Going 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 today to welcome a new guest of Sprott Radio, Dr. Tim Gregory. Dr. Gregory is a senior nuclear chemist at the United Kingdom National Laboratory. Dr. Gregory, thank you for joining me on Sprott Radio.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Thanks for the invitation. It's good to be here.

Ed Coyne: As a new guest on Sprott Radio, maybe tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into this field, and who you are as a person.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Sure. As a kid, I wanted to be in a rock band, but I became a scientist instead. I've loved science since I was a kid, before I could even remember. After my undergraduate degree in geology, I did a PhD in Cosmochemistry, where I measured the age of the solar system by dating meteorites, using radioactive dating. It was during my PhD that I always said that I learned my trade, which is as an analyst.

I learned to measure the chemical and isotopic composition of rocks, which is very similar to what I do now as a chemist. I measure the chemistry and isotope composition of all sorts of interesting nuclear materials. You would be surprised at the similarities between the two jobs, although the materials are very different.

The cool thing about the tools of science is that you can apply them to different problems. The instruments that I run on a day-to-day basis and the types of chemistry I do now for my day job are very similar to what I did in my PhD and my postdoctoral research after my PhD, as well, in Cosmochemistry. Applying that tool set to a different area of science has been quite the learning curve.

Ed Coyne: I bet. Let's stay on the PhD for a moment. I have to be honest, Cosmochemistry, A, I didn't know it existed. That probably says more about me than your field of study. Talk more about that because I was fascinated as I looked into it. You talk about the study of meteorites and the history lessons you get from that. Please walk us through, A, deciding to focus on that for your PhD and then, B, what that involves or entails.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Yes, sure.

Ed Coyne: I think that'd be fascinating for our listeners.

Dr. Tim Gregory: It's so amazing. It's such an incredible subject. My undergraduate degree was in Geology. It was after the third year of my undergraduate degree, before my master's year, that I interned at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. I flew out for the summer, which was just amazing. I was like the kid who had NASA T-shirts growing up. Growing up, I was completely obsessed with NASA, the moon, Apollo, and all that, so going to the Johnson Space Center when I was 21 was a complete dream come true.

My project for the summer was to use the tools of geology to unpick the history of a meteorite that had been found in Antarctica in 1994. That's when I fell in love with the lab, because I hadn't spent that much time in the lab up to that point. I used all these incredible instruments I'd only ever read about: scanning electron microscopes, electron probes, mass spectrometers. That's when I got the bug for analysis, being in the lab, obsessing over detail. You get immersed in very detailed, careful work. That's what motivated me to do my PhD.

I remember that isotopes were important at the time. I write about isotopes in my new book Going Nuclear. Isotopes are different versions of the same elements with the same chemistry but have different masses because they have different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. I knew that isotopes were important for all different areas of science, including Cosmochemistry. I didn't know a huge amount about them, and I knew even less about how we measure them precisely. I saw this PhD position at the University of Bristol here in the UK, dedicated to measuring the isotopic composition of meteorites. Maybe, I don't know, looking back naively, I thought, "Well, I don't know anything about that. I should do that for a PhD."

The whole point of doing a PhD is learning things you didn't previously know. That's where I learned to run mass spectrometers. Mass spectrometry is my bread and butter. It's my particular area of scientific expertise. It's funny, like I said, I learned my trade measuring the composition of meteorites, and now I measure all sorts of things, nuclear fuel, nuclear medicines, space, fuels, all sorts of cool things.

Ed Coyne: I do want to throw a fun fact out there, or maybe a question about a fun fact out there. You mentioned that you were at NASA, a space center in Houston at 21, which must have been fascinating, but you were also on a BBC series called Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes? I don't mean to embarrass you, but can you talk about that? As I uncovered some more stuff, I thought that was fascinating, too. Maybe give us a little taste of that as well.

Dr. Tim Gregory: For sure. I remember vividly having a cup of tea and looking at Twitter. This was back in 2016, and I saw an advert from the BBC calling for people to apply for this program or a show, as I guess you'd call it, which was astronaut selection. I thought, "Wow, that sounds amazing. Everyone will apply to this, so this is a long shot, but you've got to be in it to win it." I applied and ended up getting down-selected to the Final 12, and went through the rigors of astronaut selection and many of the same tests that real-life astronauts get put through as they get selected.

