The surging price of electricity in Europe and concerns about the reliability of the grid in the U.S. have brought renewed attention to nuclear power. More people are arguing that it solves the problem of cheap electricity, while not emitting carbon to the atmosphere like coal or natural gas. But of course, it remains controversial for a host of reasons. On this episode, we speak with author and researcher Meredith Angwin, who makes the pro-nuclear argument.
Joe Weisenthal:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway:
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe:
So Tracy, we recently did an episode with Matt Klein and we talked about essentially what a disaster German energy policy has been over the last several decades, winding up in this position where its energy usage is not only heavily reliant on Russian gas. It's also really not clean. And so even if your vision is low carbon, they haven't achieved that either.
Tracy:
Yeah. The worst of all worlds, I would say, years of under investment in energy capacity, moving away from nuclear after Fukushima, increased reliance on Russian gas, which clearly is problematic now and not actually reducing any of their carbon emissions all at the same time.
Joe:
Yeah. Kind of an extraordinarily bad combination. And you mentioned nuclear and of course Germany has been moving away from it for some time, but it does feel that even prior to the recent energy price spike, or even prior to this sort of heightened awareness on the German energy situation specifically, there does seem to be a sort of rethinking of how much nuclear has been shut down over the last several years, how little new nuclear has been built and whether that's been wise.
Tracy:
Yeah. It's definitely been an ongoing debate, but I have to admit this is something, I mean, I was aware that nuclear had fallen out of favor, but I cannot remember when that moment actually happened and what exactly the process was. So obviously Fukushima happened in Japan and there was a lot of concern around that, but I'm very, very interested in how nuclear sort of lost the public debate.
Joe:
Yeah, me too. And I think, obviously, look, you have a handful of well known either disasters or near near disasters, but it is interesting that at a time when there's so much interest in reducing carbon emissions, you know, so much has been focused on wind solar, maybe hydropower, very little about how nuclear could be part of the solution.
Tracy:
Right. And at the same time we have in recent years really seen some of the weaknesses or the downsides in certain renewables. So, you know, days when there isn't enough wind, we just don't have energy in some parts of the world. Days when there isn't enough sun, we've seen that in places like the UK and also in Texas.
Joe:
Yeah, that's exactly right. And so obviously wind and solar could at times produce incredibly cheap electricity, but it's intermittent and we don't have the battery technology to store it when it's really sunny. As you mentioned, I think it was in November, December, there are all these days in Europe and it was like the wind just wasn't blowing. And so then energy prices soar because what can you do? And so whether it's in the U.S. where we've had a number of energy grid blackouts, we saw that in Texas last year, whether it's Europe, where the price of electricity is soaring, a rethink of nuclear. So I’m very excited about our guest. We are gonna get the case for nuclear investment today. I'm super excited about our guest. We are gonna be speaking with Meredith Anwin. She is the author of the book “Shorting The Grid: The Hidden Fragility Of Our Electric Grid.”
Absolutely fascinating book, basically talking about grid policy and somehow it's incredibly readable. It's actually a page turner, even though the topic is very dense and arcane. Meredith has a gift for taking what is highly technical and making it extremely compelling. And she is also a pro-nuclear activist in some way and thinks it is the solution to many of our energy questions. She has been for several years, a research worker in the utility industry on our power problems. So Meredith thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Meredith Angwin:
Thank you so much for inviting me.
Joe:
Meredith. I loved your book. And like I said, and other people on Twitter said the same thing, how is a book that is on such a technical topic — regulatory policies at the grid — so readable and I mean, it is a page turner somehow, but why don't you just give us a little bit of your background prior to writing the book? What is your experience within the utility and energy industry?
Meredith:
Well, I was always very interested in chemistry. I became a chemist and I was also interested in geology and I was working toward my PhD at University of Chicago. I did not complete it. I have a master’s degree in mineral chemistry. And when I began thinking what you do with mineral chemistry, when I got outta school, I was also interested in geothermal energy. And so I began researching how could I work in geothermal? I learned enough to be actually getting some little contracts in geothermal and then I got a job at a company that wanted to get into geothermal, but was working on nitrogen oxide pollution, which is a really big problem. And so I was working on nitrogen oxide pollution, including some patents, nitrogen oxides are one of the prime ingredients in smog.
