to the information was not available in the early days when nuclear power took off. That's another thing. It's failing climate policy and energy policy in general.

Ed Coyne: What about from a perception standpoint, then? If policy is slowly evolving, particularly here in the U.S., what have you seen from a perception standpoint? We discussed the rise and the fall, and people's association with energy and the bomb. Have you seen that perception start to change a little further?

Marco Visscher: Absolutely, yes. I looked at opinion polls in several countries, only those done by the most established polling agencies, just to see how much support there is for nuclear power. I was surprised to find that, overall, a majority of people support nuclear power—in some cases, even up to 70% or 80%.

This surprised me because it's not the impression you would get if you opened a newspaper. Any journalist covering nuclear power wants to show that the journalist is critical and considers all the dangers and impracticalities of nuclear power. You would think that people are against it, but apparently, this is not true at all. The support has grown substantially over the past couple of years, mostly due to failing climate policy and the dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

Ed Coyne: I would agree with that—everything I've been seeing and reading seems to indicate that the pendulum has swung to that side. We've talked about the environment. Can we talk about it from an economic standpoint for just a moment? What are some of the key economic benefits we're seeing with countries embracing nuclear power? What have you seen with that?

Marco Visscher: I think nuclear power can flourish in countries where governments are taking control over the energy market. This was true when France built its vast fleet of nuclear reactors. This was true in Sweden, for instance, and probably even in the U.S. Over time, there was a change in the energy market, which has become much more liberalized, and for governments now to enter the energy market and expand nuclear power, that could be a different reality than it was decades ago.

The prices are fairly low when it comes to power coming from nuclear power plants built in the '70s or so. Nuclear power's not inherently expensive because you need so little uranium. Even if the price of uranium were to rise drastically, that wouldn't make much of a difference.

Ed Coyne: I think there's an interesting distinction between existing reactors continuing to operate and new traditional ones. I'll call them traditional reactors, large ones we recognize and know are coming online. I think those two alone address many of our energy issues. Then the nice-to-have or aspirational goals are these more regionalized micro and small reactors.

I don't think you need those to hit the market as much as just extending the existing ones' operating licenses and building additional traditional reactors. I think that covers a lot of the waterfront.

Marco Visscher: That's very true. The International Energy Agency also recommends extending the lifetime of currently operating nuclear power plants as the best, fastest, and cheapest way to produce zero-carbon electricity. That's certainly something we should do. We should also build more nuclear power plants, and that should be easier than it is now.

Ed Coyne: At Sprott, we talk about this energy transition. Yes, there's a transition happening. What's happening in my mind is an additional way to create energy. I've read that coal plants are still being built. These things take decades to transition. Given the substantial amount of energy needed globally, it's just an additional way to create more energy.

We're becoming more electrified in everything we do, from tech to cars to homes, you name it. We just did a podcast a couple of months ago, and we joked about my new dishwasher wanting to link up with my phone. It's like all these things are happening. This morning, I just read that saying please and thank you when you're using ChatGPT or other AIs out there is consuming millions and millions of dollars worth of energy.

We're all growing simultaneously here, which will be interesting. I do agree. I think public perception is coming along. Policy is probably behind a little bit. The technology is already there. From that point forward, after you finish your book and send it out to the world, where do you see the future of nuclear going? Are you feeling positive after doing all this work and going from being a skeptic to a supporter? Where do you see the future as it relates to nuclear?

Marco Visscher: We've covered a lot of ground, but maybe just this one here as a thought experiment. Just imagine that nuclear power did not exist. There was no nuclear bomb. There was no Chernobyl. Just imagine you open up a newspaper and read an article about scientists who have invented a way to produce a lot of clean energy without air pollution or emitting greenhouse gases. It can be obtained by using very few resources, a resource that is abundantly available on all continents, so it's very cheap, and you could power modern societies with this.

If you read an article like that, you would think, "Wow, this is brilliant. Let's get going with this." Well, we have great news. We have that energy source. It's called nuclear power.

Ed Coyne: I think, if they're looking for one, they found the new head of the Nuclear Institute, Marco, because I believe you are spot on. Just recast the die, so to speak, and get people to rethink it in a fresh way. How can one find you and track what you're up to and working on, but more importantly, how could someone gain access to your most recent book?

Marco Visscher: My book is The Power of Nuclear. It's out on Amazon and in every bookstore, so you should be able to get it there. I'm not on Substack, Twitter or X. I think I'm old-fashioned. I have a website, marcovisscher.com, and I'm on LinkedIn, so please connect with me if you are there.

Ed Coyne: That's awesome, Marco. I appreciate you taking the time today. Once again, The Power of Nuclear: The Rise, Fall and Return of our Mightiest Energy Source, is a wonderful book. I encourage people to give it a read. It's fascinating, and it's giving a lot of information. Marco, thank you again for taking the time today to talk to us on Sprott Radio.

Marco Visscher: Sure. Yes, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Ed Coyne: Thank you. Once again, I'm your host, Ed Coyne. Thank you for listening to Sprott Radio.