Of course, it was televised, but I must say, the BBC did a great job of making it a blend of reality TV and educational and authentic. Amazingly, I made it down to the final three, much to my surprise. I was pipped to the post by an amazing lady called Susie Ember, who's a planetary science professor at the University of Leicester. She was incredible. She ended up coming first, but runner-up is not bad, and I was the youngest contestant by quite a long way.

Ed Coyne: That's fantastic. What were you lacking, sadly, that didn't get you to number one?

Dr. Tim Gregory: If I'm being kind to myself, probably life experience.

Ed Coyne: Okay, fair enough.

Dr. Tim Gregory: There we go.

Ed Coyne: Let's circle back to your PhD for a second. I have to believe your first book, Meteorite, which talks about the universe's building blocks, had to come from your PhD. I also want to get to your most recent book, but can you briefly discuss your first book and how that came about?

Dr. Tim Gregory: Sure. I'd completely immersed myself in the subject of Cosmochemistry and meteorite science, at least when I wasn't going through astronaut selection. I'd read these amazing papers and attended these amazing conferences. I'd had a glimpse and a taste of what it felt like to look down the barrel of a microscope at a meteorite and think, "Wow, this thing is older than planet Earth. This rock existed before the planet existed," and verify that myself.

I hadn't just read that in literature or a textbook. I'd measured the edge of the meteorite myself. It's like standing on the edge of this cliff of deep geological time, which is absolutely incredible. I thought someone had to write a book on this because this is just such a core subject. Everyone loves space, right?

It's probably the most popular area of science. Still, oftentimes it's astronomers who steal all the limelight and fair enough because astronomy is incredible. Still, I thought people might be interested in learning about space from the perspective of geology, looking at the rocks that fall to the Earth's surface all the time. 40,000 tons a year. Can you believe the number of meteorites falling to the Earth's surface yearly?

Ed Coyne: Really?

Dr. Tim Gregory: Yes, really.

Ed Coyne: Wow.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Most of it's microscopic and falls into the oceans because Earth is 70% covered in water, but the ones that survive and that we find are the meteorites. From them, we've unpicked how the solar system formed. We've discovered the age of the solar system and the age of the Earth. It's an absolutely incredible subject.

I wrote Meteorite alongside my thesis while pursuing my PhD, alongside my thesis, much to the dismay of my supervisor. He thought I was probably getting too distracted, but it came out well in the end.

Ed Coyne: Impressive. The book came out in 2020, and you got your PhD in 2019, so you can clearly multitask.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Yes, for sure. It was a real joy to write that book. It just happened. I'm an avid reader. I grew up on Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman, who are all great popular science writers. I never thought I had even one book in me. It was also quite an eye-opener, realizing, "Oh, I can actually write a book." That was fun. It was such a lovely book to write. From the author's perspective, it was a really nice subject articulation. It's so fascinating and so cool. People enjoyed it too, which was great.

Ed Coyne: The way you talk about the building blocks and the origin of life from meteorites, how that came to be, and how it created the planets and the entire solar system.

Dr. Tim Gregory: It's unbelievable. The origin of the chemical elements is important as well. I always think that, like with physics, the origin of physics was the beginning of the universe, and we don't know how that happened. The origin of biology was the origin of life, and we don't know how that happened, but the origin of chemistry, we know exactly how that happens. It happens in stars with nuclear synthesis, so I dedicated an entire chapter to that.

Again, it's very interesting to learn about the physics of the inside of a star and how you build heavy elements that you can't produce through fusion. That's everything on the periodic table above iron, which is exactly the same way that you make heavy elements inside a nuclear reactor. I hadn't realized that before I took my sideways career step. Again, it was another example of how you can take science tools from one subject and apply them to a different subject.

Although nuclear scientists use slightly different terminology and jargon than astrophysicists, the underlying science is very similar. It's identical to neutron capture. That's been a real eye-opener. It's been great and really interesting.

