Decouple

The decision by the Japanese government to begin releasing 1.25 million tonnes of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant site over a 10 year period has caused a major stir not only amongst environmental NGO's but also regional countries with historic emnity to Japan.    Greenpeace alleges that radionuclides released into the sea "may damage DNA of humans and other organisms." China states that "the release is extremely irresponsible and will pose serious harm to the health and sagety of people in neighbouring countries and the international community."  So what are the politics and science behind the controversy?    The Fukushima water has been treated and the almost all radio-isotopes have been removed except for tritium. Just how dangerous is it? Tritium is a weak beta emitter with 70x less energy then the the naturally occuring and ubiquitous intracellular radioisotope Potassium 40 which undergoes 4600 radioactive decays per second in our bodies.   The health impacts of a radioisotope are multifactorial. The type of radiation emitted, the energy of that decay, the physical and biologic halflife of the isotope. The amount of tritium that one would need to drink to match a dose from something like a CT scan is simply impossible to ingest.   In response to the Fukushima accident in an effort to gain the trust of the population Japan has already reset its regulatory limits for radiation in drinking water at 1/100th that of the EU. Are these efforts actually counter productive?   Dr. Geraldine Thomas is a senior academic and Chair in Molecular Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine of Imperial College London. She is an active researcher in fields of tissue banking and molecular pathology of thyroid and breast cancer. She is also the director of the Chernobyl Tissue bank.

While hydrogen fuel cells were once hyped for use in personal transportation, hydrogen is now being marketed as an energy panacea and a vital part of a 100% renewables grid. Most of the world's hydrogen is currently produced through steam methane reformation and is used as a very carbon-intensive feedstock for ammonia for fertilizer and other chemical industry applications. Decarbonizing this sector is already a monumental task.  Green hydrogen produced by wind and solar-powered electrolysis is now being proposed as a solution to the problem of renewable intermittency. Is this viable? What are the challenges?  I am joined by James Fleay, an Australian engineer and project manager who has worked in the power and oil and gas sectors. He has also been a solar industry investor and is the founder of DUNE, Down Under Nuclear Energy

We live in a world transformed by big tech and exponential advances in computing. It is no surprise we hope this pattern can be repeated with an energy transition as anxieties mount over the implications of climate change. Unfortunately, magical thinking leaves us far from deep decarbonization and brings with it some staggering implications when it comes to resource extraction and the waste stream of dilute and intermittent energy sources.   Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he co-directs an Institute on Manufacturing Science and Innovation.

Mark Z Jacobson's roadmap is cited by politicians like AOC, Bernie Sanders, and many others as an article of faith that a 100% renewables system is achievable and desirable. With great power comes great responsibility, and it is essential that those in the political class wrestling with climate change are well-informed about the consequences of their policy decisions.  Enter Michael Conley and Tim Mahoney, who in their book "Roadmap to Nowhere" work through the implications of Mark Jacobson's plan. This includes a massive parallel HVDC transmission system to connect far-flung wind and solar installations to load centres, and a "fuel-less" system that matches supply and demand with very little reserve, predicated on a weather modeling system designed by Mr. Jacobson himself. Lastly, the plan calls for a dramatic increase in hydro involving increasing current capacity by 13x, which would result in discharges that would regularly dwarf historic 100-year floods and wash away population centres on America's major river systems.  Rather than quaint scenes of small-scale, localized, democratically controlled infrastructure, the plan calls for industrialization of America's countrysides with almost 500,000 wind turbines 35 stories high and 14.5 billion square meters of utility solar panels.   When Jacobson's plan was criticized in the academic community, rather than defending his ideas in scientific journals, he responded with a 10 million SLAPP lawsuit alleging defamation. This lawsuit was subsequently thrown out, and Jacobson has been ordered to pay the defendants' costs. It's time for policymakers to devote themselves to energy literacy, understand the studies that they reference, and make informed decisions to guide us through something as consequential as an energy transition.

What happens to our decision-making when we turn nature into God? Humans crave cognitive shortcuts to spare us the metabolically costly mental labour of reasoning through complex decision-making. The heuristic of "Natural Good, Unnatural Bad," has become one such shortcut. But what is natural? Why have we come to deify nature? And does worshipping it help us to make the best decisions for humanity and the environment? Natural is not always what is good for humans or the environment. Nature, for instance, is very good at killing off children under the age of five. Charcoal production, while quite natural, is leading to rapid deforestation throughout Africa. And biomass burning is treated as carbon neutral by many government regulations partially because it feels natural.  Humans are not the first species to radically alter the planet and its atmospheric chemistry. During the Paleoproterozoic era, the first mass extinction was caused by cyanobacteria metabolizing CO2 into O2, turning the oceans and atmosphere from a reducing to an oxidative environment which wiped out most of life on earth. Humans, via our harnessing of technology, have radically altered the carbon, nitrogen, and hydrological cycles of the planet. As a result, standards of living have improved but a deep existential angst and fear of technology is building as we threaten the ecosystem life support services that "nature" provides us with. Can humanity have its cake and save nature too? While some dispute the very notion of nature claiming that everything is natural and made of stardust, traditional environmentalists and ecomodernists both heavily reference nature, though they have radically different conceptions of it and tools for how to preserve and interact with it. Environmentalists favour harmonizing with nature through agroecology and renewable energy, with human populations and energy infrastructure distributed diffusely across the land. Ecomodernists favour "decoupling" from nature by continued urbanization and intensifying agriculture and energy production on the smallest footprint possible to allow rewilding.  We live in strange times where rather than setting clear goals and searching for the best tools to achieve them we make emotional decisions based on deifying nature and what feels natural. We are at risk of relying on simplistic labels and slick marketing in making our most consequential decisions like how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Alan Levinovitz is a professor of Religion at James Madison University. He works at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and science, focusing especially on how narratives and metaphors shape belief. His most recent book is "Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science." Books Referenced:  Sapiens: Noah Yuval Hariri Factfulness: Hans Rosling

Biologist and science communicator Iida Ruishalme used to sing a Finnish antinuclear protest song about hiding from the Chernobyl plume in her youth. More recently, she had the chance to visit Chernobyl with a group of scientists and filmmakers. With her trusty Geiger counter in hand and her relative risk thinking cap on, she drew some very interesting conclusions from her visit. We continue our exploration of the concept of hazards and relative risks as Iida describes her flight to Ukraine through the radioactive cosmic rays of the upper atmosphere; to smog-choked Kiev; to the city of Narodychi, which refused to evacuate from the exclusion zone; to the dogs and wildlife of the zone; and finally to touching the switch in the control room that was the last straw in the tragedy of errors which caused the accident.

China is currently 3rd in the world in Nuclear Energy capacity with ambitious plans to have the most reactors in the world by 2030. The Tsinghua climate plan calls for a 7-fold increase by 2050. Is China on the verge of a historic moment like the French Messmer plan, which saw France accidentally decarbonize by nuclearizing its grid in 15 years while electrifying a significant amount of heating and rail transport? The answer is a very complex "No."  At great expense in a time of post-civil war, crushing agrarian poverty and "great leap forward" economic mismanagement, China managed to join the nuclear weapons club in 1964. It was, however, very late to develop power reactors, with its first coming online only in 1991. Since then, China has imported many different turnkey projects from Europe, the USA, Canada, Russia while also developing its own indigenous designs culminating in the Hualong 1. For a variety of pragmatic reasons, including the transport and air pollution externalities of coal and the ability to make nuclear cheap and profitable by very low-interest financing, nuclear is on the rise in China. However, coal use is still rising, as is energy demand, with data centre and 5G infrastructure expected to use as much energy as is currently produced by the entire Chinese nuclear fleet.  I am joined by Francois Morin, the China Director of the World Nuclear Association, to discuss the fascinating past, present, and future of nuclear energy in China.

On the progressive side of the political spectrum, it is assumed that with an increasing acknowledgment of the reality of climate change will come default support for a progressive Green New Deal agenda. There is, however, another possible outcome of the far-right abandoning climate denial: Avocado Politics, green on the outside, brown(shirt) on the inside.  In the words of Nils Gilman, "The strong state demanded by right-wing environmentalists will not be one that is liberal, tolerant, or inclusive but rather one that prioritizes the welfare of the native-born and ethnically pure while enforcing punitive restrictions against foreigners, immigrants, and the ethnically impure." A Green/Far Right alliance has sprung up in Austria which calls not just for 100% renewable energy, but also banning Islamic headscarves and detaining asylum seekers. The El Paso and Christchurch shooters both centered their manifestos around ecological justifications for their mass murders.  There is a deep intellectual history for these ideas going back to Social Darwinism and beyond. The founder of the term "Ecology" Ernst Haeckel also invented the term Lebensraum which the Nazis used to justify their destruction of the peoples of Eastern Europe. In America, up until the 1990s, the Sierra Club was one of the fiercest anti-immigrant organizations in America.  Nils offers a sweeping history and analysis of the phenomenon of Avocado politics and cautions progressives that catastrophist language may have unintended and unfortunate consequences.

Nuclear has not always been a culture wars issue. Is there an opportunity for the Left with its concern for climate action and the Right with its trust in large scale energy projects to come together around the importance of nuclear energy to address our social and environmental challenges? Historically many nuclear build outs were accomplished by social democratic governments with support accross the political spectrum. Why is harnessing this support from a more traditional left and right politics so difficult at present? In some ways the modern political expressions of Left and Right traditions are unrecognizable to their founding thinkers.  On the Left the science part of scientific socialism has eroded away as the left has moved away from a broad based working class politics into the safety of liberal arts departments on university campuses. The Left's new embrace of "small is beautiful" post-modern politics are hostile to notions of progress and the large centralized projects that have successfully brought basic services to the masses. Degrowth and eco-austerity is the guiding light of so called "eco-socialists" articulating a romantic vision for a way out of our ecological challenges.  On the Right, modern conservatism has undergone a mutation due to exposure to neoliberal economics which has given social license to greed. The value of conserving all different kinds of capital: social, human, cultural and the meta resource: a habitable earth for future generations has been replaced with an ideology that only values a short sighted maximization of financial capital. Free market fundamentalism has led to a fear and loathing of government and a belief that markets are the only way to organize the economy including basic human services and the monopoly that is the electrical grid.  Can we find commonalities across our ideologies again to support Nuclear energy, a technology which can deliver prosperity not austerity, reliability not black outs and economic growth without ecological collapse?

"What man desires is not knowledge but certainty." Winston Churchill In this episode Iida Ruishalme, the brains behind "thoughtscapism" discusses science and risk communication. We explore the inner workings of human thought and the cognitive biases that make us vulnerable to junk science and its prophets. We identify some of the red flags that should cue us to move from intuitive thinking to analytical thinking and we look at the real harm of fearmongering around vaccines, biotech and nuclear energy.    In the developed world we have been liberated from the major hazards and risks that have plagued humanity and shortened lifespans through public health measures like vaccination, the regulation of pollution and abundant energy which has enabled a high quality of life.    However notions of purity and anxieties around contamination have led to dramatically inflating the sense of danger from trivial or imagined hazards and the concurrent rise of anti-vaccination, anti-biotech and anti-nuclear activism that threatens some of the fundamental advances of the 20th century.    Iida Ruishalme is a biologist specialised in biomedical research, an environmentalist, a writer and a science communicator. She is also a mother who takes the future of her children very seriously. She has become well known and respected for her blog Thoughtscapism.com