Podcasts about three mile island

Os Estados Unidos passaram anos com o consumo de eletricidade praticamente estagnado. De repente, a inteligência artificial entrou em cena e mudou este quadro. O Departamento de Energia estima que os data centers, que em 2023 já consumiam cerca de 4,4% da eletricidade do país, podem chegar a algo entre 6,7% e 12% até 2028, o que equivale a 325 a 580 TWh. É muita coisa em muito pouco tempo. O problema é que não dá para erguer uma linha de transmissão de energia como quem atualiza um aplicativo. Thiago de Aragão, analista político No operador PJM, a maior malha do país, que cobre do Meio-Atlântico ao Meio-Oeste, as projeções de carga deram um salto. O relatório de 2025 fala em crescimento médio de 3,8% ao ano no pico de inverno na próxima década, um ritmo raríssimo para padrões norte-americanos e puxado por novas cargas gigantes. Não à toa, o próprio PJM abriu um processo acelerado para criar regras específicas de conexão de megacargas, em especial data centers. É a burocracia tentando correr atrás da nuvem. A dinâmica econômica também mudou. Por anos, as Big Techs compraram certificados que comprovavam que uma certa quantidade de eletricidade foi gerada a partir de fontes renováveis, (Certificados de Energia Renovável, RECs) ou através de contratos de compra e venda virtuais ou financeiros de energia a longo prazo, em que não havia entrega física; o termo de compromisso era usado para fixar um preço da energia no mercado e garantir previsibilidade financeira. Agora, a discussão é sobre lastro: contratos longos de energia física, isso é, o comprador garante a compra de uma quantidade de energia ou a produção de um parque renovável. A Microsoft, por exemplo, assinou um contrato de compra e venda de energia elétrica (PPA na sigla em inglês) de 20 anos com a Constellation, empresa americana de produção de energia de baixo carbono, para viabilizar a retomada da usina nuclear de Three Mile Island. A Meta fechou outro contrato de 20 anos com a mesma empresa para o complexo nuclear de Clinton, em Illinois. Esses arranjos não são apenas marketing de sustentabilidade; são a forma de garantir gigawatts 24/7 para operações que não podem piscar. Nem tudo, porém, é plug and play. O caso Amazon–Talen, na Pensilvânia, em que um data center foi construído colado à usina nuclear de Susquehanna, virou novela regulatória. A FERC rejeitou duas vezes o acordo de interconexão que buscava ampliar o fornecimento direto “porta a porta”, por temores de custo e impacto na rede compartilhada. A moral da história é simples: estar perto de uma usina ajuda, mas não anula as regras sobre quem paga pelo fio. Esse recado já foi ouvido em outros estados. E quem paga, afinal? Alguns estados começaram a definir tarifas e classes específicas para hipercargas. Na Virgínia, a Dominion propôs uma categoria nova de tarifa para data centers muito grandes e, em paralelo, ganhou autorização para construir uma linha de transmissão que atende apenas um hyperscale em Alexandria. A decisão gerou protestos de bairros vizinhos e revelou o óbvio: a “nuvem” tem 230 kV e passa no quintal de alguém. Demanda real e fantasma Do lado dos planejadores, há outro nó difícil: o que é demanda real e o que é “demanda fantasma”? Com a corrida por IA, desenvolvedores entram em múltiplas filas de conexão ao mesmo tempo, muitas vezes para o mesmo projeto. O resultado é um inchaço artificial dos números que pode levar a redes superdimensionadas e depois subutilizadas, e essa conta sobra para o consumidor. O Wall Street Journal contou bem essa história dos “data centers que nem existem e já assombram a rede”. No Sul, a Georgia Power redesenhou seu plano de recursos para segurar o carvão por mais tempo, investir em baterias e gás adicional e ampliar solar, tudo com um olho atento nos data centers. É uma boa síntese do momento: a transição energética continua, mas a sequência das peças mudou por causa da IA. E a nova geração de tecnologias nucleares? Os SMRs, reatores nucleares pequenos, que prometem menor investimento inicial e maior segurança, estão no radar, mas o combustível HALEU, que tem a Rússia como a única fornecedora em escala, ainda é o gargalo. A empresa americana fornecedora de combustível nuclear, Centrus, atingiu, em junho, a marca de 900 kg produzidos, um marco histórico nos EUA. Mas o Departamento de Energia dos Estados Unidos (DOE) projeta necessidade de 50 toneladas por ano até 2035. Em outras palavras, promissor, porém não no tempo dos data centers que entram em operação entre 2026 e 2028. Até lá, o que existe de nuclear “na prateleira” é estendera a vida útil e aumentar a potência licenciada dos reatores nucleares existentes, sem construir uma nova usina. Mas existem alternativas realistas para sair desta situação. A primeira delas é a velocidade frente à governança. A rede americana foi desenhada para crescer devagar, mas a IA trouxe ritmo industrial para o setor de serviços. A resposta institucional da agência federal dos Estados Unidos responsável por regular o setor de energia elétrica, a FERC, de operadores e de comissões estaduais, é tentar casar prazos de obras civis com os ciclos de investimento da nuvem. Já o operador regional de rede elétrica PJM cria trilhos específicos para grandes cargas. E é justamente isso: admitir que data center é um bicho regulatório próprio. A segunda é a adicionalidade, e não apenas a energia “verde”. PPAs que evitam o fechamento de usinas reais, como Three Mile Island, ou que financiam extensões de licença, como o caso da Meta em Clinton, têm impacto sistêmico muito maior do que certificados genéricos. É uma virada importante: a descarbonização corporativa passa a cuidar do estoque de confiabilidade do sistema, e não apenas do saldo anual de MWh limpos. A terceira é quem paga a fiação. Tarifas especiais e obrigações de investimento para novos hiperconsumidores devem deixar de ser teoria e se transformar em prática. Contratos de conexão mais rígidos, redução ou restrição da geração de energia em horas de pico e, quando fizer sentido, contribuição direta para linhas e subestações são necessários. Sem isso, a distribuição indiscriminada dos custos gera reação política, que já começou nas audiências públicas. O quarto ponto é a eficiência e a flexibilidade. Nem todo watt de IA é igual. O treinamento de modelos pode ser agendado; a inferência, nem tanto. O setor que aprender a deslocar treinamento para janelas de baixa demanda, ou para regiões com folga, vai reduzir o capex de rede e ganhar poder de barganha regulatória. Esse é o lado B menos glamouroso da IA: software de orquestração e contratos com SLAs elétricos, que garantam que o serviço entregue cumpra padrões mínimos de qualidade e desempenho. No curto prazo, o quadro será inevitavelmente misto: um pouco mais de gás para segurar o pico, nucleares antigos monetizando sua firmeza via Big Tech, solares e baterias crescendo de escala e muita obra de transmissão. A visão de fundo, porém, é de reencaixe. A rede americana sempre foi uma grande obra pública, implicitamente financiada por toda a base de consumidores. A IA está forçando um experimento de responsabilização privada pelo lastro, e isso pode ser saudável se bem regulado. O risco, claro, é o inverso: projetar para o exagero fantasma e socializar custo demais. O sinal de alerta já aparece nas projeções do DOE, que falam em até 12% da eletricidade em 2028, e nas avaliações sazonais da NERC, a entidade responsável por garantir a confiabilidade e segurança do sistema elétrico da América do Norte, que vêm registrando aumento de risco diante de picos mais altos e usinas envelhecidas. O desafio é achar o meio-termo entre subestimar a nuvem e construir para miragens. No fim das contas, a “conta de luz da IA” chega na mesma caixa de correio que a nossa.

Blame it on AI - new excuse: Flirty Chatbots NVDIA earnings the high point for a while? Announcing the WINNER of the CTP PLUS we are now on Spotify and Amazon Music/Podcasts! Click HERE for Show Notes and Links DHUnplugged is now streaming live - with listener chat. Click on link on the right sidebar. Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter Interactive Brokers Warm-Up - Tariffs deemed illegal? - So much for rates coming down - Long bond up again - Announcing the WINNER of the CTP - Blame it on AI - new excuse.... Flirty Chatbots Markets - NVDIA earnings the high point for a while? - Good month - August is green - Sept starting out wobbly - AI News  - Valuations - TO THE MOON NVDA Earnings - From last Wednesday - STRONG: Nvidia reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Wednesday, and said sales growth this quarter will remain above 50% - Earnings per share: $1.05 adjusted vs. $1.01 estimated - Revenue: $46.74 billion vs. $46.06 billion estimated - Overall company revenue rose 56% in the quarter from $30.04 billion a year ago, Nvidia said. Year-over-year revenue growth has now exceeded 50% for nine straight quarters, dating back to mid-2023 -Stock opened Thursday at $180 - now trades near $168 --- Some concern over data-center revenue declining 1% from previous quarter due to $4B less in sales of H20 chips NEW CLEAR - The Duane Arnold nuclear plant northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa is pressing ahead with plans to restart operations by the end of the decade after shutting down for economic reasons in 2020 - NextEra Energy (NEE) - Duane Arnold would follow similar restarts planned for the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which plan to resume operations later this year and in 2027 - Big Change on the economics is just 5 years! USA Travel - Who needs those pesky visitors anyway - Overseas travel to the U.S. fell 3.1% year-on-year in July to 19.2 million visitors, according to U.S. government data. It was the fifth month of decline this year, defying expectations that 2025 would see annual inbound visitors finally surpass the pre-pandemic level of 79.4 million. - New VISA INTEGRITY fees on incoming travelers from many countries - The extra charge raises the total visa cost to $442 for non-via waiver countries like Mexico, Argentina, India, Brazil and China - In China, arrivals have remained muted since the pandemic, with July numbers still 53% below 2019 levels. The visa fee also threatens travel from India, where visits are down 2.4% so far this year, driven by a near 18% drop in students. Tariffs Illegal? - A divided U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday that most of Donald Trump's tariffs are illegal, undercutting the Republican president's use of the levies as a key inter - Trump lamented the decision by what he called a "highly partisan" court, posting on Truth Social: "If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country." national economic policy tool. - So, now it goes to the Supreme Court (non - partisan?) - Talk of the Bond Vigilantes making a move if the tariffs struck down because not much to pay the huge deficit and debt encumbered with new OBBBA   Check this out and find out more at: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/ Speaking of Rates - Since the Powell hint of cuts - rates on the rise - -Longer-Term rates - Mortgage rates are the highest in months and the 10-Yr is at approx 4.30% -- Please note, the Fed controls short-term rates.... Some influence on mortgages due to Quantitative easing, but even if rates are dropped does not mean that longer-dated paper will see a drop in the rates DEE MINIMUM US - The de minimis exemption, which allowed shipments valued under $800 to enter the country duty-free, came to an end globally last Friday.

Medicine has come a long way in the past 50 years, but here's what's fascinating: many of the breakthrough treatments we use today for pain, addiction, and mental health started with a handful of doctors who were willing to go against the grain.In this conversation, Sam sits down with Dr. Howard Kornfeld, a triple board-certified physician whose career reads like a roadmap of medical innovation. We're talking five decades of pushing boundaries - from emergency medicine to nuclear war prevention to being at the ground floor of psychedelic research.Dr. Kornfeld doesn't just share stories (though he has plenty). He walks us through his transformative experiences at Esalen Institute, his pioneering work with buprenorphine treatment, and his connections to the key figures who literally shaped modern psychedelic medicine as we know it.What makes this conversation essential listening? Dr. Kornfeld's journey shows exactly how questioning established medical practices - while still maintaining rigorous, evidence-based standards - can lead to treatments that actually change lives. His story proves that individual physicians can drive real systemic change, but it requires persistence, innovation, and the willingness to work outside conventional healthcare systems.If you've ever wondered how breakthrough treatments actually make it from "experimental" to mainstream, or if you're curious about what it really takes to challenge medical orthodoxy, this conversation will give you the historical context you need.What You'll Learn in This Episode・How questioning medical orthodoxy led to breakthrough treatments and career-defining insights・The evolution of pain medicine from the 1920s through today and lessons for modern practice・Dr. Kornfeld's journey from emergency medicine through nuclear activism to integrative practice・Historical context for psychedelic medicine's current renaissance and key pioneering figuresEpisode 39 show notes:00:00 Teaser - Physicians as Shamans of Our Culture00:34 Welcome Back To the Podcast 03:04 Challenging Medical Orthodoxy: The Mastectomy Story 07:04 Triple Board Certification Journey 09:41 Cook County Hospital vs Prestigious Academics 12:55 Esalen Institute: A Medical Education Like No Other 17:37 Three Mile Island and Nuclear War Prevention 31:08 Meeting Sasha Shulgin and Early MDMA Research 35:32 Entering Addiction Medicine36:43 The Esalen Psychedelic Research Conference 49:05 From Nuclear Activism to Addiction Medicine 53:037 Buprenorphine: Years Ahead of Everyone Else 1:00:14 The Pendulum Swings of Pain Medicine 1:14:15 Recovery Without Walls Clinic Model 1:17:37 Ketamine's Paradoxical Nature in Addiction 1:20:38 Treating Ketamine Use Disorder 1:22:20 Starting Your Own Practice: Practical Advice 1:28:21 Advice from Your 100-Year-Old Self 1:31:52 Contact Information and ClosingThanks for listeningConnect with Dr. Howard Kornfeld at:Recovery Without Walls

In this fascinating episode, Bryan welcomes back longtime friend and nuclear industry veteran Bill Nowicki to discuss a recently released document from DHS and NUSTL that provides new recommendations for HVAC operations during nuclear events. Bill brings over 40 years of nuclear experience, starting as a 19-year-old Navy nuclear operator (after being deemed "not ready for the grill" at Friendly's restaurant) and progressing through various roles, including lead engineer on critical control systems at nuclear facilities. Bill shares his journey from nuclear plant evaluator to leadership trainer, now working internationally to help nuclear professionals develop their skills. His current podcast, "The Nuclear Leader," continues this mission alongside his passion project, "Navigating Mental Illness: Parent Stories." Bill provides an accessible explanation of nuclear reactor operations, using the analogy that "contamination is the poop and radiation is the smell" to help listeners understand the difference between radioactive material and radiation itself. He walks through the three-barrier system in nuclear plants: fuel cladding, reactor coolant system, and containment structures. The discussion covers how fission works, the controlled chain reaction process, and what happens when these systems fail, using examples from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima to illustrate different failure modes. The episode explores the current nuclear renaissance driven by AI data centers and industrial companies seeking clean baseload power. Bill explains how private industry is now directly funding nuclear projects, bypassing traditional utility structures, with companies like Microsoft and ExxonMobil investing billions in new nuclear facilities. This represents a dramatic shift from the post-Three Mile Island era when nuclear construction essentially stopped in the United States. The core discussion focuses on updated emergency guidance that reverses previous recommendations. Instead of the old "shelter in place and shut off your AC" advice, the new guidance suggests keeping HVAC systems running while eliminating outdoor air intake. This approach recognizes that modern, well-sealed buildings with high-efficiency filtration can provide better protection by maintaining positive pressure and filtering recirculated air rather than allowing uncontrolled infiltration. Bill and Bryan discuss how building characteristics dramatically affect the best response strategy. High-performance homes with tight construction, MERV 13+ filters, and controlled ventilation systems offer significant advantages, requiring only the ability to shut off outdoor air intake. Conversely, older, leaky buildings may still benefit from complete system shutdown to prevent contamination circulation. The conversation highlights how lessons learned during COVID-19 about airborne contamination and filtration directly apply to nuclear emergency preparedness, emphasizing the importance of case-by-case analysis rather than one-size-fits-all approaches. Topics Covered Nuclear industry career paths - From Navy nuclear training to civilian plant operations and leadership roles Basic nuclear physics - Fission process, chain reactions, and the difference between contamination and radiation Nuclear plant safety systems - Three-barrier containment approach and historical accident analysis Current nuclear renaissance - AI-driven power demand and private industry investment in new reactors Emergency preparedness evolution - How COVID-19 research influenced nuclear emergency HVAC guidance Building performance factors - Impact of construction quality, filtration, and ventilation design on safety HVAC system modifications - Importance of outdoor air shutoff capability and high-efficiency filtration Case-by-case response strategies - Why building characteristics determine optimal emergency procedures Podcasting journey - Early days of niche podcasting and building communities around specialized topics Leadership development - International nuclear industry training and professional development Personal stories - Navy submarine experiences and nuclear plant operational challenges   Here is the full document from the DHS: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2425/ML24250A059.pdf Have a question that you want us to answer on the podcast? Submit your questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/hvacschool. Purchase your tickets or learn more about the 7th Annual HVACR Training Symposium at https://hvacrschool.com/symposium. Subscribe to our podcast on your iPhone or Android. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our handy calculators here or on the HVAC School Mobile App for Apple and Android

