Small Modular Nuclear Reactors: A Conversation and its Role in the Energy System

In this episode, Australian comedian Dan Ilic hosts me on The Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

While I was down under in Australia, I appeared on a show called A Rational Fear, a pod about climate change which is, I’m told, the winner of Australia’s Best Comedy Podcast.

More specifically, I appeared on a spinoff show they’re doing called [ahem] The Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation, a series of interviews with climate types hosted by comedian and journalist Dan Ilic.

It was short, and fun, so I figured, why not share it with the Volts audience? Enjoy, and do check out A Rational Fear some time — it’s quite delightful.

Dan Ilic

I'm recording this on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I encourage you all to think about whose land you're on and the wealth of the life that you enjoy on that land and why you enjoy it. As we head into this referendum month, I think it's all upon us all to kind of think about listening more. And if you don't know what the Voice Referendum is all about, go and find out. Let's try listening.

David Roberts

Despite global warming, A Rational Fear is adding a little more hot air with long form discussions with climate leaders, good and bad.

Intro

This is coal, don't be afraid. The — heat waves and drought — Greatest — mass extinction — Moral — we're facing a manmade disaster — Podcast — they're the climate criminals — of Our Generation. All of this with the global warming and that a lot of it's a hoax. The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation. GMPOOG for short.

Dan Ilic

Every now and then, the A Rational Fear podcast turns green. We talk to someone who is super interested and who lives and breathes climate on a podcast I like to call The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, or GMPOOG for short. And I'm excited for you all to meet our next GMPOOG guest. Since about 2015, I have been following his writing on Vox.com and the Grist, but in more recent years, I've been listening to his podcast and reading along with his newsletter. It is Volts, or rather the presenter and the writer of Volts podcast, David Roberts. Welcome to A Rational Fear.

David Roberts

So glad to be here.

Dan Ilic

Or welcome to The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation.

David Roberts

Yeah, I'm not sure I can keep that acronym in my head.

Dan Ilic

Well, the first guest on The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation was former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who coined the phrase that climate change was the greatest moral problem of our generation. So that's why we called GMPOOG, GMPOOG. You are one of the foremost experts when it comes to climate and energy. I love Volts. I devour it, I listen as often as I can. And for such a complex and often combative topic, quite frankly, your voice is so calming and reassuring.

David Roberts

Thank you.

Dan Ilic

I mean, you could sell anything, which is why you're here today. To sell us on small modular nuclear reactors.

David Roberts

Exactly. And carbon capture and sequestration. That's my thing.

Dan Ilic

Well, it's such a sprawling conversation I'd love to have with you. Let's start there. We do hear a lot from a very small subsection of our politics all about small modular nuclear reactors. In fact, Barnaby Joyce, who at one time was a leader of a party in this country, said, "People aren't talking about the cost of living down at the supermarket. They're talking about small modular nuclear reactors."

David Roberts

Are they?

Dan Ilic

So I want to ask you, David Roberts, is anybody talking about small modular nuclear reactors?

David Roberts

I mean, yes, people are talking and talking and talking about them. The more relevant question is anyone building small modular nuclear reactors? And the answer to that is a big no. So I think they play more of a rhetorical role than an actual physical role in the energy system.

Dan Ilic

Why is there this energy, for better, no pun intended there, around small modular nuclear reactors? Why is this conversation happening now? Why is there a big drumbeat happening not only in Australia but other countries for it when there are no working models anywhere in the world?

David Roberts

There's two answers to that a cynical answer and a less cynical answer. The cynical answer is if you need something to say about climate policy and the other party has already claimed renewable energy, you need something to talk about, right? You need a climate policy and there's nothing left to grab but nuclear. And you want to claim to have a policy, but in practical terms, delay any actual real solutions. That's the cynical answer. The less cynical answer is renewable energy is variable. It comes and goes with the weather. So you need what's called firming. You need sources that can firm up renewable energy i.e. that you can turn on and off at will. And right now gas is serving that role. And so in a decarbonized system, you need something else to serve that role. So exactly what will serve that firming role, we don't completely know yet. Could be batteries, could be geothermal, could be hydro or small hydro, or it could be SMRs, if they ever come along. There is a role for that kind of thing in the energy system.

Dan Ilic

I'm excited to have you here because you're in the country. It's great to see you face to face because first and foremost, I'm a super fan. But two, we're at a really weird spot right now in Australian politics and global politics when it comes to climate. We're about a year on from the Inflation Reduction Act. We had Rich Duke on this podcast about a year ago when it got announced. How has the IRA been and where is it still lacking?

