Decouple

The Philippines exports its people to earn foreign exchange to, amongst other things, pay for imported fossil fuels to power the country. Families are broken up, parents absent for years at a time, and many of the brightest Filipino minds leave the country causing a significant brain drain. While its neighbours have experienced steady economic growth and improvement in standards of living, the Philippines has stagnated, burdened by high energy prices and unreliable power that has deindustrialized the country and discourages foreign investment and development. Nuclear energy due to its low fuel and transporation costs and the ability to stockpile years of fuel onsite has the potential to deliver the energy security and the reliable power needed for economic development at an affordable cost and prevent the hemorrhaging of so many Filipino's from their country and families. It can also address the water and air pollution caused by coal ash which has significant impacts on the health of Filipinos.  What's most surprising is that there is a nuclear plant, Bataan, that was built in the 1980's that was 100% complete and ready for fuel loading but never actually brought online. It has stood idle for 36 years while the Filipino grid has been strained and electricity prices have been some of the highest in the world due to fossil fuel and shipping price volatility.  I am joined by Mark Cojuangco, a former Representative of 5th District of Pangasinan and the vice-chairman of Committee on Appropriations. He is the author of the House Bill 04631 that sought the immediate re-commissioning and commercial operation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant.

Due to the global geopolitics of the 1940's Canada became the unlikely centre for the world's second largest nuclear research infrastructure at the end of World War II. Devoting itself to the peaceful use of the atom It went on to develop a unique power reactor design, the CANDU, based on the use of heavy water to avoid the need for uranium enrichment and pressure tubes to get around the need for a heavy forging industry for reactor vessels. These features make the CANDU ideal for export and technology transfer to less developed countries with industrial capacity resembling that of Canada back in the 1960's. CANDU reactors provide 61% of the power for the Ontario grid, the largest province in Canada, making it one of the cleanest electricity grids on earth and allowing for the complete phaseout of coal. CANDU has been exported internationally and delivered on budget and on time in China, South Korea and Romania. Alongside it's high grade uranium deposits which are the richest in the world, Canada has a unique ability to foster a made in Canada reponse to climate change. It can export its ultra low carbon technology to address its climate debt by helping developing countries to leapfrog fossil fuels on their way to ultra low carbon energy.  CANDU meets many of the criteria for an advanced reactor design with passive safety elements, modular design, and the ability to use nuclear waste as fuel. Why then is CANDU languishing especially in a country where the supply chain is 95% in country?  Dr. Jeremy Whitlock former president of the Canadian Nuclear Society and Section Head of the Dept of Safegaurds at the IAEA walks us through this incredible history. He is the brains behind nuclearfaq a treasure trove on the history of nuclear energy in Canada. http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/

The Texan grid AKA the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is a house of cards. It is an energy only, deregulated market which does not reward keeping spare generation capacity on board and keeps a razor thin cushion to buffer against unpredictable surges in demand. It has isolated its grid from the rest of the conry in order to avoid federal reguation. Texas has made the decision to invest heavily in wind and natural gas, pairing an unpredictable and intermittent energy source with a dispatchable source that relies on just in time delivery of its fuel.  In the clutches of a polar vortex which has covered wind turbines in ice, frozen natural gas infrastructure and driven up demand for gas for both home heating and electricity ERCOT is strained to the breaking point with rolling blackouts affecting millions in this freezing weather. Welcome back for another Decouple short. We are joined by energy analyst Mark Nelson, the managing director of the Radiant Energy Fund to understand this breaking news out of Texas. 

While wealthy countries in the West are engaged in an energy transition obstensibly away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy the developing world is emerging from energy poverty largely through the use of fossil fuels. Four million people die every year as a consequence of indoor air pollution from cooking using biomass in poorly ventilated homes. This is more lives lost year after year, every year than COVID in 2020 and more than Malaria and HIV/AIDS combined. The transition away from biomass towards sources like liquid petroleum gas cooking fuels is an undeniable global health benefit.  How do we balance the immediate needs of people to exit energy poverty with the fossil fuel driven threat of climate change that looms on the horizon. What are the consequences of market interventions and economic planning when policy makers struggle with basic energy literacy? Dr Scott Tinker is a geologist, educator, energy expert and documentary filmmaker. He is the bureau of economic geology at the University of Texas and the chairman of the Switch Energy Alliance which aims to inspire an energy educated future through film.