On March 28th, 1979, the United States came terrifyingly close to a full-scale nuclear catastrophe. The Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania was supposed to be “contained,” with officials insisting that no serious harm was done. That's the story we were told. But behind the official narrative lies a trail of cancer clusters, silenced victims, and a government desperate to bury the truth. In this episode, I sit down with a whistleblower who lived through it all, and her testimony paints a far darker picture than anything admitted to the public. - SUBSCRIBE TO "THE CONSPIRACY FILES" on YouTube!: https://www.youtube.com/@UCsYWvjBZc6nhVspRKh9BppQ - LISTEN TO "THE CONSPIRACY FILES" WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS!: -Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5IY9nWD2MYDzlSYP48nRPl -Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-conspiracy-files/id1752719844 -Amazon/Audible - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/ab1ade99-740c-46ae-8028-b2cf41eabf58/the-conspiracy-files -Pandora - https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-conspiracy-files/PC:1001089101 -iHeart - https://iheart.com/podcast/186907423/ -PocketCast - https://pca.st/dpdyrcca -CastBox - https://castbox.fm/channel/id6193084?country=us - "THE CONSPIRACY FILES" is the most DANGEROUS show on the internet. Join host COLIN BROWEN (of "The Paranormal Files" and "Murder In America") as he dives deep into some of the world's most dangerous and disturbing conspiracy theories. From Epstein Island to the North Fox ring and the murder of Marilyn Monroe, NO STORY is off limits and NO DETAILS or INFORMATION will be left out. If you like conspiracies, mysteries and true crime, then THIS SHOW is for you. Get ready to have your mind blown. - SUBSCRIBE to "The Paranormal Files" (my ghost hunting channel!): https://www.youtube.com/theparanormalfilesofficialchannel?sub_confirmation=1 - LISTEN TO MURDER IN AMERICA (my podcast)! SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/episode/204fV6xstY3a5atxoHOhz8?si=H1einpJoR42jnfmEjqk5qw APPLE PODCASTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-in-america/id1547409175 SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/tkz56KWDmYAyVNAZA - Connect with me on social media!  Colin's INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/colinbrowen/ The Conspiracy Files INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/conspiracyfilespodcast?igsh=MWgxamxmOW44MWZpOA== FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/share/PUK2AgELoekFzHye/?mibextid=LQQJ4d TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@theparanormalfiles -

On today's episode of The Daily Windup, I sit down with Marsha, a seasoned professional who's been in the world of government contracting since 1981. She cut her teeth as a cost engineer on the historic Three Mile Island cleanup contract with Bechtel and later sharpened her expertise at McDonnell Douglas as a pricing specialist. With decades of experience spanning pricing, accounting, and contracts, Marsha reveals why understanding strategic pricing is the foundation of success in government work. We dive deep into the reality of pricing government contracts—breaking down cost-plus, fixed price, and time & materials—and expose the challenges that companies face when moving from commercial work into federal projects. If you think government money is “easy money,” think again. Marsha explains the hidden complexities, compliance burdens, and regulatory hoops that can make or break your success. This episode is a must-listen for anyone trying to break into government contracting and avoid costly mistakes.