David Roberts

The headline news is that there have been, I think, around $70 billion of announced new manufacturing facilities and industrial facilities announced in the wake of IRA. So it has unquestionably sparked a huge flood of new investment.

Dan Ilic

Is this because the IRA is like — one of the core tenants is all kind of transport need to be built in America in order to get this government money?

David Roberts

Yes, there's a lot of the buy domestic sort of provisions in it, so everybody's coming to the US. So they can claim that. So that's part of it. And also, I think estimates of US economic growth have been revised upward a couple of times in the wake of IRA. So it has absolutely sparked growth, sparked a huge wave of investment. But in the larger picture, there are still big chunks of IRA that are where the implementation is being hashed out. So we really don't know yet. It really has not come into — all the subsidies for household stuff, demand side stuff, household stuff, your heat pumps, et cetera.

They were just announced. The structure of those tax credits was just — sort of came out last week, so it's too early to tell with those. And things like the green hydrogen subsidies, which are billions and billions and billions of dollars. The US Treasury Department is still beavering away trying to put those together, figure out how they work, figure out the requirements for those. So a lot of the bill hasn't even come into effect yet, so it'll be a couple of years before we really know what happens in the week. But it's clear it's sparking growth and investment.

Dan Ilic

Hey, this is a very tough question for you. If Trump gets in —

David Roberts

Oh, God. Everybody keeps asking me this. Everybody keeps asking.

Dan Ilic

what will happen to the IRA?

David Roberts

Everybody asks me this, and I get the strong sense that they want me to say something other than the obvious answer. But I'm afraid I have only the obvious answer, which is that it would be totally apocalyptic. Not only, I mean, for everything, but like the Heritage Foundation, the sort of right-wing think tank for some definition of think.

Dan Ilic

Yeah, I love these words. Like the Heritage Foundation. And generally, the Conservatives, they don't want to conserve anything and they're not interested in the heritage of anything.

David Roberts

I know, but they've already put together a plan, a very concrete plan, to roll it all back. So their intentions are clear. So it would get nuked, basically, is the short answer.

Dan Ilic

Okay, you're in Australia, I understand it, to do some side events around the ALP conference later this week. How have you been soaking up Australia and Australian culture and Australian politics to get kind of a grasp on where we are with climate policy?

David Roberts

Yeah, well, I spent a couple of days in Canberra talking to politicians, and I've been talking to philanthropists and activists and business people have been talking, talking. That's why my voice is so scratchy. My strong sense is that I am here pushing on an open door. The question of whether something big needs to happen is settled, and what remains to be seen are the details. So it really seems like an inflection point.

Dan Ilic

I mean, this is not strictly energy — well, it is, but it isn't — but when it comes to our own scope 3 emissions in Australia and our own emissions targets in Australia, our government keeps signing off on new gas projects and new coal mines, as does America. Where do you see similarities in this kind of talk versus action disconnect between our two countries?

David Roberts

Well, I think what's happening is and you see this in virtually every fossil fuel producing country, which is they are trying to say: Yes, let's reduce our domestic emissions. Let's decarbonize ourselves, but then let's go on exporting fossil fuels to everybody else. And of course, everyone can't do that, right? The trickier argument is trying to give Australian policymakers some sense of what could replace and improve on their export economy that they now depend on. I mean, Australia completely depends on fossil fuel and iron ore exports at the moment. So the question is, what role could Australia play in a clean economy and still maintain its sort of healthy exports?

And that has a lot to do with, I'm sure you've heard these discussions, critical minerals processing. Critical minerals processing iron ore to make it green so that people can make green steel. I mean, the world needs these clean materials and Australia is awash in them.

Dan Ilic

Well, whose mouth has been chewing your ear off about that?

David Roberts

Everyone.

Dan Ilic

Who's lobbying you to tell these lies? Not these lies, not these lies. these liens.

David Roberts

Everyone. Because that's the big question for Australia, is what, if anything, can replace, or at least diversify? I mean, Harvard issues this list every year of countries by economic complexity. And I think Australia is like 70 something right down near Nigeria. It is really 100% —

Dan Ilic

It's because we have two major exports: Rocks and Hemsworths. There are two major exports.

David Roberts

And you're out of Hemsworth.

Dan Ilic

I think we found a renewable source. It's okay. It just takes a while to regenerate.

David Roberts

I assume they'll be producing new Hemsworths shortly. Yeah, that's on everyone's mind. One of the big features of IRA is the US, and a large pool of global capital is going to be looking around for sources of these materials that aren't China, basically. That are friendly sources of these materials. And Australia is on the front of the line for that. So it's a huge opportunity for Australia.

Dan Ilic

When it comes to our unique political landscape. Have you gotten across that? What do you find most interesting about that?

David Roberts

Oh, my goodness, so many things. Let's say I'm extremely jealous of compulsory voting. I'm extremely jealous of ranked choice voting.

Dan Ilic

Yes.

David Roberts

I'm extremely jealous of having an independent nonpartisan commission that does districting rather than partisan gerrymandering.

Dan Ilic

Okay, David, you're talking to an Australian audience who takes all this for granted. What we think is so weird is like, what? Like, you wait for CNN to call the election? You let some Republicans and Democrats decide who won in that particular city.

David Roberts

Don't remind me. And you know what else I find super, super fascinating, which absolutely could not exist in America's dysfunctional system is the sort of rise of the Teals, the sort of independents, the sort of what, I guess back home we would call moderate Republicans, which is pretty much an extinct species back home because we have such a binary system. But here you have room for a little variety, a little complexity. It's much more interesting than America's extremely boring: Left v right, red v blue. Everything is polarized. One or the other. It's mind deadening. So it's just interesting to have some complexity.

Dan Ilic

I've spent a lot of time in America, I've worked a lot in America. When I explained to people that Australians aren't really polarized by political party because of compulsory voting, because everyone has to vote, no one has to pick a team. And what we essentially do as a population is stand back with our arms folded and go, "All right, impress me."

David Roberts

Yes. Political parties don't go out picking and choosing their voters. Right? They don't win by choosing voters. Everybody votes.

Dan Ilic

Oh, my God. Gerrymandering is a whole other thing.

David Roberts

I mean, the US political system is dysfunctional in so many ways. I could go on and on.

Dan Ilic

What about the room itself? What about you were in Canberra who struck you as an interesting character, talking to them? I assume you would have been protected from the crazy ones.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was not forced to deal with any of the crazies. I did a little roundtable thing with Chris Bowen, the energy minister, and he was nodding along and seemed very on board and said something that I thought was striking, which is that the US IRA is probably the most significant climate event, even more so than the Paris Climate Agreement, which I thought was quite dramatic and I think defensible.

Dan Ilic

Do you think that was a fair comment?

David Roberts

Yeah. I mean, the US still, despite its dysfunctions, has enormous soft power, it has enormous influence over people and just the sheer amount of money it's spending now, like the other developed countries, simply cannot afford to sit on their hands at this point. I think the message of the IRA, which I've been saying over and over again to everyone who will listen while I'm here, is that the era of free trade, free market neoliberalism is over. It is over. And the Biden administration is explicit that it's over. There's a new economy, global economy, taking shape around clean energy, around semiconductors, around all these things.

And the US is taking active measures to shape its place in that economy, and other countries need to do the same.

Dan Ilic

So, what do you see in 15 years? How will the economy be different in 15 years' time? I mean, I'm asking you because 15 years ago, you were writing about climate —

David Roberts

I know, don't remind me.

Dan Ilic

and energy. Someone who's had their eye on this game for so long. In 15 years, what do you see? Every country, it seems — here's my understanding, watching other countries talk about climate from their perspective, they're all saying that they are going to transition to become a renewable energy superpower. It's not a slogan that we just have in Australia from progressive climate people. You hear that, I see and read that in other countries everywhere around the world. It's like a disease that's kind of caught this meme that everyone thinks they're going to be, but everyone can't be an energy exporter.

What does it look like for you in 15 years? Where do you see the board?

David Roberts

Well, the problem answering that question is that in the US, now, with every election, the entire fate of the free world is on the line. Literally —

Dan Ilic

No pressure.

David Roberts

literally, if Trump and the Republicans win in 2024, it could be the end of democracy in the US. It could be that we double down on fossil fuel. It could be that we choose a sort of Russia style, sort of like as long as there are fossil fuels being used anywhere in the world, we're going to be the producer of them. Or we could have a green utopia down the other route.

It's so hard to predict, but I mean, I think you can see a few things like EVs are going to dominate. I think heat pumps are going to dominate, electrification is going to take over. Renewable energy is going to be even cheaper than anybody now predicts, which is what has happened at every stage of renewable energy growth. It's always cheaper than anyone says it was going to be. Because the beauty of renewable energy, which is not true of fossil fuel energy, is that the more you do it, the more you build of it, the cheaper it gets, on and on to eternity.