Just as the political spectrum is divided between left and right, thinking on environmental problem solving is similarly split into two rival camps exemplified by the archetypes of the Wizard and the Prophet. Award winning science writer Charles Mann explores these archetypes as personified by the father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug and the intellectual godfather of the environmental movement, William Vogt.  Crudely put wizards are foremost humanists who eschew limits believeing that our growing population and appetites can be accommodated by the wise application of decoupling technology. Prophets are foremost environmentalists who believe that carrying capacity is limited and that humans must remain within natural energy flows or risk ecosystem and civilizational collapse.  Understanding the origins of one's opponents ideological beliefs and values goes a long way to depersonalizing a sometimes ugly debate and perhaps finding a small patch of common ground.  Prophets who have contributed some impressive advances in natural resource stewardship such as water conservation must wrestle with an ugly history of malthusian ideas which at their worst have justified horrific campaigns of coercive population control. Despite the success of technofixes that fed billions and averted famines wizards must temper their scientific rationalism with a sociologic understanding of the dark sides of modernization such as enclosures of the commons.  This conversation challenged my cognitive biases more then I was expecting. I hope it does the same for you.  

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. When environmental NGO's morph into fossil fuel companies something is very wrong with environmentalism. The company Greenpeace NRG sells a product they label as ProWindGas made of 99% fossil methane and less than 1% hydrogen from water electrolysis.  "Our long-term goal is to increase the proportion of wind. Since the production of renewable hydrogen is still comparatively expensive today and we want to keep our gas price competitive, we can only increase the hydrogen share slowly..." While aiming to increase the share of hydrogen from wind over time, the amount of green hydrogen in Greenpeace NRG's Pro Wind Gas has actually decreased and remains at or below 1%.  Welcome to our inaugaral "Decouple Short" episode. A 15 min or less episode that compliments our long form interviews by bringing you expanded coverage and breaking climate and environmental news.

Is part of our rejection of expertise, distrust of science and weaponization of the precautionary principle tied to how suicidally close we came to mutually assured destruction during the cold war? What are the cultural drivers that have led the modern left to reject nuclear energy? How did we come to exaggerate the potential harms from a nuclear accident to biblical proportions? How is the idea of nuclear apocalypse different from climate apocalypse in terms of its imagery and cultural framing? I am joined by Spencer Weart the retired director of the Center for History of Physics for the American Institute of Physics to answer these questions. Spencer holds a Ph.D. in physics and astrophysics and has devoted much of his career to working as a historian of science. He is the author of a number of books including “The Rise of Nuclear Fear.” 

There is money to be made in Nuclear Fear. Consider this. In Japan over the last 10 years since the Fukushima accident, approximately 50 billion USD a year in additional fossil fuels have been traded to supply energy demands that would have been provided by Japan's shuttered nuclear plants. The ability to terrify people with the prospect of serious health harms from low dose radiation has kept most of the Japanese nuclear fleet idle and created an enormous market for LNG and Coal as well as a significant burden of disease secondary to particulate air pollution. On June 12th 1956 the National Academy of Sciences released its report on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR.) It became part of the basis for a paradigm shift in radiation protection towards the Linear No Threshold model which proposes that radiation is a uniquely dangerous toxin with no safe lower dose limit. The BIER report was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation whose endowment came directly from the Standard Oil Company. Did the Rockefeller Foundation and its fossil fuel baron patrons have a vested interest in exagerating the dangers of radiation to disparage a potentially disruptive, air pollution free technology that threatened the market share of the fossil fuel industry? Was their support coincidence, conspiracy or just good business acumen? I am joined by Rod Adams, a former US nuclear submarine engineer officer, who runs the Atomic Insights blog and hosts the Atomic Show podcast to discuss this tantalizing question.

I am joined by Robert Bryce, an American author, journalist, filmmaker and podcaster in a wide ranging discussion of the politics of the world's unfolding energy transitions.  Energy illiteracy is epidemic and basic concepts such as power density and scale are absent from most policy discussions. We discuss the impacts of fracking on the nuclear renaissance and the mounting resistance to wind and solar farms in rural America. Big decisions lie before our government representatives and the technological choices they make will be hugely consequential not only to limiting climate change but also the health and stability of the commons in the form of the network that underlies all modern networks, the grid. 

Fusion is supposed to be even more powerful than fission but without the baggage. It resonates with the appeal to nature fallacy with notions of bringing the power of the sun down to earth. 39 years ago Dr. L. Lidsky wrote that "The scientific goal of fusion energy turns out to be an engineer's nightmare."  Building a reliable, affordable power plant that requires achieving temperatures hotter than the sun and as cold as physically possible within several meters of each other all under the materially challenging conditions of high energy neutron bombardment is only the beginning. Low power densities and parasitic load further chip away at the potential performance of "the ultimate solution" to our clean energy challenges.  Gerrit Bruehogg is a nuclear engineer with a background in fission reactors and particle accelerators who is currently doing his thesis at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics on inertial confinement fusion. Join us for a lively discussion that leaves no subatomic particle unturned.