I'm not sure on this one. On the one hand, Isabelle Boemeke is a pin-up of an environmentally activist generation - going from superstar Brazilian model and Instagram influencer to the author of Rad Future, a manifesto about how nuclear electricity will save the world. On other other hand, there's something slightly troubling in our social media age about this kind of dramatic trajectory - especially given the existential stakes here. Especially since Boemeke - who happens to be married to Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and one of the world's richest men - acknowledges her lack of scientific knowledge about electricity, nuclear or otherwise. The New York Times just ran a piece about Boemeke , describing her appearance as “like the heroine of a dystopian novel”, and expressing similar concerns, even wondering is she might be in the pay of the nuclear electricity lobby. I guess my worry is less about Boemeke and more about a culture that is comfortable transforming “saving the world” into an Instagrammable meme. Or maybe, as Boemeke suggested in our feisty conversation, I'm just an old fart who just doesn't get the immediacy of the existential environmental crisis that the world now faces. 1. Nuclear Energy Has Surprising Bipartisan Political SupportUnlike most energy sources, nuclear power enjoys support from both Trump and Biden administrations. This rare political consensus suggests nuclear might transcend typical partisan energy debates, making it more viable for large-scale implementation than other clean energy sources.2. The Weapons-Electricity Connection Is Largely OverblownOnly 7 of the 31 countries with nuclear electricity have weapons, and 5 of those had weapons before developing civilian nuclear programs. The data suggests the fear of proliferation from civilian nuclear programs may be largely unfounded, challenging a core anti-nuclear argument.3. Nuclear Safety Data Contradicts Public PerceptionNuclear power has a death rate per terawatt hour comparable to solar and wind, and significantly lower than hydropower. Boemeke argues that Three Mile Island wasn't actually a disaster (no health impacts), and that safety fears are largely based on outdated perceptions rather than current data.4. Shutting Down Nuclear Plants Increases Fossil Fuel UseEvery time a nuclear plant closes (like Indian Point in New York), it gets replaced by fossil fuels, not renewables, despite political promises. This pattern suggests that nuclear closures may actually harm climate goals rather than help them.5. Expertise vs. Influence Raises Troubling QuestionsBoemeke's transformation from model to nuclear advocate highlights broader questions about who gets to shape critical policy debates in the social media age. Her acknowledged lack of scientific expertise, combined with her massive platform and wealthy connections, exemplifies tensions between technical knowledge and cultural influence in addressing existential challenges.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,Nuclear fission is a safe, powerful, and reliable means of generating nearly limitless clean energy to power the modern world. A few public safety scares and a lot of bad press over the half-century has greatly delayed our nuclear future. But with climate change and energy-hungry AI making daily headlines, the time — finally — for a nuclear renaissance seems to have arrived.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Dr. Tim Gregory about the safety and efficacy of modern nuclear power, as well as the ambitious energy goals we should set for our society.Gregory is a nuclear scientist at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory. He is also a popular science broadcaster on radio and TV, and an author. His most recent book, Going Nuclear: How Atomic Energy Will Save the World is out now.In This Episode* A false start for a nuclear future (1:29)* Motivators for a revival (7:20)* About nuclear waste . . . (12:41)* Not your mother's reactors (17:25)* Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. A false start for a nuclear future (1:29)The truth is that radiation, we're living in it all the time, it's completely inescapable because we're all living in a sea of background radiation.Pethokoukis: Why do America, Europe, Japan not today get most of their power from nuclear fission, since that would've been a very reasonable prediction to make in 1965 or 1975, but it has not worked out that way? What's your best take on why it hasn't?Going back to the '50s and '60s, it looked like that was the world that we currently live in. It was all to play for, and there were a few reasons why that didn't happen, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It's a startling statistic that the US built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Three Mile Island than it has built since. And similarly on this side of the Atlantic, Europe built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than it has built since, which is just astounding, especially given that nobody died in Three Mile Island and nobody was even exposed to anything beyond the background radiation as a result of that nuclear accident.Chernobyl, of course, was far more consequential and far more serious than Three Mile Island. 30-odd people died in the immediate aftermath, mostly people who were working at the power station and the first responders, famously the firefighters who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation, and probably a couple of hundred people died in the affected population from thyroid cancer. It was people who were children and adolescents at the time of the accident.So although every death from Chernobyl was a tragedy because it was avoidable, they're not in proportion to the mythic reputation of the night in question. It certainly wasn't reason to effectively end nuclear power expansion in Europe because of course we had to get that power from somewhere, and it mainly came from fossil fuels, which are not just a little bit more deadly than nuclear power, they're orders of magnitude more deadly than nuclear power. When you add up all of the deaths from nuclear power and compare those deaths to the amount of electricity that we harvest from nuclear power, it's actually as safe as wind and solar, whereas fossil fuels kill hundreds or thousands of times more people per unit of power. To answer your question, it's complicated and there are many answers, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.I wonder how things might have unfolded if those events hadn't happened or if society had responded proportionally to the actual damage. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are portrayed in documentaries and on TV as far deadlier than they really were, and they still loom large in the public imagination in a really unhelpful way.You see it online, actually, quite a lot about the predicted death toll from Chernobyl, because, of course, there's no way of saying exactly which cases of cancer were caused by Chernobyl and which ones would've happened anyway. Sometimes you see estimates that are up in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. They are always based on a flawed scientific hypothesis called the linear no-threshold model that I go into in quite some detail in chapter eight of my book, which is all about the human health effects of exposure to radiation. This model is very contested in the literature. It's one of the most controversial areas of medical science, actually, the effects of radiation on the human body, and all of these massive numbers you see of the death toll from Chernobyl, they're all based on this really kind of clunky, flawed, contentious hypothesis. My reading of the literature is that there's very, very little physical evidence to support this particular hypothesis, but people take it and run. I don't know if it would be too far to accuse people of pushing a certain idea of Chernobyl, but it almost certainly vastly, vastly overestimates the effects.I think a large part of the reason of why this had such a massive impact on the public and politicians is this lingering sense of radiophobia that completely blight society. We've all seen it in the movies, in TV shows, even in music and computer games — radiation is constantly used as a tool to invoke fear and mistrust. It's this invisible, centerless, silent specter that's kind of there in the background: It means birth defects, it means cancers, it means ill health. We've all kind of grown up in this culture where the motif of radiation is bad news, it's dangerous, and that inevitably gets tied to people's sense of nuclear power. So when you get something like Three Mile Island, society's imagination and its preconceptions of radiation, it's just like a dry haystack waiting for a flint spark to land on it, and up it goes in flames and people's imaginations run away with them.The truth is that radiation, we're living in it all the time, it's completely inescapable because we're all living in a sea of background radiation. There's this amazing statistic that if you live within a couple of miles of a nuclear power station, the extra amount of radiation you're exposed to annually is about the same as eating a banana. Bananas are slightly radioactive because of the slight amount of potassium-40 that they naturally contain. Even in the wake of these nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, and more recently Fukushima, the amount of radiation that the public was exposed to barely registers and, in fact, is less than the background radiation in lots of places on the earth.Motivators for a revival (7:20)We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.You just suddenly reminded me of a story of when I was in college in the late 1980s, taking a class on the nuclear fuel cycle. You know it was an easy class because there was an ampersand in it. “Nuclear fuel cycle” would've been difficult. “Nuclear fuel cycle & the environment,” you knew it was not a difficult class.The man who taught it was a nuclear scientist and, at one point, he said that he would have no problem having a nuclear reactor in his backyard. This was post-Three Mile Island, post-Chernobyl, and the reaction among the students — they were just astounded that he would be willing to have this unbelievably dangerous facility in his backyard.We have this fear of nuclear power, and there's sort of an economic component, but now we're seeing what appears to be a nuclear renaissance. I don't think it's driven by fear of climate change, I think it's driven A) by fear that if you are afraid of climate change, just solar and wind aren't going to get you to where you want to be; and then B) we seem like we're going to need a lot of clean energy for all these AI data centers. So it really does seem to be a perfect storm after a half-century.And who knows what next. When I started writing Going Nuclear, the AI story hadn't broken yet, and so all of the electricity projections for our future demand, which, they range from doubling to tripling, we're going to need a lot of carbon-free electricity if we've got any hope of electrifying society whilst getting rid of fossil fuels. All of those estimates were underestimates because nobody saw AI coming.It's been very, very interesting just in the last six, 12 months seeing Big Tech in North America moving first on this. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have all either invested or actually placed orders for small modular reactors specifically to power their AI data centers. In some ways, they've kind of led the charge on this. They've moved faster than most nation states, although it is encouraging, actually, here in the UK, just a couple of weeks ago, the government announced that our new nuclear power station is definitely going ahead down in Sizewell in Suffolk in the south of England. That's a 3.2 gigawatt nuclear reactor, it's absolutely massive. But it's been really, really encouraging to see Big Tech in the private sector in North America take the situation into their own hands. If anyone's real about electricity demands and how reliable you need it, it's Big Tech with these data centers.I always think, go back five, 10 years, talk of AI was only on the niche subreddits and techie podcasts where people were talking about it. It broke into the mainstream all of a sudden. Who knows what is going to happen in the next five or 10 years. We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.In the US, at least, I don't think decarbonization alone is enough to win broad support for nuclear, since a big chunk of the country doesn't think we actually need to do that. But I think that pairing it with the promise of rapid AI-driven economic growth creates a stronger case.I tried to appeal to a really broad church in Going Nuclear because I really, really do believe that whether you are completely preoccupied by climate change and environmental issues or you're completely preoccupied by economic growth, and raising living, standards and all of that kind of thing, all the monetary side of things, nuclear is for you because if you solve the energy problem, you solve both problems at once. You solve the economic problem and the environmental problem.There's this really interesting relationship between GDP per head — which is obviously incredibly important in economic terms — and energy consumption per head, and it's basically a straight line relationship between the two. There are no rich countries that aren't also massive consumers of energy, so if you really, really care about the economy, you should really also be caring about energy consumption and providing energy abundance so people can go out and use that energy to create wealth and prosperity. Again, that's where nuclear comes in. You can use nuclear power to sate that massive energy demand that growing economies require.This podcast is very pro-wealth and prosperity, but I'll also say, if the nuclear dreams of the '60s where you had, in this country, what was the former Atomic Energy Commission expecting there to be 1000 nuclear reactors in this country by the year 2000, we're not having this conversation about climate change. It is amazing that what some people view as an existential crisis could have been prevented — by the United States and other western countries, at least — just making a different political decision.We would be spending all of our time talking about something else, and how nice would that be?For sure. I'm sure there'd be other existential crises to worry about.But for sure, we wouldn't be talking about climate change was anywhere near the volume or the sense of urgency as we are now if we would've carried on with the nuclear expansion that really took off in the '70s and the '80s. It would be something that would be coming our way in a couple of centuries.About nuclear waste . . . (12:41). . . a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup. I don't know if you've ever seen the television show For All Mankind?I haven't. So many people have recommended it to me.It's great. It's an alt-history that looks at what if the Space Race had never stopped. As a result, we had a much more tech-enthusiastic society, which included being much more pro-nuclear.Anyway, imagine if you are on a plane talking to the person next to you, and the topic of your book comes up, and the person says hey, I like energy, wealth, prosperity, but what are you going to do about the nuclear waste?That almost exact situation has happened, but on a train rather than an airplane. One of the cool things about uranium is just how much energy you can get from a very small amount of it. If typical person in a highly developed economy, say North America, Europe, something like that, if they produced all of their power over their entire lifetime from nuclear alone, so forget fossil fuels, forget wind and solar, a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup. You need a very small amount of uranium to power somebody's life, and the natural conclusion of that is you get a very small amount of waste for a lifetime of power. So in terms of the numbers, and the amount of nuclear waste, it's just not that much of a problem.However, I don't want to just try and trivialize it out of existence with some cool pithy statistics and some cool back-of-the-envelopes physics calculations because we still have to do something with the nuclear waste. This stuff is going to be radioactive for the best part of a million years. Thankfully, it's quite an easy argument to make because good old Finland, which is one of the most nuclear nations on the planet as a share of nuclear in its grid, has solved this problem. It has implemented — and it's actually working now — the world's first and currently only geological repository for nuclear waste. Their idea is essentially to bury it in impermeable bedrock and leave it there because, as with all radioactive objects, nuclear waste becomes less radioactive over time. The idea is that, in a million years, Finland's nuclear waste won't be nuclear waste anymore, it will just be waste. A million years sounds like a really long time to our ears, but it's actually —It does.It sounds like a long time, but it is the blink of an eye, geologically. So to a geologist, a million years just comes and goes straight away. So it's really not that difficult to keep nuclear waste safe underground on those sorts of timescales. However — and this is the really cool thing, and this is one of the arguments that I make in my book — there are actually technologies that we can use to recycle nuclear waste. It turns out that when you pull uranium out of a reactor, once it's been burned for a couple of years in a reactor, 95 percent of the atoms are still usable. You can still use them to generate nuclear power. So by throwing away nuclear waste when it's been through a nuclear reactor once, we're actually squandering like 95 percent of material that we're throwing away.The theory is this sort of the technology behind breeder reactors?That's exactly right, yes.What about the plutonium? People are worried about the plutonium!People are worried about the plutonium, but in a breeder reactor, you get rid of the plutonium because you split it into fission products, and fission products are still radioactive, but they have much shorter half-lives than plutonium. So rather than being radioactive for, say, a million years, they're only radioactive, really, for a couple of centuries, maybe 1000 years, which is a very, very different situation when you think about long-term storage.I read so many papers and memos from the '50s when these reactors were first being built and demonstrated, and they worked, by the way, they're actually quite easy to build, it just happened in a couple of years. Breeder reactors were really seen as the future of humanity's power demands. Forget traditional nuclear power stations that we all use at the moment, which are just kind of once through and then you throw away 95 percent of the energy at the end of it. These breeder reactors were really, really seen as the future.They never came to fruition because we discovered lots of uranium around the globe, and so the supply of uranium went up around the time that the nuclear power expansion around the world kind of seized up, so the uranium demand dropped as the supply increased, so the demand for these breeder reactors kind of petered out and fizzled out. But if we're really, really serious about the medium-term future of humanity when it comes to energy, abundance, and prosperity, we need to be taking a second look at these breeder reactors because there's enough uranium and thorium in the ground around the world now to power the world for almost 1000 years. After that, we'll have something else. Maybe we'll have nuclear fusion.Well, I hope it doesn't take a thousand years for nuclear fusion.Yes, me too.Not your mother's reactors (17:25)In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming.I don't think most people are aware of how much innovation has taken place around nuclear in the past few years, or even few decades. It's not just a climate change issue or that we need to power these data centers — the technology has vastly improved. There are newer, safer technologies, so we're not talking about 1975-style reactors.Even if it were the 1975-style reactors, that would be fine because they're pretty good and they have an absolutely impeccable safety record punctuated by a very small number of high-profile events such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. I'm not to count Three Mile Island on that list because nobody died, but you know what I mean.But the modern nuclear reactors are amazing. The ones that are coming out of France, the EPRs, the European Power Reactors, there are going to be two of those in the UK's new nuclear power station, and they've been designed to withstand an airplane flying into the side of them, so they're basically bomb-proof.As for these small modular reactors, that's getting people very excited, too. As their name suggests, they're small. How small is a reasonable question — the answer is as small as you want to go. These things are scalable, and I've seen designs for just one-megawatt reactors that could easily fit inside a shipping container. They could fit in the parking lots around the side of a data center, or in the basement even, all the way up to multi-hundred-megawatt reactors that could fit on a couple of tennis courts worth of land. But it's really the modular part that's the most interesting thing. That's the ‘M' and that's never been done before.Which really gets to the economics of the SMRs.It really does. The idea is you could build upwards of 90 percent of these reactors on a factory line. We know from the history of industrialization that as soon as you start mass producing things, the unit cost just plummets and the timescales shrink. No one has achieved that yet, though. There's a lot of hype around small modular reactors, and so it's kind of important not to get complacent and really keep our eye on the ultimate goal, which is mass-production and mass rapid deployment of nuclear power stations, crucially in the places where you need them the most, as well.We often think about just decarbonizing our electricity supply or decoupling our electricity supply from volatilities in the fossil fuel market, but it's about more than electricity, as well. We need heat for things like making steel, making the ammonia that feeds most people on the planet, food and drinks factories, car manufacturers, plants that rely on steam. You need heat, and thankfully, the primary energy from a nuclear reactor is heat. The electricity is secondary. We have to put effort into making that. The heat just kind of happens. So there's this idea that we could use the surplus heat from nuclear reactors to power industrial processes that are very, very difficult to decarbonize. Small modular reactors would be perfect for that because you could nestle them into the industrial centers that need the heat close by. So honestly, it is really our imaginations that are the limits with these small modular reactors.They've opened a couple of nuclear reactors down in Georgia here. The second one was a lot cheaper and faster to build because they had already learned a bunch of lessons building that first one, and it really gets at sort of that repeatability where every single reactor doesn't have to be this one-off bespoke project. That is not how it works in the world of business. How you get cheaper things is by building things over and over, you get very good at building them, and then you're able to turn these things out at scale. That has not been the economic situation with nuclear reactors, but hopefully with small modular reactors, or even if we just start building a lot of big advanced reactors, we'll get those economies of scale and hopefully the economic issue will then take care of itself.For sure, and it is exactly the same here in the UK. The last reactor that we connected to the grid was in 1995. I was 18 months old. I don't even know if I was fluent in speaking at 18 months old. I was really, really young. Our newest nuclear power station, Hinkley Point C, which is going to come online in the next couple of years, was hideously expensive. The uncharitable view of that is that it's just a complete farce and is just a complete embarrassment, but honestly, you've got to think about it: 1995, the last nuclear reactor in the UK, it was going to take a long time, it was going to be expensive, basically doing it from scratch. We had no supply chain. We didn't really have a workforce that had ever built a nuclear reactor before, and with this new reactor that just got announced a couple of weeks ago, the projected price is 20 percent cheaper, and it is still too expensive, it's still more expensive than it should be, but you're exactly right.By tapping into those economies of scale, the cost per nuclear reactor will fall, and France did this in the '70s and '80s. Their nuclear program is so amazing. France is still the most nuclear nation on the planet as a share of its total electricity. In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming. By the way, still today, all of those reactors are still working and they pay less than the European Union average for that electricity, so this idea that nuclear makes your electricity expensive is simply not true. They built 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, and they did them in parallel. It was just absolutely amazing. I would love to see a French-style nuclear rollout in all developed countries across the world. I think that would just be absolutely amazing.Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06)I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.What is your enthusiasm level or expectation about nuclear fusion? I can tell you that the Silicon Valley people I talk to are very positive. I know they're inherently very positive people, but they're very enthusiastic about the prospects over the next decade, if not sooner, of commercial fusion. How about you?It would be incredible. The last question that I was asked in my PhD interview 10 years ago was, “If you could solve one scientific or engineering problem, what would it be?” and my answer was nuclear fusion. And that would be the answer that I would give today. It just seems to me to be obviously the solution to the long-term energy needs of humanity. However, I'm less optimistic, perhaps, than the Silicon Valley crowd. The running joke, of course, is that it's always 40 years away and it recedes into the future at one year per year. So I would love to be proved wrong, but realistically — no one's even got it working in a prototype power station. That's before we even think about commercializing it and deploying it at scale. I really, really think that we're decades away, maybe even something like a century. I'd be surprised if it took longer than a century, actually. I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.Don't go to California with that attitude. I can tell you that even when I go there and I talk about AI, if I say that AI will do anything less than improve economic growth by a factor of 100, they just about throw me out over there. Let me just finish up by asking you this: Earlier, we mentioned Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. How resilient do you think this nuclear renaissance is to an accident?Even if we take the rate of accident over the last 70 years of nuclear power production and we maintain that same level of rate of accident, if you like, it's still one of the safest things that our species does, and everyone talks about the death toll from nuclear power, but nobody talks about the lives that it's already saved because of the fossil fuels, that it's displaced fossil fuels. They're so amazing in some ways, they're so convenient, they're so energy-dense, they've created the modern world as we all enjoy it in the developed world and as the developing world is heading towards it. But there are some really, really nasty consequences of fossil fuels, and whether or not you care about climate change, even the air pollution alone and the toll that that takes on human health is enough to want to phase them out. Nuclear power already is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and I read this really amazing paper that globally, it was something like between the '70s and the '90s, nuclear power saved about two million lives because of the fossil fuels that it displaced. That's, again, orders of magnitude more lives that have been lost as a consequence of nuclear power, mostly because of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even if the safety record of nuclear in the past stays the same and we forward-project that into the future, it's still a winning horse to bet on.If in the UK they've started up one new nuclear reactor in the past 30 years, right? How many would you guess will be started over the next 15 years?Four or five. Something like that, I think; although I don't know.Is that a significant number to you?It's not enough for my liking. I would like to see many, many more. Look at France. I know I keep going back to it, but it's such a brilliant example. If France hadn't done what they'd done in between the '70s and the '90s — 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, all of which are still working — it would be a much more difficult case to make because there would be no historical precedent for it. So, maybe predictably, I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a French-scale nuclear rollout, let's put it that way.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were PromisedMicro Reads▶ Economics* The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics - WSJ* AI Spending Is Propping Up the Economy, Right? It's Complicated. - Barron's* Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. 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How Smart Is It Now? - NYT* Google and IBM believe first workable quantum computer is in sight - FT* Why does Jeff Bezos keep buying launches from Elon Musk? - Ars* Beijing demands Chinese tech giants justify purchases of Nvidia's H20 chips - FT* An AI Replay of the Browser Wars, Bankrolled by Google - Bberg Opinion* Why Businesses Say Tariffs Have a Delayed Effect on Inflation - Richmond Fed* Lisa Su Runs AMD—and Is Out for Nvidia's Blood - Wired* Forget the White House Sideshow. Intel Must Decide What It Wants to Be. - WSJ* With Billions at Risk, Nvidia CEO Buys His Way Out of the Trade Battle - WSJ* Donald Trump's 100% tariff threat looms over chip sector despite relief for Apple - FT* Sam Altman challenges Elon Musk with plans for Neuralink rival - FT* Threads is nearing X's daily app users, new data shows - TechCrunch▶ Policy/Politics* Trump's China gamble - Axios* U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China - NYT* A Guaranteed Annual Income Flop - WSJ Opinion* Big Tech's next major political battle may already be brewing in your backyard - Politico* Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants - Nature* China has its own concerns about Nvidia H20 chips - FT* How the US Could Lose the AI Arms Race to China - Bberg Opinion* America's New AI Plan Is Great. There's Just One Problem. - Bberg Opinion* Trump, Seeking Friendlier Economic Data, Names New Statistics Chief - NYT* Trump's chief science adviser faces a storm of criticism: what's next? - Nature* Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project - NYT Opinion▶ AI/Digital* Can OpenAI's GPT-5 model live up to sky-high expectations? - FT* Google, Schmoogle: When to Ditch Web Search for Deep Research - WSJ* AI Won't Kill Software. It Will Simply Give It New Life. - Barron's* Chatbot Conversations Never End. That's a Problem for Autistic People. - WSJ* Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop' off Wikipedia - Wapo* Trump's Tariffs Won't Solve U.S. Chip-Making Dilemma - WSJ* GenAI Misinformation, Trust, and News Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment - NBER* GPT-5s Are Alive: Basic Facts, Benchmarks and the Model Card - Don't Worry About the Vase* What you may have missed about GPT-5 - MIT* Why A.I. Should Make Parents Rethink Posting Photos of Their Children Online - NYT* 21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work - NYT* AI and Jobs: The Final Word (Until the Next One) - EIG* These workers don't fear artificial intelligence. They're getting degrees in it. - Wapo* AI Gossip - Arxiv* Meet the early-adopter judges using AI - MIT* The GPT-5 rollout has been a big mess - Ars* A Humanoid Social Robot as a Teaching Assistant in the Classroom - Arxiv* OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt - Wired* Sam Altman and the whale - MIT* This is what happens when ChatGPT tries to write scripture - Vox* How AI could create the first one-person unicorn - Economist* AI Robs My Students of the Ability to Think - WSJ Opinion* Part I: Tricks or Traps? A Deep Dive into RL for LLM Reasoning - Arxiv▶ Biotech/Health* Scientists Are Finally Making Progress Against Alzheimer's - WSJ Opinion* The Dawn of a New Era in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Treatment - RealClearScience* RFK Jr. shifts $500 million from mRNA research to 'safer' vaccines. Do the data back that up? - Reason* How Older People Are Reaping Brain Benefits From New Tech - NYT* Did Disease Defeat Napoleon? - SciAm* Scientists Discover a Viral Cause of One of The World's Most Common Cancers - ScienceAlert* ‘A tipping point': An update from the frontiers of Alzheimer's disease research - Yale News* A new measure of health is revolutionising how we think about ageing - NS* First proof brain's powerhouses drive – and can reverse – dementia symptoms - NA* The Problem Is With Men's Sperm - NYT Opinion▶ Clean Energy/Climate* The Whole World Is Switching to EVs Faster Than You - Bberg Opinion* Misperceptions About Air Pollution: Implications for Willingness to Pay and Environmental Inequality - NBER* Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent - Ars* Data Center Energy Demand Will Double Over the Next Five Years - Apollo Academy* Why Did Air Conditioning Adoption Accelerate Faster Than Predicted? 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That doesn't mean we're doomed to it. - Vox* To Study Viking Seafarers, He Took 26 Voyages in a Traditional Boat - NYT* End is near for the landline-based service that got America online in the '90s - Wapo▶ Substacks/Newsletters* Who will actually profit from the AI boom? - Noahpinion* OpenAI GPT-5 One Unified System - AI Supremacy* Proportional representation is the solution to gerrymandering - Slow Boring* Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist - The Ecomodernist* How Many Jobs Depend on Exports? - Conversable Economist* ChatGPT Classic - Joshua Gans' Newsletter* Is Air Travel Getting Worse? - Maximum Progress▶ Social Media* On AI Progress - @daniel_271828* On AI Usage - @emollick* On Generative AI and Student Learning - @jburnmurdoch Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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Summer rewind: Greg Lindsay is an urban tech expert and a Senior Fellow at MIT. He's also a two-time Jeopardy champion and the only human to go undefeated against IBM's Watson. Greg joins thinkenergy to talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we manage, consume, and produce energy—from personal devices to provincial grids, its rapid growth to the rising energy demand from AI itself. Listen in to learn how AI impacts our energy systems and what it means individually and industry-wide. Related links: ●       Greg Lindsay website: https://greglindsay.org/ ●       Greg Lindsay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-lindsay-8b16952/ ●       International Energy Agency (IEA): https://www.iea.org/ ●       Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-cem-leed-ap-8b612114/ ●       Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en    To subscribe using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinkenergy/id1465129405   To subscribe using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7wFz7rdR8Gq3f2WOafjxpl   To subscribe on Libsyn: http://thinkenergy.libsyn.com/ --- Subscribe so you don't miss a video: https://www.youtube.com/user/hydroottawalimited   Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydroottawa   Stay in the know on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HydroOttawa   Keep up with the posts on X: https://twitter.com/thinkenergypod --- Transcript: Trevor Freeman  00:00 Hi everyone. Well, summer is here, and the think energy team is stepping back a bit to recharge and plan out some content for the next season. We hope all of you get some much needed downtime as well, but we aren't planning on leaving you hanging over the next few months, we will be re releasing some of our favorite episodes from the past year that we think really highlight innovation, sustainability and community. These episodes highlight the changing nature of how we use and manage energy, and the investments needed to expand, modernize and strengthen our grid in response to that. All of this driven by people and our changing needs and relationship to energy as we move forward into a cleaner, more electrified future, the energy transition, as we talk about many times on this show. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll be back with all new content in September. Until then, happy listening.   Trevor Freeman  00:55 Welcome to think energy, a podcast that dives into the fast changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at think energy at hydro ottawa.com, Hi everyone. Welcome back. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a term that you're likely seeing and hearing everywhere today, and with good reason, the effectiveness and efficiency of today's AI, along with the ever increasing applications and use cases mean that in just the past few years, AI went from being a little bit fringe, maybe a little bit theoretical to very real and likely touching everyone's day to day lives in ways that we don't even notice, and we're just at the beginning of what looks to be a wave of many different ways that AI will shape and influence our society and our lives in the years to come. And the world of energy is no different. AI has the potential to change how we manage energy at all levels, from our individual devices and homes and businesses all the way up to our grids at the local, provincial and even national and international levels. At the same time, AI is also a massive consumer of energy, and the proliferation of AI data centers is putting pressure on utilities for more and more power at an unprecedented pace. But before we dive into all that, I also think it will be helpful to define what AI is. After all, the term isn't new. Like me, many of our listeners may have grown up hearing about Skynet from Terminator, or how from 2001 A Space Odyssey, but those malignant, almost sentient versions of AI aren't really what we're talking about here today. And to help shed some light on both what AI is as well as what it can do and how it might influence the world of energy, my guest today is Greg Lindsay, to put it in technical jargon, Greg's bio is super neat, so I do want to take time to run through it properly. Greg is a non resident Senior Fellow of MIT's future urban collectives lab Arizona State University's threat casting lab and the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft center for strategy and security. Most recently, he was a 2022-2023 urban tech Fellow at Cornell Tech's Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at an urban scale. Previously, he was an urbanist in resident, which is a pretty cool title, at BMW minis urban tech accelerator, urban X, as well as the director of Applied Research at Montreal's new cities and Founding Director of Strategy at its mobility focused offshoot, co motion. He's advised such firms as Intel, Samsung, Audi, Hyundai, IKEA and Starbucks, along with numerous government entities such as 10 Downing Street, us, Department of Energy and NATO. And finally, and maybe coolest of all, Greg is also a two time Jeopardy champion and the only human to go undefeated against IBM's Watson. So on that note, Greg Lindsey, welcome to the show.   Greg Lindsay  04:14 Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Trevor,   Trevor Freeman  04:16 So Greg, we're here to talk about AI and the impacts that AI is going to have on energy, but AI is a bit of one of those buzzwords that we hear out there in a number of different spheres today. So let's start by setting the stage of what exactly we're talking about. So what do we mean when we say AI or artificial intelligence?   Speaker 1  04:37 Well, I'd say the first thing to keep in mind is that it is neither artificial nor intelligence. It's actually composites of many human hands making it. And of course, it's not truly intelligent either. I think there's at least two definitions for the layman's purposes. One is statistical machine learning. You know that is the previous generation of AI, we could say, doing deep, deep statistical analysis, looking for patterns fitting to. Patterns doing prediction. There's a great book, actually, by some ut professors at monk called prediction machines, which that was a great way of thinking about machine learning and sense of being able to do large scale prediction at scale. And that's how I imagine hydro, Ottawa and others are using this to model out network efficiencies and predictive maintenance and all these great uses. And then the newer, trendier version, of course, is large language models, your quads, your chat gpts, your others, which are based on transformer models, which is a whole series of work that many Canadians worked on, including Geoffrey Hinton and others. And this is what has produced the seemingly magical abilities to produce text and images on demand and large scale analysis. And that is the real power hungry beast that we think of as AI today.   Trevor Freeman  05:42 Right! So different types of AI. I just want to pick those apart a little bit. When you say machine learning, it's kind of being able to repetitively look at something or a set of data over and over and over again. And because it's a computer, it can do it, you know, 1000s or millions of times a second, and learn what, learn how to make decisions based on that. Is that fair to say?   Greg Lindsay  06:06 That's fair to say. And the thing about that is, is like you can train it on an output that you already know, large language models are just vomiting up large parts of pattern recognition, which, again, can feel like magic because of our own human brains doing it. But yeah, machine learning, you can, you know, you can train it to achieve outcomes. You can overfit the models where it like it's trained too much in the past, but, yeah, it's a large scale probabilistic prediction of things, which makes it so powerful for certain uses.   Trevor Freeman  06:26 Yeah, one of the neatest explanations or examples I've seen is, you know, you've got these language models where it seems like this AI, whether it's chat, DBT or whatever, is writing really well, like, you know, it's improving our writing. It's making things sound better. And it seems like it's got a brain behind it, but really, what it's doing is it's going out there saying, What have millions or billions of other people written like this? And how can I take the best things of that? And it can just do that really quickly, and it's learned that that model, so that's super helpful to understand what we're talking about here. So obviously, in your work, you look at the impact of AI on a number of different aspects of our world, our society. What we're talking about here today is particularly the impact of AI when it comes to energy. And I'd like to kind of bucketize our conversation a little bit today, and the first area I want to look at is, what will ai do when it comes to energy for the average Canadian? Let's say so in my home, in my business, how I move around? So I'll start with that. It's kind of a high level conversation. Let's start talking about the different ways that AI will impact you know that our average listener here?   Speaker 1  07:41 Um, yeah, I mean, we can get into a discussion about what it means for the average Canadian, and then also, of course, what it means for Canada in the world as well, because I just got back from South by Southwest in Austin, and, you know, for the second, third year in row, AI was on everyone's lips. But really it's the energy. Is the is the bottleneck. It's the forcing factor. Everyone talked about it, the fact that all the data centers we can get into that are going to be built in the direction of energy. So, so, yeah, energy holds the key to the puzzle there. But, um, you know, from the average gain standpoint, I mean, it's a question of, like, how will these tools actually play out, you know, inside of the companies that are using this, right? And that was a whole other discussion too. It's like, okay, we've been playing around with these tools for two, three years now, what do they actually use to deliver value of your large language model? So I've been saying this for 10 years. If you look at the older stuff you could start with, like smart thermostats, even look at the potential savings of this, of basically using machine learning to optimize, you know, grid optimize patterns of usage, understanding, you know, the ebbs and flows of the grid, and being able to, you know, basically send instructions back and forth. So you know there's stats. You know that, basically you know that you know you could save 10 to 25% of electricity bills. You know, based on this, you could reduce your heating bills by 10 to 15% again, it's basically using this at very large scales of the scale of hydro Ottawa, bigger, to understand this sort of pattern usage. But even then, like understanding like how weather forecasts change, and pulling that data back in to basically make fine tuning adjustments to the thermostats and things like that. So that's one stands out. And then, you know, we can think about longer term. I mean, yeah, lots have been lots has been done on imagining, like electric mobility, of course, huge in Canada, and what that's done to sort of change the overall energy mix virtual power plants. This is something that I've studied, and we've been writing about at Fast Company. At Fast Company beyond for 20 years, imagining not just, you know, the ability to basically, you know, feed renewable electricity back into the grid from people's solar or from whatever sources they have there, but the ability of utilities to basically go in and fine tune, to have that sort of demand shaping as well. And then I think the most interesting stuff, at least in demos, and also blockchain, which has had many theoretical uses, and I've got to see a real one. But one of the best theoretical ones was being able to create neighborhood scale utilities. Basically my cul de sac could have one, and we could trade clean electrons off of our solar panels through our batteries and home scale batteries, using Blockchain to basically balance this out. Yeah, so there's lots of potential, but yeah, it comes back to the notion of people want cheaper utility bills. I did this piece 10 years ago for the Atlantic Council on this we looked at a multi country survey, and the only reason anybody wanted a smart home, which they just were completely skeptical about, was to get those cheaper utility bills. So people pay for that.   Trevor Freeman  10:19 I think it's an important thing to remember, obviously, especially for like the nerds like me, who part of my driver is, I like that cool new tech. I like that thing that I can play with and see my data. But for most people, no matter what we're talking about here, when it comes to that next technology, the goal is make my life a little bit easier, give me more time or whatever, and make things cheaper. And I think especially in the energy space, people aren't putting solar panels on their roof because it looks great. And, yeah, maybe people do think it looks great, but they're putting it up there because they want cheaper electricity. And it's going to be the same when it comes to batteries. You know, there's that add on of resiliency and reliability, but at the end of the day, yeah, I want my bill to be cheaper. And what I'm hearing from you is some of the things we've already seen, like smart thermostats get better as AI gets better. Is that fair to say?   Greg Lindsay  11:12 Well, yeah, on the machine learning side, that you know, you get ever larger data points. This is why data is the coin of the realm. This is why there's a race to collect data on everything. Is why every business model is data collection and everything. Because, yes, not only can they get better, but of course, you know, you compile enough and eventually start finding statistical inferences you never meant to look for. And this is why I've been involved. Just as a side note, for example, of cities that have tried to implement their own data collection of electric scooters and eventually electric vehicles so they could understand these kinds of patterns, it's really the key to anything. And so it's that efficiency throughput which raises some really interesting philosophical questions, particularly about AI like, this is the whole discussion on deep seek. Like, if you make the models more efficient, do you have a Jevons paradox, which is the paradox of, like, the more energy you save through efficiency, the more you consume because you've made it cheaper. So what does this mean that you know that Canadian energy consumption is likely to go up the cleaner and cheaper the electrons get. It's one of those bedeviling sort of functions.   