And so I was working on that. And then I moved over to the Electric Power Research Institute where I was in geothermal energy. So I felt I had finally achieved what I had wanted to achieve by being in geothermal energy. But then when I was in the research group that was in renewables, I began to see sort of, I don't know, the dark side of renewables, not so much the dark side is the fact that they really weren't up to the level of a lift that people were claiming they would have. And that when you wanted to put in renewable people objected. And that astonished me — that the people were trying to stop renewable development. How could they do this? But at any rate, I began working on some similar corrosion issues with a group that was working in nuclear.
And I began to get to know them now, I didn't have anything — I wasn't against nuclear, but I wasn't, I wasn't like drawn to it particularly. But then when I began working with them, I began to realize its advantages. And I switched over to the nuclear group later on. I ran a consulting company about corrosion control and water chemistry and nuclear play. And then when I sort of semi-retired, I began supporting our local nuclear plant Vermont Yankee, which led me into trying to understand how Vermont Yankee interacted with the people who ruled the grid and that eventually led to the book, “Shorting The Grid.”
Joe:
It’s funny, I actually used to live in Brattleboro, Vermont, couple miles away from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which I remember, tons of debate about it at the time and lots of local activists wanting to shut it down. And now it did get shut down.
Tracy:
Well, can we talk a little bit more about that? So, you know, I mentioned this in the intro, the idea of nuclear as sort of losing public opinion. How did that happen? And how do the alleged downsides stack up against the opportunities or the upsides of nuclear power as you learned about them?
Meredith:
Well, that is a really difficult question that there are many books about it, there's a book called “The Rise of Nuclear Fear.” One of the things is that people had it mixed in their minds with nuclear weapons. What I'm trying to say is that there are plenty of states like North Korea with nuclear weapons, but no nuclear power plants. And there are plenty of states like the United Arab Emirates with nuclear power plants and no nuclear weapons. I mean, they don't go together as like, if you've got one, then you've got the other, and the whole idea that someone would steal stuff from a nuclear power plant to make a weapon is so absurd. I mean, the things that are in nuclear power plants are very big and the plants are well guarded. So, I mean, you would have to drive some kind of a special vehicle.
I mean, it's just, it's not, it's not like an easy thing to imagine. So I don't like to even go into that very much because it's all so theoretical. It's not reasonable, but my mother was very active in ‘ban the bomb’ groups. But she wasn't against nuclear power power, but when the bomb actually got banned, I think some of those groups, just morph over like, oh, well, well, let's go after the nuclear plants. Now it wasn't reasoned. It was just sort of like, let's do the next step. We were worried about fallout. Now we have these plants, so we after them. And the fact that they're not releasing anything into the environment, we're not gonna worry about that part. They could, there's this whole word ‘could,’ they could, they could, if you have aa elaborate enough scenario, they could.
Joe:
Why don't you talk about that a little bit further. And actually of course, you know, we're talking about Europe the other night, I think it was last Thursday — we’re recording this March 10 — So I think a week ago, one of the scarier headlines that has come out of the Russia invasion of Ukraine, all the headlines are awful, but there was concern about this particular nuclear plant. There was a report about a fire, and then everyone was debating, how terrible could this be? Could this be a Fukushima or Chernobyl or something like that. And then the people who actually knew what they were talking about said, no, that's a completely unrealistic scenario. That's not like that at all, but can you give us like the basic reasons, like, okay, why isn't a nuclear power plant as sort of major security risk, if it could catch fire or something like that? Like why did the people who seem to understand nuclear the most? They did not seem particularly worried about that risk in that situation?
Meredith:
Well it's a standard kind of plant. A light water reactor. It's not like the Chernobyl plants. Every nuclear plant has to have a way to slow down the neutrons. And that's called the moderator and in American plants, that's water. And in the Russian plant, it was graphite. So when the Russian plant began overheating, the graphite began burning. It was an incredible mess, Chernobyl. But the ones that are operating now in Russia, they're practically like the American plants. They're like a pressurized water reactor. There' three levels of water safety between them. And any release to the environment — what I'm trying to say is you have the pressurized water that surrounds the reactor core, then that water goes into loops within a steam generator.
That generator makes steam, which turns the turbine. Right? But it isn't the same water that went through the reactor core. It's, as matter of fact, incredibly pure water, no expense is spared to make that water incredibly pure. And the reason is that you don't want it depositing things on these high speed turbines. And then as it comes out of the turbines, it's cooled by a tertiary loop, which actually is water that goes through a cooling tower or something, which is out in the environment. But at that point, it's like three steps away from the reactor. So people kept imagining all these scenarios, which are unreasonable of the reactor having some huge problem that causes this fast release, which actually did happen at Chernobyl.
But that was because it was a completely different plant. Another thing I have to say is Chernobyl did not have a containment structure around it. So anything that was released was immediately released. These plants have containment structures around the … generator area that can be hit by like missiles. I mean, really. They run, they're so strong that can be hit by trains, missiles. I don't know how big a missile, I suppose if it was a, but, you know, the they're ... tested with utility polls flung against them as if there was a tornado. I mean, so the whole idea that these things are just on the verge of something horrible happening is really not reasonable. But as I say, I think that the people were like, oh, we banned the bomb. Let's ban the other nuclear stuff. It's all horrible.
Tracy :
Aside from safety, were there any other constraints or are there any other other constraints on building out nuclear capacity? Because, I mean, if there's one thing I learned from Sim City it's that nuclear power plants are extremely expensive compared to all other forms of power, but obviously that might be out of date, but, you know, are there financial constraints or policy constraints that impact investing in nuclear power?
Meredith:
Well nuclear plants are more expensive and slower to build than other types of plants. And they're usually compared with combined cycle plants, natural gas plants, because very few people are building coal plants anymore, except of course, in many places in the world, but not in America. People are building coal plants in China and in India, but they're not building them in America. So we compare our nuclear plants to natural gas plants, and they're much more expensive. However, nuclear fuel tends to be lot less expensive and a lot more reliable than the fuel for the natural gas plants. And people do a comparison with a wind turbine, whatever wind turbines aren't even supposed to last more than 25 years, a nuclear plants can last 60 years, 80 years, whatever. How often do you have to build? It becomes a question with many of the types of plants.
Joe:
So can you actually do the math a little bit more for us? What's the cost of building a nuclear plant vs. natural gas? And another important thing you talk about in your book is that a nuclear plant holds the fuel on site, whereas natural gas is real time. It doesn't store the gas on site. It needs it just in time. And so if there's any sort of pipeline disruption, the natural gas plant is useless, but talk about the upfront costs of the two, and then like how it plays out over time in your view, such that the nuclear is the better investment.
Meredith:
Well, you know, this isn't my major area of expertise about investing in nuclear. I'm sorry to say that. I say that nuclear plants have had a tendency to be estimated at 5 billion and come in at 10 billion. But meanwhile natural gas plants are estimated at 500 million and come in at a billion and a half.
But the thing is that with the natural gas plant, you have to have a fuel supplied all the time. It just keeps coming in over the pipeline. And so, that's okay. And sometimes it's not okay, like right in the winter, in the Northeast, we actually are dependent on LNG deliveries, just like we were Singapore or something to get enough natural gas into our pipelines for winter use and nuclear stores about 18 months fuel on site. So some disruption in the price of fuel or anything like that, you, you've got a lot of time to try and figure out what to do about it. Well, with natural gas, they say, it's now X price. You're paying it, that's it. Well, you're even paying it or refusing to accept it. Whichever
Tracy:
Is that the main difference that you see between nuclear power and renewables, it's the, I guess the reliability of power generation and the idea that you can build up, you know, 18 months of capacity as you put it and not really have to worry about it, versus if you have something like wind or solar, it's much more unpredictable?
Meredith:
Oh yeah. That's very important. Now, one of the things is that grid reliability is dismissed by people who are in favor of 100% renewables. We'll figure out how to make them reliable. It won't take that much. But when you get right down to it, what most people want in a grid is reliability. They want the lights to go on when they turn on the lights,. They want the water treatment plant to keep operating. They want all the things that the grid gives us to keep happening. And if they're interrupted a lot, this is very, very bad. And so what happens is that nuclear plants... let me give you an example. The thing is it's very hard to talk about natural gas in terms of size, because it's a gas, right?
Nobody thinks of it in terms of size. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna compare a Vermont Yankee nuclear plant with Merrimack Station, which is not far away. It's down in New Hampshire. Merrimack Station, a coal plant, is 400 megawatts and Vermont Yankee was a nuclear plant at 600 megawatts. So Vermont Yankee would have a semi pull up every 18 months with a new load of fuel. Okay. One semi, maybe they took two sometimes, I don't know, or a new load of fuel. I've often thought that since there were several hundred people working at the plant, they probably had more deliveries of paper products of various kinds than fuel. Meanwhile over at Merrimack station, you have 400 megawatts. I did the calculation several times over to try and figure it out.
I went through a whole calculation on the probable heat rate and came up with 39 hopper cars per day. So you see the thing is they are taking delivery of a lot of coal every day to run that station. And of course, when you're delivering a lot of things that it's it can be interrupted. Now, the thing that I wanted to say is that if you look at a 400 megawatt natural gas plant, it is burn not 20 cars of coal because the two and the natural gas also burns say, it's burning 20 cars of coal a day. It isn't coal. It's carbon. You see, but at least you can have a visual then, right? You can have a visual that the natural gas plant is getting 20 coal cars, full of carbon delivered to it.
Every day you see, we can't have that. Somebody will say, oh, it's got so many million cubic feet. I can't imagine a million cubic feet of a gas and what happens. And that's beyond me. It's much easier to just think if it were coal, then how much would this be? How much would you see showing up at the plant? And let's look at the carbon for a moment that you get these 40 coal cars going to Merrimack station. And then they combine with oxygen in the air to make carbon dioxide, which is because it's combined, it's heavier than the coal was. So if you had to carry the carbon dioxide away in coal cars, you would be using more than twice as many coal cars to carry it away. So that's something to think about. I keep trying to figure out how to express it, because otherwise it's so theoretical people think, “oh yeah, we've got million cubic feet. Nobody goes like, how much does that weigh? How much space would it take up? It's a gas”
Joe:
Right.
Meredith Angwin:
So I try to put it in terms of if it were coal, if it were visible, if it had to be delivered and taken away in railroad cars, this is what it'd be like.
Joe:
That's a really interesting way to think about it. Let's go back to conventional renewables and the two renewables that people have in their mind when they hear renewables are obviously wind and solar. And they inspire a lot of very good feelings. They do not emit carbon. When the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing, electricity is extremely cheap. And I get, perhaps the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free. What is the basic flaw? What is the argument against just let's keep ramping up wind, let's keep, you know, there's gonna be this big, new wind farm out off of New York. There's gonna be some wind. Why not just to place turbines and panels on every roof and every mountain ridge we can find?
Meredith:
Okay, let me talk about why that isn't a reasonable way of looking at it. The first thing is, it's just very simple example. People go to a fancy restaurant, and the restaurant says we run a hundred percent on renewable electricity here, right? And the people say, oh, this is great. We're not only having a great meal at 10 at night, but we are also on renewable electricity. Well, actually what the restaurant has done is it hadn't put up a bunch. It may have some solar panels, but it's not running off the solar panels at 10 at night, what it is doing is it's buying renewable energy certificates, or it is net metering. That is produces more solar, and it sells it to the grid, an advised fossil from the grid at 10 at night.
And so people get, they get misled. They're at this restaurant and it's a hundred percent, a hundred percent renewables. And they're thinking, well, everybody can do this. If they can do it, we should be able to do it. Okay. So that's the simple misleading thing.
The more formal statement would have to be that renewables add to the overall system costs of the grid. For one thing you have to back them up. I don't think batteries are ever gonna do it, but that's a whole other talk. But whether you decide it's batteries or it's gas fire plants, or it's a pump storage device, okay. Something has to be available when the renewables are not available. And so that means that you have to have redundancy on the grid and that redundancy doesn't go into the cost of when the wind turbine is actually making wind.
It goes into the sort of the overhead cost of the whole grid. So what happens is that people don't understand. That they say, well, the wind turbines are really cheap, right? And as long as you've got an equal amount of install capacity that you can actually call on, okay. Whether it's fossil, whether it's nuclear, whether it's a pump storage, whether it's a battery, you don't have a reliable grid. And so people don't realize that. For example, if the grid was all what I would call traditional plants, nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, then a grid will usually try to have reserve capacity of, I don't know, 20%. So for example, if the highest amount of kilowatts being used at a time is something, then the grid will have installed capacity of that amount plus 20%.
So our grid, for example, it runs about on a nice day, not a fierce day, not a very cold day, or very hot day. It's running around 14 gigawatts at peak, okay. Or 15, well then it, and, but on a very cold day, it'll run 20 gig. So we have to have 23 gigawatts installed capacity, so that if it's a very cold day or a very hot day, and it's running 20 gigs, some of the plants go offline, then we still have that three gigawatts to make up for it. You know? So we're all set. But if those 20 gigawatts were wind and solar, we have to have another 20 gigawatts of something that we can call on when the wind and solar aren't available. And so that's an immense cost. The redundancy cost.
Tracy:
I have a, I guess, a hypothetical question. But it's related to policy and the decision about who chooses the actual mix of energy in our world. So, you know, let's say tomorrow, every one woke up and looked at their Bloomberg terminal and saw that the oil price was at $200 per barrel, or $300 per barrel. And gas prices were still spiking and everyone decided, okay, we wanna change up our energy mix. We wanna do more nuclear for instance, how would that public sentiment actually feed through into additional investment into nuclear power? Because it feels like, you know, I just moved back to New York and I've signed up with Conedison, it certainly feels like I don't have much of a choice in what type of energy is delivered to me, and who provides it. So I'm just curious, what actually changes if the world starts accepting nuclear power, who actually makes the decision saying, okay, we're gonna build a power plant here, or we're gonna add capacity to existing power plants?
Meredith:
Okay. Now, if you are in an area that is not run by auctions, if you are in a traditional vertically-integrated area, the state with permission from, for whatever issues might be coming up, the state decides on its resource mix. And it writes something called an integrated resource plan, which it presents to its public utilities commission. And then, if the public utility says, yes, this is the right thing to do, then things are put in place to do the siding, to do the permits, to raise the money and so forth. And so on. Now, the thing is that in the auction areas, which I call RTO areas, which is ‘Regional Transmission Organization,’ and New York is very interesting because it's a state and RTO. But let's look at New England instead because New England is a mixture of many states run by an RTO, and so forth.
So every state, supposedly if you ask he head of our RTO, what about the resource mix? He would say the states decide on the resource mix. We don't have any particular ability to decide on the resource mix, but what it boils down to is in the RTO, it's only the plants that have low prices, for the next kilowat hour, low marginal costs. And not very high capital costs that actually can get built in an RTO system. So even if the state puts together an integrated resource plan that says we are gonna build a nuclear plant here. The nuclear plant builders will say, are you kidding me? With the way the auctions are set up, we'll never make a living at this. And so one of the problems is that, and this is why I named my book ‘Shorting the Grid.’
It was in homage to ‘The Big Short,’ because in ‘The Big Short,’ the mortgages, which were not particularly good mortgages, liars mortgages, right? It didn't matter. They still made money. So the value of the mortgage really didn't affect things. And sure enough, pretty soon, because you had all these complex debt obligations and and collateral. But what I'm trying to say is when you got through all that complexity, then, you know, the value of the mortgage didn't matter. And so in the RTO areas, the value of the power to the grid doesn't matter much, as long as it meets certain criteria for the options. So it's very, very similar to the situation. As a matter of fact, a power plant, a renewable plant is most likely to actually make money on the grid because it gets subsidies and tax credits. And it doesn't have to rely on the auctions. As a matter of fact, some of those plants bid in saying, we'll pay you to take our power.
Joe:
This was a really striking aspect of your book, that there are times in which the wind is blowing, so much of the sun is shining, the renewable generators can actually bid to get their electricity used at negative prices because of the subsidies or the sale of credits. And in fact, your book in general talks about just how insanely complicated electricity auctions are, and it's sort of mind boggling, but you walk through it all, but can you just give the sort of simple reason why in a sort of auction-based electricity system, the opposite of vertically-integrated, nuclear, despite its advantages in reliability, is not economical for someone to invest in building?
Meredith:
Well, one of the things is that the nuclear plant is going to have to compete with plants on the auctions that will be bidding in it like negative one cent and so forth. So the overall price on the auction will be lowered by those plants sometimes even all the way to negative. And now one of the reasons that the nuclear plant is also in trouble in this auction system is that the auction system tends to favor renewables. And that means that if the sun is shining, they may want the nuclear plant to like go offline and make rules for the solar and nuclear plants are wonderful. They are not particularly flexible. Now you might say, “oh, see there's a disadvantage to them.”
But I'm telling you, let's say you're taking a car trip and you see a semi, the semi is carrying a lot of goods and it is carrying it. It is efficient. There's one or two drivers, and it's carrying all these goods. Is it flexible? Can it pass you? Can it go up a hill quickly? Can it stop on a dime? No, it's basically designed to be very efficient at carrying load forward and so forth. That's what the nuclear plants are designed for. And so, if they're being forced off the grid, because the wind is blowing, it's very, very hard on them and they will tend to have shorter life expectancies because of the changes that they're forced to do.
Tracy:
I have another basic question given that I haven't read the book, but why was everything set up in this way? Like, why was the system created in which renewables seem to benefit from the way auctions are actually conducted versus something that would incentivize nuclear?
Meredith:
Well let's look at why the whole RTO system happened. The thing was that in the vertically-integrated systems the idea was that if a company invested in a power plant, it would get a rate of return on that investment from the the people to whom it sold the power. And so that company was a ‘widows and orphans stock.’ It wasn't going to have a huge problem. It was going to get a rate of return.
Now when people looked, it was clear to some people that this was just an incentive to gold plate the grid. The more the company could invest, the more it got paid. It didn't have a particular interest in saving money. So people said, what we have to do is get some kind of market force in here to get that company to understand that saving money is important.
And so the RTO system, the auctions were supposed to do that, but they didn't. And why they didn't is a very elaborate story having to do with the shale gas revolution and the huge overruns on nuclear plants. The romance, if you pardon me saying, so the romance of we can get everything we need from the sun and the wind, that's kind of the bucolic, you know, ideal. And some of the people were, I think it was Amory Lovins who the quote was that if there was a clean source of power that was readily available, they would destroy things with it. You know, the idea is that lots of energy isn't good. The fact that there's limited energy from renewables, that'll keep humankind on the straight and narrow.
Joe:
So this is important. You talk about some of the challenges of the vertically-integrated price model, where if your return is “cost plus X”, then that gives you an incentive to just increase the cost. And so there are obvious impulses to find some sort of market mechanism to avoid that. You know, one of the things that I remember from about a decade ago was the Pickens Plan. And T. Boone Pickens of course, a well known oil and gas man, who also was very into wind power. And something that you explain a lot is the idea of the renewable industries aim to launch more natural gas, and they compliment each other very well. Or in theory they do. Can you explain that a little bit further? How renewables and natural gas sort of dovetail with each other from an industrial business perspective?
Meredith:
Oh yes. Absolutely. One of, one of the things is that renewables go on and off when they want to. And they need something that can ramp up and down on quickly to even out the reliability of the grid. Now, there are two things that can ramp up quickly to even out the reliability of the grid. Those two things are natural gas and hydro. Coal plants and nuclear plants can actually load follow. I mean, that is they can go up in the middle of the day and come down at the end of the day, right. What they can't do is take care of the SPPI of the wind up. The wind is down, the sun is shining. Whoops. So the front went by, clouds came by and in five minutes, five minutes, it is gone from less of solar to like, why is it so gloomy out there?
And so natural gas is the partner for this. It's the partner that can fill in those gaps. Now, hydro could fill in those gaps too, but let's face it. People aren’t talking about more dams, at least in my area. I can't imagine anywhere in the country, someone would say, we're going to build another dam, the size of a Grand Cooley not meet an absolute storm of opposition. And in all honesty, back in the day, that was actually a Sierra Club slogan, right? Atoms, not Dams.
Tracy:
So with everything that's going on in the world, what's your gut instinct on whether or not we are going to see a ramping up of investment in nuclear power and a rethink on the desirability of nuclear versus something like solar or wind?
Meredith:
I think the chances are very good for that, but I'm not sure that they're good enough in this country. What I mean by that is in other countries, they will look at the fact that France doesn't have a single natural gas fired plant. It's nuclear, you know? And so France, isn't particularly, concerned with what is happening in Ukraine, except as a European nation that doesn't wanna see that amount of suffering, but in terms of like, will they turn off our power? They're not worried about that. So other people are going to begin to take energy security, 18 months on site. You can't be turned off by somebody at the drop of a hat, just because he's decided to start a war. I think that people are gonna take it more seriously. Now people are already taking it seriously. In other parts of the world, nuclear plant builds have been going on. In the Middle East and have been going on in China. But in America, wehaven't done that.
Joe:
We just, we have just a minute or two left before we have to wrap, but let's say, you know, public opinion were to change on nuclear. Let's say just the U.S., what would the policy change have to be to make it happen? Would it be something at the federal government? It would be at the state level? Like obviously as you explain, the current RTO auction model does not auger well for nuclear, what would have to change? And then real quickly storage is the other big thing. And we haven't touched on it, but people talk about, “well, no, no one wants the storage in their backyard.” You know in Vermont, probably people don't want the nuclear stored in the rolling green hills or under the organic apple farm. So just real quickly, can you touch on A) where the policy impulse would have to change and how to deal with? and B) the fact that it's still extremely costly and by and large, not desirable to live near nuclear storage.
Meredith:
Okay. Basically in terms of policy changes, I think that we have to begin looking at systems costs because if you look at inexpensive wind turbine and you don't look at the fact that a natural gas plant, which will pay whatever is on offer for the natural gas has to be available to back it up, then you think that wind turbines are pretty cheap. Butif you look at the system cost, you will realize that no it isn't. And then in terms of storage, oh, I don't know. I get very concerned with people who are so concerned with storage. I mean, the material that is being stored is a ceramic. It's not a goo like in the Simpsons, right. It's a ceramic and it, you know, it's a dangerous substance. Oh, okay. Well fine. You know, somebody says, well, you know, there's enough to kill everybody in the state. And I'm like, yeah, you know, there's enough stuff under my kitchen sink to kill everybody in the family. The question is, what I mean is, you know, like, household cleaners. But the thing is not is it enough, but is it well contained? Is it something likely to leak and frankly ceramics are the least likely to leak.
Joe:
Well, Meredith this is a huge sprawling, fascinating topic it's already given me like ideas for three or four new episodes that we have to follow on. I definitely suggest people check out your book “Shorting The Grid.” So thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Meredith:
Thank you.
Joe:
Tracy. I found that extremely interesting. I do think like at this core thing — Meredith used the word bucolic when describing the allure of solar and wind. And I thought that was very apt. You could see the appeal, but when you think about the redundancy that has to be built, the difficulty of batteries and so forth, you could see why it's not a silver bullet.
Tracy:
Yeah. I was thinking about like all the responsibility that maybe pop culture has to bear, yu know, Meredith mentioned The Simpsons, and I was also thinking about Back To The Future. And the doctor stealing a bunch of plutonium and everyone getting it in their heads in the 1980s that, you know, this is something that can be stolen and terrorists use it and stuff like that. But it is interesting. I mean, I need to read that other book that Meredith mentioned as well, about how nuclear lost the public policy debate. But A) it's just gonna be fascinating to see whether or not the turnaround actually happens current events and then B) if there is a turnaround in public sentiment, how feasible that actually is given the current structure to implement.
Joe:
Yeah. There's a lot we have to do. So we have to have an episode with someone who's very pro wind and solar and believes it really is the solution. We absolutely have to do a batteries batter episode because of both cars, and then also grid level storage is gonna be a huge question to the further ramping up of renewables. There's a lot more to do. I think, I mean, this is going to be like our huge theme, I think for 20222, energy. So many different energy questions coming through, but I thought it was very helpful and people really should check out the book.
Tracy:
Yeah. All right. Well more to come on this subject, but in the meantime, shall we leave it there?
Joe:
Let's leave it there.
You can follow Meredith Angwin on Twitter at @MeredithAngwin.