Ed Coyne: Let's shift gears a bit and talk about nuclear power today, talk about some of the things that are going on out there. What's got you excited about it? Let's start with why you think nuclear power has this new resurgence of being talked about at the dinner tables in a way they hadn't been for the last decade or two.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Sure. It's deeper than nuclear power. It's energy. Energy is this amazing currency that we can use to generate prosperity and raise living standards. If you look at GDP per capita, living standards, all things that we value in life in the modern world, they're all enabled by energy, energy abundance, and how we harvest the energy that the world needs to prosper. I'm not just talking about maintaining or hopefully raising living standards in the developed world. I mean eliminating poverty in the developing world and giving everybody the living standards we enjoy in Europe and America. You need energy to do that.

The question is, how do you harvest that energy without damaging the natural environment too much in the process as collateral damage? Solving that problem is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. If you solve the energy problem, you solve the economic problem, you solve the humanitarian problem, and if you do it smartly, you can also solve the environmental problem as well, because, of course, we get most of our energy, a vast majority of our energy from fossil fuels, which are great in many respects. They've enabled the modern world. They're very convenient, and with our modern technology, they're not too difficult to find and extract either.

Of course, they come with a massive environmental and human health cost, not least in the form of climate change and air pollution in people's lungs. If we can harvest energy on the scale required without damaging the natural environment, I honestly think that's one of the things we should focus on in the 21st century. It's my view and the view of lots of other people, and I think increasingly lots of other people as well, that nuclear power has to be a part of that. Again, I believe many other people now see it as central to that future.

Ed Coyne: I couldn't agree more with that. I think these terms like clean energy, net zero, or sustainable energy seem to have been limited to the hydro, solar, and wind camps, and nuclear has been left behind. What do you think has changed to where more and more people are saying, "Hey, that really defines nuclear." When talking about those kinds of terms, you're talking nuclear. What do you say to that as more people start to embrace this or educate themselves on nuclear energy in general?

Dr. Tim Gregory: It's really interesting. If you fire up Google and go to Google Images and search clean energy, green energy, or something like that, it's just pages and pages and pages of wind turbines and solar panels. I don't want to live without wind turbines or solar panels. They're okay. They're good at getting you started, but not enough on their own.

Part of the reason is that when we think about net zero and decarbonization, we have this tunnel vision regarding renewables. The point of net zero is not to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. It's to replace fossil fuels with carbon-free electricity sources. Renewables are a bonus. I don't want to be too harsh on the proponents of wind and solar, but it's a bit naïve to think we can get there with wind and solar alone.

We live in societies that are absolutely, utterly dependent on massive amounts of reliable power. Wind and solar cannot sate that need. The wind and solar lobby have done a fantastic job over the last 20 to 25 years in positioning themselves as the answers to net zero. Meanwhile, the nuclear crowd, at least up until recently, has largely stood in the corner and hoped that no one would notice them.

I think it's maybe a slightly uncharitable way of putting it, but it's how it seems to me and lots of other people in the industry. With the urgency of phasing out fossil fuels and gaining some semblance of energy independence as well, people are starting to take another look at nuclear because, once upon a time, it was seen as the future of humanity's energy needs. This is not new. Much of the nuclear technology is actually decades old.

Ed Coyne: Let's talk about that for a second. There's still a lot of negative bias around nuclear power. More and more people, it seems like younger people. I've had some students on Sprott Radio talk about nuclear and so forth in the past. They seem more likely to embrace it. I'm 56, and my generation, maybe just a little more than me, has a negative bias towards it. What would you say to those who either A, have a negative bias towards it or are even further on the side of being anti-nuclear? What would you say to them as we go down this path today?

Dr. Tim Gregory: I would say, think again. Seriously, think again, because it's probably not as bad as you think. A few key points motivate people to be, if not overtly anti-nuclear, very suspicious and wary of it. One of them is safety. There's this perception that nuclear is unsafe. It's understandable because we live in a society where radiation is used as a specter in films, TV shows, computer games, and popular culture. It's this invisible, scentless, silent killer that's there, lurking in the background. It's used to signal, I don't know, like menace. It's like this phantom in popular culture used as a device of fear.

We're all living in radiation all of the time from natural background radiation from the sky and the rocks beneath our feet. The amount of radiation that people are exposed to as a consequence of nuclear power is absolutely negligible. It's like orders of magnitude less than you would get from background radiation, even for people living close to nuclear power stations.

There's this amazing statistic where if you live within a couple of miles of a nuclear power station, the annual radiation you're exposed to is about the same as eating a single banana. Bananas are made slightly radioactive because of the potassium-40 that they contain, which is a naturally occurring radioisotope. The safety record of nuclear power is impeccable when you put it in context with the amount of energy we've got from it. Nuclear power is as safe as wind and solar on a per-terawatt-hour basis. It's an impeccable safety record punctuated by a very small number of very high visibility events, namely Three Mile Island in North America in the late '70s, which no one died in Three Mile Island, by the way. The death toll was zero, and nobody was even exposed to anything above background radiation.

I don't mention that very much in my book. Chernobyl is what did it in Europe. Europe built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than it has built since, which is an absolutely astonishing statistic. It's even more astonishing when you look at the data and discover that nuclear power is still Europe's single biggest source of clean energy, despite the fact that we've built hardly any new nuclear reactors since Chernobyl in 1986.

Then, more recently, with Fukushima in 2011 in Japan. Again, one single death has been linked to Fukushima due to radiation. There were a few thousand deaths, interestingly, from the evacuation, and most of the evacuation, the consensus in the scientific literature is that it was unnecessary because the amount of radiation that the affected populations would have been exposed to would have had zero discernible health effects at all. There's this perception that nuclear is incredibly dangerous because of those rare, but high-visibility events and because society is saturated with this radiophobia, which is not a term that I coined. Lots of people have asked me if I coined that term. I didn't. It was already out there.

Ed Coyne: Say that one more time. I love that.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Radiophobia, the irrational fear of radiation. It turns out that when you look at the data and you step back and take a sober view of these things, splitting atoms in nuclear power stations is one of the safest things that our species does. In fact, more people die every couple of hours from fossil fuel-related air pollution than have ever died of nuclear power in the last 70 years. It's not just a little bit safer than the world's biggest power source. It's orders of magnitude safer than the world's biggest power source.

Ed Coyne: You said something I thought was spot on about the nuclear industry standing in the corner and hoping people don't pay attention to it or notice it because it's had such a negative light shone on it for so long. What needs to change? We've had guests on in the past who have talked about it being a PR problem or just an information problem.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Yes, totally.

Ed Coyne: How does that change? How do we get the industry to start thinking about that and say, "Hey, listen, this is not replacing any one thing, but here's a very safe, sustainable way to create 24/7 base load energy.” What do we need to do to tell that?

Dr. Tim Gregory: I 100% agree. It is a PR problem. Science and technology are absolutely spot on, as is the engineering, and the implementation. It’s the PR. I don't know. I work in the nuclear industry, and this lack of confidence exists. I can't understand it. Nuclear power is incredible. It's so reliable. It's the most reliable form of power. We have this metric called the capacity factor, which is a measure of uptime.

If you look at how much power an energy source could produce and how much it did produce, the ratio between the two is the capacity factor. For nuclear, the median capacity factor is north of 80%. It's the highest of any power source. It's reliable. Lots of people ask me about nuclear waste. I dedicated two whole chapters of my book to addressing nuclear waste.

The nuclear industry is the only industry that fully internalizes its waste. It fully accounts for it. The cost of the cleanup is baked into the price of nuclear power. It fully internalizes the waste, unlike the fossil fuel industry, which externalizes its waste in the form of carbon emissions and the healthcare costs of air pollution. It's reliable. It's about as green as it gets when you consider the nuclear waste footprint, the mining footprint, the land footprint, and the amount of concrete you need to use per terawatt hour of energy.

I can't understand why we haven't been singing the praises of nuclear power for the last three decades. I know why. I'm not naïve. It was Chernobyl that did it. Nuclear power's reputation never really recovered from it. I can't help but feel that the response to Chernobyl was probably overblown a little bit to rub it in the face of the Soviet Union because this was the late '80s, remember?

Ed Coyne: Right.

Dr. Tim Gregory: There was probably an element of that as well. We're already a quarter of the way through the 21st century. People care more about climate change. There's more of a renewed effort to lighten our burden on the natural environment. We're facing economic crises across the developed world, certainly in Europe. It's not so bad in North America, but there are economic problems there, too. Energy is this great enabler of prosperity, economic development, and raising living standards. There's a concerted push, and I think it's about time.

Ed Coyne: That's well said. I want to stay on the waste topic just for a moment. One of the terms in your book and doing other work, I see the words “spent fuel” being replaced with “waste”. Talk about that a bit because I think people think that you use it, it's gone, and then it's just a sludge left over, and we have to store it somewhere. There's more to it than that. Can you talk a little bit about spent fuel versus waste?

Dr. Tim Gregory: Yes, absolutely. There are different types of nuclear waste, but the one that people care about and spend a lot of time talking about is so-called high-level waste. By volume, that's a very tiny fraction of the nuclear waste. It's like a couple of tenths of a percent of the total volume of nuclear waste, but it contains almost all of the radioactivity.

Per unit volume, it's incredibly radioactive. High-level nuclear waste is basically spent fuel. It's fuel that's been in a nuclear reactor typically for three to five years, or something like that, depending on the type of reactor and the country. When you pull spent fuel out of a reactor, it's incredibly radioactive because it's full of so-called fission products. These are the atoms into which uranium splits when it undergoes nuclear fission during nuclear power generation.

There's this weird paradox with radioactivity and nuclear waste. The more radioactive something is, the less time it's a problem because the shorter-lived the isotope, the shorter the half-life, and the quicker it decays. The radioactivity of spent fuel diminishes quite rapidly because fission products tend to be quite short-lived.

After a couple of centuries, the radioactivity of fission products is backed down to the radioactivity of the ore from which you originally mined the uranium. It's a problem on historical timescales—or a challenge on historical timescales—because it's a problem that's been solved. We can talk about what Finland has done on that front, perhaps in a couple of minutes.

When you look at the chemical inventory of spent fuel, those fission products are only a tiny fraction of the spent fuel, typically 3% or 4%. The other 95% plus of the spent fuel is either uranium or plutonium, both of which can be used to generate more nuclear power. By disposing of so-called nuclear waste wholesale, we're throwing away a valuable resource. 95% of spent fuel can be turned into nuclear power, just an astonishing realization.

There are technologies that we can use to extract that power fully. For example, by chemically separating the plutonium from spent fuel, we can put it back into a reactor and use it to generate more power. That's what France has been doing for decades now. They recycle the plutonium in their spent fuel and use it to generate more power.

Nuclear waste is a misnomer because 95% of it is useful. It's like the old view of aluminum cans; when you've had a Diet Coke, you throw the can away, ending up in a landfill. We no longer see aluminum cans as waste because we can turn them into something new. We can turn them back into a can, a frying pan, a jumbo jet wing, or something like that. So it goes with spent nuclear fuel as well. It's a valuable resource.

Ed Coyne: I think we have to change the term permanently to spent fuel, not waste at all. I think we need to completely lose the word waste.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Yes. I'd be in favor of that.

Ed Coyne: Thank you for that. I think it's something that I find in cocktail conversations. People are asking me, I'm like, "I don't really know, but I'm going to find out." I appreciate that explanation.

Dr. Tim Gregory: It's completely mind-blowing. It's not just like 10% of it is useful. 95% of it is useful. It's the biggest misnomer out there.

Ed Coyne: That's astonishing. Let's shift a bit and talk about what other benefits we can extract from nuclear power, not just from an energy standpoint. What else can you use nuclear energy or nuclear power for? Is there anything else besides creating energy that we can benefit from?

Dr. Tim Gregory: When we talk about our energy systems, we spend much time discussing electricity. Electricity is amazing. It's like magic. It's clean at the point of use. It's so versatile. You can use it for all sorts of different things. There's more to our energy system than just electricity. One of the big components of the energy system, especially in industry, is heat.

We use heat for all sorts of things: steel, fertilizers, chemicals, steam for heating, paper mills, food and drink factories, and more. Heat is really important. The sad thing is that it's very difficult to decarbonize. It's not very efficient to make heat with a wind turbine or a solar panel, and it's very costly in terms of electricity.

The electricity is secondary to nuclear power. Heat is the primary energy source from nuclear power. A nuclear reactor really warms water up to make steam for a turbine. It's the warmth that's the primary energy. For these hard-to-reach sectors, such as the steel, chemical, and fertilizer industries, nuclear-derived heat is a really good way to decarbonize those sectors. We can use the heat to decarbonize these industrial processes, which are responsible for quite a large percentage of humanity's total carbon emissions. It goes far beyond just electricity.

Ed Coyne: It does. I think we even talked about it from just medical applications. There are all these different things out there. We don't want to stretch it too far, but it keeps going.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Yes. Just putting nuclear energy and nuclear power aside for one second. We solved climate change, and we can grow our economies. Just put that aside for one second. There are so many other applications of nuclear science as well. One of them is nuclear medicine, which is totally amazing. It's something that I'm fortunate enough to work in as part of my day job. I'm working on a project in nuclear medicine.

This is where we use radioactive substances to diagnose and cure illnesses. In short, we take a radioactive substance and slot it into a very carefully designed molecule designed to latch onto, say, a cancer cell preferentially. If we inject these radioactive molecules into people's bodies, the cancer will mop them up and basically make itself radioactive.

When that atom decays, it releases its nuclear energy into the cancer and basically fries it from the inside out. It's clearing cancer on the smallest scale possible, one atom at a time, which sounds like the last thing you would want to do is inject radioactivity into people's bodies. This medicine has been used for decades and is available here in the UK on the NHS. Lots of people have nuclear medicine therapies all the time for diagnostic and curative nuclear medicine.

One of the promising things about nuclear medicine is that we're only just beginning to tap the chemistry set available to us. You see that when you look at the periodic table, specifically the different isotopes of the elements. You find a very rich concoction of isotopes suitable for nuclear medicine, and so there's lots and lots of research and development ongoing right now, as we're recording that I'm sure will be deployed, certainly within my lifetime. I'm only 32, so I'll hopefully see this unfold over the next half-century. It's very promising. It's amazing. It's a brilliant intersection between clinical science, medicine, and nuclear science.

Ed Coyne: First, I was taken aback by what you just said, only 32, because what you've done in your 32 years has been just short of miraculous. Good for you for all the stuff you've accomplished already, which is amazing. It sounds like this is an extension of just the basic block and tackle of radiation, where they're being more pinpointed regarding how they can treat these things, which I think you're right. We're at the tip of the spear on the technology that will happen in medicine with all sorts of applications.

Dr. Tim Gregory: For sure. There's an exciting type of therapy called targeted alpha therapy. Alpha radiation, listeners might remember from high school science, is one of the types of radiation, and it's a high-energy helium nucleus that's ejected from an atom as it decays. Alpha particles are very high-energy but big and burly, so they don't travel very far before coming to a stop—just a couple of centimeters of air blocks an alpha particle.

We can inject radioactivity into people's bodies by medicalizing these very specific alpha-emitting isotopes. The tumor will mop them up, and it's very, very localized. Alpha particles do not travel very far before coming to a stop, so the collateral damage to other parts of the body is, I don't want to say non-existent, that would be overdoing it a little bit. Still, it's very small collateral damage. Targeted alpha therapy is particularly exciting. A couple of isotopes are very promising in the early stages of clinical trials for getting that up and running.

Ed Coyne: That's going to be exciting to watch unfold. This brings me to your most recent book that came out earlier this year, Going Nuclear, but what's more important is the tagline on how the atom will save the world. Talking about it from a medical, energy standpoint and GDP standpoint, can we unpack that for a few minutes and talk about your most recent book, because I think it hits the salient points on why nuclear energy today? Could you also give us four or five talking points on your most recent book?

Dr. Tim Gregory: For sure. Looking at the big picture, there's so much to be worried about in the world. I don't know if you feel it, but it just seems a little crazy at the moment. The future is so uncertain. There are so many big global problems. It isn't easy to see what the world is going to look like in just a couple of decades. For me, and this has been true for all of my life, and this is true of my colleagues and scientist friends as well, that science is, to paraphrase one of Carl Sagan's books, [The Demon-Haunted World: Science as] a Candle in the Dark. It's this source of hope. It's one of the best tools for solving problems, whether it be energy or the economic problem with nuclear power. Whether it be what we were talking about with new novel ways to diagnose and cure illnesses, whether it be breeding new types of crops using atomic gardening, which is an amazing technique that's been used for decades to breed weather-resistant, drought-resistant crops that need less fertilizer, or whether it be settling on the surface of the moon and thriving one day on the surface of Mars.

Nuclear power taps into all of these things across all areas of science. They're all amazing. They're all brilliant and beautiful and great at solving problems. Of all the areas of science, nuclear science in particular is one of the best tools we have for solving some of the biggest challenges we currently face in the world and will face in the future. I guess that was my main motivation for writing Going Nuclear. I mean it when I say how the atom will save the world, because it feels like we're in crisis mode on multiple fronts at the moment, and nuclear power taps into many of the problems we face.

Ed Coyne: In between talking about the environmental benefits, the security of energy, the economic advantages, you touched on a lot of, I think, very relevant points, basically even politically, both sides of the aisle are concerned with and talking about. We will see this continue to be a bigger part of a global conversation. I think you're going to be a very much sought-after person for decades to come as you continue down your career path, which is nothing short of spectacular already, with a decade or so of your time, really focused on this.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Thanks, I hope so. One of the points I always try to make, and I went to some lengths to say this in my book. However, not quite on the nose, is that whether you are what would broadly be described as on the political left, very preoccupied with environmental issues, with raising living standards, eliminating poverty, or whether you are what would broadly and clumsily be described as being on the economic right, where you're very preoccupied with economic growth and GDP, nuclear power is the answer to both of those problems. Nuclear power is for everybody, which is why, of all the political turmoil we've been through in the UK over the last 10 years, nuclear power is not one of those reasons for argument.

It's very encouraging that on both sides of the houses of Parliament, with our right-wing party, the Conservatives, and now left-wing party, Labour, both have very strong support for nuclear power, which is great. This is not a partisan issue. It may be one of the issues we unite around, which we so sorely need.

Ed Coyne: I went on your website. I tagged you on LinkedIn. I tried to learn as much about you as possible. For our listeners who are also curious, what's the best way to track you down, get access to your books, that kind of thing? What can you share with our listeners on ways to find you and keep tabs on what you're up to?

Dr. Tim Gregory: Sure. I'm on LinkedIn. When I first got LinkedIn, I thought, what am I doing on this? This will be boring compared to Twitter, but it's fun and quite supportive. It's good vibes on LinkedIn. I have a YouTube channel and a Substack. If you just Google Dr. Tim Gregory, that should come up, and the links to everywhere you can find me are on my website, which is www.timgregory.co.uk.

Ed Coyne: I will say that the styling of your website goes back to what you said at the very beginning of this podcast, that you wanted to be in a rock band. It's very cool, but it's not scientific-looking at all. I encourage people to take a look at it.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Cool. Thanks.

Ed Coyne: Very well laid out. I don't know who designed it, but it looks cool.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Thanks.

Ed Coyne: I always like to do this because I can't think of everything. Are there any other topics or points you hoped to make today that I didn't give you the platform to do so? Is there anything else you'd like to discuss related to nuclear energy that I didn't mention?

Dr. Tim Gregory: I think going back to that point, if you're unsure about nuclear power or you've got this suspicion about it, or maybe you're even completely convinced and anti-nuclear, give it a second look, you will probably be surprised. You haven't said this, but some people have said to me since my book came out: "Well, you would say all of this because you work in the nuclear industry." That's getting the cart and the horse the wrong way around. I work in the nuclear industry because of these things.

If something better than nuclear power came along, I would advocate for it. The point for me is clean energy, and lots of it, to enable the kind of future everybody deserves. If you're unsure, I'm talking to you right now. Have a second look. You will probably be surprised.

Ed Coyne: Well said, my friend. Dr. Gregory, I can't thank you enough for making the time today. This has been a real treat for me. Thank you for joining us on Sprott Radio.

Dr. Tim Gregory: Thank you very much.

Ed Coyne: Thank you all. Once again, my name's Ed Coyne, and you're listening to Sprott Radio.