Trevor Freeman  12:06 Yeah interesting. That's definitely an interesting way of looking at it. And you referenced this earlier, and I will talk about this. But at the macro level, the amount of energy needed for these, you know, AI data centers in order to do all this stuff is, you know, we're seeing that explode.   Greg Lindsay  12:22 Yeah, I don't know that. Canadian statistics my fingertips, but I brought this up at Fast Company, like, you know, the IEA, I think International Energy Agency, you know, reported a 4.3% growth in the global electricity grid last year, and it's gonna be 4% this year. That does not sound like much. That is the equivalent of Japan. We're adding in Japan every year to the grid for at least the next two to three years. Wow. And that, you know, that's global South, air conditioning and other needs here too, but that the data centers on top is like the tip of the spear. It's changed all this consumption behavior, where now we're seeing mothballed coal plants and new plants and Three Mile Island come back online, as this race for locking up electrons, for, you know, the race to build God basically, the number of people in AI who think they're literally going to build weekly godlike intelligences, they'll, they won't stop at any expense. And so they will buy as much energy as they can get.   Trevor Freeman  13:09 Yeah, well, we'll get to that kind of grid side of things in a minute. Let's stay at the home first. So when I look at my house, we talked about smart thermostats. We're seeing more and more automation when it comes to our homes. You know, we can program our lights and our door locks and all this kind of stuff. What does ai do in order to make sure that stuff is contributing to efficiency? So I want to do all those fun things, but use the least amount of energy possible.   Greg Lindsay  13:38 Well, you know, I mean, there's, again, there's various metrics there to basically, sort of, you know, program your lights. And, you know, Nest is, you know, Google. Nest is an example of this one, too, in terms of basically learning your ebb and flow and then figuring out how to optimize it over the course of the day. So you can do that, you know, we've seen, again, like the home level. We've seen not only the growth in solar panels, but also in those sort of home battery integration. I was looking up that Tesla Powerwall was doing just great in Canada, until the last couple of months. I assume so, but I it's been, it's been heartening to see that, yeah, this sort of embrace of home energy integration, and so being able to level out, like, peak flow off the grid, so Right? Like being able to basically, at moments of peak demand, to basically draw on your own local resources and reduce that overall strain. So there's been interesting stuff there. But I want to focus for a moment on, like, terms of thinking about new uses. Because, you know, again, going back to how AI will influence the home and automation. You know, Jensen Wong of Nvidia has talked about how this will be the year of robotics. Google, Gemini just applied their models to robotics. There's startups like figure there's, again, Tesla with their optimists, and, yeah, there's a whole strain of thought that we're about to see, like home robotics, perhaps a dream from like, the 50s. I think this is a very Disney World esque Epcot Center, yeah, with this idea of jetsy, yeah, of having home robots doing work. You can see concept videos a figure like doing the actual vacuuming. I mean, we invented Roombas to this, but, but it also, I, you know, I've done a lot of work. Our own thinking around electric delivery vehicles. We could talk a lot about drones. We could talk a lot about the little robots that deliver meals on the sidewalk. There's a lot of money in business models about increasing access and people needing to maybe move less, to drive and do all these trips to bring it to them. And that's a form of home automation, and that's all batteries. That is all stuff off the grid too. So AI is that enable those things, these things that can think and move and fly and do stuff and do services on your behalf, and so people might find this huge new source of demand from that as well.   Trevor Freeman  15:29 Yeah, that's I hadn't really thought about the idea that all the all these sort of conveniences and being able to summon them to our homes cause us to move around less, which also impacts transportation, which is another area I kind of want to get to. And I know you've, you've talked a little bit about E mobility, so where do you see that going? And then, how does AI accelerate that transition, or accelerate things happening in that space?   Greg Lindsay  15:56 Yeah, I mean, I again, obviously the EV revolutions here Canada like, one of the epicenters Canada, Norway there, you know, that still has the vehicle rebates and things. So, yeah. I mean, we've seen, I'm here in Montreal, I think we've got, like, you know, 30 to 13% of sales is there, and we've got our 2035, mandate. So, yeah. I mean, you see this push, obviously, to harness all of Canada's clean, mostly hydro electricity, to do this, and, you know, reduce its dependence on fossil fuels for either, you know, Climate Change Politics reasons, but also just, you know, variable energy prices. So all of that matters. But, you know, I think the key to, like the electric mobility revolution, again, is, is how it's going to merge with AI and it's, you know, it's not going to just be the autonomous, self driving car, which is sort of like the horseless carriage of autonomy. It's gonna be all this other stuff, you know. My friend Dan Hill was in China, and he was thinking about like, electric scooters, you know. And I mentioned this to hydro Ottawa, like, the electric scooter is one of the leading causes of how we've taken internal combustion engine vehicles offline across the world, mostly in China, and put people on clean electric motors. What happens when you take those and you make those autonomous, and you do it with, like, deep seek and some cameras, and you sort of weld it all together so you could have a world of a lot more stuff in motion, and not just this world where we have to drive as much. And that, to me, is really exciting, because that changes, like urban patterns, development patterns, changes how you move around life, those kinds of things as well. That's that might be a little farther out, but, but, yeah, this sort of like this big push to build out domestic battery industries, to build charging points and the sort of infrastructure there, I think it's going to go in direction, but it doesn't look anything like, you know, a sedan or an SUV that just happens to be electric.   Trevor Freeman  17:33 I think that's a the step change is change the drive train of the existing vehicles we have, you know, an internal combustion to a battery. The exponential change is exactly what you're saying. It's rethinking this.   Greg Lindsay  17:47 Yeah, Ramesam and others have pointed out, I mean, again, like this, you know, it's, it's really funny to see this pushback on EVs, you know. I mean, I love a good, good roar of an internal combustion engine myself, but, but like, you know, Ramesam was an energy analyst, has pointed out that, like, you know, EVS were more cost competitive with ice cars in 2018 that's like, nearly a decade ago. And yeah, the efficiency of electric motors, particularly regenerative braking and everything, it just blows the cost curves away of ice though they will become the equivalent of keeping a thorough brat around your house kind of thing. Yeah, so, so yeah, it's just, it's that overall efficiency of the drive train. And that's the to me, the interesting thing about both electric motors, again, of autonomy is like, those are general purpose technologies. They get cheaper and smaller as they evolve under Moore's Law and other various laws, and so they get to apply to more and more stuff.   Trevor Freeman  18:32 Yeah. And then when you think about once, we kind of figure that out, and we're kind of already there, or close to it, if not already there, then it's opening the door to those other things you're talking about. Of, well, do we, does everybody need to have that car in their driveway? Are we rethinking how we're actually just doing transportation in general? And do we need a delivery truck? Or can it be delivery scooter? Or what does that look like?   Greg Lindsay  18:54 Well, we had a lot of those discussions for a long time, particularly in the mobility space, right? Like, and like ride hailing, you know, like, oh, you know, that was always the big pitch of an Uber is, you know, your car's parked in your driveway, like 94% of the time. You know, what happens if you're able to have no mobility? Well, we've had 15 years of Uber and these kinds of services, and we still have as many cars. But people are also taking this for mobility. It's additive. And I raised this question, this notion of like, it's just sort of more and more, more options, more availability, more access. Because the same thing seems to be going on with energy now too. You know, listeners been following along, like the conversation in Houston, you know, a week or two ago at Sarah week, like it's the whole notion of energy realism. And, you know, there's the new book out, more is more is more, which is all about the fact that we've never had an energy transition. We just kept piling up. Like the world burned more biomass last year than it did in 1900 it burned more coal last year than it did at the peak of coal. Like these ages don't really end. They just become this sort of strata as we keep piling energy up on top of it. And you know, I'm trying to sound the alarm that we won't have an energy transition. What that means for climate change? But similar thing, it's. This rebound effect, the Jevons paradox, named after Robert Stanley Jevons in his book The question of coal, where he noted the fact that, like, England was going to need more and more coal. So it's a sobering thought. But, like, I mean, you know, it's a glass half full, half empty in many ways, because the half full is like increasing technological options, increasing changes in lifestyle. You can live various ways you want, but, but, yeah, it's like, I don't know if any of it ever really goes away. We just get more and more stuff,   Trevor Freeman  20:22 Exactly, well. And, you know, to hear you talk about the robotics side of things, you know, looking at the home, yeah, more, definitely more. Okay, so we talked about kind of home automation. We've talked about transportation, how we get around. What about energy management? And I think about this at the we'll talk about the utility side again in a little bit. But, you know, at my house, or for my own personal use in my life, what is the role of, like, sort of machine learning and AI, when it comes to just helping me manage my own energy better and make better decisions when it comes to energy? ,   Greg Lindsay  20:57 Yeah, I mean, this is where it like comes in again. And you know, I'm less and less of an expert here, but I've been following this sort of discourse evolve. And right? It's the idea of, you know, yeah, create, create. This the set of tools in your home, whether it's solar panels or batteries or, you know, or Two Way Direct, bi directional to the grid, however it works. And, yeah, and people, you know, given this option of savings, and perhaps, you know, other marketing messages there to curtail behavior. You know? I mean, I think the short answer the question is, like, it's an app people want, an app that tell them basically how to increase the efficiency of their house or how to do this. And I should note that like, this has like been the this is the long term insight when it comes to like energy and the clean tech revolution. Like my Emery Levin says this great line, which I've always loved, which is, people don't want energy. They want hot showers and cold beer. And, you know, how do you, how do you deliver those things through any combination of sticks and carrots, basically like that. So, So, hence, why? Like, again, like, you know, you know, power walls, you know, and, and, and, you know, other sort of AI controlled batteries here that basically just sort of smooth out to create the sort of optimal flow of electrons into your house, whether that's coming drive directly off the grid or whether it's coming out of your backup and then recharging that the time, you know, I mean, the surveys show, like, more than half of Canadians are interested in this stuff, you know, they don't really know. I've got one set here, like, yeah, 61% are interested in home energy tech, but only 27 understand, 27% understand how to optimize them. So, yeah. So people need, I think, perhaps, more help in handing that over. And obviously, what's exciting for the, you know, the utility level is, like, you know, again, aggregate all that individual behavior together and you get more models that, hope you sort of model this out, you know, at both greater scale and ever more fine grained granularity there. So, yeah, exactly. So I think it's really interesting, you know, I don't know, like, you know, people have gamified it. What was it? I think I saw, like, what is it? The affordability fund trust tried to basically gamify AI energy apps, and it created various savings there. But a lot of this is gonna be like, as a combination like UX design and incentives design and offering this to people too, about, like, why you should want this and money's one reason, but maybe there's others.   Trevor Freeman  22:56 Yeah, and we talk about in kind of the utility sphere, we talk about how customers, they don't want all the data, and then have to go make their own decisions. They want those decisions to be made for them, and they want to say, look, I want to have you tell me the best rate plan to be on. I want to have you automatically switch me to the best rate plan when my consumption patterns change and my behavior chat patterns change. That doesn't exist today, but sort of that fast decision making that AI brings will let that become a reality sometime in the future,   Greg Lindsay  23:29 And also in theory, this is where LLMs come into play. Is like, you know, to me, what excites me the most about that is the first time, like having a true natural language interface, like having being able to converse with an, you know, an AI, let's hopefully not chat bot. I think we're moving out on chat bots, but some sort of sort of instantiation of an AI to be like, what plan should I be on? Can you tell me what my behavior is here and actually having some sort of real language conversation with it? Not decision trees, not event statements, not chat bots.   Trevor Freeman  23:54 Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we've kind of teased around this idea of looking at the utility levels, obviously, at hydro Ottawa, you referenced this just a minute ago. We look at all these individual cases, every home that has home automation or solar storage, and we want to aggregate that and understand what, what can we do to help manage the grid, help manage all these new energy needs, shift things around. So let's talk a little bit about the role that AI can play at the utility scale in helping us manage the grid.   Greg Lindsay  24:28 All right? Well, yeah, there's couple ways to approach it. So one, of course, is like, let's go back to, like, smart meters, right? Like, and this is where I don't know how many hydro Ottawa has, but I think, like, BC Hydro has like, 2 million of them, sometimes they get politicized, because, again, this gets back to this question of, like, just, just how much nanny state you want. But, you know, you know, when you reach the millions, like, yeah, you're able to get that sort of, you know, obviously real time, real time usage, real time understanding. And again, if you can do that sort of grid management piece where you can then push back, it's visual game changer. But, but yeah. I mean, you know, yeah, be. See hydro is pulling in. I think I read like, like, basically 200 million data points a day. So that's a lot to train various models on. And, you know, I don't know exactly the kind of savings they have, but you can imagine there, whether it's, you know, them, or Toronto Hydro, or hydro Ottawa and others creating all these monitoring points. And again, this is the thing that bedells me, by the way, just philosophically about modern life, the notion of like, but I don't want you to be collecting data off me at all times, but look at what you can do if you do It's that constant push pull of some sort of combination of privacy and agency, and then just the notion of like statistics, but, but there you are, but, but, yeah, but at the grid level, then I mean, like, yeah. I mean, you can sort of do the same thing where, like, you know, I mean, predictive maintenance is the obvious one, right? I have been writing about this for large enterprise software companies for 20 years, about building these data points, modeling out the lifetime of various important pieces equipment, making sure you replace them before you have downtime and terrible things happen. I mean, as we're as we're discussing this, look at poor Heathrow Airport. I am so glad I'm not flying today, electrical substation blowing out two days of the world's most important hub offline. So that's where predictive maintenance comes in from there. And, yeah, I mean, I, you know, I again, you know, modeling out, you know, energy flow to prevent grid outages, whether that's, you know, the ice storm here in Quebec a couple years ago. What was that? April 23 I think it was, yeah, coming up in two years. Or our last ice storm, we're not the big one, but that one, you know, where we had big downtime across the grid, like basically monitoring that and then I think the other big one for AI is like, Yeah, is this, this notion of having some sort of decision support as well, too, and sense of, you know, providing scenarios and modeling out at scale the potential of it? And I don't think, I don't know about this in a grid case, but the most interesting piece I wrote for Fast Company 20 years ago was an example, ago was an example of this, which was a fledgling air taxi startup, but they were combining an agent based model, so using primitive AI to create simple rules for individual agents and build a model of how they would behave, which you can create much more complex models. Now we could talk about agents and then marrying that to this kind of predictive maintenance and operations piece, and marrying the two together. And at that point, you could have a company that didn't exist, but that could basically model itself in real time every day in the life of what it is. You can create millions and millions and millions of Monte Carlo operations. And I think that's where perhaps both sides of AI come together truly like the large language models and agents, and then the predictive machine learning. And you could basically hydro or others, could build this sort of deep time machine where you can model out all of these scenarios, millions and millions of years worth, to understand how it flows and contingencies as well. And that's where it sort of comes up. So basically something happens. And like, not only do you have a set of plans, you have an AI that has done a million sets of these plans, and can imagine potential next steps of this, or where to deploy resources. And I think in general, that's like the most powerful use of this, going back to prediction machines and just being able to really model time in a way that we've never had that capability before. And so you probably imagine the use is better than I.   Trevor Freeman  27:58 Oh man, it's super fascinating, and it's timely. We've gone through the last little while at hydro Ottawa, an exercise of updating our playbook for emergencies. So when there are outages, what kind of outage? What's the sort of, what are the trigger points to go from, you know, what we call a level one to a level two to level three. But all of this is sort of like people hours that are going into that, and we're thinking through these scenarios, and we've got a handful of them, and you're just kind of making me think, well, yeah, what if we were able to model that out? And you bring up this concept of agents, let's tease into that a little bit explain what you mean when you're talking about agents.   Greg Lindsay  28:36 Yeah, so agentic systems, as the term of art is, AI instantiations that have some level of autonomy. And the archetypal example of this is the Stanford Smallville experiment, where they took basically a dozen large language models and they gave it an architecture where they could give it a little bit of backstory, ruminate on it, basically reflect, think, decide, and then act. And in this case, they used it to plan a Valentine's Day party. So they played out real time, and the LLM agents, like, even played matchmaker. They organized the party, they sent out invitations, they did these sorts of things. Was very cute. They put it out open source, and like, three weeks later, another team of researchers basically put them to work writing software programs. So you can see they organized their own workflow. They made their own decisions. There was a CTO. They fact check their own work. And this is evolving into this grand vision of, like, 1000s, millions of agents, just like, just like you spin up today an instance of Amazon Web Services to, like, host something in the cloud. You're going to spin up an agent Nvidia has talked about doing with healthcare and others. So again, coming back to like, the energy implications of that, because it changes the whole pattern. Instead of huge training runs requiring giant data centers. You know, it's these agents who are making all these calls and doing more stuff at the edge, but, um, but yeah, in this case, it's the notion of, you know, what can you put the agents to work doing? And I bring this up again, back to, like, predictive maintenance, or for hydro Ottawa, there's another amazing paper called virtual in real life. And I chatted with one of the principal authors. It created. A half dozen agents who could play tour guide, who could direct you to a coffee shop, who do these sorts of things, but they weren't doing it in a virtual world. They were doing it in the real one. And to do it in the real world, you took the agent, you gave them a machine vision capability, so added that model so they could recognize objects, and then you set them loose inside a digital twin of the world, in this case, something very simple, Google Street View. And so in the paper, they could go into like New York Central Park, and they could count every park bench and every waste bin and do it in seconds and be 99% accurate. And so agents were monitoring the landscape. Everything's up, because you can imagine this in the real world too, that we're going to have all the time. AIS roaming the world, roaming these virtual maps, these digital twins that we build for them and constantly refresh from them, from camera data, from sensor data, from other stuff, and tell us what this is. And again, to me, it's really exciting, because that's finally like an operating system for the internet of things that makes sense, that's not so hardwired that you can ask agents, can you go out and look for this for me? Can you report back on this vital system for me? And they will be able to hook into all of these kinds of representations of real time data where they're emerging from, and give you aggregated reports on this one. And so, you know, I think we have more visibility in real time into the real world than we've ever had before.   Trevor Freeman  31:13 Yeah, I want to, I want to connect a few dots here for our listeners. So bear with me for a second. Greg. So for our listeners, there was a podcast episode we did about a year ago on our grid modernization roadmap, and we talked about one of the things we're doing with grid modernization at hydro Ottawa and utilities everywhere doing this is increasing the sensor data from our grid. So we're, you know, right now, we've got visibility sort of to our station level, sometimes one level down to some switches. But in the future, we'll have sensors everywhere on our grid, every switch, every device on our grid, will have a sensor gathering data. Obviously, you know, like you said earlier, millions and hundreds of millions of data points every second coming in. No human can kind of make decisions on that, and what you're describing is, so now we've got all this data points, we've got a network of information out there, and you could create this agent to say, Okay, you are. You're my transformer agent. Go out there and have a look at the run temperature of every transformer on the network, and tell me where the anomalies are, which ones are running a half a degree or two degrees warmer than they should be, and report back. And now I know hydro Ottawa, that the controller, the person sitting in the room, knows, Hey, we should probably go roll a truck and check on that transformer, because maybe it's getting end of life. Maybe it's about to go and you can do that across the entire grid. That's really fascinating,   Greg Lindsay  32:41 And it's really powerful, because, I mean, again, these conversations 20 years ago at IoT, you know you're going to have statistical triggers, and you would aggregate these data coming off this, and there was a lot of discussion there, but it was still very, like hardwired, and still very Yeah, I mean, I mean very probabilistic, I guess, for a word that went with agents like, yeah, you've now created an actual thing that can watch those numbers and they can aggregate from other systems. I mean, lots, lots of potential there hasn't quite been realized, but it's really exciting stuff. And this is, of course, where that whole direction of the industry is flowing. It's on everyone's lips, agents.   Trevor Freeman  33:12 Yeah. Another term you mentioned just a little bit ago that I want you to explain is a digital twin. So tell us what a digital twin is.   Greg Lindsay  33:20 So a digital twin is, well, the matrix. Perhaps you could say something like this for listeners of a certain age, but the digital twin is the idea of creating a model of a piece of equipment, of a city, of the world, of a system. And it is, importantly, it's physics based. It's ideally meant to represent and capture the real time performance of the physical object it's based on, and in this digital representation, when something happens in the physical incarnation of it, it triggers a corresponding change in state in the digital twin, and then vice versa. In theory, you know, you could have feedback loops, again, a lot of IoT stuff here, if you make changes virtually, you know, perhaps it would cause a change in behavior of the system or equipment, and the scales can change from, you know, factory equipment. Siemens, for example, does a lot of digital twin work on this. You know, SAP, big, big software companies have thought about this. But the really crazy stuff is, like, what Nvidia is proposing. So first they started with a digital twin. They very modestly called earth two, where they were going to model all the weather and climate systems of the planet down to like the block level. There's a great demo of like Jensen Wong walking you through a hurricane, typhoons striking the Taipei, 101, and how, how the wind currents are affecting the various buildings there, and how they would change that more recently, what Nvidia is doing now is, but they just at their big tech investor day, they just partner with General Motors and others to basically do autonomous cars. And what's crucial about it, they're going to train all those autonomous vehicles in an NVIDIA built digital twin in a matrix that will act, that will be populated by agents that will act like people, people ish, and they will be able to run millions of years of autonomous vehicle training in this and this is how they plan to catch up to. Waymo or, you know, if Tesla's robotaxis are ever real kind of thing, you know, Waymo built hardwired like trained on real world streets, and that's why they can only operate in certain operating domain environments. Nvidia is gambling that with large language models and transformer models combined with digital twins, you can do these huge leapfrog effects where you can basically train all sorts of synthetic agents in real world behavior that you have modeled inside the machine. So again, that's the kind, that's exactly the kind of, you know, environment that you're going to train, you know, your your grid of the future on for modeling out all your contingency scenarios.   Trevor Freeman  35:31 Yeah, again, you know, for to bring this to the to our context, a couple of years ago, we had our the direcco. It's a big, massive windstorm that was one of the most damaging storms that we've had in Ottawa's history, and we've made some improvements since then, and we've actually had some great performance since then. Imagine if we could model that derecho hitting our grid from a couple different directions and figure out, well, which lines are more vulnerable to wind speeds, which lines are more vulnerable to flying debris and trees, and then go address that and do something with that, without having to wait for that storm to hit. You know, once in a decade or longer, the other use case that we've talked about on this one is just modeling what's happening underground. So, you know, in an urban environments like Ottawa, like Montreal, where you are, there's tons of infrastructure under the ground, sewer pipes, water pipes, gas lines, electrical lines, and every time the city wants to go and dig up a road and replace that road, replace that sewer, they have to know what's underground. We want to know what's underground there, because our infrastructure is under there. As the electric utility. Imagine if you had a model where you can it's not just a map. You can actually see what's happening underground and determine what makes sense to go where, and model out these different scenarios of if we underground this line or that line there. So lots of interesting things when it comes to a digital twin. The digital twin and Agent combination is really interesting as well, and setting those agents loose on a model that they can play with and understand and learn from. So talk a little bit about.   Greg Lindsay  37:11 that. Yeah. Well, there's a couple interesting implications just the underground, you know, equipment there. One is interesting because in addition to, like, you know, you know, having captured that data through mapping and other stuff there, and having agents that could talk about it. So, you know, next you can imagine, you know, I've done some work with augmented reality XR. This is sort of what we're seeing again, you know, meta Orion has shown off their concept. Google's brought back Android XR. Meta Ray Bans are kind of an example of this. But that's where this data will come from, right? It's gonna be people wearing these wearables in the world, capturing all this camera data and others that's gonna be fed into these digital twins to refresh them. Meta has a particularly scary demo where you know where you the user, the wearer leaves their keys on their coffee table and asks metas, AI, where their coffee where their keys are, and it knows where they are. It tells them and goes back and shows them some data about it. I'm like, well, to do that, meta has to have a complete have a complete real time map of your entire house. What could go wrong. And that's what all these companies aspire to of reality. So, but yeah, you can imagine, you know, you can imagine a worker. And I've worked with a startup out of urban X, a Canada startup, Canadian startup called context steer. And you know, is the idea of having real time instructions and knowledge manuals available to workers, particularly predictive maintenance workers and line workers. So you can imagine a technician dispatched to deal with this cut in the pavement and being able to see with XR and overlay of like, what's actually under there from the digital twin, having an AI basically interface with what's sort of the work order, and basically be your assistant that can help you walk you through it, in case, you know, you run into some sort of complication there, hopefully that won't be, you know, become like, turn, turn by turn, directions for life that gets into, like, some of the questions about what we wanted out of our workforce. But there's some really interesting combinations of those things, of like, you know, yeah, mapping a world for AIS, ais that can understand it, that could ask questions in it, that can go probe it, that can give you advice on what to do in it. All those things are very close for good and for bad.   Trevor Freeman  39:03 You kind of touched on my next question here is, how do we make sure this is all in the for good or mostly in the for good category, and not the for bad category you talk in one of the papers that you wrote about, you know, AI and augmented reality in particular, really expanding the attack surface for malicious actors. So we're creating more opportunities for whatever the case may be, if it's hacking or if it's malware, or if it's just, you know, people that are up to nefarious things. How do we protect against that? How do we make sure that our systems are safe that the users of our system. So in our case, our customers, their data is safe, their the grid is safe. How do we make sure that?   Greg Lindsay  39:49 Well, the very short version is, whatever we're spending on cybersecurity, we're not spending enough. And honestly, like everybody who is no longer learning to code, because we can be a quad or ChatGPT to do it, I. Is probably there should be a whole campaign to repurpose a big chunk of tech workers into cybersecurity, into locking down these systems, into training ethical systems. There's a lot of work to be done there. But yeah, that's been the theme for you know that I've seen for 10 years. So that paper I mentioned about sort of smart homes, the Internet of Things, and why people would want a smart home? Well, yeah, the reason people were skeptical is because they saw it as basically a giant attack vector. My favorite saying about this is, is, there's a famous Arthur C Clarke quote that you know, any sufficiently advanced technology is magic Tobias Ravel, who works at Arup now does their head of foresight has this great line, any sufficiently advanced hacking will feel like a haunting meaning. If you're in a smart home that's been hacked, it will feel like you're living in a haunted house. Lights will flicker on and off, and systems will turn and go haywire. It'll be like you're living with a possessed house. And that's true of cities or any other systems. So we need to do a lot of work on just sort of like locking that down and securing that data, and that is, you know, we identified, then it has to go all the way up and down the supply chain, like you have to make sure that there is, you know, a chain of custody going back to when components are made, because a lot of the attacks on nest, for example. I mean, you want to take over a Google nest, take it off the wall and screw the back out of it, which is a good thing. It's not that many people are prying open our thermostats, but yeah, if you can get your hands on it, you can do a lot of these systems, and you can do it earlier in the supply chain and sorts of infected pieces and things. So there's a lot to be done there. And then, yeah, and then, yeah, and then there's just a question of, you know, making sure that the AIs are ethically trained and reinforced. And, you know, a few people want to listeners, want to scare themselves. You can go out and read some of the stuff leaking out of anthropic and others and make clot of, you know, models that are trying to hide their own alignments and trying to, like, basically copy themselves. Again, I don't believe that anything things are alive or intelligent, but they exhibit these behaviors as part of the probabilistic that's kind of scary. So there's a lot to be done there. But yeah, we worked on this, the group that I do foresight with Arizona State University threat casting lab. We've done some work for the Secret Service and for NATO and, yeah, there'll be, you know, large scale hackings on infrastructure. Basically the equivalent can be the equivalent can be the equivalent to a weapons of mass destruction attack. We saw how Russia targeted in 2014 the Ukrainian grid and hacked their nuclear plans. This is essential infrastructure more important than ever, giving global geopolitics say the least, so that needs to be under consideration. And I don't know, did I scare you enough yet? What are the things we've talked through here that, say the least about, you know, people being, you know, tricked and incepted by their AI girlfriends, boyfriends. You know people who are trying to AI companions. I can't possibly imagine what could go wrong there.   Trevor Freeman  42:29 I mean, it's just like, you know, I don't know if this is 15 or 20, or maybe even 25 years ago now, like, it requires a whole new level of understanding when we went from a completely analog world to a digital world and living online, and people, I would hope, to some degree, learned to be skeptical of things on the internet and learned that this is that next level. We now need to learn the right way of interacting with this stuff. And as you mentioned, building the sort of ethical code and ethical guidelines into these language models into the AI. Learning is pretty critical for our listeners. We do have a podcast episode on cybersecurity. I encourage you to go listen to it and reassure yourself that, yes, we are thinking about this stuff. And thanks, Greg, you've given us lots more to think about in that area as well. When it comes to again, looking back at utilities and managing the grid, one thing we're going to see, and we've talked a lot about this on the show, is a lot more distributed generation. So we're, you know, the days of just the central, large scale generation, long transmission lines that being the only generation on the grid. Those days are ending. We're going to see more distributed generations, solar panels on roofs, batteries. How does AI help a utility manage those better, interact with those better get more value out of those things?   Greg Lindsay  43:51 I guess that's sort of like an extension of some of the trends I was talking about earlier, which is the notion of, like, being able to model complex systems. I mean, that's effectively it, right, like you've got an increasingly complex grid with complex interplays between it, you know, figuring out how to basically based on real world performance, based on what you're able to determine about where there are correlations and codependencies in the grid, where point where choke points could emerge, where overloading could happen, and then, yeah, basically, sort of building that predictive system to Basically, sort of look for what kind of complex emergent behavior comes out of as you keep adding to it and and, you know, not just, you know, based on, you know, real world behavior, but being able to dial that up to 11, so to speak, and sort of imagine sort of these scenarios, or imagine, you know, what, what sort of long term scenarios look like in terms of, like, what the mix, how the mix changes, how the geography changes, all those sorts of things. So, yeah, I don't know how that plays out in the short term there, but it's this combination, like I'm imagining, you know, all these different components playing SimCity for real, if one will.   Trevor Freeman  44:50 And being able to do it millions and millions and millions of times in a row, to learn every possible iteration and every possible thing that might happen. Very cool. Okay. So last kind of area I want to touch on you did mention this at the beginning is the the overall power implications of of AI, of these massive data centers, obviously, at the utility, that's something we are all too keenly aware of. You know, the stat that that I find really interesting is a normal Google Search compared to, let's call it a chat GPT search. That chat GPT search, or decision making, requires 10 times the amount of energy as that just normal, you know, Google Search looking out from a database. Do you see this trend? I don't know if it's a trend. Do you see this continuing like AI is just going to use more power to do its decision making, or will we start to see more efficiencies there? And the data centers will get better at doing what they do with less energy. What is the what does the future look like in that sector?   Greg Lindsay  45:55 All the above. It's more, is more, is more! Is the trend, as far as I can see, and every decision maker who's involved in it. And again, Jensen Wong brought this up at the big Nvidia Conference. That basically he sees the only constraint on this continuing is availability of energy supplies keep it going and South by Southwest. And in some other conversations I've had with bandwidth companies, telcos, like laying 20 lumen technologies, United States is laying 20,000 new miles of fiber optic cables. They've bought 10% of Corning's total fiber optic output for the next couple of years. And their customers are the hyperscalers. They're, they're and they're rewiring the grid. That's why, I think it's interesting. This has something, of course, for thinking about utilities, is, you know, the point to point Internet of packet switching and like laying down these big fiber routes, which is why all the big data centers United States, the majority of them, are in north of them are in Northern Virginia, is because it goes back to the network hub there. Well, lumen is now wiring this like basically this giant fabric, this patchwork, which can connect data center to data center, and AI to AI and cloud to cloud, and creating this entirely new environment of how they are all directly connected to each other through some of this dedicated fiber. And so you can see how this whole pattern is changing. And you know, the same people are telling me that, like, yeah, the where they're going to build this fiber, which they wouldn't tell me exactly where, because it's very tradable, proprietary information, but, um, but it's following the energy supplies. It's following the energy corridors to the American Southwest, where there's solar and wind in Texas, where you can get natural gas, where you can get all these things. It will follow there. And I of course, assume the same is true in Canada as we build out our own sovereign data center capacity for this. So even, like deep seek, for example, you know, which is, of course, the hyper efficient Chinese model that spooked the markets back in January. Like, what do you mean? We don't need a trillion dollars in capex? Well, everyone's quite confident, including again, Jensen Wong and everybody else that, yeah, the more efficient models will increase this usage. That Jevons paradox will play out once again, and we'll see ever more of it. To me, the question is, is like as how it changes? And of course, you know, you know, this is a bubble. Let's, let's, let's be clear, data centers are a bubble, just like railroads in 1840 were a bubble. And there will be a bust, like not everyone's investments will pencil out that infrastructure will remain maybe it'll get cheaper. We find new uses for it, but it will, it will eventually bust at some point and that's what, to me, is interesting about like deep seeking, more efficient models. Is who's going to make the wrong investments in the wrong places at the wrong time? But you know, we will see as it gathers force and agents, as I mentioned. You know, they don't require, as much, you know, these monstrous training runs at City sized data centers. You know, meta wanted to spend $200 billion on a single complex, the open AI, Microsoft, Stargate, $500 billion Oracle's. Larry Ellison said that $100 billion is table stakes, which is just crazy to think about. And, you know, he's permitting three nukes on site. So there you go. I mean, it'll be fascinating to see if we have a new generation of private, private generation, right, like, which is like harkening all the way back to, you know, the early electrical grid and companies creating their own power plants on site, kind of stuff. Nicholas Carr wrote a good book about that one, about how we could see from the early electrical grid how the cloud played out. They played out very similarly. The AI cloud seems to be playing out a bit differently. So, so, yeah, I imagine that as well, but, but, yeah, well, inference happen at the edge. We need to have more distributed generation, because you're gonna have AI agents that are going to be spending more time at the point of request, whether that's a laptop or your phone or a light post or your autonomous vehicle, and it's going to need more of that generation and charging at the edge. That, to me, is the really interesting question. Like, you know, when these current generation models hit their limits, and just like with Moore's law, like, you know, you have to figure out other efficiencies in designing chips or designing AIS, how will that change the relationship to the grid? And I don't think anyone knows quite for sure yet, which is why they're just racing to lock up as many long term contracts as they possibly can just get it all, core to the market.   Trevor Freeman  49:39 Yeah, it's just another example, something that comes up in a lot of different topics that we cover on this show. Everything, obviously, is always related to the energy transition. But the idea that the energy transition is really it's not just changing fuel sources, like we talked about earlier. It's not just going from internal combustion to a battery. It's rethinking the. Relationship with energy, and it's rethinking how we do things. And, yeah, you bring up, like, more private, massive generation to deal with these things. So really, that whole relationship with energy is on scale to change. Greg, this has been a really interesting conversation. I really appreciate it. Lots to pack into this short bit of time here. We always kind of wrap up our conversations with a series of questions to our guests. So I'm going to fire those at you here. And this first one, I'm sure you've got lots of different examples here, so feel free to give more than one. What is a book that you've read that you think everybody should read?   Greg Lindsay  50:35 The first one that comes to mind is actually William Gibson's Neuromancer, which is which gave the world the notion of cyberspace and so many concepts. But I think about it a lot today. William Gibson, Vancouver based author, about how much in that book is something really think about. There is a digital twin in it, an agent called the Dixie flatline. It's like a former program where they cloned a digital twin of him. I've actually met an engineering company, Thornton Thomas Eddie that built a digital twin of one of their former top experts. So like that became real. Of course, the matrix is becoming real the Turing police. Yeah, there's a whole thing in there where there's cops to make sure that AIS don't get smarter. I've been thinking a lot about, do we need Turing police? The EU will probably create them. And so that's something where you know the proof, again, of like science fiction, its ability in world building to really make you think about these implications and help for contingency planning. A lot of foresight experts I work with think about sci fi, and we use sci fi for exactly that reason. So go read some classic cyberpunk, everybody.   Trevor Freeman  51:32 Awesome. So same question. But what's a movie or a show that you think everybody should take a look at?   Greg Lindsay  51:38 I recently watched the watch the matrix with ideas, which is fun to think about, where the villains are, agents that villains are agents. That's funny how that terms come back around. But the other one was thinking about the New Yorker recently read a piece on global demographics and the fact that, you know, globally, less and less children. And it made several references to Alfonso Quons, Children of Men from 2006 which is, sadly, probably the most prescient film of the 21st Century. Again, a classic to watch, about imagining in a world where we don't where you where you lose faith in the future, what happens, and a world that is not having children as a world that's losing faith in its own future. So that's always haunted me.   Trevor Freeman  52:12 It's funny both of those movies. So I've got kids as they get, you know, a little bit older, a little bit older, we start introducing more and more movies. And I've got this list of movies that are just, you know, impactful for my own adolescent years and growing up. And both matrix and Children of Men are on that list of really good movies that I just need my kids to get a little bit older, and then I'm excited to watch with them. If someone offered you a free round trip flight anywhere in the world, where would you go?   Greg Lindsay  52:40 I would go to Venice, Italy for the Architecture Biennale, which I will be on a plane in May, going to anyway. And the theme this year is intelligence, artificial, natural and collective. So it should be interesting to see the world's brightest architects. Let's see what we got. But yeah, Venice, every time, my favorite city in the world.   Trevor Freeman  52:58 Yeah, it's pretty wonderful. Who is someone that you admire?   Greg Lindsay  53:01 Great question.

Electricity demand is booming, and it’s not just because of artificial intelligence. So much so that many are ready to revisit the idea of nuclear power. Microsoft signed a $16 billion deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power their data centres for the next 20 years. But developed countries haven’t built more than a handful of new reactors in decades. When they have tried, the cost of those nuclear plants and the time to build them has been extraordinary. Will this renewed interest yield different results? Nuclear scientist and partner at venture capital firm DCVC Rachel Slaybaugh joined Akshat Rathi on Zero to discuss how these new dreams of growing nuclear power can become a reality. Explore further: Nuclear Fusion Is Unlimited Clean Power. So When Can We Have It? Long-Unloved Nuclear Power Is Staging a Comeback UK Inks Investment Deals on £38 Billion Nuclear Plant Three Mile Island's Nuclear Reboot Moves Into the Fast Lane in Win for Microsoft Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Siobhan Wagner, Sommer Saadi and Mohsis Andam. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Mark Nelson joins us to deliver his second annual “State of the Atom” address. The nuclear power landscape has transformed in the last two years. Russia continues its nuclear export dominance while the West at last awakens from its stupor, driven by an unexpected force: artificial intelligence's insatiable appetite for baseload power. From Amazon's billion-dollar Susquehanna deal to Three Mile Island's resurrection, Big Tech is discovering what nuclear advocates have long known: that when you need reliable electricity around the clock, few other generation sources compare. Nelson maps the new nuclear battlefield where Chinese reactors scale up to 1,700 megawatts, European phase-outs crumble, and Western teams scramble to assemble the talent and capital needed to compete.Read more on Substack.

En marzo de 1979, la central nuclear de Three Mile Island, en Pensilvania, se convirtió en el epicentro del mayor accidente nuclear en la historia de Estados Unidos. Un fallo técnico, decisiones humanas al límite y la amenaza invisible de la radiación desencadenaron una crisis que puso al mundo en vilo. En este episodio, viajamos al corazón de una catástrofe que marcó un antes y un después en la energía nuclear. ¿Qué salió mal? ¿Cómo reaccionó el gobierno? ¿Y qué impacto tuvo en la sociedad y la política energética? Acompañanos en este recorrido por uno de los capítulos más tensos y desconocidos del siglo XX. Redes Sociales : ✅Instagram : damiangtiscornia ✅Grupo de Ayuda en Telegram https://t.me/damiantiscorniayoutube ✅Web : damian-tiscornia.blogspot.com ✅Twitter: https://twitter.com/damiantiscornia

What if getting your big idea across the finish line wasn't about pitching harder, but about thinking like a storyteller… or a mastermind? In this episode of The Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Ed Essey, Director of Business Value at The Microsoft Garage, to uncover the surprising mechanics behind one of the most successful innovation engines in tech. Ed isn't just helping Microsoft employees come up with bold ideas. He's teaching them how to bring those ideas to life, secure executive sponsorship, and scale them globally. With more than 20,000 projects emerging from Microsoft's annual hackathon, his work is reshaping what innovation looks like inside a giant. We discuss the Garage Growth Framework, the storytelling techniques that help innovators get to 'yes,' and why corporate innovation often needs to feel more like a heist than a business plan. Along the way, Ed shares the powerful backstories of projects like Repowering Coal, which sparked the revitalization of Three Mile Island with clean nuclear energy, and MirrorHR, a deeply personal project that's helping families reduce epileptic seizures using AI and wearables. Ed also gives us a preview of his upcoming book, The Inside Job, a heist-themed guide to innovation for intrapreneurs looking to create meaningful change in complex organizations.

In 1979, one of two nuclear reactors at the Three Mile Island power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial meltdown. The second reactor was shut down 40 years later for economic reasons. Now, work is underway to restart that second reactor to produce electricity for a single customer, Microsoft. To learn what it takes to restart and ensure the safety of a nuclear power plant, and to explore the role of nuclear energy in a mix of renewable resources, we've invited back Dr. Elmer Lewis, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. Dr. Lewis is the author of the books “Nuclear Power Reactor Safety” and “Fundamentals of Nuclear Reactor Physics,” and he will soon publish his latest book, “Renewables or Nuclear, Which Should Lead in Curbing Climate Change?”

In 1979, one of two nuclear reactors at the Three Mile Island power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial meltdown. The second reactor was shut down 40 years later for economic reasons. Now, work is underway to restart that second reactor to produce electricity for a single customer, Microsoft. To learn what it takes to restart and ensure the safety of a nuclear power plant, and to explore the role of nuclear energy in a mix of renewable resources, we've invited back Dr. Elmer Lewis, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. Dr. Lewis is the author of the books “Nuclear Power Reactor Safety” and “Fundamentals of Nuclear Reactor Physics,” and he will soon publish his latest book, “Renewables or Nuclear, Which Should Lead in Curbing Climate Change?

In 1979, one of two nuclear reactors at the Three Mile Island power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial meltdown. The second reactor was shut down 40 years later for economic reasons.  Now, work is underway to restart that second reactor to produce electricity for a single customer, Microsoft. To learn what it takes

This week, we dig into Trump's surprise Iran strike: two-week warning turned two-minute missile salvo, 37-hour B-52 round trips, and vaporizing Iran's version of Three Mile Island. It's the same “stop WMDs” story from '08, but now with F-bombs on CNN. I even sketched out a gold “What Are We Doing” button he should carry for moments like that.Then Nickelodeon canceled Tiny Chef after two seasons. That little guy's lips were quivering—come on. We need a petition, a Netflix revival, or at least a uniform at Popeye's.Will Smith's music comeback? Cringe-core. His freestyles sound like 2005, his new chorus only works at 1.25x speed, and no one moved at his street show. Sorry, Will, stick to movies.The Liver King saga hits peak absurd: raw-meat guru exposed as a steroid user, challenging Joe Rogan to a fight, arrested in Texas, now ranting on TikTok. Dude needs help.Shoutout to Brendan Shaw, who moved his podcast into a Texas storage locker—no AC, auto-shutoff lights, train horns every 20 minutes. Fighter and the Kid is spiraling, and Thick Boy Studios is hemorrhaging cash.Finally, David Spade's new movie Bus Boys is stacked with Rogan pals, YouTubers, and Kill Tony alumni. Bet Tony Hinchcliffe cut a deal behind the scenes.I'm wiped from editing two client shows, so this one's a bit short. I'll be back full-force for episode 196. If you haven't yet, subscribe, like, and ring the bell. Follow wherever you scroll. What are we doing? See you next week.

While Pennsylvania lawmakers haggle over the state budget, liberal advocacy groups are using protests to call for higher taxes on billionaires to fund public services. In 1979, Three Mile Island was the site of what is often called the worst nuclear power accident on U.S. soil. Our colleague Jaxon White, from LNP | LancasterOnline, has the latest on the restarting of the Island’s nuclear reactor. Environmental groups say Tokyo-based Nippon Steel’s recent purchase of U.S. Steel should lead to cleaner operations at the company’s Pittsburgh-area plants. But they haven’t heard much from the Japanese steelmaker. New disclosures with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show President Trump will control the so-called “golden share," as part of the national security agreement under which he allowed Japan-based Nippon Steel to buy out iconic American steelmaker U.S. Steel. With the state budget deadline approaching, the company that owns “skill game” terminals throughout Pennsylvania says lawmakers have pushed it out of discussions on how the industry should be regulated. Taxing the casino-style games is a key part of Governor Josh Shapiro’s budget, one that would raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund schools and public transit. The former captain of a Dauphin County fire company is wanted by police after missing two court appearances earlier this year. A Dauphin County judge issued a bench warrant for 55-year-old Steven Bartholomew’s arrest in March. He's accused of driving firetrucks for the Paxtang Fire Company No. 1 several times in 2024 without a valid driver’s license. Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After 19 years, paranormal researcher Larry Arnold returns to talk with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about the strange and frightening phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion (SHC). He is regarded by many as the world's expert on SHC, but others regard him  as a “mystery monger” and “world-class fool.” After leaving Lafayette College and a brief career in electrical engineering, Arnold founded PSI: ParaScience International in 1976 to pursue the exploration of Fortean anomalies and consciousness. His controversial article published in August 1978, titled “Meltdown…at TMI-2,” would 8 months later be termed “uncannily accurate” by The Philadelphia Inquirer in presaging the future of that nuclear power plant's “impossible” Class IX meltdown near his home. The tragedy was best known as Three Mile Island. This discussion will cover both the nuclear incident and his 1995 classic title, “Ablaze!” This large book contains hundreds of unbelievable examples of The Fire Within, culled from long-forgotten obscure medical journals and never-before-published interviews with witnesses to the impossible. Arnold has been a guest on hundreds of radio and internet-radio programs and a number of radio and TV shows that include provocative radio host Howard Stern. He has also delivered lectures at a number of colleges and universities. His “unofficial” website is www.ParaScience.com. Caution: This episode has graphic descriptions of episodes of spontaneous human combustion.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-paracast-the-gold-standard-of-paranormal-radio--6203433/support.

Who will win Game 7 of the NBA Finals? Who won the KD trade? On a scale of Three Mile Island to Chernobyl, how much of a disaster is the Club World Cup? Why are tennis players who aren't doping still getting marks against them? Find the answers in this episode!

"Back in March of 1979 the movie The China Syndrome came out. Weeks later the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster occurred. This lead to musicians setting up MUSE and holding the NO Nukes concerts, albums and film. We have the entire story including the first time Bruce Springsteen was recorded live."

After World War II, nuclear power was heralded as the future of energy. Then the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 marked a turning point and solidified opposition. In two decades, a dozen U.S. reactors have closed and only three have come online. But the site of America’s worst nuclear accident may now be the site of its rebirth. William Brangham reports for our series, Tipping Point. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

The nuclear industry and its boosters promise clean, abundant energy, but nuclear power delivers expensive electricity while posing catastrophic radiation risks and a constant threat of nuclear war. M. V. Ramana, physicist and author of Nuclear is Not the Solution, explains why respecting the limits of the biosphere means reducing our energy use and rejecting elites' push for endless growth. Highlights include:  Why nuclear energy is inherently risky due to its complex, tightly coupled systems that are prone to catastrophic failures that can't be predicted or prevented; Why nuclear waste poses long-term threats to all life by remaining dangerously radioactive for thousands of years, with no safe, permanent disposal solution and frequent storage failures; Why nuclear energy is expensive, with projects routinely running over budget and behind schedule; Why the expansion of nuclear energy increases the likelihood of devastating nuclear war; How climate change and war-time accidents or direct targeting increase the risks of nuclear catastrophe; Why nuclear Uranium mining and its wastes often require ‘sacrifice zones' that are disproportionately found in indigenous land and less powerful communities; How the nuclear industry shapes nuclear policy and debate by capturing regulators and creating an energy ‘panic' based on one-sided narratives that block democratic discussion and scrutiny; Why, despite the hype from the nuclear industry, new nuclear plant designs like small modular reactors are subject to the same cost and safety concerns as the old designs;  Why the best answer to dealing with renewable energy's variability is not nuclear or fossil fuels but reducing demand; Why renewable energy is no panacea for planetary overshoot and why we need to have a broadly democratic conversation about living within the limits of the planet. See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:  https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/mv-ramana   OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.  Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance. Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org Copyright 2025 Population Balance

Despite its characteristics as a clean energy source, nuclear energy has not been a priority in the energy transition to date. Countries like Germany have shut down their last nuclear plants despite of the loss of pipeline natural gas from Russia and the US has been on a similar path with the Palisades and Diablo Canyon power plant closure decision as an example. You mention nuclear power and most people think of nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi. But despite those high-profile safety accidents, nuclear energy maybe seeing a comeback. A new plant has opened at Vogtle in Burke County, near Waynesboro, Georgia. The first nuclear power plant in the Middle East has opened in the UAE and a fourth-generation plant opened in 2023 at the Shidaowan plant in China's northern Shandong province. Add to these events, talk of small modular reactors and growing interest in nuclear plants to power the new AI data centers and maybe the idea of a comeback is not so crazy. In this episode we talk with Dr. Naj Meshkati from USC about nuclear energy and risk management of potential future nuclear power plants.

Preview Colleague Henry Sokolski recommends what can be done with present technology to prevent unknown actors threatening nuclear power plants with drones. More later. 1979 THREE MILE ISLAND

Check out our recap and breakdown of Season 4 Episode 14 of the Big Bang Theory! We found 6 IQ Points!00:00:00 - Intro00:09:59 - Recap Begins00:17:49 - The tragedies of the Hindenberg, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Tron 200:22:42 - Insects00:31:57 - Gaydar00:36:45 - Sheldon's true failure00:44:41 - Acting books and Henry Winklers catalog01:08:40 - Advice on actingFind us everywhere at: https://linktr.ee/theoreticalnonsense~~*CLICK THE LINK TO SEE OUR IQ POINT HISTORY TOO! *~~-------------------------------------------------Welcome to Theoretical Nonsense! If you're looking for a Big Bang Theory rewatch podcast blended with How Stuff Works, this is the podcast for you!  Hang out with Rob and Ryan where they watch each episode of The Big Bang Theory and break it down scene by scene, and fact by fact, and no spoilers! Ever wonder if the random information Sheldon says is true? We do the research and find out! Is curry a natural laxative, what's the story behind going postal, are fish night lights real? Watch the show with us every other week and join in on the discussion! Email us at theoreticalnonsensepod@gmail.com and we'll read your letter to us on the show! Even if it's bad! :) Music by Alex Grohl. Find official podcast on Apple and Spotify https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theoretical-nonsense-the-big-bang-theory-watch-a/id1623079414

Guest Colleen Kelley Creating fun and accessible chemistry stories has been a labor of love for Colleen, as a retired chemistry professor and author of a series of kid's chemistry comic books. In 2023, the PBS short documentary, “Comic Book Chemistry,” was awarded an Emmy. Colleen holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Penn State University and was a tenured professor with research expertise in environmental toxicology, medicinal chemistry, and chemistry education. Why This Episode Matters In this interview, Dr. Colleen discusses her journey from teaching college chemistry to developing "molecular literacy" programs for children ages 4-10. Inspired by her childhood experience with the Three Mile Island incident and challenges teaching college students, she created comic books with character-based storytelling to make chemistry accessible. She believes building neural pathways for understanding chemistry symbols early helps overcome traditional learning barriers and promotes lifelong scientific curiosity. Three Important Takeaways Chemistry education faces significant challenges, with a 50% failure rate among college students, often because they lack foundational understanding of molecular symbols and concepts. Teaching "molecular literacy" through storytelling and character-based learning engages young learners and creates neural pathways that make advanced chemistry concepts more accessible later in life. Chemistry education should extend beyond traditional classroom settings to help people of all ages (8-108) understand scientific concepts relevant to climate change, health issues, and daily life. Referenced https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-kelley-ph-d-049aa91ab/ https://www.youtube.com/@ChemistryColleen 

Send us a textTo meet the increased demand for carbon-free electricity that might mitigate the climate crisis that is already upon us, nations the world over are reconsidering nuclear energy.  Mansplaining listeners of a certain age remember the No Nukes movement that gained steam after frightening meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  What they may not realize is that nuclear power remains an important piece of the world's energy portfolio.  Joe and Mark assess nuclear's risk profile to determine whether it's part of the problem or part of the solution. (Recorded May 11, 2025.)

 Nuclear power was once thought to provide unlimited energy at no cost.  Then the costs became apparent–building and maintaining costly facilities, environmental degradation, abundant use of water resources, storage of radioactive waste and overall security and safety.  After the Three Mile Island accident, it was thought that nuclear energy's promise had come and gone.  But, … Read More Read More

The nuclear renaissance of the 2000s turned out to be something of a mirage. Buoyed by rising fossil gas prices, growing climate awareness, and steady load growth, nuclear seemed poised for a breakout moment. But that momentum stalled. Electricity demand flatlined. The fracking boom sent gas prices plummeting. And Fukushima rattled public confidence in nuclear power. Ultimately, only two new reactors, Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia, reached completion over a decade later. So is this latest wave of nuclear hype any different? In this episode, Shayle talks to Chris Colbert, CEO of Elementl Power, which on Wednesday announced a deal with Google to develop three nuclear projects of at least 600-megawatts each. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, is an investor in Elementl.) Chris, a former executive at NuScale Power, thinks last year may have marked the start of a nuclear revival: the recommissioning of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and Michigan's Holtec Palisades; Big Tech deals to support small modular reactor development; and the start of construction on TerraPower's Wyoming reactor, the Western Hemisphere's first advanced nuclear facility. But until new reactors move beyond one-off projects to serial deployment, nuclear won't achieve the cost reductions needed for widespread adoption. Chris and Shayle discuss what it will take to turn this groundswell of activity into widespread deployment, covering topics like: Current tailwinds, like load growth and interest from corporate buyers Why corporate buyers may be better positioned than utilities to take on development risks Elementl's technology-agnostic approach Different nuclear technologies — light water, non-light water, and advanced designs — and Chris's predictions for when they'll reach commercialization Why iteration is essential to driving down costs (and why the Google deal involves three separate projects) How regulatory timelines are speeding up The steps of project development with a corporate buyer Chris's criteria for site selection — and why attracting skilled labor ranks surprisingly high Resources: Latitude Media: Was 2024 really the year of nuclear resurgence? Latitude Media: Is large-scale nuclear poised for a comeback? Catalyst: The cost of nuclear Latitude Media: Trump's DOE is reupping Biden-era funding for small modular nuclear reactors Latitude Media: Utah bets on a new developer to revive its small modular reactor ambitions Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a platform enabling solar and storage developers and buyers to save time, reduce risk, and increase profits in their equipment selection process. Anza gives clients access to pricing, technical, and risk data plus tools that they've never had access to before. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

A committee in the Pennsylvania House is advancing two elections bills. Voter ID and a suite of reforms are being sent to the House floor for consideration. Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a Democrat from Philadelphia, says the elections reform package will address election security concerns like double voting and improving verification of voter registration, while voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. Historical societies, libraries and other local education and government organizations can apply for state funding to help improve the care and accessibility of Pennsylvania's historical records. On May 2nd, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclosed, in their online public library, that a fire broke out at Three Mile Island's Unit 2 reactor building back on Febrary 11th. Plant owners TMI-2 Solutions did not put out a public notice... although they did notify the NRC and the state Department of Environmental Protection at the time. That means a community advisory panel did not learn about the fire until the NRC's public posting on May 2nd. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was meeting recently with representatives from a Pennsylvania teachers union when things quickly devolved. Fetterman began repeating himself, shouting and slamming his hands on a desk. The interaction adds to the questions being raised about the Democratic senator's mental health and behavior barely three years after a he survived a stroke and two years after being treated for depression. The Pittsburgh Pirates fired manager Derek Shelton following a rocky opening month to the Major League Baseball season that saw Pittsburgh quickly slip into last place in the NL Central. Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part 2 of the Nuclear Mini-Series This is part two of my mini-series on nuclear power and whether it could be the clean energy solution we've all been waiting for.As I said before (and it bears repeating): fossil fuels kill about 8 million people every single year — more than the populations of Aotearoa and most of the Pacific Islands combined.Despite that, nuclear power remains the energy source we fear the most. But should we?In the last episode, we explored the science of nuclear — what it is, how it works, and why it's not nearly as scary as it sounds. In this episode, we dive into its history — a sometimes horrifying, sometimes absurd, and often misunderstood timeline that shaped our collective anxiety around nuclear energy.In this episode, I cover:The early discoveries of nuclear materials and radiationHow public fear around nuclear energy really beganThe rise of nuclear bombs and the race for atomic powerWhat actually happens inside a nuclear reactor (in plain English)The major nuclear disasters that shaped global perceptionWhat went wrong at Three Mile IslandWhat made Chernobyl so catastrophicWhy Fukushima shook public confidence in nuclear safetyKey quotes:“Nuclear energy got its hideous reputation before it had even powered a single light bulb.”“Creepy green glows and mutant fish? That's science fiction, not reality.”“Public anxiety about nuclear energy didn't actually start with power stations.”Books & Resources Mentioned:Here are the books and materials I mentioned for anyone who wants to explore:The Radium Girls by Kate MooreA gripping and enraging true story of the young women who painted glow-in-the-dark watch faces with radioactive paint — and paid the ultimate price. The Woman Who Knew Too Much by Gayle GreeneA biography of Dr. Alice Stewart, who studied radiation risks and stood up to the nuclear establishment. (Recommended for broader radiation safety context).Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters by Serhii PlokhyCovers Six major nuclear incidents — including Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island — with historical and political analysis.If you want to go down the rabbit hole, I also recommend googling:“Radithor” (yes, that glowing bottled water was real)“Clarence Dally and Thomas Edison” (the first radiation death in the U.S).Find our full podcast via the website here:https://www.nowthatswhaticall.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowthatswhaticallgreen/You can follow me on socials on the below accounts.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/briannemwest/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@briannemwestLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briannemwest/For our latest big project, find out more about Incrediballs here: https://incrediballs.com/

When you think of the phrase “nuclear power” what comes to mind for you? Perhaps some of the notable catastrophic accidents that were caused from malfunctions at nuclear power plants like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? Although nuclear power carries some risks, some are saying it’s one of the most reliable ways we have to generate electricity. Today, we are going atomic and diving into the world of nuclear power, including taking a look at what this looks like in our state. What questions do you have about going nuclear? GUESTS: John Moritz: covers energy and environment for CT Mirror Erik Katovich: Assistant Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of Connecticut Ivan Penn: New York Times reporter covering the energy industry Support the show: http://wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rising demand for electricity, largely to power the artificial intelligence boom, has stirred a resurgence in nuclear energy. Older plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania are being brought out of retirement, but there’s also investment in smaller-scale reactors with different designs. The fresh interest in nuclear generation has also renewed discussion about how to build these facilities ethically, in other words, with an approach that’s sensitive to the needs of the community and the world at large. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Aditi Verma, assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, who co-created an undergrad course about ethically designing modern nuclear facilities. Verma discussed her effort to train young engineers to transform the industry. For some engineers, it’s also renewed a discussion about how to build these facilities ethically. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Aditi Verma, professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who co-created a course for undergraduate students about how to ethically design modern nuclear facilities, about why it’s so important to be teaching this to young, would-be engineers now.

Rising demand for electricity, largely to power the artificial intelligence boom, has stirred a resurgence in nuclear energy. Older plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania are being brought out of retirement, but there’s also investment in smaller-scale reactors with different designs. The fresh interest in nuclear generation has also renewed discussion about how to build these facilities ethically, in other words, with an approach that’s sensitive to the needs of the community and the world at large. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Aditi Verma, assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, who co-created an undergrad course about ethically designing modern nuclear facilities. Verma discussed her effort to train young engineers to transform the industry. For some engineers, it’s also renewed a discussion about how to build these facilities ethically. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Aditi Verma, professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who co-created a course for undergraduate students about how to ethically design modern nuclear facilities, about why it’s so important to be teaching this to young, would-be engineers now.

Many of the innovations that have come to define the technological age we live in—from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency mining—all have one thing in common: they demand large amounts of electricity. Tech companies and utilities are currently grappling with ways to meet this need. You've likely read headlines about proposals to power data centers using “small modular rectors” (SMRs) and even a push to restart Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. HB 672, a bill in the New Hampshire Legislature, is aimed at encouraging similar developments in New Hampshire by allowing off-grid electricity providers. Listen as hosts Anna Brown and Mike Dunbar, of Citizens Count break it down in  $100 Plus Mileage. This podcast is produced in partnership with Citizens Count, Granite State News Collaborative and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications at Franklin Pierce University. Listen as hosts Anna Brown and Mike Dunbar, of Citizens Count break it down in  $100 Plus Mileage. This podcast is produced in partnership with Citizens Count, Granite State News Collaborative and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications at Franklin Pierce University. Listen as hosts Anna Brown and Mike Dunbar, of Citizens Count break it down in  $100 Plus Mileage. This podcast is produced in partnership with Citizens Count, Granite State News Collaborative and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications at Franklin Pierce University. Listen as hosts Anna Brown and Mike Dunbar, of Citizens Count break it down in  $100 Plus Mileage. This podcast is produced in partnership with Citizens Count, Granite State News Collaborative and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications at Franklin Pierce University.

Worked in the Reagan administration – check, was at Three Mile Island – check, worked in uranium mining and semiconductor manufacturing, authored several books – check, check, check. The list goes on. Mark Mills incredible career at the nexus of technology, energy, mining, investing and government policy provides the backdrop for a fascinating discussion on all things energy, including Ed's new dishwasher.This podcast is provided for information purposes only from sources believed to be reliable. However, Sprott does not warrant its completeness or accuracy. Any opinions and estimates constitute our judgment as of the date of this material and are subject to change without notice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. This communication is not intended as an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any financial instrument. Any opinions and recommendations herein do not take into account individual client circumstances, objectives, or needs and are not intended as recommendations of particular securities, financial instruments, or strategies. You must make your own independent decisions regarding any securities, financial instruments or strategies mentioned or related to the information herein. This communication may not be redistributed or retransmitted, in whole or in part, or in any form or manner, without the express written consent of Sprott. Any unauthorized use or disclosure is prohibited. Receipt and review of this information constitute your agreement not to redistribute or retransmit the contents and information contained in this communication without first obtaining express permission from an authorized officer of Sprott.

In this week's episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Daniel Poneman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Energy, about the role of nuclear energy in meeting increasing demands for electricity. As the use of artificial intelligence grows, so does demand for electricity, raising questions about which energy sources can provide reliable, clean, consistent power. Poneman discusses whether nuclear energy is a viable option, how the safety and performance of nuclear technology have evolved, and why some retired nuclear power plants are being revived—including the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, where a reactor meltdown caused by equipment malfunctions occurred 46 years ago as of last Friday. Poneman also describes what challenges the nuclear energy industry is facing, barriers to wider adoption of nuclear energy, and how public perception of nuclear energy has shifted over time. References and recommendations: “Double Jeopardy: Combating Nuclear Terror and Climate Change” by Daniel Poneman; https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546669/double-jeopardy/ “Washington: A Life” by Ron Chernow; https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/ron-chernow “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin; https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Team-of-Rivals/Doris-Kearns-Goodwin/9780743270755 “Speed of Heat” album by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter; https://open.spotify.com/album/6t5FAhdwvsYFRejUTRAzVZ Henry M. Paulson Jr.'s writings about biodiversity; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/opinion/animal-extinction.html

Host Joe DeMare compares the threat of global warming to the threat of impending dictatorship in the US. Next he interviews Diane D'Arrigo from Nuclear Information Resource Service about the insane plan to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Rebecca Wood tells us all about fish. Ecological News includes record renewables growth in 2024 as reported by IRENA, and Sea Lions going insane along the west coast and attacking people. 

March 28, 1979. The worst Nuclear accident in American history begins when Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island power plant experiences a partial meltdown. This episode originally aired in 2023.Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more.History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A new plan to absorb carbon dioxide from the ocean to fight global warming may be effective, but it is also controversial. Also, a paralyzed man that can stand again after receiving a stem cell treatment. Plus, on This Day in History, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Oceans' ability to absorb carbon dioxide could be key in fighting global warming | AP News Paralyzed man can stand again after receiving stem cell treatment in Japan | ZME Science Three Mile Island - Accident, Nuclear & Meltdown | HISTORY Nuclear power | Definition, Issues, & Facts | Britannica Closing to reopening: What's the status of Three Mile Island nuclear plant? MSN via PennLive Is Three Mile Island Still Radioactive and Is It Operating Today? - Newsweek Sponsored by Factor -use code coolstuff50off to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping.  Contact the show - coolstuffcommute@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Three Mile Island became a household name on this day in 1979. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this day in 1979, the worst commercial nuclear accident happened at Three Mile Island. 

The reopening of Three Mile Island is purportedly on schedule. People are still without power — in this cold — following those winds on Sunday. An airport has hit a milestone. And if you've ever wanted to pitch something on “Shark Tank,” here's your chance.

To meet AI-driven load growth utilities and big tech companies have been building — or reopening — big power plants. Georgia Power, for example, is planning to expand its fleet of natural gas plants. And Microsoft signed a deal last September to re-open Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant But could we meet a portion of that load growth with distributed energy resources? Pier LaFarge thinks so.  In this episode, Shayle talks to Pier, co-founder and CEO of Sparkfund. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Sparkfund). DERs can come online much faster than large, centralized generation, Pier argues. He makes the case that utilities are especially well-positioned to lead what he calls “distributed capacity procurement” (DCP) of customer-sited solar, storage, and other assets. Shayle and Pier cover topics like: How host agreements work, using utility-owned assets sited at customer locations How the effective load carrying capability (ELCC) of DERs compares to large, centralized power plants The relationship between DCP and VPPs The key tradeoff of DCP: DERs are faster to build, but cost more and have lower ELCC than large, centralized plants Who should pay for those higher costs? Why vertically-integrated utilities are best-positioned to take advantage of the value DCP creates for capacity, distribution, and transmission The limitations of DCP at a systems level Recommended resources Latitude Media: Can distributed energy answer AI's power problem? Latitude Media: Jigar Shah: It's time for VPPs to get simpler Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors. The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen. By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent.

The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors. The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen. By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent.

The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors. The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen. By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent.

The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors. The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen. By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent.