WBD614 Audio Transcription

The Truth About Nuclear Energy with Anthony Jared

Release date: Friday 3rd February

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Anthony Jared. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Anthony Jared is a 30-year Navy veteran and who has operated nuclear reactors on both nuclear submarines & aircraft carriers. In this interview, we discuss the truth about nuclear energy, the safety concerns and why there has been such a prolific anti-nuclear movement.

“I don’t like to call myself an environmentalist because that’s such a subjective term, but I’m very, very, very conscientious of the environment... I try extremely hard to make sure that my carbon footprint is very small, and I’m telling you, Nuclear is 100% the answer... there is nothing even comparable, not even in the ballpark by an order of magnitude.”

— Anthony Jared

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Anthony, welcome to What Bitcoin Did.

Anthony Jared: Hello, it's good to see you today.

Peter McCormack: It's good to see you.  So, your son reached out to us and said, "You need to talk to my dad".

Anthony Jared: Yes, then he reached out and told me and I was like, "Hm".

Peter McCormack: Danny, is this the first time we've had a son reach out?

Danny Knowles: I think so.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  How much do you know about what we do?

Anthony Jared: I have been listening to your podcast for about two years now.

Peter McCormack: Oh, right, so you're a listener anyway.

Anthony Jared: I don't miss one.

Peter McCormack: Oh, fantastic, well that's great.  Well, as you know, we cover Bitcoin but increasingly, because of Bitcoin, we cover energy and I'd say over the last year or so, we've been trying to understand the nuclear aspect of the energy industry a little bit more.  Your son was like, "You need to talk to my dad", so here we are, we've got you here.  I think the best way we can start here is that a number of the people who come on the show, people know who they are; they might not know who Anthony Jared is.  So, can you please just give us your background.

Anthony Jared: Absolutely.  So, I was born here in Tennessee, it's good to have you in the state.

Peter McCormack: Thank you.

Anthony Jared: Would it be a good time to give you some things?

Peter McCormack: Yeah!

Anthony Jared: Yeah, so I brought you a few things.

Peter McCormack: We'll have to have a few more dads on!

Anthony Jared: So, the first thing is, this is a jar of muscadine jelly from the muscadines grown on our farm for you guys to try.

Danny Knowles: What is that?

Anthony Jared: It's homemade, we made that.

Peter McCormack: Is that jam?

Anthony Jared: It's a type of grape that is indigenous to the south, so you'll have a hard time finding that anywhere else.

Danny Knowles: Very cool.

Anthony Jared: So, we made you that.

Peter McCormack: What do you put it on; do you put it on toast?

Anthony Jared: Toast.  My son likes it on peanut butter; peanut butter and jelly.

Peter McCormack: Oh, of course, yeah.  So, is jelly "jam".  We call it jam.

Anthony Jared: Absolutely.  My mother made this for you.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Anthony Jared: This is called Amish Friendship Bread, and she actually has been carrying this yeast that she makes this out of for years and years and years.  And she puts the yeast in the freezer every year and saves it, and the next year she takes it out, then she makes all of her breads and then she saves a portion in the freezer for the next year.  So, this has a lineage that goes far back.  It's kind of like a coffee cake, one might say.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Danny Knowles: This is some southern hospitality.

Anthony Jared: There you go.

Peter McCormack: All right, I've got a present for you now then.  Give me one second.  What size are you?

Anthony Jared: Medium.

Peter McCormack: All right, give me one second.  What sports do you like?

Anthony Jared: Football, that's American football, right.  We call the other soccer over here.

Peter McCormack: Do you like a bit of soccer?

Anthony Jared: Well, I go watch a little bit of soccer.  I was checking your team out, like their uniforms, I like that colour, I'm a big fan of the orange.

Peter McCormack: Well, there you go, you now have a jersey; this is your jersey.

Anthony Jared: Look there; that is outstanding!  I was coveting these as I was looking at your website!

Peter McCormack: Well, you now have one, you're now a Real Bedford fan.

Anthony Jared: Thank you so much.

Peter McCormack: Okay, well, you have a farm?

Anthony Jared: Yes, we have a farm.  So, I grew up here in West Tennessee between here and Memphis.  We have a farm, several hundred acres, grew up there, kind of an interesting story; it helps with the understanding.  I grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s, where we were under the constant cloud of nuclear apocalyptic annihilation.  You had all your movies like The Day After, you had several other scary movies, and we used to actually do drills sometimes in schools about, "What would you do if…?"

So, growing up in that atmosphere, it didn't exactly give me the best feeling about nuclear, because everything was associated with nuclear weapons, nuclear war.  Then I got to high school and I had a teacher by the name of Mr Wilson, he was my physics and chemistry teacher, and he did a great job of teaching nuclear chemistry.  And as I was listening to him, I thought, "Wow, this is really neat and it's nothing like the media has taught me that nuclear is; this is very different".  So from there, I decided to join the Navy and be a nuclear operator on the submarines and aircraft carriers. 

So, I went off to the Navy; that was in the late 1980s, 1987, and I did 25 years in the Navy as a nuclear operator.  Then I specialised in nuclear chemistry and radiation protection and monitoring, and then radioactive material shipping and then radioactive maintenance, like heavy depot-level maintenance on nuclear plants.  So, I did that for 25 years, a lot of time underway on a ballistic missile submarine, about 8 years' worth of that, 3 years underway on a nuclear aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

I came back to the States.  That's when I started getting into the depot-level maintenance.  I did the nuclear repair until I retired and then they hired me back to be the Director of the Nuclear Regional Maintenance detachment, so I did that for five years.  Then I decided, I think what I want to do is to go back to the farm, get my solar panels, raise my chickens, do my organic farming, and listen to What Bitcoin Did podcast.

Peter McCormack: Wow, okay.  There's so many things I want to get into with you.  Okay, let's talk about in the Navy, you were a nuclear operator.  So, I guess my first question, it might sound a little bit ignorant, but the nuclear subs, are they nuclear subs because they both have nuclear weapons and are powered by nuclear?

Anthony Jared: In some cases, yes, not in all cases.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Anthony Jared: So, your fast-attack submarines, which are the small submarines, those have nuclear reactor conventional weapons.  Then your ballistic missile submarines, those have both, and I was on a ballistic missile submarine that had both.

Peter McCormack: Right.  I got to visit my first submarine recently when I was in Hawaii.  I went to Pearl Harbour, took my kids, and we got to go down and visit inside one of the submarines.  I guess those ones are a lot smaller than the ones you worked on.

Anthony Jared: Yes.  Well, I worked on both, but the one that I was actually deployed on was one of the larger ones.

Peter McCormack: So, you would have spent days and days at sea underwater?

Anthony Jared: So, in my eight years, I was on the USS Tennessee and during my eight years on there, I probably spent a total of between three and four years underwater submerged.

Peter McCormack: That's unreal.

Anthony Jared: So, you would go out for somewhere between 60 and 90 days, whatever they needed you to do to cover packages, and then you pull back in and then the other crew comes down, and they take the boat over for a while.  Then, you go into a training cycle that lasts for 100 days, and you train extremely rigorously for about 100 days, and then they come back and then you take the boat back and then you go to see.  And you just rotate on and off like that.

Danny Knowles: In those 60, 90 days you're underwater, how far do you travel?

Anthony Jared: Well, that all depends on what kind of a package they have as far as where you're going, what your mission is.  So, it could vary from not very far at all to extremely far, and there is no limit to how far you go.  I mean, you're only limited by the amount of food you have onboard.

Peter McCormack: And how deep do you go?

Anthony Jared: Several hundred feet, we'll just leave it at that.

Peter McCormack: Okay!  I know we're here to talk about nuclear, but what is it like just living on a sub?

Anthony Jared: That's a good question.  First of all, you go to an 18-hour day instead of a 24-hour day, which is very different for your body to get used to; everything is 18 hours.  So, there's no sunlight, no communication with the outside world, no email, no telephones.  Every now and then you would get a little data dump of maybe football scores, maybe once every week or so.

Peter McCormack: Priorities!

Anthony Jared: Right!  Most of those would be truncated on the page so you couldn't really tell who won anyway, but they did the best they could.  You stand watch for six hours, and then you do six hours of training or maintenance and then, if you're fortunate, you get a couple of hours of sleep and then you're back on watch again.  You do that for the entire time you're out there, a lot of drills, a lot of training, constantly running emergency casualty drills and constantly training.

Peter McCormack: And do you get time off there?

Anthony Jared: No.

Peter McCormack: None at all?

Anthony Jared: You wake up and you've got enough time to go do some sit-ups and push-ups and lift a few weights and take a shower and then go on watch.  So, you could work an hour into your 18-hour day, U-time.

Peter McCormack: And those modern subs, what are they like in terms of space?  Obviously the one I visited was very compact.  It would have been thinner than this room that we're in now and it was very tight and you would jump between compartments.  But every single area was using something.  It would be either a bunk or washroom or part of the engine.

Anthony Jared: The efficiency.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: Very efficient uses of space.  So, the ballistic missile submarines are larger than the fast-attack submarines.  You would have a bunk room that was maybe a quarter of the size of this space we're in with nine guys in it, but that's far better than the guys on the fast-attack submarines.  So, my life wasn't nearly as cramped as theirs was.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, unless you're the captain, or a general?

Anthony Jared: You get captains.  Even those guys don't have a lot of space on submarines.  So, when I went to the aircraft carrier, my state room on an aircraft carrier was larger than a captain's on a submarine.

Peter McCormack: I did also get to go on a couple of the ships there at Pearl Harbour as well.  Have you ever been, Danny?

Danny Knowles: My experience of seeing submarines is in Barrow-in-Furness, so it's a little bit different to Pearl Harbour.

Peter McCormack: It is quite the experience to go and see it all.  Okay, so you were a nuclear operator on the sub; what does that mean?

Anthony Jared: So, you start the reactor up, you maintain the reactor, as far as routine maintenance, just routine maintenance, not heavy, depot-level maintenance.  You operate the reactor during all kinds of different plant conditions.  It's for propulsion, it does all the propulsion, all the electricity generation for the submarine.  Then, you shut it down.  When you bring it into port, you cool it down, do some more maintenance on it.  Then the depot-level guys will come in and do the heavy-duty maintenance, which is what I did later in my career.

Then also, while you're underway operating, I specifically was in charge of the nuclear water chemistry and the radiation monitoring.  So, we have devices that we wear and those devices tell you how much radiation you're getting on a daily basis, monthly basis, quarterly basis.  So, I would take those and I read those to see, monitor, make sure everyone wasn't getting any radiation from the reactor plant.  You actually walk around and do surveys to make sure that there isn't any radiation or contamination. 

Then of course, all the water chemistry you do is to monitor the plant's integrity to make sure the reactor's operating properly.  It's kind of like a doctor doing blood work, right, to see how your health is.  Well, I would sample the water to make sure that the reactor was healthy.

Peter McCormack: And so, I mean the first time I heard about nuclear reactors on submarines, I was a little bit surprised, I was like, "What do you mean there's a nuclear reactor on a submarine?"  I'd never even had to think how propulsion worked on a submarine, but to actually hear, "Hold on, firstly, how; and how safe is that?"

Anthony Jared: Very, very safe.  So, the Navy has been operating those reactor plants for over 50 years, 5,700 total years of reactor operation and 134 million miles steamed around the world and never a reactor accident and no release of radioactive activity that in any way has ever harmed the environment.

Peter McCormack: That's incredibly safe.

Anthony Jared: That is incredibly safe.  And think about the conditions that these reactors operate under, right.  They're not sitting on land in a stable spot; they're on a submarine, underwater, taking all kinds of angles, subjected to all kinds of atmospheric, environmental conditions, even meant to be taken into warfare and fight other submarines, and yet they're that safe and that stable.

Peter McCormack: Well, that was going to be my next question.  If it went into warfare and there was a direct hit on one, would that present some kind of risk?

Anthony Jared: Not the kind of risk that it would present to just those of us who are in the hull and a hull breach and the associated ocean rushing into the people space.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you're in a lot of trouble there.

Anthony Jared: Yeah, a lot of trouble.

Peter McCormack: But there's no possibility of it causing some kind of explosion?

Anthony Jared: No, absolutely not.  So, you have to understand, the word "explosion" means something very specific, so let's unpack that a little bit.  So, whenever they mine uranium to make fuel for a nuclear reactor, they turn it into what they call yellowcake.  Then they take that and they turn it into a gas, and it's called uranium hexafluoride gas.  Then they put that through a series of machines that basically take out all the impurities, not all, but some of the impurities.  So, your uranium goes to about 3% to 5% enrichment, and that's the amount of enrichment you need for your uranium-235 in order for a reactor to work.

In order to get a situation where it will explode, you have to have it enriched to greater than 80%, which is extremely expensive, it takes extremely complicated machinery in order to do that.  That's why very few countries have such a programme.

Peter McCormack: But that is what I would have heard about when I would have read the reports about, say, Hans Blix going to places like North Korea or Iran, I can't remember where, but they would talk about monitoring their enrichment programme, and it's to ensure they're only going up to the level required for nuclear power?

Anthony Jared: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Anthony Jared: So, you don't have to worry about nuclear reactors exploding; it's physically impossible, it would defy the laws of physics.

Peter McCormack: So, do you know what, and we're jumping ahead now, but I think a lot of people maybe believe that is a risk of a nuclear plant exploding like a weapon.

Anthony Jared: Absolutely, they do.  Too much Hollywood, too much fiction.  They're getting their information from Facebook memes and Reddit threads.

Peter McCormack: Or perhaps misinformation from environmentalists?

Anthony Jared: Absolutely.  Those are the people making the memes on Facebook and on the Reddit threads.

Peter McCormack: So, the real risk is, if there was warfare, you would have some kind of leak?

Anthony Jared: Sure, because Mother Nature is always trying to kill us, right, and when you're underwater, there's an extreme amount of pressure on the hull of your submarine.  Or, if you're on a surface ship, you've got the ocean around you, so a breach in the hull is not a good thing to have.

Peter McCormack: And when you're monitoring for radiation, is there a safe level that comes from the reactor that is an acceptable level?

Anthony Jared: So, I think it could be a good time maybe, let's talk about what this terminology means before we go forward, so you have understanding.

Peter McCormack: Yes, please.

Anthony Jared: Okay.  So, from here on out, I would like for us to use the term "millirem" when we're discussing the amount of radiation, right, so that's "mrem".  So, that's going to be a measure of dose deposited in the tissue of your body.  For perspective, because perspective is extremely important, so what I have found reading anti-nuclear propaganda websites, they like to talk in percentages, but they don't like to talk in numbers and they never want to give perspective.  So, an analogy would be, "Peter, I increased my Bitcoin holdings by 80% this year".  That sounds nice.

Peter McCormack: I don't know how much Bitcoin you have.

Anthony Jared: Right.  If I only have 1 sat, that's nothing.  If I'm Michael Saylor, that's really good.

Peter McCormack: Yeah!

Anthony Jared: Okay.  So, a lot of times, they'll speak in percentages, because it makes it sound like it's a whole lot, but they don't give perspective.  So, for instance, in 30 years of working in nuclear power, 11 years underway on nuclear power, 8 of that I slept within 60 feet of an operating nuclear reactor.  My bunk where I slept was within 60 feet of the reactor.  I received less radiation in 30 years from those reactors than I would have gotten in one whole body CT scan at the hospital.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Anthony Jared: Those are facts, those are numbers.

Peter McCormack: Just as a side point, whenever I go to the dentist, which is quite often because I'm British, whenever they do an X-ray, they set it up, they leave the room, they press the button and then they come back in.  So, I'm guessing there's an exposure that's acceptable for me, but they wouldn't want to have that day in, day out.

Anthony Jared: Right.  So, a dental X-ray, you're probably getting somewhere 3 mrem to 5 mrem, which is about what you get on a cross-country flight.  But from England to here, you probably get 7 mrem to 10 mrem.  Danny gets a whole lot on his trip all the way from Australia.  So, a whole body CT scan is about 1,000 mrem and an abdominal X-ray is about 70 mrem.  A federal limit for a nuclear worker is 5,000 mrem.  For the general population, it's about 100 mrem in the United States, just for understanding.

Peter McCormack: Are we being hit right now?

Anthony Jared: Yes, absolutely.  Natural background radiation in the United States, the average is around 300 mrem to 320 mrem per year.  You also receive about another 300 mrem per year from medical sources, manmade sources, X-rays, CT scans.  The natural radiation that we're getting is from bananas, they have potassium-40; spinach; most of the radioactivity in the ocean is potassium-40 that's radioactive; Brazil nuts are radioactive; there's all kinds of natural cosmic radiation.  That's why on a flight you get so much more radiation than you do when you're at sea level; it's because the cosmic radiation, the photons, the gammas, all the cosmic radiation doesn't have to go as far through the atmosphere.

So, if you live somewhere, say Albuquerque, New Mexico, or in Denver, Colorado, you get significantly more radiation a year than you do in Nashville, Tennessee.  So, like I say, we get about 300 mrem per year.  There's places like Finland that get 7,500 mrem per year.

Peter McCormack: What about astronauts?

Anthony Jared: I do not know enough to speak to the specifics of that, but yes, they would get significantly more radiation, unless they have something that shields them from it, and I'm not an expert enough on what they do to understand that.

Peter McCormack: I went to South by Southwest about a decade ago in Austin, Texas, and I went for the tech, but I ended up -- there were lots of these weird side ones, and there was one, NASA were running a panel on getting to Mars.  It was just a panel to explain all the challenges they have to get to Mars.  The one thing I remember they said, I'm not going to say it's the biggest challenge, but one of their biggest challenges they said is that Mars does not have the atmospheric protection of the Earth and the biggest risk is radiation poisoning.

Anthony Jared: Yes, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Something I haven't heard Elon talk about, but anyway.

Anthony Jared: So, let's talk about two different types of radiation that you could get as far as time periods.  So, there's acute doses and then there's chronic doses; that makes a big difference.  An acute dose is a dose you would get in hours or days or maybe weeks.  A chronic dose would be over the course of a year.  Those impact your body differently, because your body naturally heals itself because it's constantly being bombarded by radiation, so your body knows how to heal itself.

Three things that can happen when the radiation hits your cells, it interacts with the electrons in your cells: it can immediately just heal itself; it can die and go away, you have cells that die every day, thousands and thousands; or, it can mutate.  That's the one you're of course concerned with.  So, if you get an acute dose, up to say 10,000 mrem, not a problem.  Chronic doses over the course of a year, up to 50,000 mrem, not a problem.  So, it's important that you understand those numbers, because those numbers, we've been proving forever that they won't hurt you.

For instance, the people in Finland probably get 50,000 mrem a year and they're extremely healthy, and they get that from the granite where the glacier scrapes the dirt away from the granite.  It's got uranium in it, so they get a lot of radiation naturally and they're perfectly healthy.  Where you get into the problem is high, short, acute doses.  Over 100,000 mrem, you start to get radiation sickness, blood changes.  And then at about 500,000 mrem, that's when you start getting death.

Peter McCormack: And what are the kinds of incidents where that may happen?

Anthony Jared: So, it would be very, very difficult to do that, except for use of medical isotopes; so the medical field, if they were continuously giving you CT scans.  Now sometimes, when doctors use it for cancer treatments, they go into extremely high doses, but they're isolating where that is being used, so it's not a whole body dose.

Peter McCormack: Is that like radiotherapy?

Anthony Jared: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: So it's interesting, my father is about to have to take a course of radiotherapy and he said most of the session is getting the setup, laid down, and targeting a specific point.  And I want to say it's like the whole thing is like a six-hour session, but the majority of the time is getting the setup absolutely pinpoint correct.

Anthony Jared: Yeah, it's very high levels, I'm not aware of exactly how high they do go because I'm definitely not a doctor, but it matters also the parts of your body that are exposed.  So, your hands, your feet, your extremities, they don't have large, blood-producing organs.  So the dose, when it's deposited in those portions, doesn't have the same detrimental effect.

Now, there's a theory that most people prescribe to, it's called the linear non-threshold theory.  What that means is that since we know that very high levels of radiation can kill you, they say that that's linear all the way down to zero and there is no threshold under which it's safe.  It's a very conservative outlook.  It's much like saying, at 212°F, water will burn you; so at 36°F, it will burn you a little bit.  It's not true.  And there's been a lot of studies that have actually shown what they call the hormesis effect, and it's where small amounts of radiation actually trigger your DNA repair mechanisms, which to me would make sense as we have evolved in an atmosphere of radiation for thousands and thousands of years, that our bodies would understand how to make those repairs.

So, small amounts of radiation, definitely not a problem.  It's large amounts over 100,000 mrem that are acute in a very short period of time that are of concern.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what I'm already feeling is this morning, Peter Zeihan had clips of him appearing on Joe Rogan talking about Bitcoin and it's clear he doesn't understand it.  I can imagine there's many scenarios you're hearing people talk about nuclear and you get very frustrated because they have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

Anthony Jared: Danny asked me if I'd watched the movie Chernobyl; I told him I couldn't bring myself to do it, I'm saving myself from the frustration.

Peter McCormack: The series is actually very well made.  I'm going to bring it up, because that's where my education of Chernobyl comes from!  It's very well made, very well acted, but I'm going to be interested to dig into your issues with that, but we'll come back to that.  Just back to the sub, the reactor in the sub, is that encased with something to protect it?

Anthony Jared: Absolutely.  So, you have all pressurised water reactors in the United States and elsewhere, first of all they're what we call inherently stable.  So, they don't take a lot of operator action to keep themselves safe, because your water is used as a moderator.  So what happens is, when you have a uranium-235 and another neutron hits it, it becomes excited, and then it gives off a barium, a krypton and three neutrons.  Then those three go and do more reactions.  These reactions are releasing the binding energy which is extremely powerful.  E=mc­­2, the conversion of mass to energy, the c2 portion, that's your constant that explains the energy release.

So, when you're burning fossil fuels, all you're doing is breaking down chemical bonds which are not very efficient, so they don't release a lot of energy.  If you took a uranium-235 the size of a raisin and you could convert 100% of that into energy, which is very difficult to do 100%, but if you could, it would power New York City for a day.  So, one pellet of uranium-235, about the size of a sugar cube maybe, you drink that in your tea, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: So, a sugar cube is the same as about 2,000 pounds of coal, 17,000 cubic feet of gas, or 120 gallons of oil.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Anthony Jared: That's how dense the energy is from nuclear energy.  So, when this reaction happens, it's releasing all this binding energy, then what happens, the neutrons need to be slowed down so they'll spend more time in the area to cause more fissions.  So, we use the water to slow the neutrons down to thermal neutrons, then they create more reactions.

Well, if something happens, in the unlikely event that it did, and the power started going up uncontrollably, the temperature starts going up, the water becomes less dense; the less dense the water, the less neutrons are thermalised; the less neutrons are thermalised, reactor power turns and drives itself down with no operator action, so it's inherently safe.

Danny Knowles: So, it self-regulates almost?

Anthony Jared: Yes, it self-regulates right through that process.  Now, your new, integrated, fast reactors and advanced reactors, they have a little bit of a different mechanism, by which they use the geometry of the fuel in the expansion and the contraction of metals in order to do the same thing; where a pressurised water reactor just uses the density of the water, they use fuel geometry.

Peter McCormack: The sub I visited, one of the primary issues they had was how long the battery packs would last for, and then they would have to go back up to the service to recharge.

Anthony Jared: So, you were on a diesel submarine?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: Yeah, you were on a diesel submarine.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so they'd have to go back up to the surface to recharge, and there was a limitation on how, just because of the technology at the time.  Obviously with a nuclear reactor, that's not an issue.  But you also mentioned you have the nuclear reactors on the ships as well; did you mention that?

Anthony Jared: On surface ships, aircraft carriers, yes.

Peter McCormack: Is there an efficiency, like is there a more -- or, is it just because aircraft carriers are just so huge, they require so much power; or, is there an efficiency over fuel; or, is it more expensive to run these, do you know?

Anthony Jared: Well, you don't have to refuel them, right.  So for instance, around every month or so, we do what we call an underway replenishment on an aircraft carrier.  So, you go up and you drive the aircraft carrier and you have to maintain a certain heading and a ship comes alongside you and you have to load food onboard for the 5,000-plus people.  Imagine if you also had to do that with fuel.  We never have to refuel, we can just go and go and go with no refuelling.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I get that efficiency, but the cost of a nuclear reactor in a sub and the cost of maintenance versus, say, the cost of diesel, what I'm trying --

Anthony Jared: Over time, it's not even in any way comparable.  The nuclear reactor's far less expensive over time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I wonder why don't cruise ships have them?

Anthony Jared: I do not know the answer to that, I can only speculate, but my speculation would be the amount of --

Peter McCormack: Fear!

Anthony Jared: Well, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they could educate themselves and not be fearful, but it's probably the immense amount of training, because you have regulatory bodies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the International Atomic Energy Agency; so, we have very stringent oversight from the nuclear regulator and you have to do a lot of training and it's a very exacting, precise process, and a lot of people probably would not be willing to invest the money necessarily in that piece of it and the constant upkeep.

Peter McCormack: The reason I ask, back when I used to work in advertising, one of my clients was Royal Caribbean Cruises and Celebrity Cruises, part of their group, and one of the issues they faced was that these cruise ships pollute the oceans because they're diesel-powered, they use a lot of diesel and they pollute the oceans.  The pollution from a nuclear reactor is the minimal amount of nuclear waste I guess you have that you have a whole process for dealing with.  But outside of that, I guess is there any?

Danny Knowles: So, it was tried, it looks like.

Peter McCormack: Oh.

Anthony Jared: She was a merchant ship.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "NS Savannah was the first nuclear-powered merchant ship.  She was built in the late 1950s at a cost of $46.9 million and launched on…  She was funded by the United States Government agencies.  Savannah was a demonstration project for the potential use of nuclear energy".

Danny Knowles: Oh, that's a cargo ship; I thought it was a cruise ship.

Peter McCormack: But even so, why not cargo ships?  "Economics of nuclear propulsion", that's probably where I'd be most interested, do you see that, Danny; number three?  "Savannah was a demonstration… However, Savannah's cargo space was limited to 8,000 tons…  As a result of her design handicaps, training requirements and additional crew members…"

Anthony Jared: You see, training.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, training, "Savannah cost approximately $2 million a year more in operating subsidies".

Anthony Jared: Training will get you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But I wonder if it was something that widespread, there would be efficiencies, but anyway.

Anthony Jared: Well, there would be, right, because that's the same with the small modular reactors.  The more widespread and the more repetitive it becomes and the more interchangeable it becomes, the more you pick up efficiencies, just like Henry Ford did with the assembly line; it's exactly the same concept.  When you take a ship like that that's one of a kind, it's extremely expensive to upkeep.  You have to have an entire supply process just for that one ship.  I mean, that in itself is tremendously expensive.  You have to have a specific training programme just for that one ship.

Peter McCormack: Theoretically, could the technology be used to power planes?

Anthony Jared: That was tried.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Anthony Jared: So, one of the books I would recommend if you're ever really interested --

Peter McCormack: I am so interested.

Anthony Jared: -- is called Atomic Awakening.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to read this.

Anthony Jared: So, that one explains to you the history from the time that we first began to understand what radiation was, all the way up until pretty much where we are today, and it gives a really good history lesson.  And actually, the Airforce did develop some for planes and it did not work well.  There were a myriad of problems with it that I don't think you want to go into today, but it was just not functional for an aeroplane.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I guess also, you talked about the stability underwater.  Planes do crash!

Anthony Jared: Yes, and that's problematic.

Peter McCormack: You can have a rate of plane crashes.  Maybe it's only ever one or two a year, but there are two instances there --

Anthony Jared: And even more problematic than that was, they were going to try it to power spaceships, like space shuttles.  And when they started doing the risk analysis, they started seeing that while they could do it in theory, the downside was not what they wanted, it just simply wasn't worth the risk that it would pose if they were to try something like that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, if you had a Challenger high up in the atmosphere, we don't know what would rain down.

Anthony Jared: Right.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you move from the sub onto the aircraft carrier.  How many years were you on that?

Anthony Jared: Three years.

Peter McCormack: Similar job?

Anthony Jared: Yeah.  I actually got commissioned as a Nuclear Officer, and then I went to the aircraft carrier to be the Chemistry and Radiological Controls Officer, which I did more nuclear chemistry and more radiation controls, and did that for three years.  Also qualified as a Surface Warfare Officer, Officer of the Deck, all those great things you do so you can fight the warship in the Persian Gulf and I spent a year in the Persian Gulf during Iraqi freedom.

Peter McCormack: The first Iraq War?  Yeah.

Anthony Jared: Then went from there back to the United States and that's when I started doing the depot-level maintenance.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so when you say, "Doing nuclear chemistry", is this just the ongoing process of the reactions within the…?

Anthony Jared: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Anthony Jared: So, you want to measure the water to make sure it's the right purity, because if you do not have the right purity and there's any sort of defects in your piping, you can start having issues with corrosions.

Peter McCormack: Is this where they talk about soft water or hard water?

Anthony Jared: Well, yes, you're correct.  Not the right terminology --

Peter McCormack: What's the term?

Anthony Jared: Well, pure is what we call it, pure, but pure would be soft.  But pure is far, far, far less chlorides, or whatever the case may be, in that water, total dissolved solids, all those kinds of things; the pH has to be perfect because you don't want corrosion in your reactor plant.  My understanding is a lot of the problems the French are having right now is because they've discovered a few defects, I believe there might have been in some welds in the piping.  And so improper water chemistry can really exacerbate a problem like that.  That's why you have to have very exacting standards on your water chemistry. 

So, it's kind of twofold.  You measure the purity of the water constantly, daily; and then you also have to measure the radiochemistry in the plant to make sure that you're not releasing any fission products from the fuel, to make sure that it's operating safely.  So, you do both of those every day.  And then, on your secondary side, that's your steam that's spinning your turbines, making your electricity and propulsion, you also measure all that for the right levels of purity also, because you don't want any contamination or radiation contamination on the secondary side.

Peter McCormack: And on the aircraft carrier, how big's the team working on the reactor?

Anthony Jared: I believe we had around 400-ish, in that neighbourhood.

Peter McCormack: On the reactor?

Anthony Jared: Yes.

Peter McCormack: 400 on the reactor on an aircraft carrier?

Anthony Jared: We have two of them, two reactors, so you've got about 200 on each one.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  If you'd asked me to guess in advance, I would have said 20, 30.

Anthony Jared: No, that's on a submarine.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but how many people are on the aircraft carrier in total?

Anthony Jared: So, it depends.  We have airwings that come onboard, the guys that actually fly the planes.  When they come onboard, it really swells the company.  I'm just guessing between 2,000 and 3,000 normally, all depending on the day of the week.  Then, when the airwing comes onboard, it probably doubles that or more.

Peter McCormack: But it's still a significant percentage purely on the reactor.

Anthony Jared: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Wow.  And just for my perspective, what size is the reactor on say an aircraft carrier?

Anthony Jared: Larger than a submarine.

Peter McCormack: Larger than a submarine's reactor, or larger than the submarine?

Anthony Jared: Larger than the submarine's reactor.

Peter McCormack: Okay, yeah.  I kind of want to see one.  Can you have a look and see if you can see what one looks like?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you've left the Navy.

Anthony Jared: I have now, yes.

Peter McCormack: No, sorry, I'm talking in terms of timescale.  So, you leave the Navy and remind me of what you went to do then?

Anthony Jared: So, I took a job as the Director of Nuclear Regional Maintenance Detachment, which is stationed in Southeast United States, and I took over the actual depot-level maintenance.  So, I had an engineering group, great group of guys, wrote all the paperwork, all the technical work documents to do all the maintenance; had an operational group that would help the sailors on the ships with the conditions of the reactor plants during maintenance; had a radiological monitoring department that took care of all the stuff that I had done my entire career; and then of course you have your admin and overhead people as well.

Peter McCormack: Still supporting the Navy though?

Anthony Jared: Yes, absolutely.  As a matter of fact, I had a couple of probably 75 to 100 civilians and then about that many Navy guys.  It was a mixed group that worked for me.

Peter McCormack: Just seeing this picture that Danny's brought up of the reactor, it kind of looks about the size of a minivan, maybe a bit bigger?

Anthony Jared: Yeah, maybe three.

Peter McCormack: Three minivans, okay.  But the interesting thing about that, the technology in that, two of those can power a -- is it two because one's a backup, or do they both operate at the same time?

Anthony Jared: They both operate at the same time, but it gives you backup and reliability.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, two of those can power an aircraft carrier, carbon-free; how often would it have to stop because you needed new nuclear fuel, or could the nuclear fuel just last for years?

Anthony Jared: Decades.

Peter McCormack: Oh, decades?

Anthony Jared: Yeah, it's pretty amazing, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it really is.  It kind of makes you realise, I'm jumping ahead, but it kind of makes you realise this is the technology we should be using for powering our homes.  

Anthony Jared: Right, so one of the things I've been discussing with Danny earlier is that I don't like to call myself an environmentalist because that's such a subjective term, but I'm very, very conscientious of the environment.  My farming, organic, I raise my own food.  All the red meat that I eat, most all the red meat that I eat, I kill myself by hunting; I have solar panels on my house.  The average home uses 12,000 kW of electricity a year; I've gotten it down to 3,500 kW a year.  I try extremely hard to make sure that my carbon footprint is very small and I'm telling you, nuclear is 100% the answer, after operating on it, working on it for 30 years, monitoring the safety.  There's nothing even comparable, not even in the ballpark, by order of magnitude.

Peter McCormack: What do you hunt?

Anthony Jared: Deer.

Peter McCormack: You do?  I feel like we need to visit this farm.  I think we need to come down, we need to go hunting with you, have some of your organic food.  Okay, we're going to get to that part, but I want you to talk to me about Fukushima, what happened there.  So, rather than me just give a rough intro of my understanding, just what happened at Fukushima?

Anthony Jared: So, what basically happened, it was my understanding that the Japanese regulatory group operated somewhat differently than what our Nuclear Regulatory Commission does in the United States.  So, the way we operate is, it's kind of like having a police officer, that's what you call them, right, in England, a police officer?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: A police officer driving around in the car with you all the time.  So, we have one on-site all the time.  When the regulator gives you recommendations, you go do those things.  Well, the Japanese regulatory agency does not appear to have been maybe as independent.  They had given some recommendations of some things that needed to happen to protect from the eventuality of earthquakes, tsunamis.  Some of the plants in that area did do what they were supposed to do, the recommendations, they had no problems. 

The ones that did, when the earthquake happened, the offsite power went down.  The reactors shut down like they were supposed to, their diesels started to provide backup power, because when a reactor shuts down, the high-level power generation stops but you have what we call decay heat from fission product decay, which continues to generate some level of heat, less than normal power heat.  But you have to remove that by circulating water.  They had to have these emergency diesels to power the pumps to circulate the water to remove the heat.  Everything worked exactly like it was supposed to.

The diesels were located entirely too low in relation to what they should have been, so when the tsunami came, it swamped the diesels and the diesels shut down.  Now, the earthquake had already shut down the power offsite, the tsunami shut down that power, nothing was circulating water.  So, three important things with a reactor: you've got to control it, you've got to contain it, you've got to cool it.

Peter McCormack: And in a scenario where you want to shut it down, if you successfully shut it down, have you neutralised all the threat, the majority of the threat?

Anthony Jared: You have neutralised the criticality of the reactor so it no longer has a self-sustaining criticality, so it's no longer splitting and giving you the three extra neutrons that go on to make more reactions.  But you still have the fission products.  It takes them some amount of time to decay, and they release heat while they're decaying, so you have to cool it during that interim.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  And the risk, just so we understand the risk, when there is a risk to a nuclear plant, what is the risk that they're trying to avoid happening?

Anthony Jared: So, meltdown of the fuel would be -- that's why you have to control, contain and cool.  So, you insert the control rods that are made of something like cadmium, hafnium, whatever the case may be, and that absorbs the neutrons and shuts down the nuclear chain reaction.

Peter McCormack: Is it like a casing?

Anthony Jared: If you can just imagine a long pencil and it gets inserted down into the reactor.  So, it goes down into the reactor where all the neutrons are interacting with the fuel and it absorbs, it soaks up all the neutrons, so the criticality stops.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and how long does that take?

Anthony Jared: Instantaneously.  I mean, it's some amount of seconds, or maybe a minute, but it's practically, for all intents and purposes.

Peter McCormack: And the risk is if that doesn't happen and the neutrons start going crazy?

Anthony Jared: So, they fail, the rods will fail by going to the bottom.  So, even if the worst case happened and one of them were ejected or something, the rest of them would shut it down.  I mean, it's a failsafe method.  What happens is, when you can't remove that residual decay heat from the fission products, that's the problem.  So, as we have gotten into Generation III and IV reactor plants, they now have much better systems than the one at Fukushima.  They have gravity-fed cooling, so they don't need pumps and diesels in order to supply that power, it will just gravity feed down and cool them.

Peter McCormack: And is the risk here that when a plant goes into meltdown, that too much steam is created, it creates too much pressure and that's what causes an explosion?

Anthony Jared: Not an explosion, remember we talked about that.  It could cause a violent release.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, when I say explosion, not like a nuclear explosion; I just mean there's too much steam and it causes some kind of pressure, and the pressure --

Anthony Jared: Yes, expansion, which could be released.  I like to be careful, because the word "explosion", that's a touchy word that's usually associated with bombs.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I'm trying to remember it from watching Chernobyl, whereby my understanding is that there was so much pressure from all the steam and that caused -- the only word I can think of is explosion.

Anthony Jared: And understand the problem at Chernobyl was, they had no pressure containment building, and that is a huge -- that is the only example of that in the world.  Basically what Chernobyl was, it was the --

Peter McCormack: Shall we come back to Chernobyl, because I want to discuss that separately?  But that's the issue, is the pressure, and if there is a pressure release, that would shoot the nuclear radiation outwards?

Anthony Jared: Yes, radiation and contamination.

Peter McCormack: Yes, okay.

Anthony Jared: You understand the difference between radiation and contamination?

Peter McCormack: So for me, radiation is the neutrons.

Anthony Jared: It's the electromagnetic waves.

Peter McCormack: And the contamination is the nuclear waste getting into the soil and atmosphere.

Anthony Jared: Finely divided particles.

Peter McCormack: There we go.

Anthony Jared: So, the contamination is just finely divided particles.  If you were to take a file and file a piece of metal, and then the radiation is the waves coming off of that.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I understand.

Anthony Jared: Then what you're really worried about is you've got alphas, betas and gammas, and they react with your body differently.  The alphas can be the most damaging if you get them internal, but they pose no health risk if they're external, because they can't get through the dead layer of skin on your body.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I understand.

Anthony Jared: Your betas don't do quite as much damage, but they can't make it through your clothes.  The gammas are really the ones you're concerned with.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, back to Fukushima, there was no ability for the diesel generators to run, so therefore they couldn't go through the shutdown process?

Anthony Jared: Well, they were shut down at this point, they just could not continue to circulate cooling water.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what happened after that?

Anthony Jared: Okay, so then you start to get a pressure build-up.  And then, as the pressure built up, you started having the releases you were talking about, with damage to the fuel, subsequent releases due to the pressure build-up.  Then, they had to of course vent some of that, they had to release some of that water, because the pressure continues to build up, build up, so they were trying to pick strategic times to do it when they could, but it was a mess, so it took some time.

Peter McCormack: And, was there a meltdown at Fukushima?

Anthony Jared: Yes.

Peter McCormack: There was, okay.  How serious a situation was that?

Anthony Jared: I think any time you have a meltdown, it's a serious situation.  I mean, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, all three of them were serious situations, Chernobyl being by far the worst, then Fukushima, then Three Mile Island in that order.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and in terms of Fukushima, do we know the collateral damage?  Is there a quarantine zone?

Anthony Jared: They call it an exclusion zone.  So just perspective, because it's important.  So, most of your radionuclides decay relatively rapidly.  For instance, you're worried about radioiodine; that's the one that would cause thyroid cancer.  It has about an eight-day half-life.  Something has to go through five half-lives in order to no longer really be a concern.  So, after about 40 days, that was all decayed away, it was no longer a concern.  Then you've got a multitude of other things that all decayed away.  Caesium-137 is a gamma emitter.  That one has a 30-year half-life, so you're talking much, much longer.  Plutonium has an extremely long half-life.  So, at this point, those are the things that are left.

So for perspective, current radiation levels, now this is a general radiation level in that exclusion area.  I understand there'll be people listening that can probably find something on Google that shows one spot somewhere, one square inch that's different, but the general level is about 200 mrem per year above background; and remember, background can range from 300 mrem to 26,000 mrem.  So, what I'm telling you is the amount that is still there would be much like you getting on a scale and saying, "I weigh 160 pounds" and eating a peanut and thinking you're going to see the difference. 

Peter McCormack: And Fukushima, I'm trying to go by memory, but was it not the case they had to send some workers into the plant, into a dangerous environment?

Anthony Jared: Absolutely, just much like they did at Chernobyl.  I mean, there's things that -- okay, that's a great question, because what really came out of Fukushima was a little bit about design, in that how do you get your backup power; and what are the constraints on your backup power; and is your backup power really reliable, which was a great thing.  But really came out of Fukushima during the hot washes, where they debriefed and really studied the lessons learned, was response, preparation, training, people, right protective clothing, understanding.  Those lessons that came out of Fukushima, that was what was really learned.

So, in the future, they will have a much better plan.  We were able to help them a lot with that when they sent us in, because we very stringently train on those things in the United States.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so you went out there?

Anthony Jared: Yes.  So, I was working down in Georgia at the time and when that happened, they flew me to the Ronald Reagan Strike Group, which was the aircraft carrier, Strike Group, that was off the coast, that had actually went through the radioactive plume and had some contamination deposited on the ship, and the other ships.  They flew me out and I helped with the recovery efforts from the carrier Strike Group side, while other people from our regulatory agency worked with the Japanese Government. 

So, I headed up the efforts in the Strike Group, and it was basically making sure that when we went out to fly missions, because we were flying routine relief missions, I think it was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 250,000 tons of relief of food, water that we took to them, I would decontaminate the helicopters when they came back, decontaminate the people, make sure that anything they picked up, they didn't bring into the people space; decontaminate the flight deck of the aircraft carrier.  So, we worked on a lot of things like that.

Peter McCormack: Do we know what the resulting number of deaths, casualties, cancers from --

Anthony Jared: Zero.

Peter McCormack: -- Fukushima; nothing?

Anthony Jared: Nothing.  So, no deaths from Fukushima.  The World Health Organisation, the last release that they had, said that there would be no observable increase in cancers from Fukushima.  Now, what is meant by "observable"; it's one of those terms that I think we have to understand.  So, 25% to 30% of any population dies of cancer, anywhere, just pick your group.  What that means is, there are going to be people that were there that are going to die of cancer, but it's going to fall within the statistics of the 25% to 30% that would normally die of cancer.  There would be no observable increases.

Peter McCormack: And even the workers who went into that dangerous environment?

Anthony Jared: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Anthony Jared: The only example we have -- of course, the same with Three Mile Island, it was no deaths, no cancers.  Of course, when they're looking at the cancers, they look at like Leukaemia, so that manifests itself relatively quickly, say within 10 to 20 years, so we're definitely past that on most things like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.  Your solid cancers take longer to manifest, so they have to do statistical analysis for those things.  So, Chernobyl, 46 people died at Chernobyl and the worst-case, most conservative estimates, are that 4,000 total could die from cancer; that's the worst case.  Statistically, it will probably be much, much less than that. 

The real sad story of Chernobyl is, for instance, it's estimated 200,000 women aborted their children for fear of genetic effects, and there has never been an observed genetic effect from radiation exposure ever, not even in the 70,000 people they have tracked following the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; zero genetic effects.

Peter McCormack: The interesting thing about these numbers is that I wonder how many people have died mining coal.

Anthony Jared: Well, for instance, how many people died of shark bites last year?  11 to 15.  People are terrified of sharks. 

Peter McCormack: I am.

Anthony Jared: Okay, 40 people died from dog bites.  You probably love dogs.

Peter McCormack: I would have thought that number would even be higher.

Anthony Jared: 87,000 people were accidentally poisoned in their homes last year.  And the worst is, vehicular accidents just in the United States alone, 45,000 to 50,000 people die a year in vehicle accidents; 6 million to 7 million from air pollution from fossil fuels and other industrial pollutants, 7 million.  Improper diets and lack of exercise, 11 million a year, and we're worried about the 46 at Chernobyl, which was a horribly designed, horribly engineered -- they basically had it built in a tent.

Peter McCormack: We will come back to Chernobyl.  Just back to Fukushima, was the location a poor choice, being that close to the ocean?

Anthony Jared: I don't think the location was a poor choice.  It was not engineered properly for the location.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Anthony Jared: That makes more sense, right.

Peter McCormack: Will Fukushima ever be an operational plant again in the future?

Anthony Jared: I do not know enough to answer that.  I'm not sure what their plans are and what they're going to do.  I know the other plants that had taken the right precautions are still operational, and I do believe they have plans to continue to operate those.

Peter McCormack: Does it not make sense that all plants globally operate by the same standards, and is there an attempt to do that with the International Atomic Agency?

Anthony Jared: It's my understanding that that's their intent for that to happen, and the more knowledge-sharing that we have and the more cross-training that we have, the more interaction between agencies we have, certainly the better that gets.  We saw that following Katrina in the United States.  Our agencies did not interact well together and a lot of things happened that could have been avoided because of that.  So, yes, absolutely; standardisation is key.

Peter McCormack: Okay, let's talk about Chernobyl.  You said you've not watched the series.  What is your fear?

Anthony Jared: So, when I'm watching shows like that, I get frustrated at some of the -- I'm not judging that one because I haven't seen it.  I can only speak to the things that I have seen and read, for instance the initial reports, when you go and read the initial reports that came out of Chernobyl, they were estimating hundreds of thousands of people were going to die; there was a report of a mass grave that they had bulldozed 15,000 people into.  It's just insane, the propaganda, the hysteria.  So, I get frustrated when I read and watch things that aren't based on reality.

Peter McCormack: I mean, my only recent education of what happened at Chernobyl is from that show, but based on that show being, my assumption is at least partially accurate --

Anthony Jared: Sure it is.

Peter McCormack: -- some of the main issues there were not proper operations, processes, poor management.  And then, following the explosion was the desire by politicians to interfere with what was happening.  That seemed like the primary issues.

Anthony Jared: We all have that problem in our countries, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we do.  But this seems like a problem of history, not the kind of issues we hope we wouldn't have now anyway.

Anthony Jared: I think that we as a people, we are very poor at risk assessment.  Maybe this would be a good time to talk for a minute about how the fear and superstition happens.  So, back when we first developed nuclear power and atomic energy, there was a lot of secrecy, big government secrecy.  It was also associated with the military, industrial complex, a lot of people's not so favoured thing, especially our libertarian friends.  That secrecy really turned a lot of people off.

Then you had all the weapons testing, which scattered a good bit of radioactivity around the globe, by all countries involved over time.  That really turned a lot of people off.  You had a whole anti-war movement back in that time period, late 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, that they knew there was nothing they could do about the nuclear weapons, because even if we were to give them up, as soon as we went to war, we would all make them again.  So, there's a thing called the psychology of distancing.  What happens is, let's say one of two spouses goes to work and is having a hard time with their boss.  So, they go home and they yell at the other spouse.  The other spouse says, okay, and they go and yell at the kids.  The kids can't do anything about that, so they kick the dog.

They couldn't do anything about the weapons, so they turned their angst to nuclear power.  That started the anti-nuclear movement.  People fear that which they don't understand.  And when something is not clearly understood, people think more of consequence than they do of probability.  We're horrible at risk-assessment, absolutely terrible at it as people.  That's why people are more afraid to fly than they are to drive, even though the odds per mile of them dying in a vehicle are much, much greater.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you don't want to fly with me!

Anthony Jared: There you go, because they don't feel like they're in control.

Peter McCormack: Yes.  I think, yeah, it is fear of consequence.

Anthony Jared: Absolutely.  So, what it is, they start substituting the, "How do I feel about it?" question with the, "What do I think about it?" question, and it all becomes about feel, it doesn't become about facts.  The media will always report on things; if it bleeds, it leads.  It's much like FTX and Bitcoin; got to work some Bitcoin in!  So, Bitcoin has gotten lumped into what happened with LUNA and FTX, because Bitcoin equals cryptocurrency equals LUNA and FTX bad, so it's all the same. 

That's what we've done with nuclear power over the decades and the media feeds that, because they're not nuanced and educated enough to have the nuanced conversation on air.  And a bit on air is, what, 7, 15, 30 seconds, so they just shoot out this little headline of information that totally lacks understanding and nuance and lumps every day together.  So, that's what's happened with nuclear power.

We recall information through an availability heuristic.  So, when you have heard something over and over, whether it's true or not is irrelevant.  If your mind recalls it quickly, you'll believe it's true.  Then, when you see several different media outlets doing this, you have what they call an availability cascade.  Then, the more they report on it, the more afraid people get, the more they watch, the more they report on it and you've got a positive feedback loop.  So, that's what happens in regards to these things; they lack nuance and understanding.

People confuse plausible with probable.  They think that just because something is plausible that it is probable.  They have nothing to do with each other.  You can develop a coherent story in your mind that's plausible and the odds of it occurring could be 1 in a billion, 1 in billions, but it could be plausible in your mind.  So, that's what's happened with a lot of this that makes people fearful and superstitious, and then it becomes almost like a religion.  Have you ever noticed how apocalyptic we are, human beings in general?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: Every major religion out there has an apocalyptic ending.  We're apocalyptic, we're drawn to that.  So, things like Chernobyl feed that, even though the numbers of the worst-case thing that could possibly happen, the worst engineering, the worst casualty control, the worst design, everything, 46 unfortunate individuals lost their lives.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: 10.9 million a year from poor diet and exercise.

Peter McCormack: Well, I just think of mining disasters.  You hear about a mine caving in and 100, 150, all these different numbers.

Anthony Jared: Have you ever heard of Bhopal, India?

Peter McCormack: No, but tell me.

Anthony Jared: So, Bhopal, India, is the worst industrial accident to have ever occurred.  There was a Union Carbide plant, they were making methyl isocyanate, which is basically used in adhesives and plastics, pesticides.  Someone left a valve open and released it.  It killed 15,000 to 20,000 people and gave 500,000 respiratory distress.

Peter McCormack: Wow, okay.

Anthony Jared: And that's a plant just like a nuclear plant.  We didn't go shut down all the methyl isocyanate plants, we still build them, they're in the United States.  We learned, we moved forward, we took more precautions.  There was a dam that broke in China, killed 26,000 people and another 171,000 died of malaria and starvation following the dam break.  That's way worse than Chernobyl.

Peter McCormack: It's the word "nuclear" that isn't helpful.

Anthony Jared: Right, that's it.

Peter McCormack: It needs a rebrand.

Anthony Jared: Yes, it needs rebranding.  But there's a great progressive case for nuclear power, absolutely.  I mean, there's no quicker way to lift people out of poverty than abundant cheap energy, and we can make it clean.  I mean, coal, wood and coal, and this is important I think to understand.  This is where I get passionate, so bear with me.

Peter McCormack: Go for it.

Anthony Jared: So, it's important to understand, this is not an "or" question, it's not this or that.  We lack a coherent policy, as countries and a world, about what we need to do.  We need to get the politics out of it and we need to put the education into it, because if you educate people, they're not afraid.  3 billion people still burn wood to heat their homes and cook.  Wood is 3 times worse than natural gas and 1.5 times worse than coal.  I read an article recently, 35,000 additional wood stoves have been bought in England this past year over previous years, people afraid they couldn't heat their homes.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, is natural gas worse than coal?

Anthony Jared: No, so the wood is 3 times worse than natural gas and 1.5 times worse than coal; does that make sense to you?

Peter McCormack: Okay, yeah.

Anthony Jared: So, we need to move these 3 billion people that still use wood onto something else.  Even if it's coal, that's better; natural gas is even better.  While we're working on clean energy -- when I say clean energy, that's nuclear, solar, hydroelectric and wind.  The problem is, when you're dealing with your water and your solar and your wind, that's energy capture, it's not energy storage, so it's very inefficient.  So, the capacity factors, the usage factors of those things are very low.  So, if you have let's say a 100 MW system of solar, you get about 25 MW out of it, the same with your wind.  Your hydroelectric I think is around 40% and your fossil fuels are around 70% and your nuclear is around 90%, so that is a big deal. 

So, we've got to start moving people away from the wood to the coal, away from the coal to the gas, and then along to these other things like nuclear.  Right now, I think nuclear is 20% of the energy of the United States and it's 56% of our clean energy.

Peter McCormack: It feels like it needs to be about 98%.  I even struggle for the idea of why you would have -- I mean, it's great at your home you have solar panels, an excellent thing that people could be doing, but I kind of think a lot of this move now to solar and wind is pointless when you can do the majority with nuclear.

Anthony Jared: Yes, because what we've done is, you don't solve a problem by conceiving the problem incorrectly.  So, we've taken a poorly conceived problem and we've built an economic model on top of it.  That's a recipe for disaster and you're seeing it in places, you specifically where you're from, are seeing the pain of poor political decisions driven by people that aren't nuanced and educated.  And understand, everything carries some risk; there's no such thing that's risk-free.

One of the things I tried to do in preparation for this was go figure out, so we can compare apples to apples, deaths per terawatt of energy generated because that equals the playing field.

Peter McCormack: That is the risk factor.

Anthony Jared: So, 25 from coal, 25 deaths per terawatt.  You get into your things like hydro, 1.3; gas, 3 instead of 25; wind, 0.04; nuclear, 0.03; solar, 0.02.  100% safer, and that's 50 years of data.  Does it pose some risk?  Absolutely.  So does wind, so does solar.

Peter McCormack: I think the risk really is, what is the catastrophic risk from solar, and it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist for wind.

Anthony Jared: But even when you use all the accidents in nuclear that have occurred, the numbers still come out the same over time, because people die installing solar panels --

Peter McCormack: Oh, no, I understand all this.  I think the fear is the catastrophic risk.  With Chernobyl, isn't part of the story that we were particularly lucky, that it could have been significantly worse and half of Europe could have been affected?

Anthony Jared: I don't believe so, no.

Peter McCormack: You don't believe so?

Anthony Jared: I think if you had developed a computer model of worst-case scenarios, it would have been Chernobyl.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  What was the bit my brother was talking about?

Danny Knowles: I can't remember exactly, but it was something to do with a pool of water below the reactor, and if something had have reached that pool of water, it would have been -- I'm hesitant to use the word "explosion", but an event.

Anthony Jared: So, there are issues, and I'm not an expert in graphite moderators, but there are issues with graphite moderators and water.  But the reason it reacted the way it did was the water in the graphite moderator to start with.  So, I don't know that more water would have made that big a difference at that point, but I would have to look at specifically what he was referring to in order to answer that accurately.

Peter McCormack: Okay, fair.  To complete the circle, but just the short version, what happened at Three Mile Island?  I know there's a Netflix thing that you guys watched, but I fell asleep!

Anthony Jared: So, Three Mile Island, they lost cooling, temperature increased, pressure increased.  Relief valve opened to relieve pressure as designed.  The effluent went to a controlled area as designed, pressure dropped, valve did not re-seat, valve stayed open.  The operators did not believe their indications.  They stopped cooling water to the reactor, which you never do under any circumstances, and then the meltdown occurred.  So, they didn't believe their indications, and they did not understand the importance of maintaining cooling flow.

So, what came out of Three Mile Island was the whole training process around the world for nuclear reactors; started focusing specifically on control it, cool it, contain it.  So, much like we wouldn't look at a Model T vehicle and the problems that we had with those, and assume that your new Rolls Royce or your new Ferrari would have the same problems.  We have a lot of data and a lot of lessons learned since Henry Ford made the first one. 

So, a lot of your anti-nuclear arguments are based on outdated models, overly conservative models, that were originally made not based on good facts but on speculation, which they had to do that at the time, I'm not faulting them for that.  But instead of updating the risk probabilities with new models and new information, they tend to fall back on what happened in the past and assume that's going to happen again, and not take into account all the lessons learned and progress that has been made, especially in design and training.

Peter McCormack: So, it seems like the majority of the issues have just come down to human error?

Anthony Jared: Chernobyl was the most horrible design.  I can't believe anybody in their right mind would design anything like that.  So, Chernobyl was a perfect storm of the worst design -- the guys they had doing the test that night, most of them they pulled off a neighbourhood coal plant, they weren't even nuclear operators.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay!

Anthony Jared: They brought guys from a coal plant in to operate a nuclear reactor, "What are we working on?"

Peter McCormack: When was Chernobyl constructed?

Anthony Jared: I'm not sure of the date.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but my assumption is back then, there's probably a bit more variation in design because it was a newer technology, whereas you've got a lot more standardisation now?

Anthony Jared: Yes, absolutely.  And they were also designing that for more than just power generation, right.  They were also designing it to make plutonium for weapons, so it was a different type of design.

Danny Knowles: It opened in 1977.

Anthony Jared: That sounds about right.

Peter McCormack: It was the year before I was born.

Anthony Jared: Well, you make me feel old!

Peter McCormack: How old are you?

Anthony Jared: I was born in 1969.

Peter McCormack: I mean, that's nine years.  You're nearer my age than I am near Danny's.  Danny's a baby.

Danny Knowles: I was 1991.

Peter McCormack: 1991!  Okay, so I have a good understanding of what's happening with those three main incidents.  I mean, I didn't really have much of a fear of nuclear any more.  So, I think one of the primary issues is communication to help people understand, because I think if you're an environmentalist, you have a duty to understand nuclear and this is the solution both to environmental concerns, and also to cheap, abundant energy for people who require it.

Anthony Jared: Yes, absolutely right.  So, you're familiar with the ESG ETFs, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: Let's talk about those for a minute.  If I look at one of those ESG ETFs and it doesn't include nuclear, I immediately just dismiss it, because if it doesn't have nuclear in it, it obviously isn't concerned about the environment.

Peter McCormack: I don't really think many of the ESG people are concerned about the environment anyway.

Anthony Jared: I don't either, which is the point I'm making.  Then you've got the governance piece and the social piece.  Well, is there anything better you can do to lift people out of poverty than abundant, clean, cheap energy?  And the more money people have to spend, or are able to spend on other things than energy, then the more your GDP goes up, the more tax revenue you have, the more money you have to help the unfortunate.  I mean, their systems' thinking is weak.  They don't understand second- and third-order consequences.

They know climate change bad, fossil fuel bad, nuclear bad; that's their talking points, but they're not nuanced, they don't understand the second- and third-order consequences of what they're doing.  Climate change is not a problem, it is hundreds, maybe thousands of problems, and the solution for one can exacerbate another one.  Does that make sense, what I'm saying?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it does, yeah, of course.

Anthony Jared: So, they have to think more dynamically in a systems' thinking and have an overarching plan.  Their systems' thinking is very weak, their mental models are ill-informed.  And they don't take the time to learn; they're getting their information from Facebook memes.

Peter McCormack: Has the nuclear industry itself then done a poor job in educating people?

Anthony Jared: In my humble opinion, yes.

Peter McCormack: Because, I'm going to take everything you said as correct and in doing so, there is close to zero reason to not support the proliferation of nuclear energy.  It solves a lot of problems.

Anthony Jared: It's cleaner; it's cheaper, contrary to popular belief, much, much cleaner.  It's even cleaner than solar.  So, coal puts about 800 g/kW generated; your gas does about 400, so it's only half as bad; your solar does about 40 g/kW; and then wind and nuclear are around 12 and 14.  So, it's cleaner even than the other clean energy sources.  It's safer, as we can tell by deaths per terawatt hour produced, big picture over decades of data. 

It's also cheaper.  Batteries with solar is about $120 per MW; offshore wind is about $120 per MW; nuclear is about $40 to $50 per MW, some estimates even as low as $30 per MW, which that's even cheaper than gas.  So, your upfront cost is the problem, but they relatively quickly make back and then they're in a profit for several decades after that.  The new plants are supposed to last 60 to 80 years easily, and if they get more data down the road, they might even be able to extend that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, why would they last 60 to 80 years; is that just an assumption based and they don't know what's coming in the future?

Anthony Jared: It's all probabilistic risk analysis and design, right.  So, there's two types of risk analysis.  There's probabilistic risk analysis and deterministic risk analysis.  If you do good probabilistic analysis, what you do is you take all the data and all the subsets of data and you plug it into an algorithm and you get a bell curve.  Then you can truly understand what risk is and what life expectancies are.  That's very much the model they use for climate change models.  That's what they use for nuclear power.  I find it interesting that most of the people who believe the probabilistic risk analysis for climate change deny the probabilistic risk analysis for nuclear power, but it's the same process.  It tells you that nuclear power is ultimately the safest.

They like to use deterministic for nuclear power, which is where you pick a data set and then you do the risk analysis, and you can imagine how easy that is to manipulate.

Peter McCormack: Of course, yes.  It would be interesting to put this in front of somebody who is anti-nuclear and see what their arguments are.

Anthony Jared: Well, their arguments will be, it's more expensive, if you look at it cradle to grave; it's dirtier, you get nothing that you can do with the nuclear waste, which is absolutely 100% not true; they're worried about terrorists attacking plants, which is virtually impossible and even if they got there, I don't know what they could possibly do.  There's much larger bang for their buck elsewhere for them to waste their time with something like that. 

They'll tell you that fusion is the way of the future and hydrogen is the way of the future, which we certainly need to keep working on those technologies; but what you'll find out is that any time, if you look throughout history, any time the conversation about fusion comes up, it's always 50 years away.

Peter McCormack: Well, we did have a breakthrough recently.

Anthony Jared: We have, yes, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: And I guess more than anyone, you will be tracking what's happening in fusion.

Anthony Jared: Absolutely, it's an amazing technology, but we struggle to figure out how to handle 150 million degrees Celsius and the plasma involved.  So, we have just figured out how to make the wheel; we're a long way from having a Ferrari.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Do you believe they will get there?

Anthony Jared: I think human ingenuity is amazing, and I ultimately think that the economics are going to drive the policy.  And I think if we eventually get to a point where we are really worried about climate change, then we will adopt nuclear power and we will keep working on fusion, and even hydrogen.  The problem with hydrogen, and a lot of anti-nukes really believe in hydrogen power; the problem, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to split the hydrogen and the oxygen, because in your car you would recombine them to create electricity.

The problem is, the only viable method to put enough energy into the system to split them so that you can have hydrogen is nuclear power.  You have to have nuclear power in order to cause the process by which you would get the hydrogen to put in the car.

Peter McCormack: Okay, just one more on fusion.  My understanding of fusion is that if they did manage to solve the technical challenges and build fusion reactors, you would actually get to the point where you have cheap, abundant energy, but also close to zero risk; it doesn't present the risk that fission does.

Anthony Jared: I don't think we know enough to make a definitive statement like that.  I think that could be true.

Peter McCormack: Is there radiation from fusion?

Anthony Jared: You know, I'm not an expert on fusion, so you'd probably do better to talk to someone who understands the specifics of that more.  But I would tell you this, that any new technology is going to have bugs.  And I know I keep repeating this, but everything has some risk, everything.

Peter McCormack: Okay, we'll look that up, we'll have to get a fusion person on at some point.  Okay, so just back to my other point, so the proponents of nuclear energy have done a bad job at communicating the benefits.

Anthony Jared: Yes.

Peter McCormack: But I still don't understand why the people that run our governments still have this issue, because they have the time and the ability to talk to people like you or other experts and understand this is clearly a good option.

Anthony Jared: So, you and I sitting here, it's easy to make that assessment.  When you're dealing with money and lobbyists ---

Peter McCormack: That's the issue.

Anthony Jared: -- in politics, it becomes more challenging.  I'm only speculating, but I can only imagine that there's a cross-section of the fossil fuel industry that's not crazy about nuclear power for a reason.  Now, have I ever talked to one specifically?  No, but it's pretty -- observe behaviour and infer motivation, right.  So, your people who lobby against it, that hide behind data that's not factual, they're doing that for a reason.  Okay, what is the reason?  It's not hard to figure out that between green lobbyists, Hollywood, newspapers, fossil fuel, solar and wind, they're not going to want to lose their share of the clean energy pie to nuclear.  Why would they?  That's money out of their pockets.  So, there's a lot of politics I can only imagine.  Like I said, I'm speculating but I can only imagine.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it will be interesting if it's the fossil fuel industry that's driving the green lobbyists to work against nuclear!  Fascinating.  So, in terms of nuclear, I can't even remember the last time we commissioned a new plant, although I think we've just commissioned a new plant in the UK, but it's been a while since we've had one.

Anthony Jared: Most of them are happening overseas right now.  So, the United Arab Emirates have done a couple of gigawatt reactors.  I believe that is the biggest ever.  They did two of them, great success story.  From the time they conceived the process and requested permission, until it was built, flowing electrons, was about ten years.

Peter McCormack: Wow, because I think I've heard the process in the UK from conception, you wouldn't even get to construction in ten years, because of all the regulations.

Anthony Jared: Right.  So, Congress recently mandated for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who license our plants in the United States, to streamline the process and make it better.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's a positive step.

Anthony Jared: That's a positive step.

Peter McCormack: Because, I heard it's close to impossible to even get new ones commissioned in the US.

Anthony Jared: So, I think that we're seeing a shift in the last five or six years.  Basically, the NRC, I read an article, it's only been a few weeks ago, that the NRC came back with their proposal and it did not really streamline their process in the way that Congress was looking for.  So, I believe they've been sent back to the drawing board.  Now, how accurate the article was, I can't speak to, but that was what I gleaned from it.

Peter McCormack: And we've had a number of plants decommissioned.  There was the one in California that Newsom wanted to decommission; I think they kept it going, didn't they?

Anthony Jared: Yeah, there's still a lot of debate back and forth, the same with the ones in Germany.

Peter McCormack: The same with Germany, yeah.

Anthony Jared: So, there are people starting to wake up and they're starting to realise, maybe this isn't such -- it's easy to have high ideals when your belly is full and you're warm and your car starts and everything's working.  You let people go without heat, air conditioning, hot showers, they'll start doing some research and becoming more nuanced about energy.

Peter McCormack: And can you mine Bitcoin off nuclear energy?!

Anthony Jared: Well, you had a gentleman on who talked about that, right, I believe he did.  You see, I do listen!  He did a great job, absolutely he did, yeah.  I thought his points were very good.

Peter McCormack: Is there anything we've not covered yet that you think we should have covered?

Danny Knowles: Shall we get into the waste maybe?

Peter McCormack: Yes, waste, let's talk about waste, because people talk about that, what do you do with it; where do you put it; how dangerous is it?

Anthony Jared: So, let's segue into it like this.  Whether it's intentional or not, I do not know, but the fact of the matter is that the anti-nuclear and green groups have created problems in the nuclear industry and then complained about the problems that they created.  For instance, "It's extremely expensive, it's too expensive, we need other forms of energy because nuclear's too expensive" yet, they push for the overregulation that makes it too expensive. 

They do the same thing with the waste.  They figured out early on that if they could attack the back end of the process and make it impossible to dispose of the waste, that the waste would build up and then they could talk about how unsafe it was for the waste to build up.  So, they create their talking points through political process and they're very effective at it.

Peter McCormack: And what is the waste?

Anthony Jared: So, your waste is your fission products, so plutonium, americium, neptunium, all your actinides; that's what they're called.  So, new technology, advanced fast reactors, solves a lot of that problem.  So, let's say for instance, let's start with perspective.  So, if you lived 80-plus years and every single electron you ever used was from nuclear power, every single mile you drove was from electricity generated by nuclear power in your Tesla, then you would generate 2 pounds of waste that would fit in this can of water.

Peter McCormack: Me individually?

Anthony Jared: You individually, 2 pounds in your lifetime.  Every man, woman and child in the United States generates 800 pounds of coal waste a year.

Peter McCormack: But is there not a difference between coal waste and nuclear waste?

Anthony Jared: So, the radioactive emissions from a coal plant are far more than from a nuclear plant.  If a nuclear plant emitted the amount of radionuclides that a coal plant does in their coal ash, the nuclear plant would be shut down immediately.

Peter McCormack: But we are still talking about therefore over the next 30 years, I mean the population of the US is 300 million people --

Anthony Jared: 325 million, 340 million.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we'd be talking about 325 million cans; that feels like a lot still.

Anthony Jared: But it's not when you look at the perspective of the other option; 800 pounds of coal a year instead of 2 pounds of nuclear waste.  So, 2 pounds in a lifetime; 800 pounds a year.  It's a huge difference in the amount.  You talk to someone one day and they had a neat statistic like, "If you took all the waste that had ever been generated worldwide, it would fit on a soccer field about 10 feet deep", it's just simply not that much.

So, the plan was originally that we were going to store the waste in Yucca Mountain out in Nevada.  The reason that that place was selected was because the government already owned it and they had done weapons testing there, so there was already some contamination and radiation present; it made sense at the time.  Then the political lobbying started, both sides, back and forth, back and forth.  So, we decided in the interim, we were going to keep our waste in what we call dry cask storage, which is good for at least 100 years, very safe.  Eventually it needs to be moved somewhere more permanent.

My understanding of the problem with Yucca mountain is that it's very geologically complex.  So, as far as tectonic, volcanic, water permeability of soil and rock, it's very complex, which doesn't mean that it will not work but I would have to look at the probabilistic analysis and the maths to make that determination, and so far they have not managed to convince the regulators that we can go forward with that.  But how much of that's politics, I do not know, but they were supposed to have it online in 1998 and the nuclear industry was paying a certain amount of cents per kilowatt generated to a fund that was meant to pay for it.  In 1998, it didn't come online and the nuclear industry made the government pay them back.

Peter McCormack: Where is the nuclear waste being stored right now?

Anthony Jared: Wherever the plants are, they have it in dry cask storage at the plants.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, they want to ideally move towards more centralised?

Anthony Jared: Yes, more centralised is better, it's easier to keep track of.  The other thing is, is deep geological repositories, that's really the way to go.  That's what most other, Finland and several other countries, use your deep geological repositories.  What they basically do, they take the waste, they wrap the waste in copper so it will never corrode, then they pack it with bentonite clay.  That's what they call sorption, because if anything's released, it automatically adheres to the clay and it won't go any further, and then they bury that some 500 feet, 600 feet, I don't know the exact distance, underground, and they do it in an area with no tectonic or volcanic activity, where water doesn't move through the soil.  So, that's one plan.

The second plan, which we have been doing for a long time now, is a place in New Mexico called The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and that's where all the weapons waste goes from clean-up of weapons sites from back in the 1940s and 1950s, and it's in a salt bed some 2,000 feet underground that has remained exactly the way it is now for millions and millions of years; great place to store waste, and they've been doing it very safely there for a long time with zero problems.

Peter McCormack: And it's not drums of green goo, like the Simpsons?!

Anthony Jared: No, that's part of our media hysteria, right!  Now, I think that looking forward in time, there's a place that's in the Pacific Ocean, 32° North/164° West, is what they refer to it as, and it's deep sea bed disposal.

Peter McCormack: That does sound scary.

Anthony Jared: But it's not, listen, this is good.  There's a place there that has remained exactly the same for over 35 million years.  It's a 35,000 or 38,000 -- it's almost the size of the state of Tennessee and it's like a plane with no currents, no marine life.  The clay is several hundred feet deep.  You can put it into clay, you've got the same sorption characteristics that you would have in the bentonite clay.  You could put a tracker on it, you can keep track on it, you don't have to worry about terrorists being able to get to it and nuclear weapon proliferation.  It solves a lot of your problems.

Peter McCormack: Have you looked at any of this, I'm sure I saw a thing to do with nuclear waste as a battery?  Can you search for nuclear waste batteries, Danny?

Anthony Jared: Well, what they can do is, the water reactors that we have, so whenever they burn fuel, they burn about 2% to 5% of the fuel.  So, it would be like you taking a log, throwing it in your fireplace and burning the bark off and then throwing the log away.  They're not using much.  Your advanced fast reactors, you can take the fuel once it's depleted; about every 18 months you change the fuel.  You can take the fuel out and you can put it in a fast reactor and burn almost 100% of it and there's almost zero waste left.

Peter McCormack: And why does a fast reactor do that?

Anthony Jared: Because it uses fast neutrons instead of thermal neutrons.  Remember our discussion about thermal neutrons, it uses fast neutrons.  So what it can do is, it can turn all those different actinides into burnable fuel and then burn it.  That's a new technology that of course we didn't have 50 years ago, right.  Two fast reactors can burn all the fuel from five power reactors.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.  Did you find it?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, there is this.  I don't know if anything's come of it.

Peter McCormack: "Nano Diamond Battery is an innovative energy generator and storage that redefines and revolutionises the battery as we know it.  Its long-lasting properties and longevity are ensured by converting the radioactive decay energy from nuclear waste into energy".

Anthony Jared: So, you remember we were talking about the decay heat; remember that discussion we had earlier about the reactor? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Jared: Okay, so that's the same decay energy process and you're still releasing as you're having beta minus decay and other decays, you're releasing energy.

Peter McCormack: Interesting. 

Anthony Jared: I've never seen that before, but I can see technologically why it would work.

Peter McCormack: Can you go back, Danny, and go to Google images, because I can think of a specific image I've seen with regards to this.  Yeah.  Interesting.  So, there's a lot of innovation still to happen within this industry as well.

Anthony Jared: Absolutely, yeah.  There's some amazing things.  There are some new reactors that I do not have a good understanding of, but they're gas-cooled reactors, and a lot of the fuel is in a different form in those, so that's some new, new, cutting-edge technology that I'm not overly familiar with, but that seems to be what's coming out on the cutting edge.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, in terms of the issues that we're facing, how do you think we better communicate?  Is it things like this that get out to more people?

Anthony Jared: Yes, absolutely.  Imagine if the government took the time and energy that it spent on convincing people COVID vaccines were safe and did that for nuclear power for a year?  That would work.

Peter McCormack: That would definitely work.

Anthony Jared: And if we're really concerned about rising sea levels, drought; if we're really concerned about all of these deforestation, toxic chemicals; if we're really worried about all of these things, why would we not?  If 7 million people are dying a year from pollution, why would we not go and do that training?  We did it for COVID; why would we not for nuclear power?  Education and get the politics out; that's the two things that need to happen.

Peter McCormack: Do you miss working in the industry, or are you very happy in retirement?

Anthony Jared: I get to listen to these wonderful What Bitcoin Did podcasts, and they keep coming out very frequently!  So, I do miss it sometimes.

Peter McCormack: You've got one episode you can skip now because you were in it.

Anthony Jared: I can.

Peter McCormack: I can't listen back, I don't know how you'll do when you do it.  Danny, anything else we've not covered?

Danny Knowles: I think we got into it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we got into everything.  This is everything I hoped and expected it would be, I've really, really enjoyed it.  I do think me and Danny are going to have to come and visit you and go hunt some deer and sit by the fire and come down and see your farm.  But honestly, this was great, it was really useful and the information's great.  I hope this can be something that goes towards a better debate with regards to nuclear energy.  I'm certainly going to be sending it to my friends and telling them to listen; and, yeah, I'm a pro-nuclear guy so I appreciate you coming in.

Most of the time I say to people, "Do you want to send them anywhere?"  Do you want to send people anywhere; have you got a Twitter?

Anthony Jared: I do have a Twitter, Anthony Jared @PAGJ69.

Peter McCormack: All right, and a big thank you to your son for reaching out and good luck to the future and I hope we see you again.

Anthony Jared: Well, thank you, sir, I appreciate it.  Thank you, Danny.

Peter McCormack: Thank you.

Danny Knowles: Thank you.