So it's going to be much cheaper and that's going to change. And the question is, once countries can domestically generate their own energy, once fossil fuel importers are able to generate most of their own energy and no longer depend on fossil fuel exporters, how is that going to change geopolitics? I mean, who knows? But it's definitely going to shake up the world order, right, in ways that I think are incredibly difficult to predict.

Dan Ilic

Oh, yeah, of course. Like Japan currently is one of the biggest importers of fossil fuels, so they can run their economy.

David Roberts

Well, I mean, it's a relatively small handful of countries that are fossil fuel exporters, so most countries are going to benefit from this. Most countries are going to be better off when they're generating their own energy. It's only the exporters that really have anything to lose here.

Dan Ilic

I hear what you're saying, we're going to have to find a new source of Hemsworth.

David Roberts

Renewable Hemsworths.

Dan Ilic

It's interesting. I think it was your podcast, you had somebody on talking about batteries within appliances. I remember that's —

David Roberts

A geeky one.

Dan Ilic

yeah, forgive me, David, I'm very excited to talk to you, but most of the time I listen to you it's in the shower —

David Roberts

More than I wanted to know.

Dan Ilic

because it's a great place to listen to podcasts. And I think there's something really interesting with stovetops and water heaters and all these large appliances that need power at nighttime to have batteries within them, to run them. That was all this kind of interesting innovation. Who's going to be making those next lots of appliances, do you think?

David Roberts

It's a good question. Right, because what you generally big established — I mean, this is true, I think it's sort of a truism of business scholarship, which is that big established incumbents are not generally particularly innovative. So it's probably going to be a bunch of little startups to begin with. And the question is, once — one of the most fascinating things I see happening at the household level is that eventually all these appliances and all these households are going to be connected digitally. All the appliances are going to be talking to one another, they're going to be talking to the house, they're going to be talking to the neighborhood, they're going to be talking to the grid.

So what happens in terms of emergent effects? Once you have literally hundreds of thousands of basically small scale, energy producing, energy consuming, energy storing devices distributed around the grid, talking to one another and coordinating, I think that's going to open up whole new markets, whole new vistas, whole new things that we can't even really guess at yet, what that's going to look like.

Dan Ilic

We're going to see startups. I guess a great parallel would be the Teslas and the Rivians of the kitchen world. And then the GEs will come along.

David Roberts

Yeah. You're going to see a lot of startups, most of whom will end up carcasses on the side of the road. As with any new market, as with any sort of emerging market, there's going to be one or two Googles at the end of the line, but most of them are going to die along the way. But in the process, we'll be innovating.

Dan Ilic

Yeah. I want to know a bit more about you. You don't give a lot away about you as a person on your podcast. It's strictly for the nerds, but how did you —

David Roberts

I'm very boring.

Dan Ilic

Well, I want to know a little bit about you. How did you come to this subject? How did you come to energy and climate? What was the catalyst for you?

David Roberts

100% random chance. I went to grad school for philosophy for a good while, got along far enough in that to get a good look at academia, recoiled in horror, dropped out and moved to Seattle, was unemployed, bouncing around crappy tech jobs for a while. And literally the first time I ever went to Craigslist, I don't know if you guys have used this, was I think early in Craigslist, the first time I ever went there, there's just a little ad for an editorial assistant at a small web publication called Grist, which was devoted to the environment. And to that point, I had no journalistic experience.

I had no particular experience in the environment or interest in the environment. So I wrote this long overwrought cover letter begging for the job because I didn't want to get stuck in tech jobs, wormed my way into Grist and just over the years, wormed my way over into writing. So 100% self-taught in terms of journalism and in terms of climate stuff.

Dan Ilic

I mean, you say this sometimes in your podcast, how you're just a guy trying to learn about stuff. And you're not an expert. At what point has that tipped over and you've become an expert? At what point does that shtick no longer count?

David Roberts

I will never feel comfortable. I talk to too many genuine experts to claim to be one. I've seen genuine expertise up close, and I know that's not what I have. I think I'm a better than average educated generalist, let's say.

Dan Ilic

Who has an obsession with climate.

David Roberts

Who's obsessed. And I loved what I found when I started at Grist and I was like, well, I got to find something in this area that really interests me. And then I gravitated to climate and clean energy because much like what attracted me to philosophy, it's just these big systems and systems within systems and how do they all hang together and how do you think about them and conceptualize their relationships? And it's just really intellectually, endlessly fruitful and interesting.

Dan Ilic

It's such a hard time right now with what's happening in the global north with climate. Seeing your home country in flames is terrible, like we were on fire three years ago, which radicalized me. That moment was a moment where I was like, well, when am I doing this comedy podcast for? Let's really lock in and do more on climate. How are you coping with kind of this time we live in after covering it for so long?

David Roberts

My great anxiety is — there's sort of two stories you can tell one story which I think climate people have kind of been telling themselves for a long time, which is, enough of this stuff happens, enough disasters pop up, it's going to change people's mind and radicalize people, and they'll come around and then we'll all start acting. The other story is the more disasters there are, the more stress there is. The more anxiety there is, the more dislocation there is. And people generally do not respond to anxiety and dislocation with rational, forward-looking reason. They generally, stress and anxiety make people more small c conservatives.

So my great fear is that all these disasters are going to have people drawing in and putting walls up rather than throwing themselves more into international cooperation. I worry a lot.

You're here to do side, as I mentioned, to do side projects around the ALP conference. Do you have any kind of — I know it's weird to ask someone who's kind of outside of the political sphere do you have any notion of how you might be received from ALP people or how you might be received within the decision makers in labor themselves?

I mean, I think there is widespread fascination about the IRA, about the Inflation Reduction Act, widespread interest in it, how it came about, what effects it's having, what political effects it's having. Because the big dynamic right now is my feeling is liberal knows it needs to do something, but it has a little PTSD about the grubby history of climate policy here in the country. It's had a lot of backlashes.

Dan Ilic

You're talking about the Liberal Party, not liberals.

David Roberts

Well, I mean, Labor has, I think, suffered backlashes in the past due to climate policy, or at least it perceives. So it has a little bit of that hesitancy. So the question is just can it screw up its courage to go big? And sort of that's why I think it's fascinated by IRA, because the US has also had a lot of history with climate policy and the US somehow managed to go big. So that's I think at the very least, their ears are open.

Dan Ilic

So you're thinking IRA might see some kind of big ATM cash injection in Australia? Like you think that the government in Australia might do something as bold as IRA?

David Roberts

Maybe, if it can overcome its reticence about big spending. Right. Because the hangover of neoliberalism, the hangover of treating the national budget like a household budget, all that nonsense, things needing to be revenue neutral, terror of deficits, all this kind of like neoliberal hangover, there's still some of that around. So it's a little question of which way they fall —

Dan Ilic

Spoken like an American.

David Roberts

Yeah, but I think at the very least they're open in a way, at least from what I've heard, that they have not been in a long time.

Dan Ilic

It seems so counterintuitive that they are not more aggressive on climate and energy, clean energy. Because the Teals, as you mentioned before, when they got elected, they got so many seats, they're only one seat away from disrupting Labour's majority. And I don't know if Labor can see that, but that movement was not just about anti the coalition, it was about pro climate, pro green energy. And I don't know if they can see that. I think they just see these Teal seats as a threat to liberal seats. But what they're actually threatening is the notion that if you don't act on climate, those Teals are going to take your seats.

David Roberts

Right, well, is the risk going too big or is the risk not going big enough? And I think that's really up in the air right now. I think there's a real — they're very torn about that right now.

Dan Ilic

Right.

David Roberts

That's part of why I'm here is to nudge them in the one direction.

Dan Ilic

So who's paying the bills? Who's bringing you out here? Is it a big Teal?

David Roberts

It's the big electrical union. Because another feature of IRA that's new for America is the unions are on board. Now the unions are pulling in the right direction. It's the same here, because unlike previous iterations of climate policy, IRA is all about jobs, good jobs. A lot of these tax credits are conditioned on prevailing wages and using apprentices. And so it's a very pro union, pro good, well-paying job environment. And it's good to have the environmental justice community and the unions and the centrists, all the factions of the left are aligned for once, which is not the normal state of affairs.

Dan Ilic

Let's quickly ask you this. So I saw two nights ago, you're at the MCG watching AFL. What did you think?

David Roberts

I saw the Roos fall to the Bombers and I tweeted out, I said, I'm here at the AFL game and I'm rooting for the Bombers. And was quickly informed by a number of Australians that I might want to use different nomenclature.

Dan Ilic

Yes, rooting means f*****g.

David Roberts

It turns out I'm barracking for the Bombers. Excuse me.

Dan Ilic

That's great. Well, thank you so much for hanging out with me on The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation. It's a real thrill to meet you, and I'm a big fanboy. So hopefully many of our listeners can jump over to the show notes and click the link and go listen to your podcast as well.

David Roberts

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Dan Ilic

Hey, no worries.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe